Showing posts with label Auschwitz-Birkenau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Auschwitz-Birkenau. Show all posts

Monday, June 12, 2017

Another BIG Announcement from Love For His People...Northern Ireland - The James Clint Family Update

Jim Clint family in Northern Ireland

Another BIG Announcement from Love For His People!

Northern Ireland - The James Clint Family Update!

Last week we had the nice excitement about our readers/supporters getting a weekly message from Hadassah in Jerusalem (Hadassah's Message).

This week we received our first report, in this format, from Jim Clint, now back to their home base in Northern Ireland, after a few years helping Jews in Hungary make aliyah (immigrate) to Israel. Love For His People has been sending monthly support for a year now.

We are committed to continuing our $50 monthly support for them, and want to help even more. Jim will keep us all posted on a monthly basis.

We love you Lord and what Your people are doing to help the Chosen Ones get back to their Promised Land! Thanks Jim and family.

With our ongoing and committed love,

Steve Martin
Founder/President
Love For His People, Inc.

P.S. You can help us help them help Hungarian Jews. Please see below, after you read this first update. Thanks!




JAMES CLINT FAMILY UPDATE

On June 2nd 2017 we returned to Northern Ireland after four years serving the Lord in Hungary. Our service in Hungary was focused in helping needy Hungarian Jews make Aliyah to Israel. 

Here in Northern Ireland we'll continue raising support for needy Jewish people from Eastern Europe. 

Sadly antisemitism is rising again in Europe and across the world. As never before we feel the urgency to highlight the need for western Churches to support Jewish Aliyah. 

Keep us in prayer as we endeavor to encourage believers to stand with Israel and the Jewish people. 

As believers face difficulties for standing on God's word we can be sure of one thing, He will never leave or forsake us. 

Blessings in Yeshua. 

The James Clint family
Northern Ireland


Love For His People note: Please help us support this family as they minister to Jews seeking aliyah (immigration) to Israel. You can send your love gifts to:

Love For His People, Inc.
P.O. Box 414
Pineville, NC 21834

Or use our Love For His People - PayPal account (all major credit cards accepted even if you don't have a PayPal account) with the "Donate" button on the right hand column of our blog Love For His People.


History of the Jews in Hungary


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hungarian Jews
יהדות הונגריה
Magyar zsidók
Total population
( Hungary  Israel 152,023 (total estimated)
48,600 (core population, estimation) (2010)[1]
120,000 (estimated population) (2012)[2][3]
 Israel 32,023 (immigrants to Israel) (2010)[4]
10,965 (2011 census)[5])
Regions with significant populations
Budapest
Languages
HungarianHebrewYiddish
Part of a series on the
History of Hungary
Coat of arms of Hungary
Flag of Hungary.svg Hungary portal
Jews have a long history in the country now known as Hungary, with some records even predating the 895 AD Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin by over 600 years. Written sources prove that Jewish communities lived in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary and it is even assumed that several sections of the heterogeneous Hungarian tribes practiced Jewish religion. Jewish officials served the king during the reign of Andrew II. From the second part of the 13th century the general religious tolerance decreased and Hungary's policies became similar to the treatment of the Jewish population in Western Europe.
The Jews of Hungary were fairly well integrated into Hungarian society by the time of the First World War. By the early 20th century, the community had grown to constitute 5% of Hungary's total population and 23% of the population of the capital, Budapest. Jews became prominent in science, the arts and business.
Anti-Jewish policies grew more repressive in the interwar period as Hungary's leaders, who remained committed to regaining the lost territories of "Greater Hungary", chose to align themselves (albeit warily) with the governments of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy – the international actors most likely to stand behind Hungary's claims.[6]Starting in 1938, Hungary under Miklós Horthy passed a series of anti-Jewish measures in emulation of Germany's Nürnberg Laws. The vast majority of Jews who were deported were massacred in Kameniec-Podolsk (Kamianets-Podilskyi). In the massacres of Újvidék (Novi Sad) and villages nearby, 2,550–2,850 Serbs, 700–1,250 Jews and 60–130 others were murdered by the Hungarian Army and "Csendőrség" (Gendarmerie) in January 1942. A Jew living in the Hungarian countryside in March 1944 had a less than 10% chance of surviving the following 12 months.[citation needed] In Budapest, a Jew's chance of survival of the same 12 months was about 50%. Jews from the Hungarian provinces outside Budapest and its suburbs were rounded up. The first transports to Auschwitz began in early May 1944 and continued even as Soviet troops approached. During the last years of World War II, they suffered severely, with over 600,000 being killed (within Hungary's 1943 borders) between 1941 and 1945, mainly through deportation to Nazi German-run extermination camps.
The 2011 Hungary census data had 10,965 people (0.11%) who self-identified religious Jews, of whom 10,553 (96.2%) declared themselves as ethnic Hungarian.[5] Other media sources estimate an Hungarian population with Jewish ethnicity of around 48,200 (no methodology or data collection method is given for the estimate) [7] mostly concentrated in Budapest,.[8] The intermarriage rates for Hungarian Jews is around 60%.[citation needed] There are many active synagogues in Hungary, including the Dohány Street Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Europe and the second largest synagogue in the world after the Temple Emanu-El in New York City.[9

The Deportation of the Hungarian Jews




Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 26,1944


It was not until May 1944, when the Hungarian Jews were deported, that Auschwitz-Birkenau became the site of the largest mass murder in modern history and the epicenter of the Final Solution. In 1942, there were 2.7 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, including 1.6 million at the Operation Reinhard camps, but only 200,000 Jews were gassed at Auschwitz that year in two old converted farm houses. This information is from the book "Auschwitz, a New History" by Laurence Rees, published in 2005.

Almost one half of all the Jews that were killed at Auschwitz were Hungarian Jews who were gassed within a period of 10 weeks in 1944. Up until the Spring of 1944, it had been the three Operation Reinhard camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, that were the main Nazi killing centers for the Jews, not Auschwitz.

The order to round up the Hungarian Jews and confine them in ghettos was signed by Lazlo Baky of the Royal Hungarian government on April 7, 1944. Jews in Hungary had been persecuted since 1092 when Jews were forbidden to marry Christians.

The deportation of the Hungarian Jews began on April 29, 1944 when a train load of Jews were sent to Birkenau on the orders of Adolf Eichmann, according to the book by Laurence Rees. According to The Holocaust Chronicle, a huge book published in 2002 by Louis Weber, the CEO of Publications International, Ltd., another train filled with Hungarian Jews left for Birkeanu on April 30, 1944; the two trains with a total of 3,800 Jews reached Birkenau on May 2, 1944. There were 486 men and 616 women selected to work; the remaining 2698 Jews were gassed upon arrival.

On May 8, 1944, former Commandant Rudolf Höss (Hoess) was brought back to Auschwitz-Birkenau to supervise the further deportation of the Hungarian Jews. The next day, Höss ordered the train tracks to be extended inside the Birkenau camp so that the Hungarian Jews could be brought as close as possible to the gas chambers.

According to Laurence Rees, in his book "Auschwitz, a New History," the first mass transport of Hungarian Jews left on May 15, 1944 and arrived at Birkenau on May 16, 1944. The mass transports consisted of 3,000 or more prisoners on each train.

In October 1940, Hungary had become allies with the Axis powers by joining the Tripartite Pact. Part of the deal was that Hungary would be allowed to take back northern Transylvania, a province that had been given to Romania after World War I. Hungarian soldiers participated in the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

On April 17, 1943, after Bulgaria, another ally of Germany, had refused to permit their Jews to be deported, Hitler met with Admiral Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian leader, in Salzburg and tried to persuade him to allow the Hungarian Jews to be "resettled" in Poland, according to Martin Gilbert in his book entitled "Never Again." Admiral Horthy rejected Hitler's plea and refused to deport the Hungarian Jews.

From the beginning of the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis in 1933, until March 1944, Hungary was a relatively safe haven for the Jews and many Jews from Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Poland sought refuge within its borders. However, in 1938, Hungary had enacted laws similar to the laws in Nazi Germany, which discriminated against the Jews.

On September 3, 1943, Italy signed an armistice with the Allies and turned against Germany, their former ally. Horthy hoped to negotiate a similar deal with the Western allies to stop a Soviet invasion of Hungary.

"Sonderkommando Eichmann," a special group of SS soldiers under the command of Adolf Eichmann, was activated on March 10, 1944 for the purpose of deporting the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz; the personnel in this Special Action Commando was assembled at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and then sent to Hungary on March 19, 1944 during the celebration of Purim, a Jewish holiday.




Famous photo of Hungarian Jews walking to the gas chamber


On March 18, 1944, Hitler had a second meeting with Horthy at Schloss Klessheim, a castle near Salzburg in Austria. An agreement was reached in which Horthy promised to allow 100,000 Jews to be sent to the Greater German Reich to construct underground factories for the manufacture of fighter aircraft. These factories were to be located at Mauthausen, and at the eleven Kaufering subcamps of Dachau. The Jews were to be sent to Auschwitz, and then transferred to the camps in Germany and Austria.

When Horthy returned to Hungary, he found that Edmund Veesenmayer, an SS Brigadeführer, had been installed as the effective ruler of Hungary, responsible directly to the German Foreign Office and Hitler.

On March 19, 1944, the same day that Eichmann's Sonderkommando arrived, German troops occupied Hungary. The invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union was imminent and Hitler suspected that Horthy was planning to change sides. As it became more and more likely that Germany would lose the war, its allies began to defect to the winning side. Romania switched to the Allied side on August 23, 1944.

After the formation of the Reich Central Security Office (RSHA) in 1939, Adolf Eichmann had been put in charge of section IV B4, the RSHA department that handled the deportation of the Jews. One of his first assignments was to work on the Nazi plan to send the European Jews to the island of Madagascar off the coast of Africa. This plan was abandoned in 1940.

According to Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, "Eichmann had concerned himself with the Jewish question since his youth and had an extensive knowledge of the literature on the subject. He lived for a long time in Palestine in order to learn more about the Zionists and the growing Jewish state."

In 1937, Eichmann had gone to the Middle East to research the possibility of mass Jewish emigration to Palestine. He had met with Feival Polkes, an agent of the Haganah, with whom he discussed the Zionist plan to create a Jewish state. According to testimony at his trial in 1961 in Jerusalem, Eichmann was denied entry into Palestine by the British, who were opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine, so the idea of deporting all the European Jews to Palestine was abandoned.

At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, at which the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned, Eichmann had been assigned to organize the "transportation to the East" which was a euphemism for sending the European Jews to be killed at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.




Hungarian Jewish children walk to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau


The next day after German forces took over Hungary, Adolf Eichmann arrived to oversee the process of deporting the Hungarian Jews. There were 725,000 Jews living in Hungary in 1944, including many who were previously residents of Romania, according to Laurence Rees, who wrote "Auschwitz, a New History."

The Jews in the villages and small towns were immediately rounded up and concentrated in ghettos. One of the ghettos was located in a brick factory in the city of Miskolc, Hungary, where 14,000 Jews were imprisoned while they waited to be transported to Birkeanu.

Magda Brown, who was born in Miskolc on June 11, 1927, said in a speech at a Synagogue in Morgan Hill, CA that her family was marched though the city to the Miskolc ghetto on her 17th birthday in 1944. From there, Magda was transported on a train to Birkenau, where she was immediately separated from her family.

After two months at Birkeanu, Magda was sent, along with 1,000 Hungrian women, to work in a munitions factory at Allendorf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald. In March 1945, the prisoners at Allendorf were evacuated and marched to the Buchenwald main camp; Magda escaped from the march and hid on a farm until she was rescued by American soldiers.

Vera Frank Federman is another Hungarian survivor who was sent to Auschwitz and then transferred a few weeks later to the Allendorf sub-camp of Buchenwald.

The following quote is from an article published on April 29, 2003 in The Daily, the newspaper of the University of Washington. Vera Frank is a graduate of UW.

On Federman's 20th birthday, June 27, 1944, she and her parents were herded onto one of the transports and spent the next three days traveling to Auschwitz.

"We arrived [at] Auschwitz, and they separated the men from the women, and my father went with the men, and my mother and I arrived in front of an S.S. officer," Federman said.

The officer ordered Federman and her mother in different directions, despite Federman's claim that she was only 13 years old. She never saw either of her parents again.

Federman stayed in Auschwitz for six or seven weeks, and saw her health and that of others rapidly deteriorate.

"Girls came down with scarlet fever, and my cousin, with whom I came, became ill with scarlet fever, but she was so lucky, because up to that time, [the Nazis] took [sick people] immediately, and took them to the gas chamber," she said.

After several weeks, Federman and her two friends, Vera and Zsuzsi, were marched in front of Dr. Josef Mengele, the camp's human-genetics researcher, so he could decide which women would be sent to other labor camps, and which would be killed. Federman and Vera were rejected, while Zsuzsi was chosen to go to a labor camp.

Zsuzsi insisted that her sister come with her, and after some questioning by Mengele about whether they were twins, he approved Vera. Federman tried to convince Mengele to approve her as well, but he rejected her again.

"I said, 'Oh, but I am very strong, I can work.' And a German officer standing next to him whispered, kind of a loud whisper, 'Lassen sie das kleine gehen' - 'Let the little one go,' and he let me go," she said.

The photo below shows Hungarian women who have been selected to work.




Hungarian women who have just arrived on a transport train


According to a book which she wrote, Holocaust survivor Eva Fahidi was 18 years old when, together with her family in the town of Debrecen, Hungary, she was herded into a cattle car headed to the Birkenau death camp. Her Mother and 11-year-old sister, Gilike, were instantly murdered. Her father bore the hard labour for a few weeks only.

Eva spent six weeks in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Then she was shipped with one thousand other women to Allendorf, a slave-labour sub-camp of BuchenwaldHere, the women had to work with harmful chemical agents, "without protective gloves or masks; we inhaled all the dangerous vapour and walked in saltpeter up to our knees," twelve hours a day, incredibly hard work, "but in comparison with a death camp it was a better option." Here, being able "to maintain a reasonable hygienic standard; in times of great need being able to help each other," dignified their lives and contributed to survival.




Hungarian women who have been selected to work at Auschwitz-Birkenau


The photo above shows Hungarian women walking into the women's section on the south side of the Birkenau camp after they have had a shower and a change of clothes. Behind them is a transport train and in the background on the left is one of the camp guards. The woman with dark hair in the center of the photo is Ella Hart Gutmann who is in the outside row facing inward. Next to her is Lida Hausler Leibovics; both women were from Uzhgorod. Their heads have been shaved in an attempt to control the lice that spreads typhus.

One of the Hungarian Jews who survived was Alice Lok Cahana, whose story was recounted by Laurence Rees in his book entitled "Auschwitz, a New History." Alice was 15 when she was registered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, but months later she was sent to the gas chamber in Krema V and told that she would be given new clothes after taking a shower. The purpose of the red brick Krema V building was deceptively disguised by red geraniums in window boxes, according to Alice. She was inside the gas chamber in Krema V when the revolt by the 
Sonderkommando unit in Krema IV began on October 7, 1944. This was the occasion when the Sonderkommando blew up the Krema IV gas chamber building with dynamite that had been sneaked into Birkenau by some of the women prisoners who worked in factories outside the camp.
Laurence Rees wrote:

But the revolt did save some lives. It must have been because of the chaos caused by the Sonderkommando in crematorium 4 that the SS guards emptied the gas chamber of crematorium 5 next door without killing Alice Lok Cahana and her group.

Eva Olsson is a Hungarian Jew who arrived at Birkenau on May 19, 1944; she was 18 years old. In a speech at St. Patrick's High School and St. Christopher Secondary School, as reported by Tara Hagan in The Observer, a Canadian newspaper, Olsson told about a Nazi official who came to her neighborhood in Hungary and began rounding up the Jews, telling them that they were going to be sent to Germany to work in a brick factory. Instead, they were sent to Birkenau. Out of 89 members of her family, Eva and her sister Fredel were the only survivors.

Olsson has spoken to over a million people since she started giving lectures about the Holocaust in 1995. In her talks, she tells about the gas chamber at Bergen-Belsen and about children being burned alive, five at a time, in the crematory ovens at Bergen-Belsen.

According to the article by Tara Hagan, Eva Olsson told the students that when the Jews arrived at Birkenau "People who didn't do what they were told were shot on the spot. If a mother was holding a baby, they shot the baby and the bullet would go through to the mother. You save a bullet that way."

Tara Hagan also wrote that, at the Birkenau camp, Olssen "recalled living on bread and black, watery soup that had tufts of human hair in it, bones and mice."

Eventually, Olsson was sent to work in a factory in Essen, Germany, then to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. At Bergen-Belsen, Olsson was starving, covered in lice and sores and had a fever. She told the students that she "dampened a cloth with her own urine" in order to cool down. Others, she recalled, drank their urine.

Iby Knill was 18 and working as a resistance fighter in Hungary when she was arrested and eventually transported to the Birkenau death camp in June 1944, according to this news article by Virginia Mason, published on January 26, 2010.


Iby's story begins when she was a young girl growing up in her native Czechoslovakia; when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, she escaped over the border into Hungary but was arrested as an illegal immigrant.


"There were five of us, all girls and we made a pact to stay together as we walked through those gates and were greeted by the man we later learned was Dr Josef Mengele," she says of her arrival at Birkenau. "From that day on it became a test of survival." Miraculously, she adds, all five of them lived to witness the liberation from the Nazis in 1945. 


By 2010, Iby had started writing her story and was seeking a publisher for her manuscript, which is chillingly brutal in its frankness, according to Virginia Mason's article.


According to Iby Knill, "The shower unit and the gas chamber looked the same. They had been built that way, so we never knew if we were to be gassed or just showered."

In her lectures on the Holocaust, Iby describes the infamous Dr Mengele, whose experiments in the name of medical science earned him the nick name, Angel of Death. "We lined up and he would walk in front of us, picking out the weakest. Their fate was the gas chambers."

She talks of the cramped, inhuman conditions at Birkenau, the incredible hunger and thirst, and worst of all, the scraps of gray, latherless soap made from human ashes, and the constant fear of extermination in the gas chamber.

According to her story, Iby was able to leave the Birkenau death camp only by volunteering to go to the Lippstadt labour camp, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, where she worked in the hospital unit. On Easter Sunday, 1945, while on a death march to the main Buchenwald camp, she was freed by Allied Forces.

The following information about Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert is from an article by Ross Lydallin the London Evening Standard on January 26, 2010:
At the age of 14, Lily Ebert was taken from the Hungarian town of Bonybad to Birkenau in a packed cattle car, along with her mother, brother and three sisters. Lily was registered upon arrival in July 1944 and tattooed with the number A-10572, even though she was below the age of 15 and could have been sent directly to the gas chamber.

After about four months at Birkenau, Lily and her three sisters were transferred to an ammunition factory near Leipzig, Germany, which was a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Source: Scrapbook Pages

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Joel C. Rosenberg's Blog: Never Again, Never Forget: On Holocaust Remembrance Day, here are four true heroes to remember.

auschwitz-joelontracks


New post on Joel C. Rosenberg's Blog

Never Again, Never Forget: On Holocaust Remembrance Day, here are four true heroes to remember. Who will be the heroes of our time, standing against evil & genocide?

by joelcrosenberg
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. -- Santayana
Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Here in Israel, the sirens will sound at precisely 10am. Every car, truck, bus and taxi cab will pull to a stop. Every worker will lay down his tools. Every classroom will fall silent. Every Jewish Israeli, regardless of what he or she is doing, will stand at attention, listen to the wail of the sirens, and remember those who were ruthless sent to the gas chamber, simply because they were Jews.
How will you remember the Holocaust today? How will you teach your children about the most horrific attempt to exterminate a single people group in the history of mankind?
I encourage you to make time today to remember the six million Jews -- including 1.5 million children -- were systematically murdered by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Read the stories below. Share them on social media. Visit a Holocaust Museum. Watch Schindler's List or one of the other great films about what happened. Read Elie Wiesel's Night. Better yet, find a survivor -- or the son or daughter of a survivor -- and ask them to share their story with you and your family.
Let us honor their memories, and pledge ourselves never to forget them. In so doing, let us pledge to never allow such evil to happen again.
This is not just a time for Jews to remember, or the world to remember the Jews. This is a day for all of mankind to take a decisive stand against evil and against genocide in our time. This is especially critical in the face of the continuing Iranian nuclear threat and the apocalyptic regime in Tehran's repeated vows to annihilate the U.S. and the State of Israel. It is also critical in the light of the genocidal rampage against Muslims, Christians and Yazidis that the apocalyptic leaders of the Islamic State are engaged.
My hope and prayer this year is that in addition to remembering those who died in the “Shoah” (the Holocaust), we will also remember those who lived -- especially four extraordinary heroes who actually escaped from Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 not only to save their own lives but to tell the world the truth about what the Nazis were doing.
I first learned about these men and their extraordinary courage and selflessness upon visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland in 2011. Their stories intrigued me. Indeed, they inspired me to write the novel, The Auschwitz Escape.
Their names are:
  • Rudolf Vrba
  • Alfred Wetzler
  • Arnost Rosin
  • Czeslaw Mordowicz
In 2014, I wrote a column specifically sketching out their dramatic saga, based on the research I did for the book, including meeting with some of the world's leading Holocaust scholars at Yad Vashem here in Israel. I hope you’ll take a moment to read the whole column, and then share it with others.
They are worth remembering. They are worth emulating. Indeed, as darkness falls once again in the epicenter and around the world, may their tribe increase.
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joelcrosenberg | May 5, 2016 at 5:51 am | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/piWZ7-4C2