Nazi Megastructures: Hitler's Death Trains
For this link we viewed minutes 46:37-54:40.
The clip begins at Auschwitz Birkenau, at the end of the line. We've been reading Night by Elie Wiesel, and this location is where his concentration camp experience begins, where he and his father are separated from his mother and sister, seeing them for the last time.
Trains in the Third Reich were the means of transporting people to ghettos and camps, a vital instrument for murder on an industrial scale.
We did not view this clip in class (by Yad Vashem), but it is worth mentioning here: The Ghettos
Warsaw Ghetto
This was the largest ghetto created, in November 1941, in German occupied Europe. For those Jews who were transported from here, their final destination was Treblinka, a death camp. As I've mentioned before each camp had different uses: labor, concentration, and death-- as the name indicates, this was for extermination of life. This next clip is from a survivor of Treblinka, someone who survived by carrying out the labor of the removal and burning of corpses. His last few minutes of description bring to mind the woman on Eli Wiesel's train to Birkenau-- Mrs. Schächter. She saw visions of fire and was hysterical the closer they got to Auschwitz. Survivor Testimony About Treblinka Death Camp
Rumors of Treblinka came back to the Warsaw Ghetto and mass deportations were underway. In 1942, approximately 254,000 were sent to Treblinka. After this, the Jews in the ghetto rose up in protest, The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Jews of the ghetto built bunkers and the Polish underground smuggled in weapons and explosives. They knew this uprising was doomed, but they felt it was better to choose their own death than be subjected to the horrors of Treblinka. Marek Edelman, a leader of one of the Jewish groups, who escaped through the Warsaw sewers, later said that choosing to fight was "to pick the time and place of death." For men, women, and children long without choices and pushed along, this was their last stand.
In response to the uprising, SS forces moved into the ghetto block by block, burning houses with flame throwers. While Edelman was able to escape, the SS found a large bunker filled with leaders of the uprising. They all ingested cyanide to avoid death at the hands of the SS.
The flamethrower scene I linked above is from the movie The Pianist, which is a 2002 movie about the true story of Wladislaw Szpilman, a famous Polish pianist who is forced into the Warsaw ghetto along with his father, mother, brother, and two sisters. His family was on a transport list and were lined up to board the train to Treblinka when someone recognized him and pulled him out of line. This saved his life, but his entire family was gassed upon arrival at the camp. After the uprising was squashed with the burning of the Great Synogogue of Warsaw, he evaded capture for several months. The Hiding Scene from The Pianist. Hiding out on the Aryan side, he helped smuggle weapons for the planned uprising. He was eventually found out by a German Army officer who, instead of doing what was expected, took Wladislaw and showed him a better place to hide. This German officer was a Captain Wilhelm Hosenfeld, and was later captured by Soviets and placed in a Soviet concentration camp. After the war, Wladislaw and the Polish government tried unsuccessfully to get Captain Hosenfeld to safety, and he died in the camp in 1952.
Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, has for many long years run a program, known as The Righteous Among the Nations. This program is designed to remember the "honored by Yad Vashem, are non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust. Rescue took many forms and the Righteous came from different nations, religions and walks of life. What they had in common was that they protected their Jewish neighbors at a time when hostility and indifference prevailed." Wladislaw Szpilman worked to make sure Captain Hosenfeld was on this list, and he was added in 2008.
Also on that list of "The Righteous Among Nations" was Irena Sendler, a selfless Gentile who risked her life to save Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. Her goal was to save as many children as she could by smuggling them out of the ghetto and placing the children with Polish families who would care for them until the end of the war. There is a Hallmark movie that tells the story of her role in saving the children called The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler. A quick google search brings up an astronomical number of hits, and I waded through many of them before finding this TED Talk about a high school project called "Life in a Jar" (also the title of the book). The Irena Sendler Project. She was able to smuggle out over 2,500 children. Most of these children lost their entire families to Treblinka.
The Warsaw Ghetto
The Warsaw Uprising Memorial
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