[patriots] Just read this manipulative bullshit.

From: "Fred Bishop" <fredbiship@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <johntimbrell@xxxxxxxxxx>, <patriots@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 10 May 2015 10:57:37 +0100

http://www.hertsandessexobserver.co.uk/images/localworld/ugc-images/276463/A
rticle/images/26450205/10006155-large.jpg

Hard-hitting history lesson for Essex students on visit to notorious Nazi
death camp

By HertsAndEssexObserver
<http://www.hertsandessexobserver.co.uk/people/HertsAndEssexObserver/profile
.html> | Posted: May 10, 2015

Read more:
http://www.hertsandessexobserver.co.uk/Hard-hitting-history-lesson-students-
visit/story-26450205-detail/story.html#ixzz3ZjBUWCGC
Follow us: @HertsEssexObser on Twitter
<http://ec.tynt.com/b/rw?id=acsb4sh6qr47OQacwqm_6r&u=HertsEssexObser>

Sunshine flooded the tall, leafy trees, regimented red-brick buildings and
silent tour groups, as the coach of Year 12 students and guests pulled in to
Auschwitz I.

The Holocaust Educational Trust day trip, which saw 200 bleary-eyed students
and teachers fill a plane from Stansted at 6am on St George's Day, had
arrived at the original work camp.

It was part of a network which eventually included the larger death camp
Auschwitz II-Birkenau - just down the road - and 45 satellite sites across
Europe.

Between 1942 and 1945, Jews rounded up across German-occupied territories
would be sent here.

Families were torn apart in Nazi Germany's "final solution", aimed at the
total extermination of the Jews, never to escape its high fences, cramped
huts and gas chambers.

These students - from Hockerill Anglo-European College in Stortford, Helena
Romanes School in Dunmow, and Saffron Walden's Friends' School and County
High - knew the scale of the genocide well from classroom books.

But with the heavy responsibility of communicating the message to their
peers on their return, they would face what the Auschwitz I museum calls
"evidence" of the Holocaust.

Poignancy of the young making such a trip 70 years on from the camp's
liberation by Russian forces is underlined by the fact that Holocaust
survivors are becoming fewer.

After walking under the metal arch entrance of Auschwitz I with the words
Arbeit macht frei, meaning "work makes you free", above their heads,
students listened in sombre silence to their Polish guide.

The day ahead would see them stand in a gas chamber where countless
perished, looking up at the sunshine through a hole cut in the ceiling to
allow Zyclon B gas canisters to be dropped.

But the initial information - detailing inhumane living conditions and its
set-up - was enough to make students gulp.

Grisly experiments by notorious Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, known as the
Angel of Death, were aimed at sterilising and eliminating the entire Jewish
race in a generation.

One victim and survivor of his medical experiments, Eva Kor, 81, had told in
graphic detail of her and her twin sister's ordeal at Mengele's hands at a
trial in Germany just the day before.

Twins were his favourites. In a block near where we stood, Kor had known
that if she died her twin sister would have been killed with an injection to
the heart, with a scientific autopsy to follow.

Inside one Auschwitz I block, students thought of individuals not unlike
themselves as they looked at a two-ton mound of human hair, shaved off
victims as their identities were stripped away.

In another museum window, mostly smashed prescription sunglasses lay in a
messy pile. There was a mountain of shoes, in which many would fit a toddler
- a sister or brother, perhaps?

Having just looked at a photograph of two young boys, perhaps aged eight or
nine, who were unknowingly walking to their deaths, a room filled with the
hair of victims overwhelmed.

On my return, one person said a neat pigtail sat atop the pile, but the
power of such evidence of systematic murder meant that I and many others
missed such detail. It was hard to properly approach and directly look at
the now greying mass.

The images and emotions felt by the sixth-formers - some fighting tears as
the mound overwhelmed - will never leave them. And as Holocaust survivor
numbers dwindle, the challenge and need to grapple with the grim truth has
never been greater.

In Auschwitz I, functional signs above each door showed block numbers and,
added later, the atrocities committed within. Artefacts served to
personalise the tragedy.

But in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where massive gas chambers lie in ruins, the
scale of such genocide struck. It lay sunken and destroyed in the ground, as
Nazis hastily attempted to destroy all evidence as Russian forces approached
to liberate the camp in January 1945.

Students stood on the platform, where victims disembarked packed carriages
and were divided into men and women.

An SS doctor pointed you either right, to the gas chamber, or left, to the
work camp - a barely better situation meaning death in, on average, six to
eight months.

One student asked: "What would happen to people like us?" The answer from
our guide was short: "It depended." Around 80 per cent of arrivals were sent
straight to their deaths, we were told.

Remembering the photo of the two young boys sent right, Helena Romanes
School student Muna Muhamed said: "There's nothing that upsets me more than
hearing about families being split up."

By the demolished gas chambers, Helena Romanes student Thomas Forbes
considered what struck him most.

He said: "The thing that got me was the hair and the picture of the children
holding their hands. A child is a symbol of hope."

At the day's close, the group congregated as Rabbi Barry Marcus, who travels
on nearly every Holocaust Educational Trust trip, delivered a moving sermon
and sang a Hebrew prayer.

Most did not understand the words, but the tone moved the group as it echoed
with the wind through the sun-warmed trees and the dead end of the train
tracks.

Rabbi Marcus said that he was often asked "How was this possible?", but that
the question should be "How was this humanly possible?" as people had the
mindset to orchestrate this mass murder.

The memory of those killed in the Holocaust was remembered in silence on the
walk back along the tracks, under the Nazi guard tower and away to the
coach.

These students now bear the greatest of responsibilities to keep the story
of a place, where so many died, alive.

It's a difficult but essential task.

These talented young students - some talking of hopes for university and one
about becoming a lawyer - will soon be adults in a world devoid of Holocaust
survivors.

Read more:
http://www.hertsandessexobserver.co.uk/Hard-hitting-history-lesson-students-
visit/story-26450205-detail/story.html#ixzz3ZjBDXdxq
Follow us: @HertsEssexObser on Twitter
<http://ec.tynt.com/b/rw?id=acsb4sh6qr47OQacwqm_6r&u=HertsEssexObser>

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[patriots] Just read this manipulative bullshit.

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