August 29, 2004
Visitors
stand in the doorway of a Holocaust memorial at the
Radegast train station in Lodz, Poland, yesterday, the
60th anniversary of the last transports from the city's
ghetto to Hitler's death camps. (Reuters
)
LODZ, Poland -- Holocaust survivors and their families
gathered yesterday at one of Europe's largest Jewish cemeteries to
remember more than 200,000 Jews of Lodz who were killed by the
Nazis, marking the 60th anniversary of the last transports from
the city's ghetto to Hitler's death camps.
On the edge of the vast wooded cemetery of gray and black
tombstones, some 1,500 people stood in silent tribute as a cantor
and a choir chanted Hebrew prayers for the dead in honor of those
taken in cattle cars from the ghetto to Auschwitz and other
camps.
Lodz, some 120 kilometers southwest of Warsaw, was a thriving
center of commerce before World War II, with the city's 230,000
Jews representing about a third of its population.
The Nazis sealed the ghetto with barbed wire on April 30, 1940.
About 45,000 Jews from other parts of Europe, including
Luxembourg, Austria and Germany, were also forced into the Lodz
ghetto, as were about 5,000 Gypsies.
"Our Jewish neighbors were murdered in a bestial way," Polish
Prime Minister Marek Belka told the crowd. "Today Poland firmly
denounces anti-Semitism."
Source: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/470840.html
Voice of
America, Survivors of Nazi
persecution have gathered in Lodz, Poland, to mark the
60th anniversary of the final destruction by German
forces of that city's Jewish ghetto. The survivors and
their families assembled Sunday at a wooded town
cemetery. They remembered the more than 200,000 people
who died under Nazi oppression in Lodz between April 1940
and August 1944, or after being shipped to death camps as
the ghetto closed. After offering
prayers in the cemetery, survivors and city leaders
Sunday moved to the nearby Radegast train station,
departure point to those death camps. The ghetto was a
Jewish area of the city, in which 230,000 lived, that was
closed off by the Germans and became a depository for an
additional 30,000 to 45,000 Jews and Roma transferred
from throughout Europe. By war's end, fewer than 900
people remained in the Lodz ghetto.
August
30, 2004
Source:
http://www.truthnews.net/daily/2004080441.htm
By David Wilder Give into my
hands the victims! So that we can avoid having further
victims, and a population of 100,000 Jews can be
preserved! So, they promised me: If we deliver our
victims by ourselves, there will be peace! Views
expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those
of israelinsider.
Israelinsider
August 31, 2004
- Mordechai Haim Rumkowski, Nazi-appointed head of the
Lodz ghetto Judenrat, January 1942
Almost exactly sixty five years ago, Nazi forces
conquered and occupied the second largest city in Poland,
Lodz. Less than a week after the occupation, Rosh HaShana
1939, the Germans ordered that all businesses remain open
and that synagogues be closed. This was only the
beginning of the havoc to be wreaked on Lodz's two
hundred and thirty thousand Jews.
In November Jews were ordered to wear a yellow arm-band,
easily identifying them as enemies of the Third Reich. A
month later the arm-bands were replaced by the infamous
yellow badge in the shape of a star of David.
In February, 1940 the Nazis officially announced the
creation of the Lodz Ghetto. On May first, the fenced-off
ghetto was closed. Two hundred and thirty thousand people
were squeezed into less than five square kilometers. The
ghetto was sealed, and so was the fate of its
inhabitants.
Two years later the Germans transported another twenty
thousand Jews to the Lodz ghetto, together with five
thousand gypsies.
In early January 1942, the Germans began a transport of
all Jews under the age of 10 and over the age of 65 to
the first Nazi extermination camp, Chelmno, only about 65
kilometers from Lodz. A Nazi-appointed Jew, Mordechai
Haim Rumkowski, head of the Lodz ghetto Judenrat, or
council, made a famous speech:
"A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are
asking us to give up the best we possess - the children
and the elderly. I was unworthy of having a child of my
own, so I gave the best years of my life to children.
I've lived and breathed with children, I never imagined I
would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar
with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my
hands and beg: Brothers and sisters! Hand them over to
me!"
"Fathers and mothers: Give me your children ... I must
perform this difficult and bloody operation. I must cut
off limbs in order to save the body itself. I must take
children because, if not, others may be taken as well --
God forbid ... I must tell you a secret: they requested
24,000 victims, 3000 a day for eight days. I succeeded in
reducing the number to 20,000, but only on the condition
that these be children under the age of 10. Children 10
and older are safe! Since the children and the aged
together equals only some 13,000 souls, the gap will have
to be filled with the sick."
"I can barely speak. I am exhausted. I only want to tell
you what I am asking of you: Help me carry out this
action! I am trembling. I am afraid that others, God
forbid, will do it themselves."
"A broken Jew stands before you. Do not envy me. This is
the most difficult of all orders I have ever had to carry
out at any time. I reach out to you with my broken,
trembling hands and beg: Give into my hands the victims!
So that we can avoid having further victims, and a
population of 100,000 Jews can be preserved! So, they
promised me: If we deliver our victims by ourselves,
there will be peace!"
The parents dressed the children in their holiday best,
as if they were about to attend a party. The children
were then separated from their parents and transported to
Chelmno. As the train pulled out of the station, filled
with babies and the elderly, the cry "Mama" could be
heard from inside the cars. In less than two weeks, over
20,000 Jews were sent to their deaths at Chelmno.
Rumkowski was killed at Auschwitz in 1944, according to
the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Within the ghetto, he had
gradually overcome opposition with the aid of German
intervention and by introducing an evenhanded system of
food distribution. Ultimately, he ruled with an iron
hand. The few who dared to oppose him, ran the risk of
his taking revenge, which in some extreme instances meant
being included on the lists of candidates for
deportation.
His figure, more than that of any other Jewish leader,
has attracted the attention of historians and writers. In
the view of some, Rumkowski was a traitor and a
collaborator. Others believe that his policies helped
extend the life span of the Lodz ghetto, which remained
in existence when all the other ghettos in Poland had
been liquidated. Those who hold the latter opinion point
out that the five thousand to seven thousand survivors of
the Lodz ghetto constituted, in relative terms, the
largest among all the groups of Holocaust survivors in
Poland.
The Lodz ghetto was liquidated in August, 1944 and the
Soviets liberated the area in January of 1945. Of the
over 250,000 Jews living in the ghetto, less than 900
remained.
See:
www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/lodz.html
and www.datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html
That's the way it was then.
Yesterday, Jews and gentiles gathered in Lodz to mark the
60th anniversary of the ghetto's destruction. Among those
there: Israeli science and technology minister Ilan
Shalgi, Polish prime minister Marek Belka and Lodz mayor
Jerzy Kropiwnicki. The ceremony, at the Lodz cemetery,
was followed by a march to the Lodz train station,
infamous site of Jewish transports to concentration
camps.
The other night, while attending a wedding ceremony in
Jerusalem, I had the honor and privilege to meet a man,
who in my eyes, is a giant. In truth, I know very little
about Rabbi Haim Menachem Teichtel. My guess is that he
is over 80 years old -- he was born in Hungary, and was
fortunate to escape the flames of the holocaust. So, not
knowing him, how can I call him a giant? Simply, because
I know of his father. And with a father like his, he too
has to be a Jew of gigantic proportions.
Rabbi Haim Menachem's father was named Rabbi Yisachar
Shlomo Teichtel. A supremely talented scholar, the very
pious Rabbi Teichtel believed, along with other religious
Hungarian Jews in the pre-1940s, that Zionism was an evil
disease, to be kept at a distance.
As World War Two progressed, Hungary's Jews witnessed
what was happening to their Jewish brethren throughout
Europe. However, they thought it couldn't happen to them.
Rabbi Teichtel, with his brilliant mind and his
unbelievable spirituality, realized otherwise. Analyzing
the situation at hand, Rabbi Teichel came to an
unavoidable conclusion: had Jews seen the handwriting on
the wall and moved to Israel, in keeping with the goals
of Zionism, the calamitous events plaguing them would not
have occurred. He rejected his previous life's philosophy
which stated that Jews should not move to Eretz Yisrael
and decided to repent, for what he viewed as a terrible
sin.
Rabbi Teichtel, being trapped in Budapest, decided that
his repentance would take the form of a book, which he
titled "Em Habanim Smacha," which literally means, the
Mother of the Sons is Happy. The entire work, quoting
hundreds of Jewish texts and scholars from memory, is
dedicated to an appreciation of Eretz Yisrael, including
the many reasons why Jews should live in their land, the
Land of Israel. The book is a tremendous source of praise
for the land, and bears witness to its author's humility
-- a giant Torah scholar who rejected his earlier
beliefs, announced his change of heart publicly and wrote
a classic Torah volume to convince others of the
rightness of his ways.
Rabbi Yisachar Shlomo Teichtel's family escaped the
horrors of Aushwitz, but the Rabbi was not so fortunate.
He survived the camps only to be killed days before the
liberation by a Ukrainian while attempting to prevent the
barbarian from stealing a piece of bread from a
woman.
So, where does this all lead? If we are to learn from the
past, we should recognize, for the nth time, that
appeasement does not work. I cannot evaluate the deeds of
Mordechai Haim Rumkowski -- I certainly do not know if,
when reaching the next world, he was judged as a traitor
or a hero. But his premise, saving the many by
sacrificing the few, was already tried, only a few years
earlier, by then British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain. So why try again?
From Rabbi Teichtel we can learn many things -- but first
of all, not to ignore the obvious, the events taking
place around you. Putting on blinds, saying, "it won't
happen to me," is a sure recipe for defeat. That's what
happened to Hungarian Judaism, at the cost of more than a
half a million killed, over 60 percent of the Hungarian
Jewish population, obliterated in the course of one
year.
One last example that I feel obligated to mention. Last
night the IDF again destroyed the Hazon David synagogue,
as well as the small, makeshift camp at the site of the
Hebron Heroes neighborhood, between Hebron and Kiryat
Arba.
How paradoxical that these two quintessential sites, one
a place of worship in memory of two murdered men, and the
other, the seeds of a neighborhood in memory of 9
soldiers and officers and three civilians, all killed by
Arab terrorists, should be again destroyed on orders of
the Israeli government at the same time that Israel, the
Jewish people, and even Polish leaders, thousands of
kilometers away, commemorate the slaughter of Jews sixty
years ago. What would the martyred victims of Ghetto Lodz
say if they knew that the Jewish people, with their own
hands, were destroying synagogues in the Land of Israel,
in Hebron, built in memory of murdered Jews?
It is so imperative that we learn from the past, but too
many times we seem to either forget or ignore.
Appeasement is fatal mistake, and blinders do not change
reality. They just screen out what you do not want to
see. If Israel really wants to honor those Jews who lived
and died in Lodz, it is not enough to attend ceremonies
and make speeches. We must collectively reject and then
correct the erroneous ways of the past, adopting the
right means of action -- standing tall and proud for what
is legitimately, rightfully ours, never acquiesce, when
necessary take the offensive rather than hide behind a
good defense, and never, ever, despair.
With blessings from Hebron.
© 2001-2004 Koret Communications Ltd. All rights
reserved.
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