Video Of The Week - Powerful Speech- Auschwitz Liberation After
75 Years- https://tinyurl.com/uf42lv7
For full Article
and videos go to - https://tinyurl.com/uvwfrat by Tom Gross 23-01-2020
There were some important speeches at today’s World
Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to mark the 75th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz.
I attach videos of some of them below. They are short
so you may want to make time to watch them.
If you only have time to watch one, I suggest you watch
the last one, delivered in a heartfelt way without notes by former Israeli
Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau.
Lau was liberated aged 7, in April 1945, by the 89th
Infantry Division of the United States army, having already lost both his
parents in the Holocaust.
He was the only Holocaust survivor speaking today to
the dozens of assembled presidents, prime ministers, kings and princes and in
effect he is speaking for the 6 million. (In fact, research and newly opened
archives since the fall of communism in eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union mean that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust is much closer to 7
million.)
Previous Nazi camps had already been liberated,
starting with Majdanek, freed by the Red Army on July 24, 1944.
But Russian, Polish, French and British officials
didn’t want any public knowledge of the camps to be made, or photos released,
so as (supposedly) not to alarm people, and strict censorship was imposed.
It was only after US forces arrived in Buchenwald on
April 6, 1945 (where Yisrael Lau was imprisoned) and the Supreme Commander of
Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, visited the camp on April 12, that
he said these “conditions of indescribable horror” must be made public, and he
ordered all censorship of Nazi atrocities lifted.
Later that month, on April 20, 1945, the BBC radio
correspondent Richard Dimbleby accompanying British and Canadian forces into
Belsen, said in his report: “This day when we reached Belsen was the most
horrible day of my life”:
“Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people.
You could not see which was which... The living lay with their heads against
the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated,
aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out
of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had
been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven
mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust
the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the
bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the
most horrible of my life.”
The last of the dozens of Nazi camps to be liberated
was Theresienstadt (Terezin) north of Prague, when Soviet forces arrived on May
8, 1945, over a week after Hitler was dead and Berlin occupied. It could have
been liberated earlier and lives of prisoners would have been saved, but
American forces (on the order of President Roosevelt in agreement with Stalin)
deliberately stopped in Plzen in the west of Czechoslovakia to allow the Red
Army time to move westwards and take over the country.
(Several members of my
own family were imprisoned in Terezin before being killed there or taken on in
packed cattle trains to be murdered in other camps.)
No comments:
Post a Comment