- Oct 17, 2015
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The Nazi regime in Germany had a very comprehensive and effective propaganda machine which is still spreading its disinformation today as witness this post above. However I have met two people who shared their stories with me. I will share them with you.
A holocaust survivor once told me that on the morning of his liberation he woke to find the camp gates wide open, the towers unmanned, the soldiers gone. At the age of 16 he was probably the only one in the camp still strong enough to walk to the main gate and out onto the road. He felt exhausted and sat down on a large stone at the side of the road across from the gates. He enjoyed the bright warm spring day and listened to the birds singing. The birds were singing!!! He had not heard them the day before or the day before that. He realized that because he was a prisoner that, even though they sang, he did not hear them. He was free, he could hear the birds again! He then heard the footsteps of his liberators. The first Russian troops were approaching the camp. This was ealy spring 1945 somewhere in the Balkans.
The first Russian soldier to see him sat down beside him on the rock, handed him his canteen with fresh water, pulled a long loaf of fresh bread out his pack, broke off two pieces. They shared a silent meal for a few moments. Then two civilians, a young man and woman approached, both blonde haired, Aryan in appearance and well fed. The Russian soldier leveled his SMG at them and ordered them to stop. He walked up to the young man and tore the sleeve off his shirt exposing his SS tattoo. He then came back and handed his weapon to the survivor and indicated that he should shoot them. The survivor shook his head no and handed back the weapon. The Russian shot them both dead in the middle of the road.
He also told me that it was 25 years before he could even speak of the horror of his experience in the concentration camps. His own wife did not know till 15 years after their marriage. He said "for 25 years I could not speak of it, now I cannot stop speaking of it". He now spends much of his time telling his story before school groups. His effect on these groups is deeply profound.
It was about 1995 when he told me his story.
There is an old veteran in my town who has some experience with the holocaust. He enlisted in the British army early in WWII as an infantryman. He was seriously wounded in North Africa and was sent back to England for treatment and rehabilitation. He was then not deemed fit to be an infantryman so he retrained as a medic. It was in that role that he entered Bergen-Belsen when the camp was liberated by elements of the British 11th Armoured Division and the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division. Sixty thousand prisoners were found inside, most of them seriously ill, starved and debilitated . Another 13,000 corpses lay around the camp unburied. The scenes that greeted these troops were famously described by the BBC war correspondent , who accompanied them: “Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which ... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.” The veteran mentioned earlier said that the survivors were terribly infested with lice, ticks and other vermin so they were treated with DDT just as soldiers were. He then broke down crying and said “My God, we didn't know! We killed ten thousand of them. Over the next 24 hours they dropped dead in front of us of toxic shock. We just didn't realize that they were so debilitated that they would react in this way.” This veteran still lives here in town.
Whenever I encounter a holocaust denier I think of this and similar stories I have been told personally by those who were there.
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