It is often stated that Rudolf Reder (who later took the name Roman Robak) was the only Jew to have survived the “pure extermination camp” at Belzec. This, however, is incorrect even from an exterminationist viewpoint, since according to orthodox historiography there were in all seven survivors: Reder, Chaim Hirszman, Sara Beer, Hirsz Birder, Mordechai Bracht, Samuel Velser and “Szpilke”. The last person appears only within Reader’s account. Although Reder claims to have met “Szpilke” in Lemberg after the war, and states that he later lived in Hungary, yet this mysterious witness to the last days of the camp has left no historical trace whatsoever. As for Sara Beer, Belzec expert Michael Tregenza informs us (“Belzec – Das vergessene Lager des Holocaust”, in I. Wojak, P. Hayes (eds.), “Arisierung” im Nationalsozialismus, Volksgemeinschaft, Raub und Gedächtnis, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 2000, p. 260) that she was transferred from the “death camp” to Trawniki together with 20-25 unnamed other Jewesses, and that she survived also Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen to be liberated by British troops in April 1945; she appears to have left no testimony on her stay in Belzec. Birder, Bracht and Velser are basically unknowns. Further, two women named Mina Astman and Malka Talenfeld are reported to have escaped after spending only some hours in the camp, and their brief impressions seems to have been recorded only second-hand (see Y. Arad,Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.., p. 264). Only two of the survivors, Reder and Hirszman, left witness accounts. The former published the 74-page pamphlet Belzec in collaboration with Nella Rost in 1946, and also testified before a Polish investigative commission and in connection with the 1965 Munich Belzec trial. As for the latter, Carlo Mattogno informs us (Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History, p. 51):

“On March 19, 1946, Chaim Hirszman appeared before the regional historical commission of Lublin, but he was murdered the same day after his interrogation had been adjourned. Therefore, we have only a very laconic testimony from his side (Zydowski Instytut Historiczny (Jewish Historical Institute), Warsaw, Report No. 1476). As far as its content is concerned, it is so irrelevant that it does not even appear in the extract of testimonies on Belzec presented by Marian Muszkat in the official report of the Polish government on the German crimes against Poland.”

Yet, despite its extreme brevity, it is obviously of a certain importance as the only witness account left by a former Belzec prisoner besides those of Reder’s. The fact that it has gone virtually unmentioned and unquoted by Holocaust historians is likely foremost due to the aforementioned brevity and obscurity, but it cannot be wholly excluded that it also has to do with its contents, i.e. Hirszman’s statements about the alleged mass killings at Belzec.
Yitzhak Arad informs us that Hirszman and two other, unnamed prisoners escaped from the train which was taking them from the liquidated Belzec camp to Sobibor in July 1943, supposedly to be killed there (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka…, p. 265). The orthodox claim that the remaining Belzec inmates were taken to Sobibor to be executed there does not square well with the abovementioned fact that Sara Beer and other female detainees were sent to the Trawniki labor camp.
As for the ultimate fate of Hirszman, historian Martin Gilbert writes (The Holocaust. The Jewish Tragedy, Fontana Press, London 1987, p. 817) that:

“on March 9, one of only two survivors of the death camp at Belzec, Chaim Hirszman, gave evidence in Lublin of what he had witnessed in the death camp. He was asked to return on the following day to complete his evidence. But on his way home he was murdered, because he was a Jew.”

The Polish Historian Henryk Pajak states, however, that Hirszman was killed not because he was a Jew, but because he was an “active and dangerous functionary” of the new Communist regime (Konspiracja mlodziezy szkolnej 1945-1955, Lublin 1994, pp. 130-31, quoted in Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust, McFarland 1998, p. 341, note 306).

Chaim Hirszman’s testimony

According to his own testimony, Hirszman was deported from Zaklikow, which was in the District of Lublin, Janow county (Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 304). Arad informs us that a transport of 2,000 Jewish deportees departed from Zaklikow on November 3, 1942 (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka…, p. 383). Gilbert reproduces the apparently most relevant part of Hirszman’s testimony as follows:

“We were entrained and taken to Belzec. The train entered a small forest. Then, the entire crew of the train was changed. SS men from the death camp replaced the railroad employees. We were not aware of this at that time.
The train entered the camp. Other SS men took us off the train. They led us all together – women, men, children – to a barrack. We were told to undress before we go to the bath. I understood immediately what that meant. After undressing we were told to form two groups, one of men and the other of women with children. An SS man, with the strike of a horsewhip, sent the men to the right or to the left, to death – to work.
I was selected to death, I didn’t know it then. Anyway, I believed that both sides meant the same – death. But, when I jumped in the indicated direction, an SS man called me and said: ‘Du bist ein Militarmensch, dich konnen wir brauchen’ ['You have a military bearing, we could use you.']
We, who were selected for work, were told to dress.
I and some other men were appointed to take the people to the kiln. I was sent with the women. The Ukrainian Schmidt, an Ethnic German, was standing at the entrance to the gas-chamber and hitting with a knout [a knotted whip] every entering woman. Before the door was closed, he fired a few shots from his revolver and then the door closed automatically and forty minutes later we went in and carried the bodies out to a special ramp. We shaved the hair off the bodies, which were afterwards packed into sacks and taken away by Germans.
The children were thrown into the chamber simply on the women’s heads. In one of the ‘transports’ taken out of the gas chamber, I found the body of my wife and I had to shave her hair.
The bodies were not buried on the spot, the Germans waited until more bodies were gathered. So, that day we did not bury…” (Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 304)

We note here first and foremost that Hirszman speaks of “gas chamber” in singularis. In many eyewitness accounts, “gas chamber” is confusingly taken to mean a building containing one or more gas chambers, but judging from Hirszman’s very brief description we are in fact dealing with only one chamber: children are thrown into “the chamber” and “the door” closes automatically once the victims are inside. According to orthodox historiography, the gas chamber building used at Belzec during this period of time consisted of six chambers arranged three and three on either side of a central corridor. There is no reason why the entrance door to the building, a opposed to the doors of the individual chambers, would be “closed automatically” before the gassing. It is also noteworthy that Hirszman for some inexplicable reason uses “kiln” as synonymous with “the gas chamber”, while at the same time he implies that the building was disguised as a bath.

The claim that the hair of the victims being shaved off after their death goes completely against all other available eyewitness testimony. We may compare here with Kurt Gerstein’s statement that the women had their hair cut off and stuffed inside potato sacks before entering the gas chambers (cf. H. Roques, he ‘Confessions’ of Kurt Gerstein, IHR, Costa Mesa 1989, p. 30) or Rudolf Reder’s claim to the same effect (cf. Rudolf Reder, “Belzec” in: Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, volume 13 (2000), p. 274).

The assertion that at the day of Hirszman’s arrival “the bodies were not buried at the spot” but instead left lying on the ground and only buried once “more bodies were gathered” is spurious for two reasons. First, no other witness has attested to this procedure; rather most witnesses imply or state that the corpses were interred right after the gassing in the burial pit open for the moment, and then covered with a sand layer. Second, the archeological evidence furnished by Andrzej Kola contradicts it. Given a theoretical maximum of 8 corpses per cubic meter, the approximately 2,000 victims (if we are to trust Arad’s figure) would have occupied 250 cubic meters. Of the 33 grave pits identified by Kola at Belzec, 10 (in their present state) have a volume of 250 cubic meters or less. There is thus no reason to believe that the SS would wait for more corpses to accumulate before burying them. Besides, the idea of letting 2,000 corpses lie around in the open for a day or more seems odd. On the other hand, the procedure described by Rajchman might be realistic if the only victims from the transport were a small number of en route deaths.

The second-hand testimony of Pola Hirszman

The day after Chaim was shot, on March 20, 1946, Chaim’s wife Pola testified about what her husband had allegedly witnessed at Belzec. Her testimony is likewise kept in the archive of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Gilbert writes that “Chaim Hirszman’s experiences at Belzec were also set down in 1946 by his second wife, Pola, to whom he often retold them after the war” (ibid., p. 305). Needless to say, second-hand accounts are more or less worthless as evidence, but we will anyway take a look at some of her statements.

Mrs. Hirszman’s testimony starts out with a typical atrocity story about a transport consisting of small children – babies to three year olds – being murdered in a most unseemly manner:

“The workers were told to dig one big hole into which the children were thrown and buried alive.” (ibid., p. 305)

There is not really much to comment on here. The same goes for the next story, about a prisoner being hanged for a failed escape attempt; on the scaffold, the condemned man prophesize the fall of Hitler and his Reich. We are also told that typhus was prevailing in the camp, and that Chaim also contracted the disease but avoided being “murdered on the spot” by concealing his condition from the Germans. Pola also relates a story that is found with variations also in the Treblinka and Sobibor lore, about an Aryan (in this case a Ukrainian woman) arriving by mistake at the camp who is then gassed with the Jews, despite showing the SS men proper identification. Next we learn about the camp that

“Once you crossed the gate to the camp, there was no chance to get out of there alive. Not even any Germans, except for the camp staff, had access to the camp.” (ibid., p. 305)

This claim is contradicted by several eyewitness statements. The former camp staff member Heinrich Gley declared in 1961 that a Jewish work detail had been carrying tasks far outside the camp and Polish witness Maria D. affirmed in October 1945 that some Jews in the camp “had the right to leave the camp perimeter” (Mattogno, Belzec…, p. 44). According to orthodox Belzec expert Michael Tregenza, four Polish villagers were employed in the camp proper, while, most astoundingly, other villagers were allowed inside the camp to take photographs (ibid., p. 43).
One of the stories related by Pola concerns Jews employed outside of the camp:

“Two Czechoslovak Jewesses were working in the camp office [which was located outside of the camp]. They, too, had never entered the camp. They even enjoyed a certain freedom of movement. They often went with the SS men to town to arrange different matters. One day they were told that they would visit the camp. The SS men showed them around the camp and in a certain moment they led the women to the gas-chamber and when they were inside, the door closed behind them. They finished with them in spite of the promise that they would live.” (Gilbert, The Holocaust, pp. 305-306)

This story clearly does not make much sense. On one hand, we are told that the two Jewesses had been promised that they would live, and thus they must have known that the Jews were being exterminated at Belzec – and working at the camp office, they could hardly have escaped figuring out the “true nature” of the camp (especially since this was supposedly well-known in the Belzec community from the start; cf. Mattogno, Belzec…, p. 43). But why then would the women walk gullibly into the “gas chamber”? Furthermore, we again note the singular of “door” being used in the description of the “gas chamber”.

When not carrying out a wholesale mass murder, burying small children alive or tricking Jewish secretaries into gas chambers, the SS men in the camp spent time relaxing with their victims:

“The Germans ordered the prisoners to set up a football team and on Sundays games were being played. Jews played with SS men, the same ones who tortured and murdered them. The SS men treated this as a matter of sport, and when they lost a game, they had no complaints.” (Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 306).

On this point, at least, there is reason to believe that Pola is relating the truth. The SS man Werner Dubois mentioned during an interrogation in 1961: “It also happened that I organized a soccer match with 22 Jews on the sports ground” (quoted in Mattogno, Belzec…, p. 66). The soccer games are also confirmed by the Polish witness Tadeusz M., who further noted that the Germans had organized a string orchestra among the inmates (ibid., p. 44)

Conclusion

Chaim Hirszman’s Belzec testimony is indeed largely irrelevant due to its brevity and lack of detail, but is nonetheless illuminating. Within the space of only some paragraph our witness manages to include several statements contradicting the orthodox picture of the “death camp”. Further, the second-hand recollections of his wife do not exactly help his reliability. It is a shame that Hirszman did not survive to leave a more complete testimony, as it would undoubtedly have constituted another bullet in the foot of the Belzec story. However, the stuck splinter that is Hirszman’s Belzec statement should be enough to make the defenders of the pure Shoah faith cringe with embarassment.

“Sixty-five years ago, the world woke itself to the horrors of Auschwitz. Today, it is our duty to pay tribute to the 6 millions of Jews and all the other victims of the Holocaust.

We have a duty to remember the loss of life and the suffering caused by this unprecedented crime in history. This legacy must be passed to future generations as a memento. Miep Gies, one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis and who preserved Anne Frank’s diary said that the past is never over.

Remembrance of the Shoah must strengthen our determination to fight, in today’s world, against the phenomena that several decades ago led the world into the abyss of the Holocaust. (…)

No form of antisemitism, regardless of where and whom it comes from, is acceptable. The commemoration of other crimes cannot be to the detriment of the remembrance of the Shoah. The conflict in the Middle East cannot be an excuse or justification for antisemitism. It is deplorable to read at the very wake of the commemoration of the Holocaust statements that deny the Shoah. It is unacceptable to deny or minimize the established history of the Nazi genocide against the Jews. The value of human life is universal: this is true for each and every human being, regardless of their race, religion, or nation.

At the end of this year, Member States will have to implement the long-awaited Framework Decision on racism and xenophobia. Sixty-five years after the extermination camps were liberated, we can be proud that EU law makes the denial of the Shoah a crime in all its Member States. The Commission is strongly committed to pay particular attention to the correct transposition and implementation of all the provisions of this Framework Decision across the Union.”

Thus, if Barrot and his cohorts have their way, critical scrutiny of the “Holocaust” claims, i.e. “Holocaust denial” will be illegalized come 2011 in all EU member states, not only the ones already equipped with such anti-heresy laws (among them Germany, Austria, France, Belgium and the Netherlands). The modern day inquisition of the Holy Shoah will enter a new stage. “The European Mind Stops…”

In 2005, historians Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband published a volume entitled What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (John Murray, London). The book contains a number of recent interviews with Germans as well as Jews of German nationality deported to ghettos and “death camps”. One of the latter is Ernst Levin, born in Breslau (Wroclaw) in 1925. In January 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he worked in the Buna-Werke in Monowitz (Auschwitz III). The most interesting part of the Levin interview, however, does not concern Mr. Levin himself, but a friend of his in Breslau (pp. 74-75):

“Just about four weeks before I went on my transport, there was one transport before mine and a friend of mine named Helmut went on that transport. That transport wound up in Treblinka. In a place near Treblinka, there was also a contingent of Germans working, one of whom we had known. Helmut wrote a letter and gave it to this man and said: ‘Send it to my Ernst.’ I got this letter. I never knew who sent it or how they got it out. He told me in this letter that he was near Treblinka and ‘hier ist ein Lager, wo die Menschen chemisch behandelt werden.’ [here is a camp were the people are being treated with chemicals.] It is amazing that even at that time he wouldn’t say that they were gassed. Isn’t that amazing? I was thinking, ‘what the heck does he mean?’ I guess he eventually was gassed. He certainly didn’t survive.”

What is especially striking about the letter’s reported content is the wording “chemisch behandelt” (“chemically treated”). According to official historiography, the alleged mass killings at Treblinka were carried out using engine exhaust gas. Obviously no ordinary person would connect exhaust gas with chemicals. The early war-time and post-war claims about killings with steam and vacuum on the other hand are impossible to connect with the concept of “chemical treatment”. From Levin’s statement it is clear that his friend Helmut did not write that the deportees died from the “chemical treatment” (otherwise Levin would have easily drawn the conclusion that the phrase referred to mass killings using some chemical agent).

Since the reported message from the Breslau Jew Helmut is only fragmentary, it is as good as impossible to draw any conclusions from it. It is possible, though, that “chemisch behandelt” is a reference to a part of a delousing procedure. The Ostarbeiter Galina K., who worked in a transit camp near Hannover during the war, has testified that she and the other worker prisoners “smeared heads, armpits and genitalia [of the Ostarbeiter deportees] with a chemical solution” (Janet Anschutz, Irmtraud Heike, “Medizinische Versorgung von Zwangsarbeitern in Hannover: Forschung und Zeitzeugenberichte zum Gesundheitswesen”, in: Gunter Siedburger, Andreas Frewer, Zwangsarbeit und Gesundheitswesen im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Einsatz und Versorgung in Norddeutschland, Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, Zürich, New York 2006, p. 52).

The statement that Helmut was sent to Treblinka, but then ended up “near Treblinka” can be taken to imply that he was transferred from the “death camp” to either the labor camp Treblinka I or to some labor detail in the Treblinka-Malkinia area. It should not be excluded though, that the letter could have been sent from Treblinka II. The phrase “near Treblinka” could possibly refer to the village of Treblinka, which was located some four kilometers to the north of the “death camp” Treblinka II, or to the railway station, which was located about 1 km to the north of it. The phrasing “hier ist ein Lager” (here is a camp), while not unequivocal, also fit this interpretation. What speaks against such an interpretation is the claim that Helmut gave the letter to a German working “near Treblinka”, a claim which, however, Levin appears to contradict himself (“I never knew who sent it or how they got it out”).

That at least some of the inmates in the Aktion Reinhardt “pure extermination camps” were able to send letters to the outside world has been revealed by Jules Schelvis. In his study Sobibor. A History of a Nazi Death Camp (Berg Publishing, Oxford 2007), Schelvis briefly mentions (p. 139) Walter Poppert, a German Jew who was deported from Westerbork (a collection camp in the Netherlands) together with his wife on May 8, 1943. At Sobibór, Poppert was foreman of the Waldkommando (wood-cutting detail) a fact which he mentioned himself in a postcard dating from August 1943 (p. 112, 141). Orthodox historians often maintain that the Dutch Jews who arrived at Sobibór had to write postcards which were sent to their relatives in the Netherlands as part of the overall “deception”. However, this is supposed to have happened at their arrival, before the vast majority of them supposedly were led to the gas chambers. Poppert’s postcard on the other hand was sent 3 months after his arrival to the camp. In other words: the SS allowed an inmate in a top secret “extermination camp” to communicate with the outside world!

By Carlo Mattogno (January 2010)

My work Le camere a gas di Auschwitz. Studio storico-tecnico sugli “indizi criminali” di Jean-Claude Pressac e sulla “convergenza di prove” di Robert Jan van Pelt (The Gas Chambers of Auschwitz. A Historical and Technical Study on the “Criminal Evidence” of Jean-Claude Pressac and the “convergence of evidence” of Robert Jan van Pelt, Effepi, Genoa 2009) has now been in print for several months and, as expected, it has been met with almost complete silence. Below I will speak of it briefly as a dignified celebration of the “Remembrance Day”. The work in question is not “negationist” but *affirmationist* because it refutes the interpretations proposed by the authors mentioned in its title while reconstructing, piece by piece, thanks to documents unknown to Pressac and van Pelt, the real context of events. It is therefore not a work of sterile or negative criticism, but a positive contribution to our knowledge of the camp.

First some technical information. The book consists of 715 pages, whereof 658 are text and the remaining 51 contains reproductions of documents. The critical apparatus consists of 2,510 notes with references to documents from 22 archives and a bibliography listing approximately 270 works, including over 80 on the subject of cremations. The appendices contain, among other things, a glossary of more than 400 German technical terms. The study is divided into five parts and 19 chapters. The table of contents below already provides a fairly accurate idea of the topics that are treated. I will therefore limit myself to making some brief comments.

Part One is devoted to the “criminal traces” of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, as presented by Jean-Claude Pressac and later – in a publication bordering on plagiarism – by Robert Jan van Pelt. The original formulation of the “traces” goes back to the Polish investigative judge Jan Sehn, who listed nearly all of them after the war.
With “criminal traces” Pressac means the alleged “bavures” that appears in several German documents relating to the crematoria of Birkenau and for which, he said, it is impossible to give any explanation other than a homicidal one. But, as is documented in the seven chapters of this section, this claim depends solely on Pressac’s inability to correctly explain the documents in question.

In Chapter 1 are listed accurately all the “criminal traces” put forward by the two historians, divided according to which crematorium they relate to, as well as distributed chronologically, highlighting the often overlooked fact that they are concentrated to the period of the construction of the crematoria. The orthodox historians wants us to believe, that the alleged gas chambers at Birkenau operated for several months without leaving any trace behind. In particular, the alleged gas chamber of crematorium II is supposed to have been in operation for twenty months, exterminating a total of 500,000 Jews (according to van Pelt) without leaving a single “criminal trace”.

The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ventilation systems of Leichenkeller 1 (the semi-subterraneous basement rooms supposed to have served as a homicidal gas chamber) and 2 (the alleged changing rooms) of crematoria I and II. The original German documents show that, for the alleged Auschwitz gas chambers, the SS planned 9.5 air changes per hour, whereas the ventilation capacity for the “undressing rooms” was set at 11 air changes per hour.
Thus the “undressing rooms” were better ventilated than the “gas chambers”! There follows another tehnical discussion, likewise based on German documents, concerning an elevator with a capacity of 300 kg which was installed in Crematorium II as a temporary device, but remained in permanent use, contrary to the unfounded claim of van Pelt that it was replaced with another elevator having a capacity of 1,500 kg (but which in fact was mounted in crematorium III). In order to bring the alleged 500,000 corpses from the semi-basement to the furnace room on the ground floor, the elevator would have had to make 100,000 trips up and down. This would mean 231 transports a day, each lasting 6 minutes, without interruption, day and night on all of the approximately 430 days during which the crematorium actually was in operation, without ever a mishap occuring and without a moment’s rest!

Chapter 2 covers, one by one, the “criminal traces” pertaining to crematorium II – Vergasungskeller, Gaskeller, Gasdichtetür, Auskleideraum, Auskleidekeler, Sonderkeller, Drahtnetzeinschiebevorrichtung and Holzblenden, Gasprüfer and Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste, Warmluftzuführungsanlage, Holzgebläse and others – discussing them in detail and clarifying their real historical context, thus refuting the fallacious interpretations of Pressac and van Pelt. Chapter 3 examines the secondary “criminal traces” relating to the same crematorium, while Chapter covers the primary “traces” pertaining to crematorium III. Among other things I show here, basing my argument on documents unknown to Pressac and van Pelt, that the 14 showerheads mentioned in a document relating to Leichenkeller 1 of crematorium III were not “fake”, as apodictically proclaimed by them, but real ones. They were, in fact, part of a program of “Special measures for the improvement of hygiene facilities” launched at Birkenau in early May 1943, which also included the crematoria and of which, apparently, the two abovementioned authors know nothing. In their ignorance, they have turned an installation for the maintenance of hygiene among camp inmates into a “criminal trace” of mass extermination.

Chapter 5 deals with the “criminal traces” of crematoria IV and V. While Pressac admitted that there exists no evidence for the presence of homicidal gas chambers in these buildings, he nevertheless ventured four different hypotheses regarding their structure and functioning, one more inconclusive than the other. It is no wonder that he described the gassing technique supposed employed here as “irrational and ridiculous”. Even this judgement is all too kind, because the procedure described by Pressac, with Zyklon B being inserted through small windows, was technically impossible. These windows were, in fact, fitted with metal bars, making it impossible to introduce a can of Zyklon B from the outside. Moreover, we are supposed to believe that the Auschwitz SS designed the alleged homicidal gas chambers in Crematorium IV and V without a mechanical ventilation system, at the risk of contaminating the entire crematorium, and this after ordering, on 9 December 1940, ventilation installations for the dissection rooms and the mortuary of crematorium I, and after installing ventilation systems not only crematoria II and III, but also in the disinfestation gas chambers in Block 3 of the main camp as well as the disinfestation facilities BW 5a and 5b in Birkenau and the so-called Kanada I.

In Chapter 6 are analyzed the “criminal traces” of a general nature, i.e. those not pertaining to a specific crematorium, such as Normalgaskammer, a standard warm-air circulation disinfestation chamber constructed by Degesch. Incredibly Pressac argues that the term implies the existence of an “abnormal” or “homicidal” gas chamber (the opposite of a Normalgaskammer was in fact a behelfsmäßige Gaskammer, a temporary gas chamber, such as all the existing disinfestation gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau). Here is also discussed the only “criminal trace” discovered by van Pelt, the “cremation with simultaneous Sonderbehandlung“, which historical context and meaning van Pelt both distort due to his lack of historical and technical knowledge.

Chapter 7 deals with the “criminal traces” artificially attributed to the so-called “Bunkers” at Birkenau, two farmhouses allegedly converted into homicidal gas chambers, which in reality never existed as such. The individual “traces” are examined in their historical context and restored to their true meaning, which has been systematically distorted by the two abovementioned authors.

Part Two consists of a scientific study of the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Opening it, Chapter 8 presents an 86 pages long summary of my research on this topic, which is yet to be published in full. As can be seen from the table of contents below, it addresses all the key technical problems related to the structure and operation of the cremation facilities, their capacity and the duration of the cremation process. The data from the actual operation of these facilities are compared with testimonies relating to them, which all turn out to be grossly exaggerated or false, a result of such exaggerations being functional to the Soviet propaganda figure of four million gassed at Auschwitz: only by attributing hyperbolic capacities to the Birkenau crematoria could the Soviet propaganda be propped up. But why, when all witnesses have lied intentionally regarding the cremations, should we trust their claims about the supposed gassings? As explained in my description of Chapter 10, they have already destroyed their own credibility on this issue. Here is also examined the allegations of massive outdoor cremations being carried out in 1944, which are contradicted by American and British aerial photographs of Birkenau. In Chapter 9 are discussed in detail Pressac’s claims regarding cremation and the crematoria at Auschwitz. Here is shown that the French historian had no grasp of the related technical problems and that his speculations in this regard lack any foundation.

Part Three deals with the two most important testimonies left by former Auschwitz inmates and SS camp staff. Chapter 10 presents a critical analysis of the statements of Henryk Tauber, a witness considered by Pressac to be “95% historically reliable” and whose testimony by van Pelt is ascribed “the highest evidentiary value”. The latter has also arrogantly proclaimed that “negationists have not been able to discredit him as a witness” and therefore prefer “to bury it [=Tauber's testimony] in silence”. What has in fact been buried in silence are 47 pages of detailed criticism. In addition to the well-known deposition of Tauber before the investigative judge Jan Sehn on May 24, 1945, which I have analyzed in the original Polish, I introduce two more statements unknown to both Pressac and van Pelt: a deposition made by Tauber before a Soviet investigative commission on February 27 and 28, 1945, which I have examined in the original Russian, and a deposition in Polish made before the Jewish Historical Commission in Cracow in 1945. As can be seen from the table of contents, some thirty issues are dealt with in all. The conclusion reached by this critical analysis is that there is no need for the revisionists to discredit, since he has done this efficiently enough by himself with absurdities and mendacious assertions. And this is the witness par excellence!
Chapter 11 exposes the painful efforts of van Pelt to paint as credible the “confessions” of the former commandant of Auschwitz. He claims that “negationists have tried to find contradictions in Höss’s testimony” but that they “have not been successful in attacking Höss’s credibility, by pointing out contradictions”. However, van Pelt himself, in an earlier work, speaks explicitly of “internal inconsistencies in his statements”. In this chapter is highlighted the method of systematic distortion and complicit silence implemented by van Pelt to conceal these contradictions, which are so huge that they by themselves demolish the whole credibility of Höss’s statements.

Part Four is a careful examination of the historical and technical errors of van Pelt. Chapter 2 examines his statements regarding cremation and crematories, highlighting his astounding technical and historical ignorance on this subject. To this we must add his arrogance. He criticizes Fred Leuchter for his lack of “expert knowledge” on this issue even though he himself comes off as an illiterate (his knowledge in this regard is even smaller than that of Pressac), yet he has the gall to pontificate as were he a world-reknowned expert. Besides being absurd, his claims often border on the comical, as when he ascribes to a proposed yet never constructed crematorium furnace a cremation capacity of 7,200 corpses per day, despite the fact that this would require a furnace of rather unusual size, with a height of 100 meters and a width of 40 meters (the project in question was referring to an installation 6 meters high and 3 meters wide), or when he states that the cremation of a corpse requires 3.5 kg of coke (the average of the Birkenau crematoria was approximately 17 kg when the furnaces had reached operating temperature, which required an additional quantity of coke). The reader may enjoy a large assortment of nonsense courtesy of van Pelt. Here he flounders desperately and has to resort to painful sophistry to keep from sinking, but in the end, the only thing to remain afloat is his blatant ignorance.
Among other things, this chapter examines van Pelt’s fanciful claim that “by the time the crematoria were finished, Auschwitz had virtually no permanently dedicated morgue capacity”, in other words: the morgues of the crematoria were permanently employed as gas chambers and undressing rooms. This claim is confronted with a series of documents, unknown to van Pelt and ranging in time from 20 March 1943 to 25 May 1944, which show that the morgues of the crematoria were always available as such. The mortuaries and morgues remained in use.
Chapter 13 contains a detailed discussion of the alleged Zyklon B introduction holes in the roof of Leichenkeller 1 of crematorium II in Birkenau, which, through a detailed rebuttal of the two most important exterminationist studies on the subject, demonstrate that these openings never existed, so that the gassing technique described by the witnesses could never have worked.
Chapter 14 evauates the conjectures drawn by van Pelt relating to Zyklon B. By carefully selecting witnesses favorable to him (those who claim that it took about 30 minutes for the victims to die) and excluding inconvenient ones (such as those who refer to a time of about 3 minutes) he rules that the alleged homicidal gassings took place with concentrations of hydrogen cyanide “as low as 100 ppm [parts per million]“, corresponding to 0.12 g/m3. This is done mainly to “refute” the Leuchter Report. Unfortunately, the figures provided by Höss, van Pelt’s SS witness par excellence, results in a concentration 140 times higher! By an even more bizarre calculation, he reaches the conclusion that a good 1,660 of the 12,000 kg of Zyklon B delivered to the camp during 1943 were used for the alleged homicidal gassings. However, since the documents on the use of Zyklon B are very rare and, moreover, refer exclusively to disinfestation, this claim is completely unfounded and further contradict Pressac’s conjecture that only 2-3% of the total deliveries of Zyklon B was used for the alleged gassings (while van Pelt’s figure amounts to almost 14%). What we have here is proof of the fact that in the absence of documents, historians make arbitrary and unfounded speculations.
Chapter 15 concerns the number of Auschwitz victims. The various figures are examined chronologically, beginning with the 4 million of Soviet propaganda and the calculations found in the related “expert report” (which presuppose for the Birkenau crematoria an absurd capacity of 9,000 corpses per day, almost 10 times the theoretical capacity of the facilities – yet, as noted above, the “eyewitnesses” have readily conformed their statements to fit this figure) and ending with the official statistics of Franciszek Piper. Here is documented that Piper’s figure contains at least 180,600 fictitious deportees. The number of documented deaths amounts to approximately 135,000.

Part Five deals with one of the fundamental principles of van Pelt’s historical methodology: the “convergence of independent accounts”. This assumes that the first reports about Auschwitz were truthful, independent and convergent.
Chapter 16 examines the origins of the propaganda spread by the resistance movement in Auschwitz, and how its first absurd stories, which later fell into oblivion, with difficulty came to form the literary motif of the homicidal gas chambers, aided by contributions from the Soviets, Brits and the Poles.
Chapter 17 considers the “reconstruction of how knowledge of Auschwitz had emerged” proposed by van Pelt and demonstrates how this propaganda was spread. The key document here is a report, written in 1944 by two Jewish inmates who escaped from Birkenau, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, which is well known for its blatant lies relating to both the crematoria and to statistics; lies that Pressac and van Pelt have painfully attempted to explain and justify with sophistry and nonsense.
Van Pelt makes a similar attempt to salvage also Boris Polevoi’s article on Auschwitz from 2 February 1945, which contains clumsily invented claims about the alleged extermination process. Here is also examined the Polish reports and investigations (Roman Dawidowski, Jan Sehn), the major testimonies (Charles Sigismund Bendel, Miklos Nyiszli, Filip Müller) and the minor (Ada Bimko, Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Severina Shmaglevskaya, Janda Weiss) as well as the statements from Germans who stood accused at the Belsen trial (Josef Kramer, Hans Aumeier, Fritz Klein and others) put forward by van Pelt in a most unseemly manner. One of the gems found in his exposition is the pathetic attempt to justify the ridiculous lies of Ada Bimko.
Chapter 18 demonstrates the inconsistency of van Pelt’s historiographical methodology and his imaginative but evidentially baseless historical reconstruction, from the “first gassing” in Block 11 of the Auschwitz main camp and the “gas chamber” of crematorium to the so-called “Bunkers” of Birkenau. Also discussed are the related testimonies put forward as evidence (Pery Broad, Hans Stark, Jerzy Tabeau, Szlama Dragon, David Olère, Johann Paul Kremer).
Chapter 19 refutes the legend of the “terrible secret” of Auschwitz, which only came to light in 1944 through the Vrba-Wetzler report. In fact one should rather speak of a “terrible propaganda” which was only gradually developed from said report and subsequently “historicized” by the Soviets, Brits and Poles. The camp was permanently exposed to prying eyes: the prisoners in the more than one hundred Kommandos in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, the Polish workers employed by companies in the camp (only in Birkenau twenty firms were present), and workers released from Birkenau after a few weeks of internment for breach of employment contracts (at least 335 between July 335 and December 1944). From all these sources came no “terrible truth”, but only the absurd reports examined in chapters 16 and 17. Moreover, relatives of SS men stationed in Auschwitz were able to visit them in the camp (at least 270 such visits are attested to). Many senior SS officers also visited Auschwitz. The documents show, however, that these people discussed everything but the alleged “gas chambers” and extermination – there are not even veiled references or insignificant “bavures”. These important aspects have been completely overlooked by van Pelt.
Finally, the chapter examines the pivot of van Pelt’s methodology, the “convergence of evidence” and in extension the alleged “convergence of independent accounts” and documentary sources (documents, photographs, archaeological finds). The result should be a “convergence” between testimonial and documentary sources, that is, a mutual confirmation: the documents would corroborate the testimonies and vice versa. In reality, the testimonies are neither true, independent nor even convergent, while the documents are systematically misrepresented by van Pelt, so that the “convergence” he presents is purely fictitious. His unjustly celebrated book The Case for Auschwitz is not a historical study, but a journalistic overview of misunderstood and misinterpreted historical sources.

Historians, critics, journalists, polemicists, storytellers, holocaustianist bloggers, defenders “truth and memory” and all the faithful of the Auschwitz faith – they can not with impunity continue to repeat the arguments of Pressac and van Pelt without having to deal with this work, which refutes those arguments totally and radically, and in turn, they themselves deserve respect only if they meet the challenge presented by this work in a no less total and radical way.

Table of Contents:

PREFACE

PART ONE

THE “CRIMINAL TRACES” CONCERNING THE HOMICIDAL GAS CHAMBERS
A historical and critical discussion of Jean-Claude Pressac’s and Robert Jan van Pelt’s theses

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 – THE “CRIMINAL TRACES”

1.1. Historical background
1.2. The archive of the Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung
1.3. Methodological Premise
1.4. The “39″ criminal traces
1.4.1. Traces for crematorium II
1.4.2. Traces for crematorium III
1.4.3. Traces for crematoria IV and V
1.4.4. Further traces (crematoria II and III)
1.4.5. Other traces
1.5. Preliminary considerations
1.6. Chronological sequence of the “traces” and its significance
1.6.1. Items concerning crematorium II
1.6.2. Items concerning crematorium III
1.6.3. Items concerning crematoruia IV and V
1.7. Fundamental contradictions
1.8. The ventilation system of Leichenkeller 1 and 2 in crematoria II and III
1.9. The freight elevators of crematoria II and III
1.9.1. The history of the freight elevators of crematoria II and III
1.9.2. The freight elevators in the Irving-Lipstadt trial

CHAPTER 2 – THE “CRIMINAL TRACES” FOR CREMATORIUM II

2.1. “Vergasungskeller”
2.1.1. The importance of the indication
2.1.2. The historical context
2.1.3. The significance of the document
2.1.4. The function of the “Vergasungskeller”
2.1.5. Objections and replies
2.1.6. Van Pelt’s comments and objections
2.2. “Gasdichte Tür“, “Gastür”
2.3. “Auskleideraum“, “Auskleidekeller” and the barrack in front of crematorium II
2.3.1. “Auskleideraum” and “Auskleidekeller”
2.3.2. Origin and function of the “Auskleideraum” of crematorium II at Birkenau
2.3.3. The barrack in front of crematorium II
2.3.4. Van Pelt and the “Auskleidekeller”
2.4. “Sonderkeller”
2.5. “Drahtnetzeinschiebevorrichtung” and “Holzblenden”
2.5.1. The discovery of the indications
2.5.2. Significance of the terms and localization of the devices
2.5.3. Michal Kula’s testimony
2.5.4. What the “Drahtnetzeinschiebevorrichtung” were not
2.5.5. Van Pelt’s comments
2.6. “Gasprüfer” and “Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste”
2.6.1. Pressac’s interpretation
2.6.2. The destination of the “Gasprüfer”
2.6.3. The historical context
2.6.4. The bureaucratic context
2.6.5. The problems not solved by Jean-Claude Pressac
2.6.6. What were the “Gasprüfer“?
2.6.7. Prüfer and the “Gasprüfer”
2.7. “Warmluftzuführungsanlage”
2.7.1. Statement of the problem
2.7.2. Pressac’s explanation
2.7.3. Van Pelt’s explanation
2.8. “Holzgebläse”
2.9. The elimination of the slides for the corpses
2.9.1. Plan 2003 of December 19, 1942 and its significance
2.9.2. Concealing the slide

CHAPTER 3 – THE SECONDARY “CRIMINAL TRACES” RELATED TO CREMATORIUM II

3.1. Origin and definition of the secondary “criminal traces”
3.2. General aspects
3.3. The drainage system of the crematorium
3.4. The opening up of an access to Leichenkeller 2
3.5. The opening direction of the door of Leichenkeller 1
3.6. Substitution of a double door by a single-leaf (gas-tight) door in Leichenkeller 1
3.7. Elimination of the faucets in Leichenkeller 1
3.8. The elimination of Leichenkeller 3

CHAPTER 4 – THE “CRIMINAL TRACES” FOR CREMATORIUM III: “GASDICHTETÜR” AND “BRAUSEN”

4.1. Pressac’s interpretation
4.2. The historical context
4.3. The wooden plates of the alleged “dummy showers”
4.4. The “Gasdichtetür”

CHAPTER 5 – THE “CRIMINAL TRACES” RELATIVE TO CREMATORIA IV AND V

5.1. Presentation of the indications
5.2. The evolution of crematoria IV and V: the original plan
5.3. Development of crematoria IV and V: the first operating concept
5.4. Development of crematoria IV and V: the second operating concept
5.5. Development of crematoria IV and V: the third operating concept
5.6. The gassing technique
5.7. The introduction of Zyklon B
5.8. Van Pelt and the “12 St. gasdichte Türen”
5.9. The natural ventilation
5.10. The mechanical ventilation
5.11. Analysis of plan 2006 of January 11, 1943

CHAPTER 6 – THE “CRIMINAL TRACES” OF A GENERAL NATURE

6.1. “Normalgaskammer”
6.2. Why did the SS not use Degesch-Kreislauf gas chambers for homicidal purposes?
6.3. “Verbrennung” and “Sonderbehandlung”
6.3.1 The document
6.3.2. The “historical context” according to van Pelt
6.3.3. Van Pelt’s errors
6.3.4. The true historical context
6.3.5. The real meaning of the document

CHAPTER 7 – THE ALLEGED “CRIMINAL TRACES” FOR THE “BUNKERS” OF BIRKENAU

7.1. Some remarks concerning the title
7.2. “Sonderbehandlung”
7.2.1. Pressac’s thesis
7.2.2. Bischoff’s explanatory reports
7.2.3. The four barracks “für Sonderbehandlung” and the Birkenau “Bunkers”
7.2.4. “Sonderbehandlung” and “Entwesungsanlage”
7.3. The “Badeanstalten für Sonderaktionen”
7.3.1. Pressac’s explanations
7.3.2. A project not implemented
7.3.3. “Badeanstalten” and crematorium ovens
7.3.4. Van Pelt’s explanation
7.4. “Sperrgebiet”
7.5. The “Materialen für Sonderbehandlung” (materials for special treatment)
7.6. “Materialen für Judenumsiedlung” and the “Franke-Griksch Report”
7.6.1. “Materialen für Judenumsiedlung”
7.6.2. The Franke-Griksch ”report” and Pressac’s comments
7.6.3. Critical analysis of Pressac’s comments

PART TWO

THE CREMATORIUM OVENS OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU
Design, operation technical features and historiographical implications

CHAPTER 8 – THE FIRST SCIENTIFIC TREATMENT OF THE CREMATIONS AT AUSCHWITZ

8.1. Introduction
8.2. Structure of the work
8.3. The modern cremation
8.3.1. Crematorium furnace technology up to the end of the First World War
8.3.2. Technical developments of the German crematorium ovens in the 1930s
8.3.3. Legislation and statistical data concerning cremation in Germany
8.3.4. The firm J.A. Topf & Söhne of Erfurt
8.3.5. Design and operation of a crematorium oven with a coke-fed gasifier in the 1930s
8.3.6. Chimney draft and hearth loading
8.3.7. Consumption of coke in a crematorium oven with gasifier
8.3.8. The duration of the cremation process in ovens with coke-fed gasifiers
8.4. The Topf crematorium ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.4.1. The Topf crematorium ovens for the concentration camps
8.4.2. The crematorium oven with 2 muffles (Doppelmuffel-Einäscherungsofen) heated by coke
8.4.3. The crematorium oven with 3 muffles (Dreimuffel-Einäscherungsofen) heated by coke
8.4.4. The crematorium oven with 8 muffles heated by coke
8.4.5. Operation and control of the Topf crematorium ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.4.6. The crematoria ovens made by the firms H. Kori of Berlin and Ignis-Hüttenbau of Teplitz
8.5. Coke consumption of the Topf ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.5.1. Heat balance of the double-muffle Topf oven at the Gusen crematorium
8.5.2. Heat balance for the Topf double-muffle oven at Auschwitz
8.5.3. Heat balance for Topf triple-muffle and 8-muffle ovens
8.5.4. Remarks on the consumption of ovens with 3 and 8 muffles
8.6. The duration of the cremation process in the Topf ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.6.1. The documents
8.6.2. Kessler’s cremation experiments
8.6.3. The list of cremations at the Westerbork crematorium
8.6.4. The list of cremations at the Gusen crematorium
8.6.5. The list of cremations in the naphtha-fired Ignis-Hüttenbau ovens of the Terezín crematorium
8.6.6. Conclusions
8.7. The cremation capacity of the crematorium ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.7.1. The continued operation of the ovens
8.7.2. The simultaneous cremation of several bodies in one muffle
8.7.3. The Soviet expertises with the Kori crematorium ovens at Lublin-Majdanek, Sachsenhausen and Stutthof
8.7.4. The cremation capacity of the crematorium ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.7.5. The growth of the cremation installations at Birkenau
8.8. Historiographical implications
8.8.1. The activity of the Birkenau crematorium ovens
8.8.2. The durability of the refractory brickwork of crematorium ovens
8.8.3. The number of cremations in 1943: what the SS reckoned on.
8.8.4. The number of cremations in 1943: coke consumption
8.8.5. The open-air cremations of 1944
8.8.6. Van Pelt’s eloquent silence
8.8.7. The witnesses

CHAPTER 9 – PRESSAC AND THE CREMATION OVENS OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

9.1. Pressac’s Technical Incompetence
9.2. Cremation capacity
9.2.1. Crematorium I
9.2.2. The Birkenau crematoria
9.3. The loading of a muffle
9.4. Coke consumption
9.5. The ratio of muffles / detainees
9.6. Pressac’s New Interpretations
9.6.1. Pressac’s arguments concerning cremations and the crematorium ovens
9.6.2. Discussion of the arguments
9.6.3. Pressac’s conjectures and conclusions on the subject of the crematorium ovens
9.6.4. Pressac’s technical drawings
9.7. The Novellette of the Ovens of Crematorium I
9.7.1. The first crematorium oven
9.7.2. The second crematorium oven
9.7.3. The “first gassing” and the deterioration of the second crematorium oven
9.7.4. The third crematorium oven
9.8. Ventilation of the Morgue in Crematorium I
9.9. The 8-Muffle Ovens
9.10. The Projects of Mass Cremations at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943

PART THREE

THE WITNESSES HENRYK TAUBER AND RUDOLF HÖSS

CHAPTER 10 – CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF HENRYK TAUBER’S TESTIMONIES

10.1. Introduction
10.2. CREMATORIUM OVENS AND CREMATIONS
10.2.1. Dimensions of the muffle
10.2.2. Temperature of the muffle
10.2.3. Loading system of the muffle
10.2.4. Loading the corpses: David Olère’s drawing
10.2.5. Loading the muffles and duration of the cremation
10.2.6. Opening the muffle doors
10.2.7. The combustibility of the corpses
10.2.8. The “auto-combustion” of the corpses
10.2.9. The embers of the corpses
10.2.10. The flaming chimneys
10.2.11. The test cremations
10.2.12. The “fire-proof” sack
10.2.13. The “cremation trenches”
10.2.14 The “cremation trenches” and the aerial photographs of Birkenau
10.2.15 The ground-water table in the Birkenau area
10.3. The gassings
10.3.1. The first homicidal gassing in crematorium II
10.3.2. The undressing barrack
10.3.3. The later gassings in crematorium II
10.3.4. The door of the alleged gas chamber
10.3.5. The Zyklon B introduction devices
10.3.6. The “fake” showers
10.3.7. The split-up of the alleged gas chamber of crematorium II
10.3.8. The gassing procedure in crematoria IV and V
10.4. Strength and events in connection with the “Sonderkommando”
10.4.1. The strength of the “Sonderkommando” in March-April of 1943
10.4.2. The “Sonderkommando” of the “Bunkers”
10.4.3. The alleged gassing of 200 detainees of the “Sonderkommando”
10.4.4. The alleged transfer to Lublin-Majdanek
10.4.5. The revolt of the “Sonderkommando”
10.4.6. The mystery of the survival of the 90 members of the “Sonderkommando”
10.5. The black propaganda concerning the atrocities committed by the SS
10.5.1. People burned alive
10.6. Conclusions

CHAPTER 11 – CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE TESTIMONIES OF RUDOLF HÖSS

11.1. The “non-existent” contradictions in Höss’ declarations
11.2. Errors, incongruencies and deceptive measures of van Pelt
11.3. The tortures applied to Höss

PART FOUR

VAN PELT’S TECHNICAL AND HISTORICAL MISTAKES

CHAPTER 12 – VAN PELT’S “EXPERT KNOWLEDGE” AND THE CREMATORIUM OVENS OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

12.1. Van Pelt’s competence regarding cremations
12.2. The cremation capacity of the Birkenau crematoria
12.2.1. The Zentralbauleitung letter of June 28, 1943
12.2.2. The project of the Fritz Sander oven
12.3. Kurt Prüfer’s note of September 8, 1942
12.4. Coke consumption for one cremation
12.5. The number of corpses cremated with the coke delivered to the
crematoria
12.6. The multiple cremations
12.7. Crematoria and morgues
12.8. The “excessive” capacity of the crematorium ovens

CHAPTER 13 – THE ALLEGED OPENINGS FOR THE INTRODUCTION OF ZYKLON B IN THE ROOF OF LEICHENKELLER 1 OF THE BIRKENAU CREMATORIA II AND III

13.1. Van Pelt’s conjectures
13.2. The report by Daniel Keren, Jamie McCarthy and Harry W. Mazal
13.2.1. Critical analysis of Keren, McCarthy and Mazal’s “discoveries”
13.3. “Converging” testimonies
13.3.1. Yehuda Bakon
13.3.2. David Olère
13.3.3. The aerial photographs of August 25, 1944
13.3.4. The “train photograph”

CHAPTER 14 ZYKLON B

14.1. The concentration of HCN in the alleged homicidal gas chambers
14.2. The deliveries of Zyklon B to Auschwitz
14.3. The number of the potentially gassed victims

CHAPTER 15 – THE NUMBER OF VICTIMS

15.1.The Soviet Commission of Investigation
15.2. Nachman Blumental and others
15.3. The revisions by G. Wellers and F. Piper
15.4. F. Piper’s statistics
15.4.1. The number of deported Jews
15.4.2. The number of registered, unregistered and allegedly gassed persons
15.4.3. The number of deaths among the registered detainees
15.4.4. Conclusions
15.5. Significance and value of J.-C. Pressac’s and F. Meyer’s revisions
15.6. The propaganda figure of 4 million and the reliability of the witnesses

PART FIVE

THE ORIGIN OF THE “CONVERGENCE OF INDEPENDENT ACCOUNTS”

CHAPTER 16 – THE PROPAGANDA OF THE SECRET RESISTANCE MOVEMENT AT AUSCHWITZ

16.1. The forgotten propaganda stories
16.2. The story of the industrial exploitation of human corpses
16.3. The birth of the propaganda story of the gas chambers
16.4. The propaganda takes shape: Soviet, British and Polish contributions

CHAPTER 17 – THE GENESIS OF THE “KNOWLEDGE” OF THE AUSCHWITZ GAS CHAMBERS

17.1. The “War Refugee Board Report”
17.2. The justifications of a historical falsification
17.2.1. Van Pelt’s justifications
17.2.2. Pressac’s justifications
17.3. The origin of the report and of the drawing of crematoria II and III
17.4. The Soviets and the Lublin-Majdanek camp: general proof of propaganda
17.4.1 The “gas chambers”
17.4.2. The pile of shoes
17.4.3. The crematorium ovens
17.5. Boris Polevoi’s article of February 2, 1945
17.6. The Polish assessments and investigations
17.6.1. Roman Dawidowski
17.6.2. Jan Sehn
17.7. The witnesses Charles Sigismund Bendel, Miklos Nyiszli and Filip Müller
17.7.1. Charles Sigismund Bendel
17.7.2. Miklos Nyiszli
17.7.3. The witnesses Bendel and Nyiszli according to Pressac
17.7.4. Filip Müller
17.8. The lesser witnesses
17.8.1. Ada Bimko
17.8.2. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier and Severina Shmaglevskaya
17.8.3. Janda Weiss

CHAPTER 18 – ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE STORY OF THE ALLEGED GAS CHAMBERS AT AUSCHWITZ

18.1. Van Pelt’s historiographical deficiencies
18.2. The alleged “first homicidal gassing”
18.3. The alleged homicidal gassings in crematorium I
18.3.1. Historical and documental unfoundedness
18.3.2. Pery Broad
18.3.3. Hans Stark
18.3.4. The novelized account of the first cremation in crematorium I
18.4. The Birkenau “Bunkers”
18.4.1. Total lack of proof
18.4.2. Van Pelt’s first interpretation
18.4.3. Van Pelt’s second interpretation
18.4.4. Van Pelt’s final interpretation
18.4.5. The alleged homicidal activity of the “Bunkers”
18.4.6. The witnesses
18.4.6.1. Jerzy Tabeau
18.4.6.2. Szlama Dragon
18.4.6.3. David Olère
18.4.6.4. The “convergence of evidence” concerning the “Bunkers”
18.4.6.5. Johann Paul Kremer

CHAPTER 19 – VAN PELT’S METHODOLOGY

19.1. The legend of the “terrible secret” of Auschwitz
19.2. Visits to Auschwitz by high-ranking SS officers
19.3. The illusion of the “convergence of independent accounts” and of the “convergence of evidence”

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX

Glossary
1) Structure of SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (1942)
2) Departments (Abteilungen) and structure of KL Auschwitz
3) Explanatory note on the position of the Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung within the structure of the camp
4) Sectors (Sachgebiete) of Zentralbauleitung at Auschwitz in January of 1943
5) Bauleitungen attached to Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung in January of 1943
6) Organization of J.A.Topf & Söhne Co., Erfurt, at the end of the 1930s

DOCUMENTS

ABBREVIATIONS OF ARCHIVES

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON CREMATION

INDEX OF NAMES

Joachim Neander, PhD, an independent scholar from Cracow, Poland, examines Irene Weisberg Zisblatt’s holocaust survivor narrative and concludes it is “not in accordance with the historically established facts,” is “exaggerated,” “implausible” and not true overall. Neander has contributed to publications in Poland, Germany, Israel and the USA. In 2001-02 he had a Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship for Archival Research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

His January 9th article Irene Zisblatt, the “Diamond Girl”- Fact or Fiction? can be read here: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/01/irene-zisblatt-diamond-girl-fact-or.html.

Dr. Neander asks in the title of his critical review of Irene Zisblatt’s autobiography The Fifth Diamond, which purports to be a Holocaust survivor ‘true story,’ or memoir, whether it is fact or fiction. He comes to the only conclusion possible for a man who wishes to maintain his reputation as a scholar—that it is mostly fiction.

However, probably for the reason that he seems to have been assigned this project by some well-known Holocaust defenders (Kenneth Waltzer, Chairman of the Jewish Studies Dept. at the University of Michigan, who provided him with the Seigelstein documents, for one) and he is a Holocaust defender himself, he has tried to soften the blow wherever he thinks he can, going out of his way to find some positive things to say about “Mrs. Zisblatt” and her narrative. These positives are mainly in the realm of having a forgiving spirit and a sympathetic attitude toward an “elderly lady” who has suffered in her life. But Neander rightly decides that truth must be upheld, it being more important that not hurting someone’s feelings.

On the whole, Neander does an excellent job of dissecting Zisblatt’s claims in The Fifth Diamond, but his forgiving spirit causes him to overlook some of her more atrocious lies, and her attacks on the German character, by attributing them solely to her repeating “Holocaust stereotypes and myths.” In my opinion, she exhibits a special intent to blacken the German nation and magnify the alleged hatred of the “Nazi” for the Jew, when she includes long dismissed war atrocity propaganda, such as Nazi soldiers tearing Jewish babies in half and throwing them in a river; SS men picking up Jewish children by the legs and banging their heads against a truck; hauling children to a burning pit; using the skin of Jewish women like herself to make lampshades and gloves; undergoing meaningless but very painful “experiments” by Dr. Mengele, of whom she made the statement, “Yes, that kind of hatred existed in the Twentieth Century in Nazi Germany.” The hateful attitude of Germans vs. the innocence of all Jewish victims is her theme. All SS are cruel monsters and so are even non-German Gentiles; she doesn’t distinguish between them—they have all become Nazis.

Since Neander basically agrees with my own dissection of Zisblatt’s book, I will here just point out the things he has smoothed over, in some cases by “setting it aside,” in order to “soften the blow” to Zisblatt, the Holocaust Industry, and all who are involved or have an interest in the Zisblatt saga.

Smoothing over inconvenient facts/implications

In the first paragraph, Neander writes that she “had her first name changed to Irene” when she obtained a visa in 1947 for emigration to New York. That can be understood either as ‘someone else changed her first name’ or ‘she herself had it changed’—leaving the interpretation up to the reader. In fact, she claims in her book (but not in her testimony) that her name was Chana (by which she called herself up to that point), and this name was changed, much to her surprise, by an immigration official because he (or someone) thought the “American” name of Irene would be better for her. Taking such prerogatives is and was simply not done by immigration officials, and adds to the farcical quality of the book.

Neander asks in the 7th paragraph, pointing out why some will believe he should not criticize Zisblatt: “Are there not the Holocaust deniers, who already have attacked Mrs. Zisblatt on the Web and even at court? […] a handful of cranks.” But Dr. Neander, isn’t it just these “cranks” that have brought the fictions of Zisblatt to your attention; that have stood up for the truth, in spite of being called names for it? Would you have written this article were it not for we “cranks?” The reason Neander gives for telling the truth about dishonest holocaust survivors is not a regard for truth itself, but is because students who today are gullible enough to believe it, might, when they grow up, “reach for a scholarly book” and, discovering they were lied to, reject the entire Holocaust story. Ironically, that is exactly what happened with Eric Hunt. He was forced to read Elie Wiesel’s Night in high school; he believed it was true and was distressed by it, but learning later that it was a fiction, he is now a well-known “holocaust denier.” So people like Neander are cognizant that extreme liars like Zisblatt must be rejected. (He will need to take on Wiesel next.)

Neander only gives a couple of instances of Zisblatt’s Shoah testimony that differ from her book, whereas in reality there are many, as I have documented in “A Special Jewel in the Genre of Holocaust Horror Stories,” posted here at Inconvenient History Blog. This alone proves that one or the other is fiction—as it turns out, both are.

Neander says that Zisblatt is very lax in putting dates to the events she describes, but “this is common in survivor memoirs, and it alone does not speak against her.” Yes, it does, Dr. Neander. Just because it is common among dishonest survivors doesn’t excuse it. In Zisblatt’s case, her bigger problem is that the dates she does give, or attempts to give, are wrong.

Neander goes on to say that, in spite of her failure to provide dates, “We can fix her arrival at Birkenau between May 16 and 26, 1945, when the deportation transports from Munkács arrived there.” Now he is ignoring that Zisblatt says in both her Shoah testimony and book that her family was transported to Munkács (a two hour train ride) two days after Passover, which was April 8 in 1944. She says they spent no more than a week in the Munkács Sajovits ghetto (which corresponds with other witnesses) before being transported to Auschwitz (a 3 day trip, though she says 5 days). This puts her stated arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau on April 20 or 22, a full month ahead of the officially stated arrival of Jews from Munkács. This is one of Neander’s “smooth-overs” or an oversight on his part.

Neander contributes two items of important factual information that highlight the seriousness of Zisblatt’s lies. One is the fact that the number 61397, which she claims was the Auschwitz prisoner number tattooed on her arm (or under it) that she “could never forget,” could not have been her number. According to records, it belonged in 1943 to a non-Jewish Polish female political prisoner, and numbers were never given twice after 1942. This puts a big blot on Zisblatt’s AND the Shoah Foundation’s credibility. The other is the two file cards from the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen, supplied to him by Kenneth Waltzer, referring to a single page from an Auschwitz list of prisoners, the original of which can be found in the Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum under file nr. D-HygInst/7/No.inw.106156 Segr.50 str.285, according to Neander. There her name is spelled as “Zegelstein, Irén.” The Auschwitz list contains over 770 names of Jewish Hungarian women from Block 8 of camp sector BIIc (Lager C in Zisblatt’s terminology). This is the transit section of the camp. The list is dated September 28, 1944. It has no prisoner numbers because the women from BIIc, the “transit Jews,” were not registered and, therefore, did not have Auschwitz prisoner numbers. The List is a part of documents from the SS Hygiene Institute Auschwitz showing that the women were screened by stool samples, found to be free of typhus and other diseases, and could be transferred into the Reich’s interior for labor. This is an important addition to what we know about Irene Zegelstein of Poleno, and confirms that Zisblatt has concocted a story different from what is the real story of this person.

Neander twice uses the phrase, “There can be no doubt …” about something that can clearly be doubted. The first is: “There can be no doubt that a multitude of unethical, cruel, and even outright criminal medical experiments were performed by SS doctors (and paramedics) in the concentration camps.” A multitude? There is little clear evidence for this, and certainly not for a “multitude.” And even as he says this, he dismisses the experiments that Zisblatt describes as “urban legends” or “pure fantasy.” Neander restricts his own speculation about Dr. Mengele to saying he was the “camp physician at Birkenau” and saw himself as a “scientist.”

A similar self-serving statement: “There can be no doubt that most of the crimes and atrocities reported in The Fifth Diamond did happen sometime, at Auschwitz or another site of the Final Solution.” Here Dr. Neander is contradicting himself. In his own words, he characterized “most of the crimes and atrocities” reported by Zisblatt as simply legends and rumors; as never happening — anywhere. His scholarly credentials are being strongly tested when he uses the phrase “there can be no doubt.”

Says diamonds central to book marketing

Neander writes that “it is inconceivable that Chana for months has been able to relieve herself undisturbed in some corner of the latrine and to retrieve her diamonds unnoticed. As the diamond episode is central in the marketing of Mrs. Zisblatt’s book—and also in her contribution to the documentary The Last Days with the sub-title Everything you are about to see is true — Holocaust deniers hook up particularly on this part of her story.” How right he is. Congenital liars like Zisblatt and the producers of, and other survivors featured in, The Last Days do indeed make it easy for holocaust revisionists and doubters.

But Neander then makes the foolish argument or comment that “On the other hand, according to her story, Chana obviously did not have health problems with ingesting feces, as the Stehzelle episode shows. During the five days in this dungeon, the girls relieve themselves into the ankle-deep water in which they stand and drink the same water repeatedly, without becoming sick.” Is this supposed to make an impression on a few of the more gullible that the diamond-swallowing story could be true, since Chana allegedly could ingest feces without getting sick?!

Neander himself wrote about the “eye-color experiment” earlier, saying “It is also hardly believable that after the experiment the girls were confined to Stehzelle (standing cell) arrest, and that they survived there five days without food and drink. […] What is more, in the known history of Auschwitz we never hear about standing cells filled ‘with water up to [the prisoners'] ankles’.” Cells would not be full of water in any event, because that would mean the guards would sometimes have to walk in that filthy water themselves. It totally contradicts all the efforts made in the camps to prevent disease and epidemics.

The version of the eye-experiment story in which the fifteen women were put into a small cubicle that was divided into little sections, designed so that they could walk into or touch the person in the section on either side only, was in Zisblatt’s Shoah testimony. In her book, the five girls are standing very close together in one small cell located below the Birkenau infirmary. If this is her idea of what “standing cells” were (after reading the literature about them), she has botched it up as she does everything else. The four Stehzellen alleged to be in the basement of Block 11 at Auschwitz (for which there is no definitive evidence beside witness testimony that they ever existed [1]; what is shown to visitors today are all reconstructions) were in the main camp, not in Birkenau. These reconstructions have a tiny door that would make it extremely difficult for each person to enter and be brought out again. According to official historiography, the alleged standing cells were torn down by order of Arthur Liebehenschel, the new camp commandant on December 1, 1943. [2] Assuming that this is so, they could not have existed when “Chana” and “Sabka” were being “experimented” on.

Above is a partially-built RECONSTRUCTION of a “standing cell” that is shown to visitors in the basement of Block 11 at Auschwitz. These cells are approximately 3 feet square and must be crawled into through the tiny door, as shown in this 1998 photo. (credit: scrapbookpages.com)

Gas Chamber story most implausible of all

As unbelievable as being able to relieve herself in the corner of the latrine is to Neander, he calls her account of her trip to the gas chamber and subsequent escape “the most implausible episode in Mrs. Zisblatt’s story.” In saying this, he is admitting that she never went to the gas chamber at all. This is a very serious charge, coming from someone who wants to keep her viable by “reconstructing” her story. To tell thousands of young, impressionable teenagers — in their school setting where they are conditioned to believe what they are told — that she experienced being sent naked to a gas chamber to be murdered by the cruelest people on earth, the Germans, when she experienced nothing of the sort — well, what do you call a person like that? What do you call those who support her and facilitate her story, even when they know or suspect she is not telling the truth, such as Steven Spielberg and the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation?

The fantastic account of American “Liberator” General George S. Patton meeting with Chana is one of the incidents that Neander decides to “set aside” on the grounds that “it is difficult to prove or disprove.” Difficult, perhaps, but not impossible to discover that Patton was never in the Volary or Pilsen area when Zisblatt claims she was there.

Neander notes that “Since the only fellow prisoner whose name she remembers, Sabka, died at the very end of the war, it is also nearly impossible to cross-check her memoir.” He should add that by the time she revealed her holocaust experience, 50 years after the fact, everyone involved was dead! This includes the relatives she came to live with in America, and the man she married in 1956 when she was going by the name of Stein, who died in 1969—who was left to refute what she said?

The only other characters she gave a name to were Dr. Mengele and “Bob,” the Jewish soldier who “liberated” her. If he were really the friend to her that she claims, he would have given her his last name and probably an address to “keep in touch” after the war, and she would not have forgotten it. This by itself shows Zisblatt’s entire story to be as phony as a two-dollar bill, to use a trite but effective phrase.

In another effort at rehabilitation, Neander writes: “It is well possible that she personally believes what she tells, that her story is her ‘subjective truth’.” But in all honesty, it is NOT possible that she believes it. She has given two different versions of her holocaust experience; she would have to be insane, mentally retarded or a congenital liar to believe both of them, even “subjectively.” Therefore she has to be seen as an egotist and a business woman (not a very good one) who is marketing herself and has come to believe that she can get away with anything, since so far she has. It could also be that her loyalty to Israel and “the Tribe” is another motivation, one which gives her a sense of safety and belonging.

Can Irene Seigelstein be reconstructed?

In keeping with his attempt at salvation, Neander offers a “reconstructed narrative” that fits the documents that are available, without inquiring into the matter with “Mrs. Zisblatt.” He then concludes that Irene Weisberg Zisblatt is not only a survivor of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, but that she has an interesting and instructive story to tell, however one that differs from her Shoah Testimony and her autobiography. His “reconstruction” is the story she should now tell.

But what about her book that is in all those school and town libraries? What about those thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of innocent school kids she has lectured to and brought to tears with her “incredible” life story? Above all, what about her Survivors of the Shoah testimony archived at the University of Southern California, and the academy award-winning documentary The Last Days? How does she take all that back?

Dr. Neander, it is not that easy. It’s one thing to dissect and show the falseness of a narrative that, in your words, is made up of implausibilities and ubiquitous legends. It’s quite another to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. What we have now are a lot of broken pieces shattered on the ground; they will not come together again in any form that is convincing. I’m afraid Mrs Zisblatt’s goose is cooked.

[1] For example, the only source used for the existence of Stehzelle on the Wikipedia Auschwitz page is Polish priest Maximillian Kolbe’s account of his persecution, for which he was canonized by Polish Pope John Paul II in 1982. See www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Kolbe.html

[2] This is reported in many books, among them Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, edited by Gutman and Birenbaum, published 1998 in association with the USHMM. In it, Danuta Czech writes: “Liebehenschel also had the standing bunker torn down” (p. 378). The alleged standing cells at Dachau concentration camp are also said to have been removed by the American Army in 1945, after liberation. But why would they do that? At his trial before an American Military Tribunal in Dachau, former Commandant Martin Weiss testified in December 1945 that he had no knowledge of the standing cells, claiming he first heard about them during his trial.

Click on the links below to read the article “‘The Fifth Diamond’: A Special Jewel in the Genre of Holocaust Horror Stories”

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Apophenia: the phenomenon of seeing things that aren’t there. People will see, and believe, what they expect to see, what they want to see, or even what they are told they are seeing, as often as they will see, and believe, what they are actually seeing.

By Carolyn Yeager

Part Five

(ST=Shoah Testimony, FD=The Fifth Diamond, LD=The Last Days, RI=Radio Interview. See Part One for further explanation.)

Displaced Persons camp

(ST) She only says “They took us to Salzburg, Austria … I was with people from Poland, from different countries, waiting for borders to open up, waiting for papers to come through to go to different countries. Most of the people were hoping to go to Palestine, but that was closed too.” (@3hr3min) She says (Jews) had to be smuggled in and “we tried that also, we did get to Italy and laid on the beaches for 5 days and nights waiting for a ship to come get us … but there was no ship.”[24] When asked by the interviewer—“Who did you go with?”—she remained vague by answering, “Just, uh, kids that, uh, well, there were a couple of leaders that were very devoted, uh, Haganah[25] people and Zionists … they came one night” and recruited the residents to try to get to Palestine illegally. She says, “Most of the people, we didn’t even know each other.” She stayed in the DP camp until 1947. She had information placed in newspapers in the States and an uncle in the Bronx answered her “article” in The Forward.[26]
Remarks: When she says ‘us’ followed by ‘people from Poland’, it indicates she was with mostly Polish people. I suspect Zisblatt changed “Sabka’s” identity from Polish to Lithuanian because, as time went on, she wanted to distance herself from every Polish association, not least because she is hiding her early marriage to the Pole Alter Lewin, along with other Polish ties she may also be hiding. I note her failure to put names to any of the “we’s” and “us’s” she is so fond of using. She spent two years in the DP camp, was never alone, and not one friend or helper is mentioned by name. Two years versus one year in Nazi camps—the one year is filled with events and experiences worthy of an entire book, but the two (in spite of her marriage) are devoid of anything worth talking about.
(FD) When she was “strong enough to leave” the hospital she was assigned a guardian to help her get situated in the DP camp. Although she says he became a friend to her, he is not named. According to her statements in FD, she would have arrived in the DP camp in early July 1945—not, as she tells in her ST, “at the end of summer … close to 1946. Otherwise, she tells essentially the same story but adds a period of time living with other Jewish refugees in the home of an elderly Salzburg widow, who she takes great pains to describe as a hateful German Nazi whose husband had been in the Gestapo.[27] We’re only given the poor woman’s first name—Herta (pp. 101-2)
She writes: “Staying in this camp I made new friends,” but she doesn’t give a single name or describe a single friend, including any mention of Alter Lewin.
(LD) None of these experiences are in the Spielberg film.

Voyage to America

(ST) On November 8th, “I arrived on the Marine Flecher [phonetical] in New York and met my family that I never knew before.” (@3hr5min) She says nothing more about the trip or about her new family and gives only a sketchy outline of her early time in the US: she went to school at night, taking high school equivalency in English, and worked during the day in a bakery. When she finished school, she went to work for RCA as what sounds like an assembly line worker. She was active in B’nai Brith and president of BBYO (its youth organization), and an enthusiastic seller of Israeli war bonds.
(FD) In October 1947, she received her official papers to travel to the US on the ship “Marine Fletcher.” Now she tells us how “Chana” became “Irene” when an immigration official handed her a passport with the name Irene Seigelstein. (p. 103) “‘I panicked … this is not my name … I have never heard of that name,’ I cried. ‘From this day forward, you are Irene,’ he replied. ‘That is a nice name. That is an American name.’ I was ecstatic. I was so honored to have an American name.’”
Remarks: From this we can fairly conclude that “Chana” is a fictional representation of “Irene,” and that when she left Europe for America, the fiction ended and reality began. Or did it?
She writes little of the voyage, saying only the ocean was rough and she was seasick. Though she was 10 days on the ship, a brand new type of experience, she doesn’t mention a single person she met or a single event that took place. Her uncle Nathan met her at the dock and drove her to New Jersey to meet the rest of the family (p. 104). On page 111, she says, “I became a member of B’nai Brith Women. As chairman of the Israeli Bond Drive, I organized all the events to try to sell bonds. I really think that was my way of starting to give of myself.” Give of herself—very particularly to Jews only, and so it continued throughout the rest of Irene’s story, even until today.
Remarks: Here again, did Zisblatt ditch her first husband, Alter Lewin, as soon as she landed, or was she not really met by “Uncle Nathan” at the dock and taken to meet the rest of her family?

Concluding Remarks

There is much more in her book and on the videotape that is unbelievable and insults the reader’s/viewer’s intelligence which I have not even touched on for the reason that she is reasonably consistent in her telling. But what can we conclude about all the major and minor differences between Irene Zisblatt’s archived Shoah Testimony and her later autobiography?

The first thing that comes to mind is that between 1995 and 2008, she thought of a way of telling her story that she liked better. She realized that some things she had said in 1995 didn’t make sense or they didn’t align with what other survivors said, so she corrected or changed these things. She also took the opportunity to add even more drama and “Nazi sadism” to her incarceration (for example, Dr. Mengele as the doctor who used her for experiments; her punishment holding the bricks for 12 hours as she observed new Hungarian and Ukrainian arrivals being abused; and, of course, swallowing and retrieving the diamonds from her feces over and over) to increase the suffering she experienced firsthand, while she also toned down some others. She put herself in the center of just about everything she had ever read of the Holocaust! All in all, this makes The Fifth Diamond a calculated exercise in pushing her anti-German agenda rather than a truthful record of her experience.

Was Zisblatt ever really at Birkenau? I believe it’s possible she wasn’t because her account of it is so filled with inaccuracies, yet I’m willing to accept that she was. Another question is: if she was, for how long? A Red Cross Tracing Service document made available by her shows an Irene Segelstern was incarcerated on 28 Sept 1944, which could possibly be a contradiction of her story that she arrived during the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews in the spring of that year. Zisblatt’s own dating in her narrative(s) would actually have her at Birkenau around April 20; yet according to several sources, the very first two trainloads left on April 29th and 30th, both arriving at Birkenau on May 2nd, carrying a total of 3800 Hungarian Jews.[28] The Jews from Munkacs were not on these trains, meaning they arrived after May 2nd.

The fact that the birth date and nationality matches Zisblatt’s indicates the misspelling of the name is probably a mistake, UNLESS Irene Zisblatt is not and never was Irene Seiglestein and is a total fraud. It is possible.[29] Her birth year is given as 1928 or 1929 on all holocaust-related listings—never 1930.

Above: A Red Cross document is held up to the camera by Irene Zisblatt. She received it in response to her inquiry, sent as Irene Zisblatt Lewin, about Irene Seigelstein (notice it reads “Segelstern”). Ironically, it lists her at places after A-B different from where she says she was. Schutzhaft means protective custody. This document creates more questions than it answers. (credit: erichunt.net)

Above: Displaced Persons refugee card for Irene Lewin, traveling with Alter and Elias; notice the original first name is crossed out. On the Ship’s Manifest for the Marine Flasher, the three are marked as traveling together, with Irene being Alter’s wife and Elias his brother. (credit: erichunt.net)

Identity confusion

I have doubts about her identity, since she traveled to the US as a married 18-year-old named Lewin, and used the name again to inquire into Irene Seigelstein’s holocaust records. I have doubts about her family and their supposed perishing in “gas chamber #2.” The only confirmation that her mother and father, Rakhel and Moshe Zeigelshtein of Polena, died at Auschwitz is a registration form made out by Tzipora Erbs, a niece of Moshe, in 1957 to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum database—where anyone can submit a name. The Yad Vashem database is not proof of anything. Additionally, Zisblatt’s four brothers and sister do not come up on that database and you would think the relative who registered the parents would have also registered them. There are no official records of the Zeigelshtein/Seigelstein family deaths at Auschwitz that I have been able to find. But how does one go about proving that someone was murdered at Auschwitz? One doesn’t; there is no proof.[30]
There are several records for Irene Seigelstein (with slightly different spellings), but they don’t match the story she tells in The Fifth Diamond or in her talks on the lecture circuit. She says flat out, “I survived Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek and Neuengamme, and a death march.”[31] Yet her records say she was an inmate at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Gross Rosen and Flossenbuerg/Helmbrechts (which she entered on March 6), and was liberated from a civilian hospital in Volary, Czechoslovakia, not alone in a forest and then taken to a hospital. Why does she refuse to mention Gross Rosen and Flossenbuerg [32] in her ST, her book and her talks? Is it because she could not then say she was on a 3-month death march? From Birkenau she went to another camp (she says in December, but probably in October), and by the first week of January she embarked on a death march. While it is possible that she was on a couple of shorter marches between the abovementioned camps, it’s just as possible she was not. Since her account is untruthful from start to finish, there is no reason to believe her about a “death march.” I think she read about them and decided to put it in her own story, as she did with so many things. Her death-march account sounds amazingly similar to the story of Szewa Szeps.[33] As to “surviving Majdanek,” the only time she spent there was either 24 or 48 hours waiting for Ilse Koch to show up – another piece of fiction.
Another, perhaps more persuasive reason for Zisblatt to misrepresent the camps she was in is because they were not “death camps.” She may be hiding the true reason she never got a tattoo: that she was “in transit” at Birkenau and was soon sent to another camp to work. Especially if she were really 14 or 15 years old, rather than 13, she would have been useful labor – not wasted carrying rocks back and forth in Birkenau for no purpose other than sadistic, or for “experiments.” Auschwitz-Birkenau was the only camp where inmates were tattooed; her lack of a tattoo is therefore a problem for which she invents her cover-up story of tattoo removal. Recall that the tattoo number she gives herself does not fit the numbers that were used at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944; that number was her prisoner number at Gross Rosen.

Spielberg’s documentary and Shoa Library undermined

Does she think no one will notice all these glaring discrepancies in her narrative? Up until Eric Hunt took a look at it, no one did! That’s how it can be that holocaust fictions are passed off as fact—people won’t use their critical faculties when they listen to “holocaust survivors.” One reason for Zisblatt’s complacency is probably her close association with Steven Spielberg, an “untouchable” figure among contemporary global elites. As one of the “stars” of his award winning documentary, she can understandably feel protected under his broad wings. But if her holocaust narrative is widely exposed as a work of fiction, this can also expose Spielberg as a perpetrator of fictions, and seriously undermine the entire credibility of The Last Days—the cover and advertising of which states: “Everything you are about to see is true.” If put in legal terms, it may be that what you “see” filmed is true-to-life, even though the relationships, context, and the words that are put with what is shown visually, are not. This is the way clever lawyers help the rich and famous to lie without really lying.
Not only is The Last Days undermined, but the entire Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation Library, under Spielberg’s executive directorship and now housed at the University of Southern California (USC), becomes suspect. The original interview of Zisblatt conducted by Jennifer Resnick in 1995 is one of those “soft-ball” sessions in which contradictory and otherwise incredible statements are not questioned. There are many red-flags thrown up by what Zisblatt says, and at times Resnick has a hint of surprise in her voice, but all is accepted at face-value. It may even be proper for the interviewer not to interject or interfere, but the producers/directors of The Last Days had a responsibility to be sure that their witness’s testimony panned out. Instead, it seems they were more interested in a memorable angle—such as swallowing and retrieving the diamonds—and a personality that was willing to indulge in untruths with a convincing, sympathetic manner. Considering what I have revealed in this article, the producers/directors of The Last Days are guilty of manipulating the public’s beliefs and feelings to fit an agenda—just as I said that Zisblatt had done in her autobiography—rather than giving a truthful rendering of what really took place during those days. The musical sound track and film clips that are interspersed with the speaker’s words are clearly there to create emotional reactions that will overpower critical thinking.

Inspiration for the diamond story

In light of the above, some further reflections on Zisblatt’s diamonds are in order. On the last page of her book (p. 167), there is a photograph of the teardrop pendant with the four diamonds. Someone pointed out to me that they appear to be two matched sets, with two larger and two smaller diamonds—suggesting they may have come from two pairs of diamond earrings that Zisblatt may have owned. In The Last Days she shows the pendant, but waves it around so that the diamonds cannot be seen clearly while she says, “See, they are all different sizes and shapes.” From what I see, this is not so; they are surprisingly regular.

Considering the timing, it’s fair to ask: Did someone from The Last Days come up with the idea of featuring the diamond-saving, diamond-swallowing story? This is where the full-blown diamond story, and the pendant, first appeared. In the Radio Interview, Zisblatt said they asked about the diamonds that she spoke of in her testimony, but in her testimony she only said she swallowed them when she arrived at Auschwitz. So where did they get the idea, from what she said in her testimony, that she still had them? I go over this again because I think it is a key to some important discoveries that I may develop in a future article.

I’d like to close with a few comments on Zisblatt’s personality as I have come to see it. One character trait that stands out to me is her strong desire to be the center of attention. This crops up in several places. One is in making herself a favorite patient of Dr. Mengele, and even in being selected for “experiments” to begin with. As Dr. Mengele’s patient, she’s in a privileged position to know all about this famous, but shadowy character, and speaks about him as an expert (but she never describes what he actually looks like). Another is her insistence that she and her imaginary friend “Sabka” were liberated all by themselves in a forest by American soldiers who made a big fuss over them. Then “Sabka” disappeared and she was alone with the soldiers in the military hospital where she was the only female—she is not just another Jewish girl with all the other Jewish girls in the civilian hospital that was created for them. And while in the military hospital, none other than General George C. Patton himself came to her bedside and was so touched by her story that he pulled buttons off his uniform and took the scarf from around his neck to give to her!

As I asked at the beginning: What kind of a person can come up with such outrageous lies, and should such a person be given free access to influence America’s schoolchildren? This is an important question that every responsible individual reading this should ask, after which they should come up with an agenda of their own.

End

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[24] This sounds a lot like the equally vague trip to Majdanek to meet with Ilse Koch who never arrived.
[25] Haganah was the underground Jewish militia in Palestine during British rule from 1929 to 1948 that became the national army of Israel after the partition of Palestine in 1948.
[26] A well-known Jewish newspaper in the US.
[27] Zisblatt, another girl, two married couples and two boys (8 in all) were “moved into the upstairs of a home owned by an old woman. (She) was forced to share her home with victims of the concentration camps […] for the first few days we didn’t even realize she was there.” They used the kitchen downstairs—I truly can just imagine what shape they left it in! “In the first week we were there, I played her piano, which was in the living room. She instructed me to never touch her piano again. […] Herta was not a gracious host.” After a couple months, the group decided to go back to the DP camp. Taking over the homes of Germans to house Jewish refugees was a common practice of the Allies for several years after the war.
[28] “The Holocaust Chronicle,” Louis Weber, Publications International Ltd, Lincolnwood, Illinois. Also, “Auschwitz, a New History,” Laurence Rees, 2005.
[29] ) The correct spelling for this common Jewish name is Siegelstein, the way Nathan Siegelstein of New York, who she claims is the uncle with whom she lived upon entry into the US, spelled it. Yet she has always spelled her name Seigelstein, which is a misspelling and would be pronounced Sigh-gel instead of Say-gel. Some records for the holocaust survivor Irene spell the name Segelstein, which is actually a more phonetic way of spelling Siegelstein. This gives some credence to the speculation that Zisblatt got the spelling wrong when she “took” the name/identity of this holocaust survivor. This would not be the first time it was done. Elie Wiesel, for example, has been accused by another Buchenwald survivor of stealing the identity of a real Buchenwald survivor who was this man’s friend. He has written a book about it.
[30] There are official German records, released from Soviet custody, that show all deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the nationality of the deceased and cause of death. The numbers are very low. The million that are claimed to have been killed/gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau are said to have not been registered, so there is no way to prove their deaths.
[31] http://www.herald-dispatch.com/videos/x140292583/Video-Holocaust-survivor-Irene-Zisblatt and FD, p, 120.
[32] The Helmbrechts camp population was mainly non-Jews, but in March 1945, a group of over 500 Jewish women arrived on foot from the Gruenberg subcamp (of Gross Rosen) in Poland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmbrechts_concentration_camp There is NO source for this information at wikipedia, not surprisingly, but the page goes on to state that in April the women of Helmbrechts were set out on a march to Dachau, but were turned toward Czechoslovakia instead. The march ended in a small farming village with an Allied air raid on the group on May 8, 1945. The US Army found them the next day.
[33] http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/Dabrowa/dab346.html

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]]> http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-5-of-5/feed/ 0 http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-4-of-5/ http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-4-of-5/#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:14:01 +0000 admin http://www.revblog.codoh.com/?p=602 Irene Weisberg Zisblatt writes of swallowing the same diamonds over and over again for a year in order to save all she has left of her family. What else does she say—and why is it not believable?

Apophenia: the phenomenon of seeing things that aren’t there. People will see, and believe, what they expect to see, what they want to see, or even what they are told they are seeing, as often as they will see, and believe, what they are actually seeing.

By Carolyn Yeager

Part Four

(ST=Shoah Testimony, FD=The Fifth Diamond, LD=The Last Days, RI=Radio Interview. See Part One for further explanation.)

Went to gas chamber with gypsy families, or 1500 women?

(ST) “They selected me with the gypsies.” (@2hr11min) “I think it was in December, because it was cold, snow … and the gypsy camp was not too far from the C lager; it was a family camp. I was just taken out of my (roll call) all by myself.” Then, as if she suddenly remembered [19], she says, “I think that it was Mengele that took me outta there.” (This is first mention of Mengele since saying she didn’t know if he was the doctor who selected her for her first experiment.) She was put on a truck transport of Gypsy families on their way to the “gas chamber.”
Remarks: The last “gassing” at Birkenau, according to the official narrative, took place on October 30, 1944. But Zisblatt has no idea of this when she recalls it being in December. This may be the strongest “evidence” of fraud in her narrative. Surely one wouldn’t forget the exact time one was sent to die in a “gas chamber.” If she decided on December, so that she could claim the longest time possible at Birkenau—May to December (7 months max, although she claims 8 months)—she has fallen into a trap. May to October would be only 5 months.
(FD) “Suddenly,” at mid-morning, she was selected with 1500 other women to leave the camp (p. 74). Mengele is not present. The women were ordered to remove their clothes and marched naked until they were forced into a narrow passageway. At this point she realizes she’s in the #3 gas chamber.
(LD) Nothing about her gas chamber experience is brought up in the film.

How she escaped the gas chamber

(ST) “As everybody (Gypsy families) was being pushed into the gas chamber” -after removing their clothing- “I was goin’ backwards and I got stuck in the door.” She hung on to the edge of the metal door and the big strong SS man couldn’t manage to push this starving child in, so he threw her out! She ran away and hid under the “eave” of the crematorium.
(FD) Basically the same unbelievable story with the 1500 women, only this time she “dug her fingernails” into the doorframe and wouldn’t let go. (With her inadequate diet and deprivation, could she have such strong fingernails?) When the big SS guard “threw her out onto the ramp” (there is no ramp) and walked away (!) she ran up the non-existent ramp and climbed under the roof.
Remarks: Being unfamiliar with the crematoriums apart from the rubble she first visited in 1994, Zisblatt doesn’t know that there was no place “under the roof” to hide and there were no eaves.

The Sonderkommando – friend or stranger?

(ST) Very shortly, a boy wearing a Jewish star came along to clear out the dead bodies from the chamber, saw her under the eave, gave her his jacket and said, “When I’m finished, I will be back. I know who you are.” She then tells a long story about how they met before in the camp and she had done him a favor which he was now going to repay. (@2hr18min)
(FD) The Sonderkommando boy sees her, gives her his jacket and speaks to her in Hungarian. They have never seen each other before.

Sonderkommando has 3 months or 3 days to live?

ST) “Within five minutes he was back. It doesn’t take long for a crew to exterminate God knows how many hundreds of gypsies and bodies, you know?” He told her, “As soon as they turn off the electricity in the wires, there is a train going to a labor camp. If I find an open cart, I will throw you over the wires into the cart.” Zisblatt says he risked his life because, “He had 3 months more to live, if that.” Immediately, he rolled her in a blanket he had brought, threw her over the high wire fence, and she landed in an open wagon with other women in it.
Remark: The fences were almost 10 ft. high and the side track around Crematorium #3 was at least 100 ft. away—not close enough for this to be at all possible.
(FD) He said, “I’m going to throw you on a train that is waiting on the tracks. There are open cars on the train […] women going to a work camp.” Immediately, he tossed her (no blanket) and she landed in an open cattle car with other women (none ever spoke to her!). She had asked his name; he said it didn’t matter, he had only 3 more days to live.
Remark: The Germans did not transport women in open train cars in freezing cold weather, if ever, and even more so if they were valuable labor.

Train took her to Gross Rosen in former Czechoslovakia or Neuengamme, Germany?

(ST) The train car carried female “machine mechanics” to a small labor camp with one factory. She couldn’t remember the name of the town or camp (how could she forget?), but said it was in Sudeten Deutschland (former Czechoslovakia).
Remarks: This could be a sub-camp of Gross Rosen, which was located directly on a rail line not that far from Auschwitz. About 10 of the subcamps were for women and were reportedly at peak activity in 1944. It’s not believable that she couldn’t “remember” the name of the place—it’s more likely she doesn’t want to bring attention to it because she is telling a different story than the one she actually lived. [20]
(FD) The train took her to Neuengamme concentration camp in the city of Hamburg in Northeastern Germany (p. 77)—many days travel from Auschwitz. (In an open cattle car, wearing only a jacket?) On page 79, she writes she “wasn’t sure of the exact dates” though by 2008 she had plenty of time to figure it out.
Remarks: It’s reported that some women prisoners from Auschwitz were transferred to the sub-camps of Neuengamme in the summer of 1944, not in October or December.
(LD) Nothing about leaving Auschwitz is brought up.

Map showing Neuengamme far up in northwest Germany. Gross Rosen is closer to Auschwitz, with Flossenbuerg west of G.R., and Pilsen directly east of Fl. It makes no sense for Zisblatt to say she was in Neuengamme, so why does she? (credit: erichunt.net)

Her job was to repair machines or pack ammunition?

(ST) Unbelievably, she re-discovered “Sabka,” who had been sent away after their tattoo-removal, in the bunk below hers in the morning. Her job in this camp was to repair machines that Czech men operated. Of course, she didn’t know how, but she tells an elaborate story about the Czech machine operator who helped her out.
(FD) Again, she finds “Sabka” in the bunk below hers, but here they both have the job of packing ammunition for the front lines. No Czechs in this camp.

Different routes for the “Death March”

(ST) The first week in January, the “couple of hundred” camp inmates were ordered on a march. (@2hr36min) Prisoners from outside came into their camp and 5000 were assembled. They wore their normal shoes and clothing, and were given a blanket. Zisblatt claims they walked from January until April with only snow to eat. When asked if she remembered the route: “I remember passing Breslau and Dresden […] I remember the signs as we were going.” Then, “The factory was deep, deep Germany … Dresden was below where we were, so … we didn’t pay attention where we were going cause we didn’t have no choice anyway. But by April we were somewhere in the Pilsen area and we knew we were close to Czechoslovakia.”
Remarks: They were in Czechoslovakia when they left! If Dresden was below the factory/camp, it was not in Sudetenland as she said it was. She has poor understanding of geography or she is just making it up as she goes along.
(FD) In January, the 5000 prisoners of Neuengamme (in Northern Germany) were assembled, each given a thin blanket, a pair of wooden shoes, an “article of clothing” and told to march. (p 79) They marched in the snow, which was their only food, tearing strips from their blanket to wrap their feet. Many died along the way; by April only a few hundred marchers were left. We are not told of any landmarks or towns to indicate where they were.
Remarks: The only march from Neuengamme was northwards to the Baltic Sea in the last weeks of the war, according to USHMM website [21].
(LD) All she said was, “The Nazis didn’t want anyone to get liberated, so they were herding the people away from the camp.”
Remarks: She fancies herself an expert on Nazis, as well as Dr. Mengele.

Liberation: with or without General Patton?

(ST) In April, Allied planes shot at their convoy; in the confusion the two girls managed to drop out of the march. They walked about “all night long,” and fell asleep next to a stream. In the morning, they were awakened by an American soldier wearing a Jewish mezuzah around his neck. She heard “loud rumblings, noise, cars and footsteps—the whole Army was here! They came and found the two of us and they had an interpreter, so we communicated. This was General Patton’s Third Army that came through there […] This one guy was always screamin’ and that was General Patton, he was screamin’ and yelling, and then the Red Cross truck came down and they put us in the truck.”
Remarks: Part of Patton’s army was in that area then, but not Patton himself.
(FD) They dropped out of the marching column after a bombing raid and wandered “for several more days,” sleeping at night under their now half-blanket. “One morning,” two soldiers, one wearing the mezuzah, wake them. Other soldiers came and spent all day talking with them, cooking for them, holding her in their arms, and one was able to speak with her in German. They were taken to the soldier’s camp and put into a Red Cross truck, with beds, for the night. But no mention of General Patton screamin’ and yelling this time.
(LD) “Planes came out from behind the mountains and bombed our convoy; none of us were hurt. That’s when I found out the first time the US was at war.”

Bread or crackers?

(ST) When asked what they wanted to eat, she only wanted a whole loaf of bread all to herself, so they gave her a loaf of bread.
(FD) They had no bread to give her, only crackers in little cardboard boxes.
Remarks: Zisblatt obviously learned that soldiers have rations; they don’t carry around loaves of bread. In addition to this, she claims they cooked scrambled eggs for “Sabka.”

April or May?

(ST) In the morning, “they (soldiers) wanted to know where we lived.” The girls said, “We would like to go to a hospital, maybe … somewheres where it’s safe. They decided the hospital was the best place to take us.” It was April 1945, white flags were out but still a lot of fighting going on.
(FD) She learned from her soldier-liberators the day before that it was May 7, 1945.

“Sabka’s” death and burial

(ST) Even though Zisblatt just said what she did above, she then said, “When we got up in the morning, my friend “Sabka” was dead. She died in her sleep.” They bury her in the woods wrapped in her old blanket because “Chana” didn’t want “Sabka’s” body to be autopsied at the hospital.
Remarks: The interviewer didn’t question Zisblatt on how Sabka could be talking in the morning and then have died in her sleep. Zisblatt had remembered that an imaginary person cannot be registered in a hospital.
(FD) In the morning, the soldiers bring them breakfast, but she can’t wake “Sabka”;
a medic finally tells her she is dead. The medic, the Jewish soldier Bob and another soldier spend the entire morning consoling her, then spend the rest of the day digging the grave. They tell her they would come back with her after the war to give “Sabka” a “proper burial.”

Hospitalized in Pilsen or Volary?

(ST) She made the statement @2hr54m40s, “They took us into the hospital at Pilsen.” At 3hr1m40s, she said she was in an American Army hospital in the Pilsen area that was formerly a German hospital. “From the hospital, at the end of that summer […] they took us to Salzburg, Austria to a Displaced Persons camp. And this was close to 1946.”
Remarks: According to the World Jewish Congress, Irene Siegelstein, age 16, born in Poleno, Hungary, father’s name Moshe, was on the list of Jewish girls now at the civilian hospital in Volary, Czechoslovakia, on April 25, 1946 [22]. This would mean Zisblatt was in the hospital for an entire year, which is not credible, and contradicts what she herself says. Yet the list exists, so when did she actually enter the hospital?
(FD) She was taken to an American Army hospital in the “Pilsen area” where “all the other residents were young military men.” (p. 98) She is treated for typhus and malnutrition. “One day” a general, who she later learned was George Patton himself, came to the hospital and made “a special visit to my bedside.” He asked her questions through an interpreter, then pulled four buttons from his sleeve and took the purple scarf from around his neck and gave them to her. Yet she has never produced these gifts as she does the diamonds, which can’t be traced to any particular person or time. She “spent two months in the hospital in Pilsen.”
Remarks: In her ST, she sees Patton in the field; now in FD she just sees him in the hospital—she is determined to have him in her story. Zisblatt refuses to say the word Volary, yet everything indicates that’s where she was. Pilsen is approximately 40 miles from Volary. Many of the evacuated female camp inmates from Poland who were set out on foot marches in January ended up in Volary, very possibly because there was a German hospital there. [23].

To be continued

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[19] I think it’s very likely that her interviewer, Jennifer Resnick, encouraged her during one of the breaks to remember if she ever saw or had any interaction with Dr. Mengele. It was Resnick who asked her earlier if she knew who the doctor was during her first selection for experiments, and Zisblatt said no.

[20] A Red Cross Tracing Service document that Zisblatt holds up during her videotaped Shoah testimony shows Irene Segelstern, born 12-28-1929, was transferred from concentration camp Gross Rosen, prisoner #61397, to concentration camp Flossenbeurg/Commando Helmbrechts, prisoner #63941, on 6 March 1945. This was when she was, according to her testimony, in the middle of a death march! The first number was, according to her, removed from her arm at Auschwitz, deleted from the records, and she got a new number and a new name. Yet this is the number she has at Gross Rosen, which does not necessarily correspond to a tattoo. Helmbrechts was a women’s subcamp of Flossenbuerg in Bavaria, founded in the summer of 1944. The document also says that Irene Segelstern was incarcerated at Auschwitz-Birkenau on Sept. 28, 1944—not April or May.

[21] “…and from Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme northwards to the Baltic Sea in the last weeks of the war.” http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005162

[22] http://resources.ushmm.org/vlpnamelistimages/WJCpics/randy/993.pdf

[23] http://www.gjt.cz/includes/military/DMUS/dmus.htm

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Part One

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Part Three

Part Five
]]> http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-4-of-5/feed/ 0 http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-3-of-5/ http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-3-of-5/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:23:44 +0000 admin http://www.revblog.codoh.com/?p=585 Irene Weisberg Zisblatt writes of swallowing the same diamonds over and over again for a year in order to save all she has left of her family. What else does she say—and why is it not believable?

Apophenia: the phenomenon of seeing things that aren’t there. People will see, and believe, what they expect to see, what they want to see, or even what they are told they are seeing, as often as they will see, and believe, what they are actually seeing.

By Carolyn Yeager

Part Three

(ST=Shoah Testimony, FD=The Fifth Diamond, LD=The Last Days, RI=Radio Interview. See Part One for further explanation.)

Suicide-at-the-fence punishment changes from 5 to 100

(ST) Claims the SS threatened to torture to death 5 prisoners for every one who committed suicide by touching the electric fence. “Many people did go to the barbed wire … every time a transport came through, the barbed wires were electrified. When it was on, people would walk up to it just to die. […] so they (SS) said: For every person that’s going to take their lives, they’re gonna torture to death 5 of us. Of course, everybody ignored the barbed wire after that.”
(LD) Now she says the SS killed 100 inmates “in front of everybody” for each prisoner who electrocuted themselves at the fence. “When the electricity came on they ran up to it to electrocute themselves.”
(FD) She left this patently false story out of her book.

Tattooed right away or later?

(ST) She does not say she was tattooed on arrival, nor does she ever give her number. Later, when telling of the tattoo removal “experiment” she gives this bizarre explanation (@1hr31min): “I wasn’t tattooed right away. I was tattooed after they selected me for something. The reason we wasn’t tattooed right away is they didn’t want us to live. We were in that camp as reserves for the gas chamber, for the crematorium, because they were burning two men and one woman, because that was the best, efficient thing to have the crematorium work efficiently—because the woman has a little more flesh on her body because of her breasts, and the men don’t, so they were using two men and one woman for the crematorium. So we were reserve, is what we were told – every time we asked for some food or some ration [we were told], ‘You think you’re here to live? You’re here to be a reserve for that chimney!’ That’s when we found out what that chimney was.”
(FD) She receives a tattoo on her arm – number 61397 [16] – along with everyone else upon arrival, while she’s still holding the diamonds in her hand. (p. 35)
(LD) Another woman survivor testifies they were given a tattoo upon arrival.

When did she learn her family had been gassed?

(ST) “We didn’t find out for a couple of days.” (@1hr22min)
(FD) On the first night, she tries to sneak out of the barracks to find her mother. The woman in charge of the barracks stopped her at the door and pointed to smoke coming out of a chimney and yelled at her, “Your mother is just about now coming out of one of those chimneys.” Later that night: “I realized [it] was true. My mother was dead.”

With her cousins or all alone?

(ST) She shared the bunk in her first barracks with two of her father’s cousins – one of whom was around her mother’s age, 33. These cousins were not mentioned previous to this, but suddenly they are with her. This is strange because back in Munkacs she said they were expecting her father’s cousins, but they never showed up; they learned one had been murdered with his whole family, including two daughters.
(FD) She’s in her first barracks alone, no relatives ever. But of the other 9 women who shared her bunk(!), one worked in the kitchen and whispered that the SS were putting chemicals into the soup to destroy their reproductive organs. This rumor is the SOURCE of her claim that the “evil Nazis” tried to destroy her reproductive ability. Later in America, she had two children, yet she still tells school kids that she was given chemicals for this purpose.

Mengele no – Mengele yes

(ST) After a month in camp, she was selected for experiments by a “German doctor.” The whole barracks of 1000 had to undress outside and 15 women were chosen for their “smooth, unblemished skin.” When asked by the interviewer if she knew the name of the doctor, she said No. “It could have been Eichmann (not a doctor), it could have been Mengeler (sic), you know after a while they all looked the same. It wasn’t important to us what their names were. […] I for one was not interested what their names were.” (@1hr33min)
(FD) At her first morning roll call, she was selected for experiments. Two men approached them; she heard the Kapo speak their names: Mengele and Toub. (p.43) She swallowed her diamonds again. Mengele, the doctor, selected her and 99 other women to line up between two barracks and remove their clothing. She was in the final group of 15 that was selected, sent to the showers, given clean clothes, and put on a train to Majdanek.
(LD) Dr. Mengele is never mentioned in the entire film.
Remarks: It’s noteworthy that Zisblatt only mentions Dr. Mengele twice in her Shoah testimony, and both times with uncertainty, and with some prompting. But in her later book (and also in her talks), Mengele, along with the diamonds, becomes a major theme.

Eye-color experiment differs

(ST) The 15 who were selected walked to Auschwitz where drops were put into their eyes and they were led into a dungeon underneath a barracks, where each was put in a small cubicle. They stood in water up to their ankles in pitch darkness for an unknown period of time. “THEY TATTOOED US THEN! When they selected us, they took us to this little section and gave us our number; they tattooed us. And then we went into the dungeon. So we had the arm, we didn’t know why we were tattooed, we didn’t eat, we just drank that water.” Some were blinded by this experiment, but all 15 returned to their barracks; later they found out the experiment was supposed to change the color of their eyes … but it failed. (@1hr37min)
(FD) After they returned from Majdanek, Dr. Mengele selected 5 from the 15 to go to the Birkenau Infirmary where “he put painful chemical injections into our eyes.” This time they stood all together in one prison cell in water up to their ankles. Their eyes burned. One of the girls finally spoke to her – it was “Sabka,” who was to become her faithful friend. “For the next four days we remained (there).” After being let out, Dr. Mengele examined their eyes and “seemed disappointed.” The other three girls were blind, and were immediately taken to the gas chamber, crying “Shma Israel.” Chana and “Sabka’s” eye-color was unchanged. (pp. 46-48)
(LD) Only describes the eye-color experiment, but combines the 5 girls (FD) with the eye drops (ST). This time they were “tightly packed” in the dungeon. Afterward, “some of the people” (of five?) couldn’t see “for several days after that.” No Dr. Mengele – no “Sabka” – no permanent blinding – no one sent to the gas chamber. (@ 32 min)

Virus testing with and without Mengele

(ST) Next experiment was injecting a virus-containing serum under their fingernail. Only 5 of the original 15 were selected for this. That evening, she had a red-line going up her arm so she tore off a string from her clothing, tied it as a tourniquet on her arm and in the middle of the night went to the back door of the barracks, put her arm through the door crack and laid with her arm in the cool mud all night. In the morning, the line was down and they were examined again. She says that if the red line had still been there she would have been sent to the gas chamber.
(FD) Only she and “Sabka” are sent to the Infirmary for the under-the-fingernail injection. Dr. Mengele is there to do the torture. They are returned to their barracks for 3 days, then come back to the Infirmary for a blood test. Mengele comes in with sadistic hatred in his eyes and sticks the needle under her fingernail again. She writes: “Yes, that kind of hatred existed in the Twentieth Century in Nazi Germany.” That night she has the red-line reaction, but she sneaks all the way outside the barracks and lays outdoors all night with her hand buried in the mud. In the morning she is alright.
She dreams up an unbelievable punishment for the next day, given to her for trying to help “Sabka,” who was sick from the injection. She is made to stand very close to the electric fence, holding a brick in each hand with both arms straight out in front of her. If she moves even an inch, she will be electrocuted. She manages to do this for 12 hours after having a blood infection the night before!! Naturally, while she’s standing there all that time, she sees many evils taking place in the camp. This craziness is only in the book.
The injections continued every three days for the next two weeks, but with no more ill effects.

How she met Sabka

(ST) She first mentions “Sabka” during the 2nd experiment—the under-fingernail injection: “This one girl, her name was Sabka and she was Polish.” (@1hr42min30sec) She then describes how Sabka came to Auschwitz in 1943, saying “she was 19 years old when we met.”
Remark: “Chana” was still 13, awfully young to be the confidant of a 19 year old. This gives credence to the idea that Zisblatt was two years older than she says she was. Even though “Sabka” is a fictional person, Zisblatt is comfortable talking of her friendship with a 19 year old.
(FD) On the trip back from Majdanek, a beautiful girl sat next to her, the strong suggestion being this was “Sabka”(p. 46). Upon their return, she and the girl spoke to each other and exchanged names while standing in the watery dungeon during the eye-color “experiment.”

Reply to a letter written by Irene Zisblatt Lewin to the Red Cross Tracing Service in 1995 inquiring about the records for Irene Seigelstein. More proof that she was listed with some agencies as Irene Lewin. (credit: erichunt.net)

Sabka’s nationality changes

(ST) “Sabka” was Polish.
(FD) “Sabka” was Lithuanian (p.7). Zisblatt invents an elaborate story about 16 year old Sabka’s parents death in a mass grave, Sabka’s escape from the grave and finding a cave to live in for two years.

How they escaped being made into lampshades

(ST) Five women, including Zisblatt, were taken to Majdanek, where the rumor was that Ilse Koch [17] was coming to select prisoners with “smooth skin” for her lampshades (@1hr46min). Koch didn’t show up at Majdanek, so the five women were sent back to Auschwitz the next day.
Remark: The charge that Koch made lampshades and gloves from the skin of prisoners has long been debunked, but Zisblatt does her best to keep it alive in schoolkid’s gullible minds. She also thought Koch was coming from Innsbruck; apparently unaware that she was from Buchenwald.
(FD) The trip of fifteen to Majdanek is the first “experiment” she mentions in her book. She describes the bunk she spent the night in with 9 other women as filled with blood and feces. This, after being specially showered and given clean clothes before they left Birkenau! After 48 hours of supposedly waiting around for Ilse Koch, who never arrived, they were returned to Birkenau. (p.44-45)

Tattoo removal with and without Dr. Mengele

(ST) She and friend “Sabka” are now the only two left of the five; are taken to the “revere” to have their tattoo removed, but can’t remember if it was in Birkenau or Auschwitz. She describes it thus: Doctors strapped them onto a rusty table, injected things into their arms; then they were pulling, then cutting, without anesthesia, and within a week to 10 days (!) they found a way to get rid of the number. The nurse told them the reason for the tattoo removal: The SS were tattooed under their arm with the same kind of ink and now wanted to hide their identity, so the doctors are experimenting to find a way to remove their tattoos.
(FD) She, “Sabka” and twenty other women are marched to Auschwitz to the hospital there. She describes what she saw along the way. Dr. Mengele has 6 young SS in training, showing them glass jars containing deformed body parts of Jews. Then, coming over to the two girls strapped on the tables, he looks at her number 61397 and says to his interns: “I must find a way to remove the tattoos from the SS … we will use the prisoners to test different methods for the deletion of their numbers.” She proceeds to write a lot about Dr. Mengele’s evilness, then describes the same removal process as above.
Remarks: This supposedly explains why Zisblatt doesn’t have an Auschwitz tattoo even though she was allegedly there. When asked by audiences where her tattoo had been, she points under her left upper arm. [18] But numbers were tattooed on the top left forearm, where they could be easily seen and checked.

To be continued

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[16] According to the USHMM website, the sequences of numbers introduced in mid-May 1944 were prefaced by the letter A for women and B for men, and began with “1” and ended at “20,000.” For an unknown reason, the “A” series for women did not stop at 20,000 and continued to 30,000. Thus, Irene’s number doesn’t match the numbers given to Hungarian Jews. For a look at an authentic tattoo, go here: http://hopelutheranchurch.net/social.php
[17] Ilse Koch, dubbed by the press as “the bitch of Buchenwald” was married to the commandant of Buchenwald, Karl Otto Koch. She had the misfortune of being the target of evil rumors, such as using the skin of Jewish prisoners to make lampshades. However, the story went that it was tattooed skin that Koch wanted, but Zisblatt doesn’t seem to know that; she says Koch was looking for “smooth, unblemished skin,” like her own. Ilse Koch was put through two show trials after the war, and eventually died in prison. You can read about her trials (4 pages with photos) here:
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauTrials/IlseKoch.html
[18] Here is a picture of Irene Zisblatt pointing to the spot where her tattoo was removed: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/IreneZisblatt.html

For the other parts of this article please click on the links below

Part One

Part Two

Part Four

Part Five
]]> http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-3-of-5/feed/ 0 http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-2-of-5/ http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-2-of-5/#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:58:32 +0000 admin http://www.revblog.codoh.com/?p=563 Irene Weisberg Zisblatt writes of swallowing the same diamonds over and over again for a year in order to save all she has left of her family. What else does she say—and why is it not believable?

Apophenia: the phenomenon of seeing things that aren’t there. People will see, and believe, what they expect to see, what they want to see, or even what they are told they are seeing, as often as they will see, and believe, what they are actually seeing.

By Carolyn Yeager

Part Two

(ST=Shoah Testimony, FD=The Fifth Diamond, LD=The Last Days, RI=Radio Interview. See Part One for further explanation.)

Zisblatt’s story really starts in 1939, when the Jews in Hungary begin to lose rights and entitlements, like her right to attend the public school. According to Zisblatt, this continued and worsened until 1942, at which time Jews fleeing Poland and Ukraine for Palestine began coming through their little town, some with terrible stories to tell. The one Zisblatt repeats in her Shoah testimony and public talks – and which was used in The Last Days, not only by her but another survivor as well – is this: she overheard a man who spent the night at their house telling her father that “he saw Nazis tearing Jewish infants in half and throwing them in the Kneister river,” which she remembered from school was a river in Ukraine. The next day she asked her father about it and he told her that it wasn’t true, to forget it. In her book, Zisblatt changed that story to Germans killing Polish Jews, including women and children, and burying them in mass graves (p. 15).

She hasn’t listened to her father. Though it’s definitely not true, just another tale passed among Eastern European Jews at the time, she continues to repeat it to the children and teenagers to whom she speaks.

(Another atrocity story that she passes along is the one about SS men picking up Jewish children by the legs and banging them against the side of trucks. She both tells in The Last Days, and writes in Fifth Diamond that she saw through a crack in her barracks wall on her first night in Birkenau: “I saw trucks coming, and screams in the trucks, and I saw two children fall out of the truck, and the truck stopped and one SS man came out from the front and he picked up the children [by their legs] and he banged him against the truck, and the blood came running down, and threw him into the truck. So, that’s when I stopped talking to God.”)

From then on, she relates personal suffering that builds to the climax of her participation in a fictional Death March, followed by a fictional “liberation” by American General George Patton’s soldiers in a Czechoslovakian forest. The most notable contradictions that fill her story are the following:

Brother David dies at home and at Auschwitz

(Shoah Testimony) Zisblatt recounts that in 1943 she lost a brother, about 5 years old, who died of Scarlet Fever. In the same year, her two paternal grandparents also died of natural causes. Toward the end of her ST (@3hr6min), she says she would like to go back to her hometown to visit, because “my grandparents and my brother are buried there.”
(Fifth Diamond) Her brother David, who would have been 5 in early 1943, is listed with her family members as perishing at Auschwitz in late1944 at age 7 (page xvii). In her talks at schools and elsewhere, she thus makes the claim we hear from so many survivors: I lost my entire family at Auschwitz; I am the only survivor.
(Last Days) None of this is brought up in Spielberg’s film.

Friendly policeman sealed up their house

(ST) Around Passover time, the authorities are taking Poleno Jews from their houses and transporting them by rail to the nearby large town of Munkacs [12], where a ghetto had been created. Their houses were then sealed up. Zisblatt says her family home was sealed up by a policeman friend of her father’s, with the family inside, in an attempt to fool the authorities and not be sent to the ghetto. She then blames the policeman for “squealing on them,” though it’s clear they could never get away with such a scheme.
(FD) The story of the policeman friend changes. He becomes a “Righteous Christian” with a Jewish wife (p. 21). He offered to seal up their house if they would take his wife in with them. Zisblatt says the wife was an assimilated Jew who had not known, before Hitler, that she was Jewish, and was deported with them. However, she is quickly forgotten in the narrative.

Zisblatt’s autobiography The Fifth Diamond is endorsed on the back cover by motion picture icon Steven Spielberg with these words: “Irene Zisblatt eloquently speaks and inspires today’s generation with her personal story of remembrance and survival.” Remembrance and survival – does that mean it doesn’t have to be true?

Confused about Passover and their deportation

(ST) The day after Passover, the police came in the early morning and broke down the door of their house. When asked about the date, Zisblatt says “I know it was on the 3rd, it was right after Passover, we didn’t have time to put away the Passover dishes; either April 3rd or May 3rd. Then she said, “Everybody (Jews) was home when we had Passover; the day after Passover everybody was gone, and the day after that, they got us.” Passover in 1944 was April 8th. Other’s accounts contradict the deportation date [13].
(FD) They celebrate Passover in their sealed up home; the following night men broke their sealed door with an ax. This time she includes Nazi soldiers along with local policemen who “rushed up the ladder” to their attic, but she gives no dates.
(LD) She says “Two motorcycles was the whole Nazi regime that occupied our town.”

Different relatives in the Munkacs ghetto

(ST) When she, with her parents, uncle and siblings arrived at the Sajovits brickyard in the city of Munkacs, her mother’s mother was already there, with her mother’s two sisters and their families, and had made a space which they joined. She says they expected her father’s two cousins but they never arrived. Time spent in the brickyard was one week or less.
(FD) This time, they meet only her mother’s mother there, alone (p. 27). Her mother’s five sisters and brothers are listed on page xvii as perishing in Auschwitz but she writes nothing about them except for Bencie, who lived with the grandmother.
(LD) Only says it was raining a lot, and guards with big German Shepherd dogs on tight leashes walked around all the time.
Nowhere does she mention that the ghetto was administered by a Jewish Council, whose president was Sandor Steiner.

Diamonds rolled or sewn, many or just four?

(ST) She says as a kind of afterthought that before getting in the train cars leaving Munkacs, her mother “rolled” diamonds into the bottom of one of her skirts, and into her sister’s skirt. She says, “Of course, my sister was only 4 ½ years old, but I guess that was a way of preserving things. And she said to me, ‘Take care of this skirt. In case you have to work at a different place than I do, and you don’t have anything to eat, take out the diamonds to buy bread. But be very careful not to lose it.’” Now how do you ‘roll’ diamonds into the bottom of a skirt so that they won’t come ‘unrolled’ and be lost?
(LD) Her mother rolled diamonds into her skirt, but not into her sister’s.
(FD) It becomes quite a different story. Before Passover, while they are still at home, her mother calls her over and shows her four diamonds which she is going to sew into the hem of one of Chana’s skirts. These are “her mother’s diamonds,” the implication being this is all there is. She is told to guard them closely, never to sell them unless she is hungry – then she can use them to buy bread. All four diamonds go to her because she is the oldest daughter; none go to her sister.

Trip to Auschwitz

(ST) She says the train doors never opened, they never saw light, never got water; there was one pail for bodily elimination. Other survivors contradict this [14] and describe stops for fresh water when the men actually got out and cleaned the pails. Said it seemed like forever, but does not give a specific time of travel. Nor does she mention her extended family being in the train.
(LD) She heard the “cattle car” doors bolt on the outside and they were locked inside for five days. Says, as above, they never opened the doors, never gave them any water.
(FD) The SS forced 100 people into each box car [15] and gave them one small pail to use as a bathroom. Again repeats that it was a five day trip with no water, but others who made the trip said it was at most 3 days and they got two pails, one with water.
If it was really as Zisblatt describes it, no one would have survived the trip. But her whole family got off the train and were all able to move and behave quite normally. She herself goes through disinfection and doesn’t say that when under the shower she took the opportunity to parch her thirst. If she were telling the truth, dehydration would have been a major concern at the time.

Sees some or all of her family members going into gas chamber?

(ST) After they arrive at Birkenau she is separated from her mother and two youngest siblings, then sees them get into a black truck. She is led into a shower/delousing building, and after undergoing that process she emerges into a courtyard from where she again sees her mother and 2 siblings, now getting off the truck and walking behind a building that she learned later was the ‘gas chamber.’ (@1hr20min) Quite a coincidence that she happened to see them twice! She says she never saw her father and brothers again after they left the train.
(FD) Story changes. Her grandmother is now with them. In this version, before she enters the shower/delousing building, she watches the four of them walk past the trucks and enter a low bunker behind barbed wire fences. Then she sees her father and 3 brothers entering the same building! Now she has all 8 of her close relatives accounted for as being immediately gassed.
(LD) Speaks of being separated from her mother and two youngest siblings; no grandmother mentioned; no talk from her about the gas chambers in the film.

Swallowing her mother’s diamonds only once versus over and over again

(ST) When undergoing the initial disinfection process, she remembered the (unknown number of) diamonds rolled into her skirt and eventually put them in her mouth and swallowed them when she saw they were examining inside people’s mouths, and pulling gold teeth (@1hr18min). After this, there is no further mention of the diamonds in her ST; they are a thing of the past. In her mind at this time in 1995, she may have visualized them as tiny diamonds, which is why she could use them to “buy bread.”
(FD) She swallows the (four) diamonds for the first time and retrieves them the next day in the latrine, continuing to do this throughout her time of incarceration. Her insistence on keeping her mother’s diamonds is a major theme of the book. She also writes that the workers examining inside mouths during the initial disinfection “were removing fillings and crowns, and pulling gold teeth” (p. 36).
The pulling of the gold teeth is not believable, as it would have caused excruciating pain, a bloody mess and infection. Gold teeth were only removed from corpses.
(LD) She talks of her first time swallowing the diamonds, and says “The whole time I was in the camp, I swallowed the diamonds … so everytime I swallowed them, I had to find them again.” She adds: “(In the latrine) I never sat on the hole, because I had to find my diamonds.” Said she would rinse them off “in the mud, or […] in the soup that we were gonna get.” (Unbelievable! That would be a serious crime for which she could truly be shot.) One day she was caught defecating in the corner and had to swallow the diamonds without “rinsing them off.” This filthy stuff is not repeated in the book.

When did she decide the diamonds were important to her story?

(Radio Interview) In 1997, according to Zisblatt, she got a call from the Shoah Foundation about being in a film. The woman said, “You’re talking in your testimony about diamonds, but not telling us where they are … where are they?” Zisblatt answered, They’re here. “Can we come see them?” they ask. Zisblatt says, Absolutely. So they came with a crew of 18 people to film her for The Last Days.
Remarks: In her ’95 taped Shoah testimony, she tells of getting diamonds from her mother, but after swallowing them the first time, never mentions them again. I don’t know why the film producers picked up on the diamond angle from her testimony; she doesn’t show a pendant with diamonds during her filmed testimony. But in the filming for The Last Days in 1997, she speaks at some length about the diamonds and shows a pendant with four gems, saying these were her mother’s diamonds she had saved by swallowing and defecating them out again and again.

To be continued

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[12] Interwar Munkacs was about 50% Jewish (like Poleno), filled with Hasidic Jews wearing their traditional garb. The first movie house was established by a Hasidic Jew; it and most stores closed on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. The Jews of Munkacs were the first to be restricted to a ghetto.
[13] Peter Kleinmann, a Munkacs Jewish resident of the time, writes in The Fallacy of Race and the Shoah (University of Ottawa Press): “Just after Passover, on 18 April 1944, the kehilla announced with posters and proclamations by drummers that all Jews must move into the ghetto. Within a week, 13,000 Jews from Munkács and some 14,000 from surrounding areas were rounded up […] and held in the ghetto and those from the rural areas were held in the Sajovits brickyard.” That would put the Zeigelstein’s arrival considerably later than two days after Passover on April 10th.
[14] Other survivors have recorded that it was a three day trip and the train stopped several times for water. Each train car had two buckets; one for water, one for bodily elimination. The men got out at each stop to clean the pails and get fresh water. See John Mandel at http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/interview.php?D=mandel&section=10 and Peter Kleinmann at http://www.cjvma.org/e/albums/kleinmann/039-042.html
[15] Peter Kleinmann reported 50 to 60 people in each box car.

For the other parts of this article please click on the links below

Part One

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five
]]> http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-2-of-5/feed/ 0 http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-1/ http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-a-special-jewel-in-the-genre-of-holocaust-horror-stories-part-1/#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:43:26 +0000 admin http://www.revblog.codoh.com/?p=506 The Incovenient History revisionist blog is proud to present a guest posting in the form of five-part article on self-styled Auschwitz survivor Irene Zisblatt. Our guest blogger is Carolyn Yeager, known as a frequent contributor to The Barnes Review.

Irene Weisberg Zisblatt writes of swallowing the same diamonds over and over again for a year in order to save all she has left of her family. What else does she say—and why is it not believable?

Apophenia: the phenomenon of seeing things that aren’t there. People will see, and believe, what they expect to see, what they want to see, or even what they are told they are seeing, as often as they will see, and believe, what they are actually seeing.

By Carolyn Yeager

Part One

Irene Weisberg Zisblatt (Zeigelstein-Lewin-Stein) is a late-blooming “holocaust survivor-memoir writer” whose life story takes many mysterious twists and turns. She claims that in 1944, at the age of 13, she was deported to Auschwitz with her entire family, where only she escaped death in “gas chamber #2.”

For 50 years, she kept quiet about being a holocaust survivor; then she saw Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List and made the decision she must add her voice to the great cause of educating the world about The Holocaust. [1] In that same year, 1994, she went as a survivor-mentor with a group of US Jewish teenagers to Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living. While there, she says, she remembered and relived her whole Auschwitz experience. [2]

In 1995 she was asked by Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Foundation if they could videotape her holocaust testimony for their archival library. Her 3 ½ hours of answering questions and prompts by interviewer Jennifer Resnick is the basis for her being chosen as one of only five Hungarian survivors featured in Spielberg’s The Last Days, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film in the year after its release, 1999.

At that time, she already wanted to publish a book and had been working on it, she says, since her son was thirteen. She asked Spielberg at the private premiere of The Last Days if the documentary would interfere with her book. He said no, but advised her to “not make it morbid, and don’t make it a 500 page book.” [3] She said she followed his advice.

Zisblatt went to work for H&K Law Charitable Foundation as their “survivor-in-chief” who would have the final say on the winning essays in their national Holocaust Remembrance Project. During one of their teacher-training seminars, where teachers get free trips to learn how to teach the Holocaust from experts like Zisblatt, she met Gail Ann Webb, a Baptist (as Webb describes herself) high-school writing teacher from West Virginia. They talked about writing Zisblatt’s holocaust memoir.

Still, it took two more years before Webb wrote a first draft of the book as fiction. Zisblatt explained to her that holocaust survivor stories have to be first-person—non-fiction. [4] It took a couple more years of changes and edits, but the final version of the book was published by Artists and Authors Publishers as “autobiography – non-fiction. It came out in 2008 and was quickly accepted in some school districts, including Webb’s own.

The Fifth Diamond is so named because the central theme of the book is four diamonds Zisblatt was given by her mother before they reached Auschwitz, and how she managed to hold on to them by repeatedly swallowing and retrieving them again after defecating. Yes, it’s quite improbable, but nevertheless this is what schoolchildren are given to believe—and they do believe it! The fifth diamond is Zisblatt herself, a brilliant light inspiring today’s youth.

The book is 160 pages of fiction, admittedly [5] custom written for 13 and 14-year old “middle-school” students in our nation’s educational system. Middle school, the two to three years between grade school and high school, is when Holocaust studies are most heavily force-fed to American school children because of laws passed in many state legislatures by craven politicians hungry for Jewish votes and money, or fearful of Jewish media power. These legislators are also indoctrinated by the holocaust industry themselves, and accept on faith, i.e. without examination, that by turning a segment of their state’s school curriculum over to Jewish organizations pushing their religion-like holocaust narrative they are promoting racial and religious tolerance. [6]

The situation amounts to forced religious beliefs in that much of The Holocaust is necessarily explained as “miraculous happenings” that don’t follow reasonable expectations for how the world really works. These happenings are outside of time and space in the sense of special Acts of God. Zisblatt’s The Fifth Diamond is full of special Acts of God.

Perhaps this silly book could be ignored but for the fact it’s being read by thousands of young people in several states (Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia are three named by Zisblatt) during their typically 6-week-long “Holocaust Studies” unit, with the goal to extend its use into as many districts as possible. Zisblatt, who leaves a copy of her book in the library of every school she speaks at, says she is on a mission to reach as many children as possible with her message of the holocaust [7] , so that “it will never happen again.” She is in a race against time, she says; at age 80, she speaks four or five times a week to whoever asks her, mostly in school auditoriums and classrooms, in community centers and universities.

Considering the reach of just this one small woman (Zisblatt is only 5’1” in height), who she is and how she evolved to be someone who could tell such an outrageous personal story, and be believed, cries out to be examined.

I will be using as sources her book The Fifth Diamond [FD], published in 2008 by Artists and Authors Publishing of New York; her 3 ½ hour testimony videotaped on Oct. 25, 1995 for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation [ST]; Steven Spielberg’s 1998 academy award-winning documentary film The Last Days [LD], and a radio interview given by Zisblatt on 6-15-09 on the Internet-only Ithaca Press and Artists and Authors Publishers of New York Radio Hour, Artists First World Radio Network, www.artistfirst.com interviewer: Tony Kay [RI].

I am indebted to Eric Hunt for making these sources and many documents available on his website: http://erichunt.net. Without Eric’s original research and his lawsuit brought against Zisblatt, Spielberg, Webb, and Artists and Authors Publishers, none of this would have gotten the attention it now has.

Above: Irene Zisblatt talks with seventh- and eighth-graders at the Emma C. Attales School in Atlantic City after her presentation in April 2009.

* * *

Who is she? She says in her Shoah Testimony (ST) she was born Irene Zeigelstein (she spelled it) in Poleno, a small town in the Carpathian Mountains, on December 28, 1930, eldest of six children in an Orthodox Jewish family. Is there any reason to question even these simple facts? YES.

On page 1 of her autobiography (FD) she writes, “My name was Chana Seigelstein,” and never refers to herself as Irene until she says she was given that previously unknown, new first name by the Immigration service before leaving Germany for the USA in 1947 at the age of 16 – two months short of 17. She also doesn’t give a birth date, only the vague statement in the Preface, “I was only 6 years old when The Third Reich started the invasion across Europe.”

Yet on the ship passenger manifest [8] for her voyage to America in October 1947, she is listed as Irene Lewin, 18 years old, traveling with her Polish husband Alter Lewin and his younger brother Elias.

Records for Irene Segelstein from the Red Cross tracing service and the Flossenbuerg Prisoner List show her born on December 28, 1929, and the former says she was born in Sosnowitz, Poland. The Sharit haPlatah list has Irene Segelstein from Polene, born 1928. The World Jewish Congress Collection on Liberation lists Irene Siegelstein, Polena, Hungary as being 16 years old when she was liberated from Civilian Hospital, Volary, Czech Republic in 1945. On the 2009 radio interview, she answered a direct question by interviewer Tony Kay that she was 14 when liberated, only she was alone in a forest.

In FD, Zisblatt writes that in October 1947 she received an assignment from Immigration to board the ship “Marine Fletcher” in Bremen, Germany, and “by the end of October, the liner began it’s voyage.” The Marine Flasher did indeed sail from Bremen on October 29, 1947, arriving in New York on November 10, 1947 with Irene Lewin aboard, but no Irene Seigelstein.

Irene Lewin’s destination is listed as 42 Madden Terrace, Newark, New Jersey; the same for Alter and Elias Lewin. Yet Irene’s Uncle Nathan Siegelstein, who she says was her sponsor and whose home she immediately stayed in, lived in the Bronx, New York. In fact, on a 1941 draft registration card, he gave his address as 2141 Honeywell Ave, NY, Bronx NY.

Supporting evidence that Irene Lewin on the ship passenger manifest is the same person as Irene Seigelstein is a DP Refugee Card for Irene Lewin issued in Munich, dated August 1947, which shows her born in Poleno in 1928 (this time on July 28 rather than December 28). If the July date was correct, she would have been 19 years old in late October 1947, not 18; this indicates that July was probably a mistake and should have been December. Her former nationality is shown as Czechoslovak (CSR) and she is in transit from Salzberg. How many Jewish girls born in tiny Poleno on the 28th of the month, in 1928, could be on that ship heading for New York? If there was another girl named Irene from Poleno, I’m sure our Irene would have found out and would talk about it … wouldn’t she?

Zisblatt writes in FD, pg 107: “When I arrived in New York, I first moved in with my Uncle Nathan and his wife, Helen.” On the following page, she writes, “I really enjoyed visiting my Aunt Fanny [9] in New Jersey, so after a few months, I ended up moving in permanently with Aunt Fanny and Uncle Morris.”(These persons are all shown on the 1930 Federal Census.)

So just who was Irene Zisblatt during these years of her youth? Irene Zeigelstein? Chana Seiglestein? Then, Irene Lewin? Should we not want to know about this woman who is speaking to our schoolchildren 4 or 5 times a week and whose sado-masochistic, anti-German book they are reading? She even became Irene Stein. When her husband Herman Weisberg died in 1969, his obituary named her as the former Irene Stein. [10]

One more item of identity: In The Fifth Diamond, her “autobiography,” Zisblatt devotes one line to a remarriage (of 10 years) that “didn’t work out” and says after Weisberg, “the love of her life,” died, she “devoted her life to her children.” I had to really dig to discover that in 1971, less than two years after Weisberg’s death, she married Jack Zisblatt of Arlington, Texas – a salesman who regularly came to New Jersey on business. In November 1981, Jack filed for divorce in Tarrant County TX. Irene cross-filed, and also filed a third party action against a corporation owned by Jack at the time they were married. Irene failed in her attempt to convince the court that Jack Zisblatt’s corporation was community property. [11]

Clearly, Zisblatt is selective in what she tells and what she doesn’t. Her life story is something she has carefully crafted to fit her new status as a film star and speaker on the lucrative holocaust survivor circuit.

Poleno cannot be found on any map, but it was firmly in Czechoslovakia from 1920 until 1939, when it was annexed back by Hungary. It had a large Jewish population; according to Zisblatt, 60 to 70 Jewish families, all Orthodox, attended the one temple, and there was only one church (ST).

To be continued.

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