21 ms·

David Dushman, last surviving Auschwitz liberator, dies aged 98

353 points by Anon84 5y ago

dalbasal 5y ago
יהי זיכרו ברוך My grandfather was on a train to Auschwitz, but managed to avoid it and survive. A childhood friend of his survived in the camp until liberation. They always paid tribute to the liberators along with those who died in the attempt, at a ceremony commemorating their community.
- galuggus 5y ago
  How did he avoid it?
  - thechao 5y ago
    I know everyone has a story, here, but I knew several survivors when I was younger. The "general" answer is that the few that survived were highly exceptional — they Nazi machine wasn't perfect. So, most of them had stories that were really over-the-top & full of coincidence. Everyone who had a normal story was dead before the war ended. One of the survivors I knew was executed twice. He said "it didn't catch".
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    A long series of events, 3 years. Initially there was a backlog. Not enough trains to Poland. He went through several camps, work assignments. He never got shipped to Poland. Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented. Most survival stories that I know of personally involved the church, one way or another. The brother who worked tirelessly to save him had been the one on the list. He had a baby on the way, born the following morning. My grandfather volunteered to take his place, while the couple hid. The daughter became a teacher. He survived the rest of the war as a partisan. I don't know the whole story. He rarely spoke of it. Many/most of the Lubaks (local SS) were from the area, and he'd gone to school with some of them. That's part of the story, but I don't know exactly how it fits in.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      > Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented. I want to remind how little people today remember who 3rd reich collaborators were. The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost. Those were often very mainstream, and popular political parties. Some of them exist to this day. Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them.
      - dalbasal 5y ago
        I wouldn't even necessarily call the SLS collaborators. They were primaries. Broadly though, yes. When we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated. Even (especially) individuals are not one thing or another.
        baybal2 5y ago
        > we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated. The history is simple, in this case. There were bad people, and there are bad people trying to muddy the boundary of a very clear cut difference of who was bad, and who was good. One go kills random innocent people — he is bad.
      - AriaMinaei 5y ago
        > The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost. Not to mention Ordinary Men [0], the dynamic that makes your average citizens with no ideological indoctrination become the murderers of tens of thousands of Jews, to the point they'd shoot at small children with a clear conscience. They'd even have the option not to directly take part in the murders, but still do. Again, these were average, ordinary people. No strong party affiliation, SS membership or anything. The fact that Christopher Browning's book was a revelation when it came out shows how little we've learned from WWII. We might have put the lid on undisguised antisemitism, but we have merely channeled its otherising roots elsewhere. Otherwise, we wouldn't find it so easy to turn a blind eye to the settler colonialism happening right now in Palestine. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution-dp-0062303023/dp/0062303023/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...
- gambiting 5y ago
  Interesting, my grandfather was also on the train to Auschwitz and also survived - he was in an orphanage in Katowice, after his parents were taken to camps in Germany, but a few months later Nazis decided to clear out the orphanage as well - he was taken along with all the other kids and put in a train carriage destined to Auschwitz, but a nurse who worked at the orphanage managed to sneak into the trainyard and grabbed the first kid that she had a chance to - my grandfather. As far as we know he was the only kid to survive from that orphanage, thanks to the actions of that nurse. He was then placed with the family of Kazimierz Gołba, a Polish poet(who was himself hiding first from Nazis then from the secret police after the war) - and lived with them using a fake name for a while, only going to back to his original name and surname some years after the war. Him and my grandma spent years and years of their lives trying to find any trace of what happend to his parents or any of his other family, but without any luck. Unfortunately, he passed away last year, almost certainly due to covid(I say almost certainly - he passed away due to respiratory problems, and grandma got diagnosed with covid a day later, he was never tested). Him and grandma and myself and the rest of our family have always lived literally 10 minutes away from the former Auschwitz camp as well - in a little town nearby.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    Bless his memory too, and those who saved him. Heroism and tragedy of that era is beyond my comprehension. My Grandmother (wife of the man I spoke about) was from your area, Wadowice. She was 16 on the eve of invasion, and her family survived by fleeing east.. gambling on Stalin over Hitler. Her father almost turned them back, having fought Russians in WW1. They were refugees for 7 years, most of the time in central asia. They returned for a while, but a couple of murders over property disputes convinced most survivors (very few survived from Wadowice) to leave. I have some family members who married out and converted. We're not in touch, unfortunately. The live in Krakov, last I heard. She always maintained ties to her old community, even their most famous member. This is her elbowing past a Prime Minister to say hi and try to get him to do some renovation on an old synagogue. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcC8xKgplBhF3BthO82AbazxkeMaSg2-/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcC8xKgplBhF3BthO82AbazxkeM... We might be related.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  I once met a Polish Jew who had barely escaped being deported to Auschwitz. He had been in the Polish army, escaped to France through Switzerland (a whole movie could be made about that) with his father to fight here, didn't go too well either. They got arrested by the Vichy police. The policemen guarding them told them, "you know, we're not looking wink wink" His father was too sick to run away, he had to leave him behind. He was deported and died in Auschwitz. He managed to join the maquis. He was a distant relative of a friend who told me, "he never told that story, I think he may be dying." And he did, a few weeks later, I learned.
- madaxe_again 5y ago
  My great uncle died at Bergen-Belsen - he was a doctor in Vienna, and he had been harbouring a Jewish family. His young sister - my grandmother - sold him out for a promotion in the hitlerjugend. From what I gather, he managed to get quite a few people out of there on medical grounds - but not himself. She never spoke of him. I only found out from the posthumous memoir of her surviving brother, who was a conscientious objector who got sent to Stalingrad. Not an easy read, but one that made me acutely aware of just how quickly things can go incredibly bad.
  - gattilorenz 5y ago
    I think this is the first time I hear of somebody bringing up the negative past of their family so directly. If I may ask, how did this influence you and/or your relationship with your grandmother?
    - madaxe_again 5y ago
      It didn’t, as I didn’t know about her other brothers while she was alive. I always thought it was just Siegfried and Sigrid, but they had pretty much a whole Ring Cycle of siblings. I think I would have forgiven her, however - I have, now, at any rate. She was born in 1928 - she grew up in Vienna, immersed in an increasingly fascist culture, and joined the Hitler youth because it was simply what everyone did. In the last days of the war, she, in terror for her life, married a German officer who promised to get her out of Vienna before the Russians arrived - which he did, dumping her, pregnant with his child, in Kano Nigeria. At the same time, many of her cousins were also fleeing Europe to escape war crime prosecution, and many remained in subsaharan Africa. She met my grandfather there, a British war and famine profiteer, through a lonely hearts advert. They had many miserable years together. All in all, I feared her as a younger child, pitied her as a young man - she was a cruel and angry woman, who was scornful to me as a child, and bitter to her (fourth) husband. Her brother, Sigrid, who by the time I was around lived with her, his wife long dead, always looked out for her, told us to be kind, that we didn’t and couldn’t understand why she was as she was. And then his death, her death, his memoir, and I understood. I wish now that I had known while she was alive, but then, I was a younger man, and I may not have understood. Now, I see her as a victim as much as any of them - her entire life was a pyre of guilt and shame and self-loathing, always running, and never escaping her past, her actions. As to me, I learned several things I felt were of critical importance: - That cruel people are usually the product of cruelty - that they are cruel because they are ashamed, and wish to hate themselves. - That righteous people, working with what they know to be right and good can carry out acts of atrocious evil. - That you should be aware that your actions, if sufficiently bad, will haunt you til the end of your days.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
I remember having a conversation with a coworker about the Holocost in the 90's. We were walking to my truck. He said, "What do you think about the event." I said something along the lines of, "Well--others have had it worse?". I blame it on stupidity, a bad American education, and an angry 20 something that was completely lost in every aspect of my life. I so regret how flipped my response was. I don't think I have ever said anything so stupid. I bet the guy I said it to remembers it too. He went into programming after our stint in the snack bar, and I imagine he's on hn.
- pythonlion 5y ago
  somehow, when we look at human life as the preciousest thing, the act deleting communities and cultures altogether stings our souls on another level.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Funny how some things stay with us. We live. We grow... to paraphrase Rabbi Hillel.
- hutrdvnj 5y ago
  If you remember his name, you could contact him and tell him that you changed your mind on the subject.
- hi41 5y ago
  I too remember a time in during college when I taunted a Sikh student with an extremely racist joke. I said sorry but even after many decades I have great regret at how callously I said that joke. To this day I don’t say any jokes and many people consider me uptight.
afavour 5y ago
I don't think it's a coincidence that we've seen a rise in holocaust denial, nazi sympathisers, etc. as this population has left us. It's a sad thought really, no number of history books will ever have the same effect as talking to your grandpa about his experiences on the beaches at Normandy, or marching in to liberate a concentration camp. I fear we're on the brink of forgetting a lot of lessons.
- CodeBeater 5y ago
  I also fear that due to the extreme "politification" of everything the narratives that survive might not be accurate. But oh well, "the victors write history" I guess.
  - panzagl 5y ago
    I don't know if you meant it to sound this way, but this comment comes off as sympathetic to the Nazis- you're implying the concentration camp 'narrative' is not accurate, but imposed by the 'victors' (Allies).
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    Who do you consider to be the victors in this case?
- goodcanadian 5y ago
  I've long felt that the last 20-30 years have shown a slow reversal from international cooperation back to nationalist protectionism. I've wondered whether this is a consequence of the dying out of the generation that experienced just how badly wrong that can go.
- brudgers 5y ago
  My grandpa was a paratrooper in the 504 PIR from Bizerte into Germany. The times he talked about the war with me, he talked about times he was scared shitless. Husky Two. Strafed in Italy. Jeep blown off the road by artillery fire. Holed up in a barn at night in the Ardennes snow. The most glamorous thing he ever mentioned was bivouacing somewhere with enough French wine to keep a functional drunk on…that story was over glasses of Port because his war experience inclined him to functional drunks for the rest of his living days. I don’t recall ever meeting a veteran who thought the important lesson was D-day or liberating the camps. Invariably the point was how much war sucks.
cholmon 5y ago
> Dushman has said he was unaware Auschwitz existed during the war, only learning about the atrocities carried out there in the years after. It's always jarring to me, with my modern/simplistic/naive perspective of these major historical events, to consider that the people who lived during and/or participated in these events didn't understand full extent of what they were seeing or what was happening. It totally makes sense, academically...fog of war, slow/spotty spread of information, determining what's propaganda and what's not. But still, there's something mind-blowing to me about a soldier mowing down the fence at Auschwitz with a tank, but not knowing what the place was.
- SPascareli13 5y ago
  It makes me think that some truths may take years, decades to really come out. Things we read today in the news might only become clear in the future, specially politics and such.
  - suifbwish 5y ago
    There is a theory that the Nazis were just a sub group of a much older and secret group. This group empowered Hitler to become a major distraction while they took control of the worlds economy, shipping and communications in the background. This theory supposed that nazis were completely invented purposely as a group of villains performing evil that no one can ignore. The theory also suggests that the jews were chosen because it was known that it would evoke the largest response from the Christian nations
    - Fauntleroy 5y ago
      Can you cite any of this, or at least give the name of the supposed group?
    - myth_drannon 5y ago
      You mean the least response? "it would evoke the largest response from the Christian nations" Christian/American/European leaders didn't care at all about jews.
rglover 5y ago
RIP sir. Running a tank through an electric fence to free people is badass.
internetslave 5y ago
Holocaust is propaganda like CNN
- dang 5y ago
  We've banned this account. You can't do this here. If you'd please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with, we'd appreciate it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
optimalsolver 5y ago
To get a glimpse at the incomprehensible inhumanity of these camps, read this interview with an SS officer who worked at the Treblinka death camp: https://religiondocbox.com/73089029-Judaism/Transcript-of-the-shoah-interview-with-franz-suchomel.html https://religiondocbox.com/73089029-Judaism/Transcript-of-th...
- heelix 5y ago
  Good lord... that was a tough read.
- slivanes 5y ago
  I managed to get about half way through. Discriminate human murder factories of men, woman, children. Frightening and horrific.
- rhodozelia 5y ago
  Wow, I happened to watch the pianist last night, a movie about the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw during world war 2, which only mentioned treblinka in passing, and then came across your comment today. I read the whole interview. Both the movie and this interview contain unimaginable horrors. Like something that can’t be unseen, I don’t think I’ll ever forget them. I hope humanity doesn’t go down that road again
  - Doxin 5y ago
    The pianist is such a good movie. I feel like it really captures the pointlessness of war for the vast majority of people involved.
olegious 5y ago
"One of just 69 men in his 12,000-strong division to survive the war" The Soviets suffered a horrific toll in WWII. 25 million dead is an unimaginable number.
- js2 5y ago
  The Soviets also had women fighting alongside the men. I can't recommend this book highly enough: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/540744/the-unwomanly-face-of-war-by- https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/540744/the-unwomanl...
  - k2enemy 5y ago
    I also recommend Vasily Grossman's books. Life and Fate, Stalingrad, Everything Flows, etc. Life and Fate is one of the most powerful books I've read. https://www.nyrb.com/products/life-and-fate?_pos=1&_sid=f10e973a3&_ss=r&variant=1094930101 https://www.nyrb.com/products/life-and-fate?_pos=1&_sid=f10e...
- baybal2 5y ago
  > The Soviets suffered a horrific toll in WWII. 25 million dead is an unimaginable number. It is. In the town in the Russian Far East where I spent my last few years in Russia, one old timer was telling me how extreme food confiscations were. There were people basically solo living in sticks, hunting, fishing, gathering, doing crafts etc. One such guy probably only catches, and dries few fishes a week, and lives off that. He lives in really unpassable wilderness, weeks of travel to get to his place. Nevertheless, NKVD had few men teams to regularly reach, try in a show trial them for "connivance," do simulated executions, and confiscate their few fishes which rot from improper storage by the time they come back to the city. At some point, there were nearly equal amount of men drafted into NKVD, and other political police, than the men on front lines. At every moment of the war, communists were equally scared of their own people, as they were of Germans, if not more. Communists fought the war betting fully on assumption that they had more soldiers than Hitler had bullets. And it was Stalin's fright, and surprise of a lifetimes when Germans somehow popped up within 10km of Moscow. He was hours away from taking a plane away from Moscow. He wasn't afraid of Germans as much as the prospect of meeting his end Gaddafi style.
eaa 5y ago
There is an interesting book on this grim subject - the book "Yes to Life" of Viktor Frankl. He managed to survive concentration camps and stay mentally sane person. He describes the life of prisoners there and what was helping them to survive. Sad but remarkable book on both history and psychology. Also, someone in this discussion said that as more and more people pass away there is less and less truth about WW2 and less and less respect to its lessons. There is also another interesting observation: the more related to WW2 people die the more Cold War #2 we see. Cold War hasn't become "hot" because during these times almost everyone except kids knew what is war and how it looks and that it causes. War heroes were not imaginary movie personalities, they were everywhere. And kids could hear real stories from someone who has seen it all with own eyes. And so, everyone knew that war is hell and that nuclear weapon can make war even worse, so that WW2 will look like a picnic. But what do we have now? Movies about WW2 with expensive SFX and cheap plot, Call of Duty, etc. War isn't scary anymore. People are eager to fight something. This mad mad mad mad mad world.
- cm2187 5y ago
  When you saw the wide support for communism after the war and the blindness to its own concentration camps and genocides, a lot of people who lived ww2 didn't really respect its lessons either.
  - gotoeleven 5y ago
    We're fine with the ones in china because we get cheap stuff with two day delivery from amazon
    - whythre 5y ago
      I’m not fine with it, and Amazon’s practices are gross. I wish we as a global community would put more pressure on China rather than turn a blind eye towards their more heinous acts. Avoiding buying Chinese goods seems almost impossible, we have outsourced also much manufacturing now.
  - d0mine 5y ago
ruined 5y ago
Son of Saul is a hungarian dramatic film about a member of the sonderkommando in auschwitz that i appreciated. it is the only production about the holocaust that didn’t feel fetishistic to me somehow. i feel like it gave a small sense of the totality of defeat that must have been overwhelmingly present in that place, and the desperate reality of existence and struggle despite all, though the main character is by no means a fighter. it’s beautifully made, in a very personally close and intensely emotional style. it’s entirely fictional but based in part on secret diaries and photographs found buried within the camp. >Dear finder of these notes, I have one request of you, which is, in fact, the practical objective for my writing ... that my days of Hell, that my hopeless tomorrow will find a purpose in the future. I am transmitting only a part of what happened in the Birkenau-Auschwitz Hell. You will realize what reality looked like ... From all this you will have a picture of how our people perished. i recommend this film, and the book Blessed is the Flame by Serafinski, to anyone interested in the people within the camps.
markvdb 5y ago
Incredibly, in my native Belgium, there's an old lady turning 100 (!) come September. She helped save almost 1000 jewish children by moving them to safe places. Many were hidden amongst other children in catholic boarding schools. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9e_Geulen-Herscovici https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9e_Geulen-Herscovici
julienchastang 5y ago
On this topic broadly, read the autobiographical "Survival in Auschwitz" by Primo Levy. If I recall correctly, out of his original convoy of 700 souls, three survived. One insane detail I remember from that book is that there was a hospital in Auschwitz where some (lucky?) prisoners could convalesce before subsequently being worked to death. Levy himself was able to survive due to his skills as a chemist which the Nazi's put to use in a laboratory and was therefore able to work in relatively sheltered conditions.
FridayoLeary 5y ago
I think it should be pointed out that Auschwitz was by no means the worst of the concentration camps. In fact that's the only reason it's so famous, because there were more survivors. Of the absolutely worst of the worst, like Treblinka, little is known, precisely because they were so terrible.
Seb-C 5y ago
I have been lucky to visit some of the camps in Auschwitz during a high-school trip about 15 years ago. It's quite hard to describe how it feels to be in such a place. Since we were guided, I could understand quite a lot of it, but otherwise I think it would be difficult to realize the horrors that went on here. The most striking is the sheer size of it. Especially when you enter Birkenau, you only see a range of buildings as far as the horizon.
RickJWagner 5y ago
Wow! Liberated Auschwitz. One of 69 to survive from 12,000. Became an Olympian. What a life!

353 points by Anon84 5y ago

יהי זיכרו ברוך My grandfather was on a train to Auschwitz, but managed to avoid it and survive. A childhood friend of his survived in the camp until liberation. They always paid tribute to the liberators along with those who died in the attempt, at a ceremony commemorating their community.

galuggus 5y ago
How did he avoid it?
- thechao 5y ago
  I know everyone has a story, here, but I knew several survivors when I was younger. The "general" answer is that the few that survived were highly exceptional — they Nazi machine wasn't perfect. So, most of them had stories that were really over-the-top & full of coincidence. Everyone who had a normal story was dead before the war ended. One of the survivors I knew was executed twice. He said "it didn't catch".
- dalbasal 5y ago
  A long series of events, 3 years. Initially there was a backlog. Not enough trains to Poland. He went through several camps, work assignments. He never got shipped to Poland. Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented. Most survival stories that I know of personally involved the church, one way or another. The brother who worked tirelessly to save him had been the one on the list. He had a baby on the way, born the following morning. My grandfather volunteered to take his place, while the couple hid. The daughter became a teacher. He survived the rest of the war as a partisan. I don't know the whole story. He rarely spoke of it. Many/most of the Lubaks (local SS) were from the area, and he'd gone to school with some of them. That's part of the story, but I don't know exactly how it fits in.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    > Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented. I want to remind how little people today remember who 3rd reich collaborators were. The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost. Those were often very mainstream, and popular political parties. Some of them exist to this day. Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them.
    - dalbasal 5y ago
      I wouldn't even necessarily call the SLS collaborators. They were primaries. Broadly though, yes. When we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated. Even (especially) individuals are not one thing or another.
      - baybal2 5y ago
        > we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated. The history is simple, in this case. There were bad people, and there are bad people trying to muddy the boundary of a very clear cut difference of who was bad, and who was good. One go kills random innocent people — he is bad.
    - AriaMinaei 5y ago
      > The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost. Not to mention Ordinary Men [0], the dynamic that makes your average citizens with no ideological indoctrination become the murderers of tens of thousands of Jews, to the point they'd shoot at small children with a clear conscience. They'd even have the option not to directly take part in the murders, but still do. Again, these were average, ordinary people. No strong party affiliation, SS membership or anything. The fact that Christopher Browning's book was a revelation when it came out shows how little we've learned from WWII. We might have put the lid on undisguised antisemitism, but we have merely channeled its otherising roots elsewhere. Otherwise, we wouldn't find it so easy to turn a blind eye to the settler colonialism happening right now in Palestine. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution-dp-0062303023/dp/0062303023/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...
gambiting 5y ago
Interesting, my grandfather was also on the train to Auschwitz and also survived - he was in an orphanage in Katowice, after his parents were taken to camps in Germany, but a few months later Nazis decided to clear out the orphanage as well - he was taken along with all the other kids and put in a train carriage destined to Auschwitz, but a nurse who worked at the orphanage managed to sneak into the trainyard and grabbed the first kid that she had a chance to - my grandfather. As far as we know he was the only kid to survive from that orphanage, thanks to the actions of that nurse. He was then placed with the family of Kazimierz Gołba, a Polish poet(who was himself hiding first from Nazis then from the secret police after the war) - and lived with them using a fake name for a while, only going to back to his original name and surname some years after the war. Him and my grandma spent years and years of their lives trying to find any trace of what happend to his parents or any of his other family, but without any luck. Unfortunately, he passed away last year, almost certainly due to covid(I say almost certainly - he passed away due to respiratory problems, and grandma got diagnosed with covid a day later, he was never tested). Him and grandma and myself and the rest of our family have always lived literally 10 minutes away from the former Auschwitz camp as well - in a little town nearby.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Bless his memory too, and those who saved him. Heroism and tragedy of that era is beyond my comprehension. My Grandmother (wife of the man I spoke about) was from your area, Wadowice. She was 16 on the eve of invasion, and her family survived by fleeing east.. gambling on Stalin over Hitler. Her father almost turned them back, having fought Russians in WW1. They were refugees for 7 years, most of the time in central asia. They returned for a while, but a couple of murders over property disputes convinced most survivors (very few survived from Wadowice) to leave. I have some family members who married out and converted. We're not in touch, unfortunately. The live in Krakov, last I heard. She always maintained ties to her old community, even their most famous member. This is her elbowing past a Prime Minister to say hi and try to get him to do some renovation on an old synagogue. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcC8xKgplBhF3BthO82AbazxkeMaSg2-/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcC8xKgplBhF3BthO82AbazxkeM... We might be related.
himinlomax 5y ago
I once met a Polish Jew who had barely escaped being deported to Auschwitz. He had been in the Polish army, escaped to France through Switzerland (a whole movie could be made about that) with his father to fight here, didn't go too well either. They got arrested by the Vichy police. The policemen guarding them told them, "you know, we're not looking wink wink" His father was too sick to run away, he had to leave him behind. He was deported and died in Auschwitz. He managed to join the maquis. He was a distant relative of a friend who told me, "he never told that story, I think he may be dying." And he did, a few weeks later, I learned.
madaxe_again 5y ago
My great uncle died at Bergen-Belsen - he was a doctor in Vienna, and he had been harbouring a Jewish family. His young sister - my grandmother - sold him out for a promotion in the hitlerjugend. From what I gather, he managed to get quite a few people out of there on medical grounds - but not himself. She never spoke of him. I only found out from the posthumous memoir of her surviving brother, who was a conscientious objector who got sent to Stalingrad. Not an easy read, but one that made me acutely aware of just how quickly things can go incredibly bad.
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  I think this is the first time I hear of somebody bringing up the negative past of their family so directly. If I may ask, how did this influence you and/or your relationship with your grandmother?
  - madaxe_again 5y ago
    It didn’t, as I didn’t know about her other brothers while she was alive. I always thought it was just Siegfried and Sigrid, but they had pretty much a whole Ring Cycle of siblings. I think I would have forgiven her, however - I have, now, at any rate. She was born in 1928 - she grew up in Vienna, immersed in an increasingly fascist culture, and joined the Hitler youth because it was simply what everyone did. In the last days of the war, she, in terror for her life, married a German officer who promised to get her out of Vienna before the Russians arrived - which he did, dumping her, pregnant with his child, in Kano Nigeria. At the same time, many of her cousins were also fleeing Europe to escape war crime prosecution, and many remained in subsaharan Africa. She met my grandfather there, a British war and famine profiteer, through a lonely hearts advert. They had many miserable years together. All in all, I feared her as a younger child, pitied her as a young man - she was a cruel and angry woman, who was scornful to me as a child, and bitter to her (fourth) husband. Her brother, Sigrid, who by the time I was around lived with her, his wife long dead, always looked out for her, told us to be kind, that we didn’t and couldn’t understand why she was as she was. And then his death, her death, his memoir, and I understood. I wish now that I had known while she was alive, but then, I was a younger man, and I may not have understood. Now, I see her as a victim as much as any of them - her entire life was a pyre of guilt and shame and self-loathing, always running, and never escaping her past, her actions. As to me, I learned several things I felt were of critical importance: - That cruel people are usually the product of cruelty - that they are cruel because they are ashamed, and wish to hate themselves. - That righteous people, working with what they know to be right and good can carry out acts of atrocious evil. - That you should be aware that your actions, if sufficiently bad, will haunt you til the end of your days.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

I remember having a conversation with a coworker about the Holocost in the 90's. We were walking to my truck. He said, "What do you think about the event." I said something along the lines of, "Well--others have had it worse?". I blame it on stupidity, a bad American education, and an angry 20 something that was completely lost in every aspect of my life. I so regret how flipped my response was. I don't think I have ever said anything so stupid. I bet the guy I said it to remembers it too. He went into programming after our stint in the snack bar, and I imagine he's on hn.

pythonlion 5y ago
somehow, when we look at human life as the preciousest thing, the act deleting communities and cultures altogether stings our souls on another level.
dalbasal 5y ago
Funny how some things stay with us. We live. We grow... to paraphrase Rabbi Hillel.
hutrdvnj 5y ago
If you remember his name, you could contact him and tell him that you changed your mind on the subject.
hi41 5y ago
I too remember a time in during college when I taunted a Sikh student with an extremely racist joke. I said sorry but even after many decades I have great regret at how callously I said that joke. To this day I don’t say any jokes and many people consider me uptight.

afavour 5y ago

I don't think it's a coincidence that we've seen a rise in holocaust denial, nazi sympathisers, etc. as this population has left us. It's a sad thought really, no number of history books will ever have the same effect as talking to your grandpa about his experiences on the beaches at Normandy, or marching in to liberate a concentration camp. I fear we're on the brink of forgetting a lot of lessons.

CodeBeater 5y ago
I also fear that due to the extreme "politification" of everything the narratives that survive might not be accurate. But oh well, "the victors write history" I guess.
- panzagl 5y ago
  I don't know if you meant it to sound this way, but this comment comes off as sympathetic to the Nazis- you're implying the concentration camp 'narrative' is not accurate, but imposed by the 'victors' (Allies).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Who do you consider to be the victors in this case?
goodcanadian 5y ago
I've long felt that the last 20-30 years have shown a slow reversal from international cooperation back to nationalist protectionism. I've wondered whether this is a consequence of the dying out of the generation that experienced just how badly wrong that can go.
brudgers 5y ago
My grandpa was a paratrooper in the 504 PIR from Bizerte into Germany. The times he talked about the war with me, he talked about times he was scared shitless. Husky Two. Strafed in Italy. Jeep blown off the road by artillery fire. Holed up in a barn at night in the Ardennes snow. The most glamorous thing he ever mentioned was bivouacing somewhere with enough French wine to keep a functional drunk on…that story was over glasses of Port because his war experience inclined him to functional drunks for the rest of his living days. I don’t recall ever meeting a veteran who thought the important lesson was D-day or liberating the camps. Invariably the point was how much war sucks.

cholmon 5y ago

> Dushman has said he was unaware Auschwitz existed during the war, only learning about the atrocities carried out there in the years after. It's always jarring to me, with my modern/simplistic/naive perspective of these major historical events, to consider that the people who lived during and/or participated in these events didn't understand full extent of what they were seeing or what was happening. It totally makes sense, academically...fog of war, slow/spotty spread of information, determining what's propaganda and what's not. But still, there's something mind-blowing to me about a soldier mowing down the fence at Auschwitz with a tank, but not knowing what the place was.

SPascareli13 5y ago
It makes me think that some truths may take years, decades to really come out. Things we read today in the news might only become clear in the future, specially politics and such.
- suifbwish 5y ago
  There is a theory that the Nazis were just a sub group of a much older and secret group. This group empowered Hitler to become a major distraction while they took control of the worlds economy, shipping and communications in the background. This theory supposed that nazis were completely invented purposely as a group of villains performing evil that no one can ignore. The theory also suggests that the jews were chosen because it was known that it would evoke the largest response from the Christian nations
  - Fauntleroy 5y ago
    Can you cite any of this, or at least give the name of the supposed group?
  - myth_drannon 5y ago
    You mean the least response? "it would evoke the largest response from the Christian nations" Christian/American/European leaders didn't care at all about jews.

rglover 5y ago

RIP sir. Running a tank through an electric fence to free people is badass.

internetslave 5y ago

Holocaust is propaganda like CNN

dang 5y ago
We've banned this account. You can't do this here. If you'd please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with, we'd appreciate it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

optimalsolver 5y ago

To get a glimpse at the incomprehensible inhumanity of these camps, read this interview with an SS officer who worked at the Treblinka death camp: https://religiondocbox.com/73089029-Judaism/Transcript-of-the-shoah-interview-with-franz-suchomel.html https://religiondocbox.com/73089029-Judaism/Transcript-of-th...

heelix 5y ago
Good lord... that was a tough read.
slivanes 5y ago
I managed to get about half way through. Discriminate human murder factories of men, woman, children. Frightening and horrific.
rhodozelia 5y ago
Wow, I happened to watch the pianist last night, a movie about the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw during world war 2, which only mentioned treblinka in passing, and then came across your comment today. I read the whole interview. Both the movie and this interview contain unimaginable horrors. Like something that can’t be unseen, I don’t think I’ll ever forget them. I hope humanity doesn’t go down that road again
- Doxin 5y ago
  The pianist is such a good movie. I feel like it really captures the pointlessness of war for the vast majority of people involved.

olegious 5y ago

"One of just 69 men in his 12,000-strong division to survive the war" The Soviets suffered a horrific toll in WWII. 25 million dead is an unimaginable number.

js2 5y ago
The Soviets also had women fighting alongside the men. I can't recommend this book highly enough: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/540744/the-unwomanly-face-of-war-by- https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/540744/the-unwomanl...
- k2enemy 5y ago
  I also recommend Vasily Grossman's books. Life and Fate, Stalingrad, Everything Flows, etc. Life and Fate is one of the most powerful books I've read. https://www.nyrb.com/products/life-and-fate?_pos=1&_sid=f10e973a3&_ss=r&variant=1094930101 https://www.nyrb.com/products/life-and-fate?_pos=1&_sid=f10e...
baybal2 5y ago
> The Soviets suffered a horrific toll in WWII. 25 million dead is an unimaginable number. It is. In the town in the Russian Far East where I spent my last few years in Russia, one old timer was telling me how extreme food confiscations were. There were people basically solo living in sticks, hunting, fishing, gathering, doing crafts etc. One such guy probably only catches, and dries few fishes a week, and lives off that. He lives in really unpassable wilderness, weeks of travel to get to his place. Nevertheless, NKVD had few men teams to regularly reach, try in a show trial them for "connivance," do simulated executions, and confiscate their few fishes which rot from improper storage by the time they come back to the city. At some point, there were nearly equal amount of men drafted into NKVD, and other political police, than the men on front lines. At every moment of the war, communists were equally scared of their own people, as they were of Germans, if not more. Communists fought the war betting fully on assumption that they had more soldiers than Hitler had bullets. And it was Stalin's fright, and surprise of a lifetimes when Germans somehow popped up within 10km of Moscow. He was hours away from taking a plane away from Moscow. He wasn't afraid of Germans as much as the prospect of meeting his end Gaddafi style.

eaa 5y ago

There is an interesting book on this grim subject - the book "Yes to Life" of Viktor Frankl. He managed to survive concentration camps and stay mentally sane person. He describes the life of prisoners there and what was helping them to survive. Sad but remarkable book on both history and psychology. Also, someone in this discussion said that as more and more people pass away there is less and less truth about WW2 and less and less respect to its lessons. There is also another interesting observation: the more related to WW2 people die the more Cold War #2 we see. Cold War hasn't become "hot" because during these times almost everyone except kids knew what is war and how it looks and that it causes. War heroes were not imaginary movie personalities, they were everywhere. And kids could hear real stories from someone who has seen it all with own eyes. And so, everyone knew that war is hell and that nuclear weapon can make war even worse, so that WW2 will look like a picnic. But what do we have now? Movies about WW2 with expensive SFX and cheap plot, Call of Duty, etc. War isn't scary anymore. People are eager to fight something. This mad mad mad mad mad world.

cm2187 5y ago
When you saw the wide support for communism after the war and the blindness to its own concentration camps and genocides, a lot of people who lived ww2 didn't really respect its lessons either.
- gotoeleven 5y ago
  We're fine with the ones in china because we get cheap stuff with two day delivery from amazon
  - whythre 5y ago
    I’m not fine with it, and Amazon’s practices are gross. I wish we as a global community would put more pressure on China rather than turn a blind eye towards their more heinous acts. Avoiding buying Chinese goods seems almost impossible, we have outsourced also much manufacturing now.
- d0mine 5y ago

ruined 5y ago

Son of Saul is a hungarian dramatic film about a member of the sonderkommando in auschwitz that i appreciated. it is the only production about the holocaust that didn’t feel fetishistic to me somehow. i feel like it gave a small sense of the totality of defeat that must have been overwhelmingly present in that place, and the desperate reality of existence and struggle despite all, though the main character is by no means a fighter. it’s beautifully made, in a very personally close and intensely emotional style. it’s entirely fictional but based in part on secret diaries and photographs found buried within the camp. >Dear finder of these notes, I have one request of you, which is, in fact, the practical objective for my writing ... that my days of Hell, that my hopeless tomorrow will find a purpose in the future. I am transmitting only a part of what happened in the Birkenau-Auschwitz Hell. You will realize what reality looked like ... From all this you will have a picture of how our people perished. i recommend this film, and the book Blessed is the Flame by Serafinski, to anyone interested in the people within the camps.

markvdb 5y ago

Incredibly, in my native Belgium, there's an old lady turning 100 (!) come September. She helped save almost 1000 jewish children by moving them to safe places. Many were hidden amongst other children in catholic boarding schools. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9e_Geulen-Herscovici https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9e_Geulen-Herscovici

julienchastang 5y ago

On this topic broadly, read the autobiographical "Survival in Auschwitz" by Primo Levy. If I recall correctly, out of his original convoy of 700 souls, three survived. One insane detail I remember from that book is that there was a hospital in Auschwitz where some (lucky?) prisoners could convalesce before subsequently being worked to death. Levy himself was able to survive due to his skills as a chemist which the Nazi's put to use in a laboratory and was therefore able to work in relatively sheltered conditions.

FridayoLeary 5y ago

I think it should be pointed out that Auschwitz was by no means the worst of the concentration camps. In fact that's the only reason it's so famous, because there were more survivors. Of the absolutely worst of the worst, like Treblinka, little is known, precisely because they were so terrible.

Seb-C 5y ago

I have been lucky to visit some of the camps in Auschwitz during a high-school trip about 15 years ago. It's quite hard to describe how it feels to be in such a place. Since we were guided, I could understand quite a lot of it, but otherwise I think it would be difficult to realize the horrors that went on here. The most striking is the sheer size of it. Especially when you enter Birkenau, you only see a range of buildings as far as the horizon.

RickJWagner 5y ago

Wow! Liberated Auschwitz. One of 69 to survive from 12,000. Became an Olympian. What a life!