Appendix 2. The First Soviet Estimates of the Victims of the Auschwitz Death Camp

This chapter looks at the testimony of Rudolf Reder, a survivor of Bełżec death camp. Bełżec murder camp was the first camp set up by Aktion Reinhard, an operation whose purpose was to dispose, in the least obtrusive manner, of the Jewish population of the General Government and adjacent countries under Nazi rule. Into this camp, Rudolf Reder was brought with one of the first transports of Jews from Lemberg caught during the great Aktion. Reder arrived in Bełżec at the height of the camp's activity. Because of his position as odd-job man, he was allowed considerable freedom of movement. He was therefore able to describe the camp, its installations, and its functioning in considerable detail. But his story is also the deeply harrowing account of someone who witnessed with horror the slaughter of innocents which went on day after day. And this, together with the relevant details which, without his description, might have remained forever obscure, make Reder's booklet, Bełżec (1946), a unique document of this terrible but little-known chapter in the history of the Holocaust.

Download Full-text

The Holocaust: Sites of Massacre

Rediscovering Traces of Memory ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781786940872.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 89-92

Author(s):

Jonathan Webber ◽

Chris Schwarz ◽

Jason Francisco

Keyword(s):

Jewish Communities ◽

Death Camp ◽

The Holocaust

This chapter recounts what happened in Polish Galicia during the Holocaust, emphasizing the brutality of the destruction by the Germans and the range of locations where Jews were murdered in occupied Poland. It includes photographs that go beyond conventional symbols that reveal how the Jews were hunted down and murdered. It also describes the remaining physical fixtures in Auschwitz, such as the barracks, barbed wires, entry gates, and the ruins of the gas chambers, that testify the force and fury of the systematic annihilation of over one million Jews. The chapter talks about the case of the Bełżec death camp in south-east Poland in which 450,000 Jews were deported and gassed immediately upon arrival. It considers Bełżec as the cemetery of the Jews of Galicia as countless Jewish communities met their end in 1942 and only seven have been thought to have survived.

Download Full-text

Enough of a Souvenir

Worldview ◽

10.1017/s008425590003686x ◽

1978 ◽

Vol 21 (12) ◽

pp. 37-40

Author(s):

Thomas J. Cottle

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Long Period ◽

Death Camp ◽

Conducting Research ◽

Immediate Response

In six years of conducting research on America's poor Jews I have met no one more delightful than the seventy-year-old man I will call Yankel Kanter. As the sort of research I do is based on speaking with people over a long period of time, it is only natural that I would be especially attracted to such a man as Yankel. If the purpose of my work is to allow people to describe in their own words how their lives are being led, then Yankel, eager to talk, was the perfect person to participate in the research.Over the years of our friendship Yankel has talked about a great many things, although never once about the death of his wife and children in a death camp in Poland. He is in his way, although he would never say this, a scholarly and learned gentleman whose immediate response to almost any question of mine was: “Oh you know, just the other night I was reading a book on that very subject.“

Download Full-text