A Pole at Auschwitz wrote a book that proves Hollywood wrong

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How he lived and suffered at Auschwitz. The testimony of a Pole who spent five years at Auschwitz
https://ioncoja.ro/cum-s-a-trait-si-cum-s-a-suferit-la-auschwitz-marturia-unui-polonez-care-a-petrecut-cinci-ani-la-auschwitz-3/

MECHANICALLY TRANSLATED FROM ROMANIAN

How it was lived and how it was suffered at Auschwitz. The testimony of a Pole who spent five years at Auschwitz

Wieslaw Kielar, Anus Mundi, 1980 (book published in Romania in 1984, under the title "Five Years at Auschwitz").

Wieslaw Kielar's book does not deny the Holocaust. It contains frequent references to the burning in the crematorium of corpses resulting from the gassing of thousands of prisoners, but, for any professional writer (and reader), these accounts are obviously "glued together", external to the actual reconstruction, affecting the main character's evolution very little. Without proposing a detailed reading and analysis of this book, we nevertheless consider it to be one of those texts that say more and sometimes something completely different than the author would have wanted to say. And this is because the account, being most often honest, lets details and assessments "escape" into the text, facts that contradict the book's thesis. The book's thesis being that Auschwitz was the anus mundi, that is, the dirtiest and most abject place in the world, of humanity.

Here are just a few of the events and situations described by the author that refute not only the thesis in the book's title, but also the entire Holocaust literature, refute the "standard" image of the Holocaust, the Hollywood image of it:

* the detainees received letters and packages from their family and any other person without restrictions;

* a prisoner "played the tambourine and the drum in the camp orchestra." So there was a camp orchestra!

* Another inmate "arranged a kind of workshop in his room with easels, frames and other painting accessories, where he passionately dedicated himself to art in his free time."

* In short, "Everyone did what they knew how. (Several prisoners) prepared a comedy or something like that. They usually came after dinner, when no one bothered them: the Lagerarzt (camp doctor, SS-man) was always missing, and the SDG (SS-man from the health service) also evaporated somewhere, and the camp authorities treated them with indulgence" (p. 62 and 96);

* a lot of romances took root at Auschwitz, because "with the passage of time and the stabilization, in a certain sense, of the conditions in the camp, another element began to predominate in relations with women, of a more intimate nature, namely the sexual one, which stemmed from more earthly, but as natural as possible, impulses" (p.111);

* quote: "On Lagerstrasse there was a crowd like on the Corso in a big city. Everyone was rushing to get to the concert near the camp kitchen, located near the wire fence that separated the men's camp from the women's.[...] It was precisely in this open place that those who understood each other had their meeting point. The camp orchestra was playing waltzes. I looked for Halina." (p.210);

* "It's true, hunger didn't threaten me. I received many food packages from home" (p.281); "We weren't interested in these issues. At that time, we weren't hungry and we had other problems to solve" (p.279);

* "Andrzej, a thief, drunk and crazy, had never lived so well in his life as here in the camp. Why would he escape?" (p. 260);

* to escape from Auschwitz was not too difficult. Our author had countless opportunities. Here is one: "Mrs. Zommer made it clear to me that I could escape. I would receive clothing, a bicycle and would be helped to get to the border of the Generalgouvernement. Although I had been tempted more than once to leave, I did not accept this project so tempting." (p.135 and others);

* "Since then, escapes have become more and more frequent. The Russians and Poles escaped most often. Gradually, the camp authorities got used to this situation. Over time, even the prolonged appeals were abandoned." (p. 270);

* prisoners received money from home and could shop at the camp cafeterias (p.232);

* "I received a large package of food. I was surprised: just the day before yesterday I had received another one from home. The sender's name clarified everything: the package had been sent by Tosia, the old man's daughter. What a pleasant surprise![...] I didn't eat the food I received alone, I shared it with them, and they gave me sardines or other canned food." (p.225) There are countless accounts from which it results that the prisoners' diet was convenient, and the possibilities for improving it were endless.

* a dietary canteen operated at Auschwitz for prisoners, which leads you to conclude that at Auschwitz you could not be exterminated, possibly by gassing, unless you were in a...perfect state of health;

* a Familienlager (family camp) also operated at Auschwitz;

* prisoners who had lice and did not declare it in order to be de-liced ��were punished by having their bread taken off the menu;

* "The holidays were rich. We had meat, ham, salami, vodka. It was an atmosphere as if we were in freedom. A full stomach and alcohol generated optimism." (p.250);

* "The worst was Sunday, the day when there was no work. In the afternoon there was a mandatory Lausenkontrolle (lice control), followed by an hour of Bettruhe (rest). It is true that Lausenkontrolle did not improve the hygiene conditions in the camp much, but at least it forced certain dirty people to wash once a week and change their underwear to cleaner ones. And the mandatory one-hour "rest" on Sunday afternoon, at the end of a week with twelve hours of work a day, was nothing more than an annoyance: temporarily blocking the movements and contacts between prisoners in different blocks. [...] I wrote down the numbers of the particularly dirty and lice-ridden, who would later be taken by the Stubendienst (room manager) to be de-loused, an operation that was particularly unpleasant for the prisoners." (p. 247);

* prisoners who were caught hiding to avoid going to work were punished with five blows to the buttocks (p.242-243);

* "The search would have ended here, if they hadn't taken two large packages of food from under the bed.[...] Hans took out all the contents one by one and put them on the table. Helmersohn turned green with anger: - Our soldiers are starving at the front, and here "these" have everything?![...] The big scandal only began after the opening of the closet from which silk underwear fell. I used silk underwear because lice did not resist in it as well as in cotton underwear. It had not been difficult for me to get hold of it..." (p.239);

* When the Allied bombings of Germany began, the guards took great care to keep the prisoners safe, meaning they tried to avoid the extermination of those deported to a camp later declared an extermination camp!

* at Auschwitz the Nazis drew up a "register of the deceased" (Totenbuch) "which had to be kept up to date, otherwise the appeals would be wrong" (p. 155). A first comment: where are these registers today? Do they contain 4,000,000 names? In addition, each death was the subject of a death report, in which "a history of the disease" was made (p. 195). A rich and explicit archive was thus produced, which would allow us to make an accurate inventory of the victims of Nazism. Why has it not been done until today?

* to kill a prisoner, even a Jew, the goodwill of the Nazi SS man was not enough, it was not a cover, but he had to stage a motive, usually an escape attempt, with statements from witnesses, etc., which was not easy (p. 123 et seq.).

The above is sufficiently edifying for the author's testimony to come, without his will, into clear contradiction with what could be called the standard or Hollywood image of Nazi Auschwitz. The state of perplexity that these details produce in the consciousness of any sensitive and intelligent reader reaches a very high level (the highest, in the case of the undersigned) when we learn what happened to the ashes of the prisoners burned in the ovens, in the famous ovens of the crematoriums in Auschwitz. We learn from Wieslaw Kielar that the famous ashes were sent by the camp authorities to the family of the cremated one! I repeat: the ashes of the prisoners who died at Auschwitz were sent to their families!... Here is the quote that, upon careful reading, says so much about the real Auschwitz:

"The sick people transferred to Birkenau were not gassed. But their fate was sealed. In the next few days, left without supervision and medical help in the terrible conditions of the barely organized Brzezinka camp, almost all of them died there. Their bodies were cremated in our crematorium, loading four bodies into an oven at a time. The cremation process was also shortened, and as a result, the bodies were not completely reduced to ashes. The unburned bones were crushed with a wooden pestle, and if, at the request of the family, the urn with the remains of the deceased was to be sent to them, (sn) then the ashes were passed once more through a sieve where the remains of all the dead were mixed. It was not enough that the family did not receive the authentic remains of their loved one, who had suffered in the camp, but they also had to pay a heavy price for sending them The cynicism and obtuse Hitlerite inhumanity celebrated their triumph according to the principle Pecunia non olet..." (p. 106)

Obviously, Wieslaw Kielar is not a professional writer and, therefore, not a professional liar. His book is, obviously, a thesis, a declared anti-Nazi book. In the above quote, sincere in his anti-Nazism, Kielar is outraged – rightly so – by the lack of respect shown by the camp authorities towards the deceased prisoners and their families. The cynicism of the Nazis, pushed to the "exorbitant price" charged for sending the urn, is indeed inhumane. But, as everything in this world is relative, the inhumanity of these authorities, of the gesture reported by Wieslaw Kielar, is a fluctuating quantity depending on the benchmarks at stake. By relating the gesture in question to a world of normality, we adopt the author's point of view.

But if we relate this text, this quote, to the hundreds, to the thousands of texts in which Auschwitz is presented as the place where, every day, hundreds of corpses were burned in the crematoria, of the 4,000,000 (four million) victims turned into ashes – which, supposedly, explains why no material trace of this apocalyptic carnage was found, if we read this text remembering the essential detail: the urn with the remains of the cremated prisoner, at the request of the family, was sent to them, by mail and for a fee, then a huge exclamation mark, of perplexity, opens in our minds. We leave our readers to experience this state, this moment, as they can.

Summarizing the logical, rational level of the comments, we will only say that if things really are as Wieslaw Kielar describes them, if the procedure described above really worked at Auschwitz - otherwise perfectly consistent with the typical German mentality - then the myth of the millions of prisoners gassed and burned in the crematoria at Auschwitz will have to be subjected to an urgent critical re-examination, based strictly on documents and other material evidence to which we can appeal, paying full attention to the arguments invoked by revisionist, denialist authors, who contest not so much the Holocaust as a tragic moment in the history of the modern world, but the lying, indecently delirious literature that has invaded the world's libraries, spreading the logically and, humanly speaking, impossible-to-accept image of a hecatomb in which not only the six million Jews would disappear, but also humanity's self-respect, our hope and faith in the excellence of the human being.

Animated by feelings that do not lack appreciation, compassion and sympathy for the Jewish people, we hope with all our hearts that such a re-examination of the record of Jewish suffering from 1939-1945 will disprove the version of the Holocaust accredited by authors, Jews and non-Jews, who have brought shame to our century. It is comforting to learn that the German authorities had established a rule according to which at Auschwitz, for strictly medical but also practical reasons, deceased prisoners were cremated, and their ashes were sent to the family, at their request and against payment, which implies that the death was communicated to the family! Even if they were not exactly respected by those designated to apply them, all these Nazi procedures categorically disprove the idea of ��a mass extermination program, by gassing and incineration! They disprove both the intention and the deed!

Wieslaw Kielar was convinced that his account would expose "Hitler's cynicism and obtuse inhumanity", the rapacity of the Nazi regime! Therefore, we can be sure that Wieslaw Kielar honestly reported the essential detail: the Nazi administration of Auschwitz was obliged, by law or by internal regulations, to notify the families of deceased prisoners of the occurrence of the death, offering to send, for a fee, the ashes of the deceased, resulting from the mandatory cremation of those who died at Auschwitz. This is the most important information that, without realizing its importance, its significance, Wieslaw Kielar provides us with some candor, because he does it against the thesis that animates the writing of the book.

And the significance of this information is only one: under such a provision and procedure, it was not possible to exterminate hundreds of thousands of prisoners on a conveyor belt at Auschwitz! And it was not even attempted or even intended!

We specify: this conclusion is required under the conditions of the aforementioned procedure, if and only if it really appeared in the regulations or legislation according to which the concentration, deportation, extermination camp, or whatever other name the Auschwitz camp will be given, functioned.

Wieslaw Kielar's book was published in Romania in 1984, by the Politica Publishing House, a publishing house well and rigorously controlled by the Jews in the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party. The director of the publishing house was Valter Roman, at that time. Reading this book did not have the effect of a revelation at that time. The issue of the Holocaust had no direct relevance to us, Romanians. Except at most to give us the opportunity to note, with satisfaction, the abstention of the Romanians, led by Ion Antonescu, from participating in the persecution against the Jews launched at the end of the 1930s.

Read after 1990, Wieslaw Kielar's book becomes very important for the Romanian public. And this for at least two reasons:

* after 1990, a vast campaign of accusations was launched against Romania and the Romanian people, based on the idea that "the Holocaust began in Romania" (thesis launched by Moses Rozen, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania), Romanians being the authors of the mass murder of over 400,000 Jews;

* after 1990, a significant, although still insufficient, number of documents, memoirs and information regarding communist prisons and the penitentiary regime of those years, especially from the period 1946-1964, was published.

By relating Wieslaw Kielar's testimony (and memories) to the two post-December "events", every Romanian reader becomes interested in all the information provided by the Polish author that he can use to reject the accusation of the Holocaust in Romania, accusations that, without our will, force us to record with satisfaction all the elements that, faute de mieux, if they do not properly concern the "Holocaust in Romania", deny or severely diminish the Holocaust in general, as a part and chapter of the history of the 20th century.

If it turns out that the figure of 4,000,000 Jewish victims at Auschwitz is exaggerated, much exaggerated, then the idea that the Romanians produced 400,000 Jewish victims will also be compromised, thus encouraging us to indulge ourselves and wholeheartedly doubt these figures, and even the act itself (see the "pogrom" of January 1941).

And if we compare the detention regime at Auschwitz with the conditions in which people lived and died in communist prisons in Romania, the difference is mind-boggling! At Auschwitz, the prisoners experienced a regime far superior to that experienced by political prisoners in Romania between 1945 and 1964, in Pitești or Aiud, in Jilava or Canal. At Auschwitz, the organizers were Nazis, while at Pitești, the detention regime was designed by Comintern communists, most of whom were Jewish.

Ion Coja

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