Auschwitz Liberated 70 years ago

++It is incredible to me that 300 survivors went back to the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. They warn of future crimes against Jews in Europe. Ron Lauder of the World Jewish Congress spoke at the ceremony urging the world to be vigilant as the Jewish communities in Hungary, the Czech Republic and elsewhere are afraid.

++The Germans opened the camp in June of 1940. Between then and its liberation by the Soviet army,1.1 million Jews were exterminated. The largest numbers came from Hungary. Another 20,000 Roma or gypsies were also executed. 

++I first heard of concentration camps when I was a pre-schooler. My sister had to write a story about a remarkable person and she had to interview that person. Our neighbor was a man named Henry Sears, who made his living designing lingerie in the Garment district of Manhattan. His wife Ann told my mother what Henry had done during the war, something he never spoke about. My sister decided to interview Henry about his war experiences,which he had not talked openly about. Deciding to help a young student,he allowed himself to be interviewed. Henry had been part of the American forces that liberated the camps. I think it may have been Dachau. What was an ordinary school assignment became an intense emotional experience both both my sister and Henry Sears.

++Then years past and it was only around the early 1960s that paperbacks appeared describing the atrocities of the concentration camps and soon the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem made the Holocaust a common theme to explore.

++Even now there are whole areas that historians are just beginning to discover the documentary evidence for. Unfortunately for our own American history, this involves the role IBM played in the development of the information technology of the round-ups and our role in smuggling Nazis to the United States, an issue that only got raised in the recent Congressional action to deprive them of social security. 

++On that cheery note,I just received the Guantanamo Diary of Mohammed Ould Slahi,a Mauretanian held in Gitmo on suspicion of being a member of Al Qaeda. Ould Slahi maintains that he was sexually abused by American female guards and tortured to the point he fabricated a non-existent Al Qaeda cell in Canada.