The Hollocaust

It is said that history can repeat , but if you know what happened in the past it is less possible to make the same mistakes that other people have done.
Do YOU know what happened at Auschwitz??
Auschwitz is a name that has come to symbolize the holocaust of the Second World War. In this place an estimated as 3 million people of various races, but mostly Jews, were murdered by Nazi Germany. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nazi Germany's largest concentration and extermination camp facility, was located nearby the provincial Polish town of Oshwiecim in Galacia .Auschwitz was the place where the Nazis perfected the machinery of extermination, starting off as quite a small camp but rapidly expanding to form other camps as they had to cope with increasing numbers of victims transported in by trains from all over Europe. When the Germans retreated in 1945, they tried to conceal the incriminating evidence of their crimes but the advance of the allies was so rapid and Auschwitz so massive that they simply did not have time to finish their work. When camp survivors started to tell of life inside Auschwitz, their stories were of crimes of such depravity and on such a scale that it was far beyond human comprehension.
As a permanent sign of respect to the people who suffered in Auschwitz, the Polish Parliament declared it a National Monument and Museum - a grim reminder to all of us of what humans are capable of doing to one another.
Many horrifying things happened there .Most of the people killed ,9 out of 10 were Jews and the rest were gypsies or soviet POWs . The people who weren’t killed through gassing, starvation, diseases, shooting or burning were used and killed in terrible experiments and those people were especially children
At Auschwitz children were often killed upon arrival. Children born in the camp were generally killed on the spot. Near the end of the war, in order to cut expenses and save gas, cost-accountant considerations led to an order to place living children directly into the ovens or throw them into open burning pits. “Special” children and twins were supposed to experiments by the ones called camp doctors. The worst doctor was Josef Mengele. He putted children into pressure chambers , tested drugs on them , children were castrated or suffered many traumas.
One twin recalls the death of his brother:
"Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why - perhaps because he was the older twin. Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt. It is impossible to put into words how I felt. They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers - and now, my twin ..."
These terrors occurred in Block 10 of Auschwitz I. Josef Mengele was nicknamed the Angel of Death for the inhuman experiments he conducted.
At that time nobody cared about those people lives about their injuries or feelings or dreams, all they wanted to do was to make a pour human race: Private diaries of Goebbels and Himmler unearthed from the secret Soviet archives show that Adolf Hitler personally ordered the mass extermination of the Jews during a meeting of Nazi German regional governors in the chancellery. As Goebbels wrote "With regard to the Jewish question, the Fuhrer decided to make a clean sweep ..."This cleaning didn’t skip Romania , jews and gypsies were deported to Auschwitz .Some of the Romanian survivors told to others their stories or even written it . Many of them were from Transilvania and were deported by the hortists, but in fact Romania never came under direct German rule, and consequently very few Romanian Jews were deported to German camps. The Romanian government pursued an anti-Semitic policy of its own, and Hitler was satisfied with it. Most of Romanian jews deported from the county Moldavia, from Basarabia and Bukovina were killed in Transnistria. Transnistria was a geographic invention, but a historic reality. The name was coined by Romanian fascists in World War II to designate a territory chosen for the annihilation of Jews deported from Romania. It was an area situated in south-western Ukraine, between the River Dniester to the west, the River Bug to the east, the Black Sea to the south, and a line beyond the city of Moghilev-Podolsky to the north. In Romanian the river is called The Nistru. TRANS-NISTRIA meant "beyond the River Dniester".Territorially, Transnistria was the largest killing field in the Holocaust. Many authors refer to it as "The Romanian Auschwitz". But even having this killing area ,Romania sent some jews to Auscwitz too, especially from Transilvania were deported to Auschwitz almost 150.000 jewish people : For example Eva Mozes Kor was a Romanian Jewish sent there which survived of Dr. Mengele's experiments:
“Mengele came in every morning after roll call to count us. He wanted to know every morning how many” guinea pigs” he had.
“Three times a week both of my arms would be tied to restrict the blood flow, and they took a lot of blood from my left arm. At the same time they would give me a minimum of five injections into my right arm.
“After one of those injections I became extremely ill and Dr Mengele came in next morning with four other doctors. He looked at my fever chart and he said, laughing sarcastically, he said: ‘Too bad, she is so young. She has only two weeks to live.’ I would fade in and out of consciousness. I would keep telling myself: I must survive. I must survive.”
“Would I have died, my twin sister Miriam would have been rushed immediately to Mengele’s lab, killed with an injection to the heart. Then Mengele would have done the comparative autopsies. That is the way most of the twins died."
Another Romanian Jew who survived at Auschwitz was Leopold Schobel who was from a village near Sighisoara , in Transilvania. He stayed 8 months at Auschwitz .He was deported by train with his mother, with his brother’s wife and her daughter. He was the one of his family that survived. At first he was taken at Auschwitz 2 (Birkenau ) and then moved in Auschwitz 1 .He was tattooed a number on his arm A-13221; he was the prisoner number A-13221, now he didn’t have a name anymore.He was a lucky man because the work he had to do there was not so exhausting as other works and he resisted for 8 months. He survived but he says that a part of him remained there with his family.
Oliver Lustig was another Romanian Jewish survivor which described the life at Auschwitz and also described some vivid images of his camp experience:
“ I am Oliver Lustig.          On May 3, 1944, soon after 4 o’clock in the morning, our house was invaded by a group of Hungarian gendarmes. We were living in the commune of Soimeni, in Cluj County. I hadn’t turned 18 yet.          Concurrently, in all the villages and communes of northern Transylvania, without exception, at the same hour, and following the same procedure, the Hungarian gendarmes knocked on the doors of all the Jewish houses with their rifle butts and seized every living Jew.          They gave us a few hours to pack and prepare ourselves to leave. They warned us not to carry more than a total of 50 kilos per family. They took us out of our homes, put us on carts pulled by oxen and herded us to the Cluj ghetto. …
…The journey from Cluj to Birkenau-Auschwitz lasted 4 days and 3 nights…

… I looked at my mother drifting away with her children. She held the youngest by the hand and the other two were close to her. They began marching to their deaths. There were only 1,000-1,200 steps to the gas chamber and the crematory. I watched them march until I lost sight of them. They were unsuspectingly approaching the end. “

What happened at Auschwitz was horrible for the Jews and for the entire humanity . It is said that now after so many years, at Auschwitz crematory you can feel the bitter smell of burnt human corpses.




The author of this project is
Anca Adriana Pasarin

Book review-"Life in the Death's Empire" by Oliver Lustig

"Not long ago, I was living my life monotonously, without thinking what my life has in store for me. Everything looked simple to me, because I had everything that I wanted without fighting for my possessions, for liberty or even for life. But I was frightened when, one day, I found out about the massacre that took place around 1940-1945.
In the extermination camps from Auschwitz hundred of thousands of innocent Jews were killed, only because of Nazi’s wish to create a “pure race” !
Since this subject seemed interesting to me, I went at the library and I borrowed a book about Holocaust, “Life in The Death’s Empire”, by the Romanian writer Oliver Lustig, born Haftering.
He wrote this book in the memory of his mother, Iolanda, killed at Auschwitz, of his father, Edmund, killed at Maulhousen, of his twin brothers, Cornel and Cornelia, killed in the gas chambers from Birkenau- Auschwitz, when they just reached the age of 14, and of his little brother, Valentin, aged only 8.
He also says that he dedicated this book “to all those at whose fight and death I was eye witness in Birkenau – Auschwitz, Kaufering no.4, Kaufering no. 9 and Landsberg camps “, also to “all the deported persons and antifascists fighters who were taken in the Nazi concentration - camps that studded Europe - , and who died convinced that the fascism will be defeated, that the life will win over death “
This way, I found out things at which I have never thought, things that my outlook refuses to perceive. What fault had those people that they were born Jews? Or… who gave the fascists the right to end the life of so many people? Did they really have no mercy? These are questions at which no one can answer.
After the Jews were taken from their homes, they were transported to camps in ware wagons, 60 people in each one, without water and food, so that not many Jews arrived alive at destination.
Once they arrived, the ones able to work were separated from the others and the old ones, the children, the invalids and the ones weakened because of the long travel, were taken directly to the gas chambers.
To avoid the panic that would have been made because of the separation of the families, the soldiers told the Jews that they were separated because they had to go much more and they didn’t have vehicles available for everybody, so that the ones still in power had to walk. These people went calm, not knowing that that was the last time when they saw their old parents.
Those who were chosen for work were undressed and they were given other used and signed clothes. In the camps they were taken, they didn’t have enough space not even to move, they slept in barracks, one next to the other, so that they couldn’t even stretch their legs. They were given food only in the evening, a slice of bread each.
They were working from the early morning till evening, and those who fainted or collapsed because of being tired, were shot. When they stopped working, they couldn’t even think of what was waiting for them. They lost trust, hope and they were willing to die faster in order to get rid of the torture.
Every time, at the evening control, the thinner ones were chosen and taken to the crematory.
So that’s how days, months, even years passed, while thousands of people died, until the fascism was defeated.
When the Nazi felt threatened, they started to wipe off their tracks, they burnt to the ground the crematories and fled.
Before that, they poisoned those who remained alive. Only a few survived from the hundreds of Jews and other populations.
Reading this book, I realized that even a second can be fatal, when you don’t do anything to prevent this kind of events. I learnt to cherish more every second of my life and everything I have got. In my opinion, it is important to know these things to avoid a replay of history and to build our future on moral values and on tolerance.
We are fortunate that some of those people who experienced Auschwitz are still alive, because in this way we can find out about it directly from the source, and together we can learn the most important lesson History has ever taught human kind: that the greatest evils are prejudice, discrimination and intolerance.
We should be more confident, we should not let ourselves influenced by doctrines and we have to choose our leaders carefully.
As long as we know about our past and we support each other, no one will be able to take control over our lives."



Alina Valentina Cazan, Class 9F2

e-twinning project Meeting at Auschwitz