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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Because of wow. / Lest We Forget: The Liberation of Auschwitz

Lest We Forget: The Liberation of Auschwitz

by Anne Laurie|  January 27, 202011:39 pm| 15 Comments

This post is in: Because of wow., Civil Rights, War

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On the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a story about the very first transport of Jews to be sent there: 997 teenage Jewish girls. https://t.co/ElKy5HJn8G

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) January 27, 2020

As world leaders gather in Poland Monday to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi-run Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland, Edith Friedman Grosman will be far away in Toronto. On Monday, the energetic 95-year-old, who was on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz, plans to live-stream the ceremony from home, but only if she feels up to it.

She’s already returned to Auschwitz four times, and that’s enough.

“I’m glad they’re doing something for Auschwitz 75,” she told The Washington Post. “But they have to do something in 100 years and 125 years, too.”…

They were told they would be registering for three months of work in a shoe factory, and that it was their patriotic duty to help in the war effort. But when they showed up to “register,” they were strip-searched, loaded into trucks and taken away. Most were teenagers, some were in their twenties, and a handful of mothers in their forties boarded in place of their daughters. None of those mothers would survive.

Over the next few days, Jewish girls were swept up from all the surrounding villages. By the end of the week, Friedman Grosman, then 17, and her sister Lea, 19, were on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz, arriving by train on March 27, 1942…

These young women arrived at a pivotal moment in the concentration camp’s history. At first, it had been a Nazi prison for Poles of every ethnicity, then for Soviet POWs. By 1942, the Nazis were focusing on gathering up Jews, though they had not yet started their “Final Solution” — mass extermination.

In fact, the girls’ real job wasn’t to make shoes, but to build the very infrastructure that would convert the camp into a death machine. Over the next year, they were brutally forced to demolish old buildings with their bare hands, empty trash out of frozen lakes and build dozens of new barracks. For clothing, they were given the bloody uniforms of dead Soviet soldiers and a few striped dresses with no undergarments. Their entire bodies were shaved, and their shoes were flat pieces of wood with flimsy cloth ties.

Most of them died that first year — of starvation, disease, beatings, medical experiments and suicide. Friedman Grosman’s sister was sent to a gas chamber after she caught typhus. More than 77 years later, her grief is still deep…

At her apartment in Toronto on Saturday, friends brought by so many dishes for Friedman Grosman that she worried she would have to throw food away. In between visits, she told The Post she had one message for the world: “Don’t hate. Because hate brings criminality and hate brings death. I saw it, I was there.”

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Reader Interactions

15Comments

  1. 1.

    PJ

    January 27, 2020 at 11:49 pm

    The most affecting thing about visiting Auschwitz for me were the window cases, filled with suitcases, or eyeglasses, or shoes, and, most affectingly, hair shorn from victims, including little girls’ pigtails.

  2. 2.

    Mary G

    January 27, 2020 at 11:55 pm

    This is my favorite video of all time ? pic.twitter.com/P560xNjCw1— Akki (@akkitwts) January 27, 2020

  3. 3.

    PJ

    January 27, 2020 at 11:56 pm

    This song, Rappaport’s Testament  – Never Give Up (originally by Chumbawumba, here performed by Ted Leo) is based on one of the portraits in Primo Levi’s Moments of Reprieve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgBsTZa5Omc

    To continue to live, to want to live, in the face of all the awfulness of the worst of humanity is, for me, one of the most heroic things.

  4. 4.

    NotMax

    January 27, 2020 at 11:58 pm

    TCM showing a trio of topically related films tonight, including the explicit and no less harrowing to watch today than when it was made 65 years ago Night and Fog, beginning at 5:15 a.m. Eastern time..

  5. 5.

    Dmbeaster

    January 28, 2020 at 12:01 am

    Although I have read and absorbed countless details about the Holocaust, it is forever breathtakingly shocking.  I could not initially see Schindler’s List because I knew what it would be like to be steeped in that horror, but eventually saw it and was blown away by its power.

    Auschwitz was the fancy death camp – most were crude killing facilities using carbon monoxide from engines, and without crematoria.

  6. 6.

    Adam L Silverman

    January 28, 2020 at 12:04 am

    Thanks for doing this, I really didn’t want to have to do this post this year.

  7. 7.

    Steeplejack

    January 28, 2020 at 12:05 am

    @Mary G:

    Man, that hits home. ?

  8. 8.

    phdesmond

    January 28, 2020 at 12:55 am

    Anne, that’s a completely new story to me.  thank you for posting it.

    Mary G’s video is beautiful.

    Here’s my poem i wrote after visiting the DC Holocaust Museum.

    peter

     

    At the Museum Café

     

     

    For lunch I order matzo ball soup

    before I tour the museum.

     

    “How was it?” asks the waitress

    as she wipes the table.

     

    “It was light,”  I say, “Airy.

    A dense matzo ball

    is like a stone in your stomach.”

     

    She smiles.  “Some people ask me

    why it doesn’t have noodles, or carrots.”

     

    Halfway through the exhibit

    I reach the hollow boxcar

    stenciled “Karlsruhe” on its side:

     

    Karlsruhe, Rhineland hometown

    of my German ancestors,

    car that rolled towards Mauthausen,

     

    crammed with Jews

    from one of the

    four hundred ghettos,

     

    each with its traditions,

    its folk songs,

    its recipes for soup.

  9. 9.

    phdesmond

    January 28, 2020 at 1:03 am

    @NotMax: that’s a very strong clip.  then one can skip to the end of “night and fog” and catch the last two minutes of the movie in french:

     

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2VtZ1P1SU

  10. 10.

    trollhattan

    January 28, 2020 at 1:04 am

    @Mary G:

    Profoundly powerful. Thanks.

    There is good in the world, even when it seems absent. There is bravery, when it seems impossible.

  11. 11.

    opiejeanne

    January 28, 2020 at 3:05 am

    I don’t know where people found the courage to survive, and yet they did.

    My older daughter had a friend whose grandmother survived one of the camps and she came every year to talk about it to the HS and Jr High kids. That was in the 1990s, and the worry then was that the survivors were dying of old age, and now their numbers must be even fewer. It is a gift and a burden given to us to remember for them when they are gone.

  12. 12.

    Jim

    January 28, 2020 at 5:10 am

    With the caged border children , Mr Miller would like to turn America into 1930`s Germany .

  13. 13.

    Gvg

    January 28, 2020 at 6:43 am

    I have a problem with the “don’t hate”. I had a small tiff with my mother recently about “don’t say you hate them. Hating is wrong.” I am not religious. I just never was. It always seemed like nonsense to me so I ignored it even as a child. My mother is religious in a try to be nice way. This seems to be part of her views on religion. Anyway I feel it’s inappropriat to ignore what Trump supporters are doing and NOT hate them. Taking the immigrant children, is to me a serious crime. I would like to see all of them highest to lowest charged and tried for kidnapping. The media doesn’t use that word. I think it’s the only right one. So I hate them. How could I not? I know they hate for stupid reasons IMO and I know they think they are right and it makes it difficult to argue if I say I hate, but still it seems immoral not to hate a bunch of child kidnappers.

  14. 14.

    marklar

    January 28, 2020 at 7:21 am

    May the memories of those who endured (or perished) in the Camps, Ghettos, or remained in hiding, and of those who hid them, always serve humankind as a blessing.

  15. 15.

    H.E.Wolf

    January 28, 2020 at 8:27 am

    @marklar:

    אמן

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