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#bergen-belsen
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Dutch boy, a former inmate of Bergen-Belsen, walking down a dirt road lined with the corpses of hundreds of prisoners who have died of starvation. Spring 1945
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girlactionfigure · 1 year
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In one of the last groups to arrive in Bergen-Belsen towards the tail end of World War II was a Jew of charismatic appearance who became known to all the other inmates as Reb Shmelke. His full name was Shmuel-Shmelke Shnitzler, a chassid and Torah scholar from somewhere in Hungary. He was very tall and distinguished looking, with strikingly warm and penetrating eyes. Most amazingly, he maintained a mood of genuine cheerfulness, a rare disposition to find in the hellish environment of the camp.
He underwent the harsh terrors and the suffering, the hunger and the abuse, that was the daily portion for the Jew’s in the camp, just as all the other prisoners. But, somehow, his demeanour and behavior seemed to indicate that he wasn’t affected the same way as everyone else, almost as if he weren’t really there.
How was he able to live in such a manner under such conditions? Nobody knew. But it was clear, nevertheless, that he was he drawing immeasurable fortitude and inspiration from some unlimited source.
He even was able to be a fountain of encouragement for his fellow prisoners. He would say to his companions at every opportunity, “A Jew and despair are contradictory in essence; they cannot co-exist.” Whenever possible he would organize a minyan for prayer, especially on Shabbat. At nights he would enliven all those around him with stories of the great Chassidic rebbes, momentarily transporting them to other worlds and places, enabling them to temporarily forget their sufferings of body and soul.
To the amazement of all, Reb Shmelke even found favour in the eyes of a few of the cruelest S.S. guards in the camp. Through these connections he was able to aid a number of the inmates.
He was assigned the job of removing from the barracks the dead bodies of the many who died from starvation. He would try to treat them with as much respect as possible, considering this to be the ultimate of holy work that he could do under the circumstances.
In addition to the prevailing conditions of horror in the camp under which the Jews barely managed to survive, Reb Shmelke was nagged by another compelling problem, one that was increasing in urgency with each day that went past: how could he possibly obtain oil with which to kindle the lights of Chanukah. The holiday was only a few short days away.
He consulted everyone with whom he came into contact that he thought might be able to help, but no one had any oil or even anything that could be substituted for it. All said that to obtain anything flammable in the concentration camp was unimaginable as well as impossible
He consulted everyone with whom he came into contact that he thought might be able to help, but no one had any oil or even anything that could be substituted for it. All said that to obtain anything flammable in the concentration camp was unimaginable as well as impossible.
Still, Reb Shmelke did not give in to despair. The mitzvah of kindling the Chanukah lights was much too important to him. He also realized how much encouragement and hope it would offer the Jews in the camp-to shine light into the deepest of darknesses, to celebrate the victory of few over the many, the pure over the impure….
On the day before Chanukah, Reb Shmelke had to hurry to one of the barracks near the end of the camp, where someone had died just that day. Not far from the fence at the edge of the camp, he stumbled when his foot sunk into a patch of red earth that turned out to be covering a small hole. It was clear that someone had dug this hole on purpose.
He gazed at the shallow depression, and after a moment perceived the sun reflecting off something in it. He looked closer and saw there was a solid object buried there, now slightly revealed. He knelt down and scooped out some dirt with his hands. It was a small jar, half-filled with congealed liquid! Could it be? Could it possibly be!
He removed its cover as quickly as he could and dipped his finger in gingerly. It was oil! He thoughts immediately flashed to the original Chanukah miracle of the finding of the single flask of oil. How could this be happening? Was he dreaming?
Then he noticed that the jar had been concealing other objects beneath it. He dug some more with his hands and uncovered a small package wrapped in a swatch of cloth. In it were eight small cups and eight thin strands of cotton!
Now convinced that someone had intentionally buried this Chanukah stash, Reb Shmelke quickly replaced everything back into the hole and filled it in with the dirt he had removed, carefully smoothing the surface. It would be too dangerous to keep the materials in his possession until Chanukah began the next day in the evening. Besides, perhaps it belonged to someone.
After he completed he job he had been sent upon, Reb Shmelke circulated among as many of the inmates he could during the rest of the day and the, casually asking with an air of innocence if anyone had concealed a quantity of oil in a hiding place. Everyone stared at him as if he were out of his senses.
The next night, all the Jews of Reb Shmelke’s barrack crowded around him as he stood poised to light the first candle of Chanukah. He struck the match, and then recited the blessings with great emotion before touching the tiny flame to the thin strands of wick projecting out of the little cups. It was a scene from a storybook in stark contrast to the dour, harsh environment of the concentration camp, a ray of hope that repeated itself for a total of eight nights.
The elderly Reb Shmelke managed to survive the next few months until finally the conquering Allied forces liberated the camp. His faith and hope had proven victorious. After the official conclusion of the war, he returned to his town in Hungary, to try to reassemble the pieces of his broken life.
Several years later, he was able to make the journey to the United States of America. One important stop for him there was to visit the Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, who lived in Brooklyn. The Rebbe, it turned out, already knew of Reb Shmelke and his deeds, and welcomed him with great warmth.
After they conversed for a while the Rebbe suddenly switched subjects and said to him, “I hear that you had the great honour of lighting Chanukah candles in Bergen-Belsen.”
“How does the Rebbe know that?” sputtered Reb Shmelke in wonderment.
“I heard, I heard,” replied the Rebbe, smiling mysteriously.
A few moments later the Rebbe bent over to his astonished visitor and whispered in his ear, “I am the one who hid the oil, the cups and the wicks in that hole next to the fence. I did it when I was imprisoned in the camp the year before you, before my miraculous escape.
“At the moment I did it,” the Rebbe added, “I believed with all my heart that at the right time it would be found by the right person who would know exactly what to do with it.”
Source: Rabbi Yerachmiel Tilles, Ascent Tzfat, with fact checking from Yad Vashem: World Holocaust Center, Jerusalem, Oral History of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe. Oral account of Bergen-Belsen Survivor Jack Eisenstein.
(Pictured here: A Chanukah candle lighting ceremony in the Westerbork transit camp, Netherlands, December 1943. Photo: Yad Vashem)
Rabbi Yisroel Bernath
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eretzyisrael · 1 year
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hcdahlem · 2 years
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Quand tu écouteras cette chanson
Pour sa contribution à la collection «Ma nuit au musée» Lola Lafon a choisi de passer une nuit en août 2021 dans l’Annexe du musée Anne-Frank, à Amsterdam. Elle y a trouvé bien plus que les traces de la jeune fille.
    En lice pour le Prix Le Monde 2022 En deux mots Le 18 août 2021, Lola Lafon s’installe dans l’Annexe, la partie du musée Anne Frank où a vécu clandestinement la famille et où Anne a écrit son journal. Durant cette nuit particulière, elle va croiser Anne et sa sœur Margot, mais aussi ses ancêtres disparus, Ceausescu et un jeune cambodgien. Ma note ★★★★ (j’ai adoré) Ma chronique Plaidoyer…
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theworldatwar · 6 months
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Bergen-Belsen camp is destroyed by British forces from the 11th Armoured Division after being liberated - April / May 1945
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dirjoh-blog · 4 months
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The Biscuit Tin that saved lives.
There are very few ‘positive; Holocaust stories, but this is one of them, When Abel and Thea Herzberg return from Germany after the Second World War, they only have two things with them: a biscuit tin in which they kept meager leftovers of food in recent months and the diary that Abel kept about the period in Bergen-Belsen. That diary, which he called ‘Tweestromenland’, was published in 1950 by…
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Holocaust Remembrance Week.
Ceija Stojka. Austrian Romany Survivor of the Holocaust.
Ceija was sent to Birkenhau aged ten and was transferred to Bergen-Belsen where she was liberated by the Aalied Troups.
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Profiled in Life Magazine, Camp SS are made to load corpses onto trucks under British guard at the Bergen Belsen concentration camp following its liberation, April 15 1945
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girlactionfigure · 1 year
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Three freight trains were each packed with 2,500 Jewish prisoners in an effort to transport them to death camps further east just before Allied troops arrived to liberate Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. Many of these prisoners had come from the special 'Exchange Camp' within Bergen-Belsen, where groups of Jews were kept who were considered suitable for possible 'exchange' for Germans interned abroad; the exchange prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothing and, initially, were better treated than other concentration camp prisoners. But, as the war's end neared, these prisoners were swept up in the Nazis' attempts to hide evidence of their crimes by 'liquidating' many concentration camps and killing as many of the remaining prisoners as possible.
After a six-day journey, the train pictured here stopped suddenly near the German village of Farsleben where artillery fire between the Allied forces and Germans could be heard all around. With American troops advancing, the train's SS guards fled during the night. One survivor, Aliza Vitis-Shomron, recalled the moment when American troops arrived: "People burst out of the carriages. Suddenly someone shouted: ‘The Americans are coming!’ To our great surprise, a tank came slowly down the hill opposite, followed by another one. I ran toward the tank, laughing hysterically. It stopped. I embraced the wheels, kissed the iron plates. We had won the war.”
Major Clarence L. Benjamin was in a jeep leading the small task force of two light tanks that first encountered the train filled Jews from Hungary, Holland, Poland, Greece and Slovakia, many of them sick and starving. It was Major Benjamin who took this now famous photograph of a mother and her young daughter moments after liberation. The woman pictured was later identified as being a 35-year-old Jewish woman from the Hungarian town of Makó and her 5-year-old daughter, who was 77 as of 2017 but did not wish to be named publicly. It has been called ‘one of the most powerful photographs of the 20th century.'
A Mighty Girl
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eretzyisrael · 1 year
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boostcmg · 10 months
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One of the most notable mercenary of ZR/RIFLE was Irma Grese. After imitation of her execution, she resurrected in the US as a Government Secretary. The fact that became possible poses muptiple open questions about the truly substance of the nazism and the nature of American democracy.
Read full article here:
https://medium.com/@boostcmg/everything-albright-9cab41991a3a
#boost #boostcmg #zrrifle #nürembergring #hatefuleight #heritage #hasheight #daughterofskjold #meggigöring #meggigoering #meggi #vanguard #johnbogle #hermanngoering #hermangöring #hermangœring #hermangøring #madeleinealbright #irmagrese #bergenbelsen #deathcamps #3rdreich #whoframedblackrabbit #battleonkrupskayabulge
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nicklloydnow · 11 months
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“Resentments as the existential dominant of people like myself are the result of a long personal and historical development. They were by no means evident on the day when I left the last of my concentration camps, Bergen-Belsen, and returned home to Brussels, which was really not my home. We, the resurrected, all looked approximately the way the photos from those days in April and May 1945, now stored in archives, show us: skeletons that had been revived with Anglo-American canned corned beef, toothless ghosts with shaven heads, just about useful enough to give testimony quickly and then to clear out to where they really belonged. But we were "heroes," namely to the extent to which we could believe the banners that were stretched over our streets and which read: Gloire aux Prisonniers Politiques! Except that the banners quickly faded, and the pretty social workers and Red Cross nurses, who had turned up in the first days with American cigarettes, tired of their efforts. Still, for quite some time there lasted what was for me a totally unprecedented social and moral status, and it elated me to the extreme: being what I was - a surviving Resistance fighter, Jew, victim of persecution by a universally hated regime - there was mutual understanding between me and the rest of the world. Those who had tortured me and turned me into a bug, as dark powers had once done to the protagonist of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, were themselves an abomination to the victorious camp. Not only National Socialism, Germany was the object of a general feeling that before our eyes crystallized from hate into contempt. Never again would this land "endanger world peace," as they said in those days. Let it live, but no more than that. As the potato field of Europe, let it serve this continent with its diligence, but with nothing other than that. There was much talk about the collective guilt of the Germans. It would be an outright distortion of the truth if I did not confess here without any concealment that this was fine with me. It seemed to me as if I had experienced their atrocities as collective ones. I had been just as afraid of the simple private in his field-gray uniform as of the brown-clad Nazi official with his swastika armband. I also could not rid myself of the sight of the Germans on a small passenger platform where, from the cattle cars of our deportation train, the corpses had been unloaded and piled up; not on a single one of their stony faces was I able to detect an expression of abhorrence. Let collective crime and collective guilt balance each other and produce the equilibrium of world morality. Vae victis castigatisque.” Jean Améry, ‘At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities’ (1966) [pages 64, 65]
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theredandwhitequeen · 2 years
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Book 47 of the 50 book challenge. Luba: the Angel of Bergen Belsen by Michelle R McCann. It’s a true story of survival in Bergen Belsen of 54 children who were left to die on the grounds. Luba was a Jewish Polish woman who had first been in Auschwitz and she saved the children in her barracks with the help of other people. It’s a good book. All but two of the children survived.
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yhebrew · 2 years
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God's Patterns - Count Omer 17 - 'Ground Zero', The Shifter
God’s Patterns – Count Omer 17 – ‘Ground Zero’, The Shifter
2 IYYAR Month Two Day Two – Doubling Factor Tribe of Issachar – Hired Counting Omer Day “Seventeen” Zayin (7) weapon + Yud (10) strength = 17 The Sabbath is the Strong Arm of God First Temple Construction Began – Ground Zero 153 Fish Miracle 1861 American Civil War Began as Confederate guns are fired on Fort Sumter. 1861 Owner Sam Clemens closes down 1000 commercial steamboats as Civil…
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dirjoh-blog · 1 year
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The execution of a sadist
The execution of a sadist
The beautiful beast, the hyena of Auschwitz these were just some names used for Irma Grese. She was born to Berta Grese and Alfred Grese, both dairy workers, on 7 October 1923. Irma was the third of five children (three girls and two boys). In 1936, her mother died by suicide after drinking hydrochloric acid following the discovery of Alfred’s affair with a local pub owner’s daughter. Holocaust…
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