Our Crime Was Being Jewish

by Anthony S. Pitch, Michael Berenbaum (Foreword)

In the shouted words of a woman bound for Auschwitz to a man about to escape from a cattle car, “If you get out, maybe you can tell the story! Who else will tell it?”

Our Crime Was Being Jewish contains 576 vivid memories of 358 Holocaust survivors. These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured. The recollections are from the start of the war—the home invasions, the Gestapo busts, and the ghettos—as well as the daily hell of the concentration camps and what actually happened inside.

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and this hefty collection of stories told by its survivors is one of the most important books of our time. It was compiled by award-winning author Anthony S. Pitch, who worked with sources such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to get survivors’ stories compiled together and to supplement them with images from the war. These memories must be told and held onto so what happened is documented; so the lives of those who perished are not forgotten—so history does not repeat itself.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Holocaust, World War II, Memoir, Biography, War

406 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 7, 2015

About the author

Anthony S. Pitch is the author of “They Have Killed Papa Dead!” on the Lincoln assassination, The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814, and Our Crime Was Being Jewish. A journalist on four continents, he has appeared on C-SPAN TV, the History Channel, National Geographic TV, Book TV, NPR, and PBS. He lives in Potomac, Maryland.

Reviews

[Sweetwilliam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a series of vignettes from Holocaust survivors. There are hundreds of firsthand accounts – some as short as a few lines and others as long as an entire page. The gruesome details really made the holocaust come to life for me.

I really think the book could use a little bit of editing. I would like to see the stories organized by the different stages of the holocaust. Also, a few of the vignettes had no depth at all and a few others were recounted more than once. But how does one rate a book? This collection of stories changed the way I think about the holocaust. First of all, the reader is given several hundred specific examples of how families were torn apart and murdered by sadists who were mostly incapable of showing the slightest hint of mercy. After reading this collection of gruesome tales I now understand why it was necessary to hunt these animals down. Every single one of these bastards should have been tried and hanged for what they did.

So my rating isn’t about editing or the lack of it and it isn’t about entertainment value or anything like this. This book moved me. It taught me why Nazi infamy should never be forgotten. As many survivors have said, It is also is a testament as to why governments should never be trusted with absolute power and authority and why citizens should be taught to question authority. Also, as one survivor said, private citizens should never be totally disarmed. Events such as the holocaust should never be forgotten and the perpetrators should never be forgiven. Finally, I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for each and every one of these war criminals.

The contents of this book are upsetting and disturbing but none the less, the stories must be told. As one of the survivors said, we are not asking you to live it. We just want you to read about it.

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have not read everything there is to know about the Holocaust if you haven’t read this book. It lays it all out there the most personal embarrassing humiliating existence I’ve ever read

[Doreen Petersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is very hard to write. This book got to the very core of my soul. Why? Because I had an uncle and cousin killed in Auschwitz. But there were no remains to be buried and no grave to visit. So like the agony the survivors and their families go through so does my family and I. I feel their pain. I truly do. I don't ever want to hear anyone say the Holocaust never happened! Ever! It's personal to me! You don't ever want to feel the same pain I do!

[Courtney Dunbar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read many books on the Holocaust, however, I was visiting he National Archives over the 4th of July weekend in DC and saw an advertisement to see the author of this book, Anthony Pitch, speak regarding the book at the Archives. Unfortunately, we left too soon to see him speak, but the advertisement inspired me to download the eVersion and . . .

I deem this as the single most important book I've ever read, aside from my Bible.

The accounts listed here are incredibly difficult to read. They are difficult to read because the stories are heinous and gut-wrenching. However, the same thing that makes these accounts so difficult to read also attributes to a disbelief that these numerous horrific events could have occurred. The detailed stories, preserved extraordinarily well by Mr. Pitch, will live as a testament, reminder, warning, and evidence for generations to come. This is an outstanding book. On all accounts, this book is a dedication . . . to those whom perished, those who lived, those who believe, those who can't help to turn to belief after reading, and those yet to be born. A respectful testament beautifully crafted from the ashes . . . kudos on a job absolutely well done, Mr. Pitch.

[Poppy || Monster Lover · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never know how to rate books like this because how can you rate someone’s oral history of their experiences? It was horrible information (obviously) and beautifully narrated.

[Lorri]

I am giving this book five stars...not because I 'really liked it', I didn't like or enjoy reading the horrific and detailed histories of the Holocaust survivors. There is nothing left to the imagination, as the testimonies resonate throughout the pages.

My rating is based on the intense and concise content regarding the varied stories.

[Carolyn Scarcella · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an outstanding book I’m reading is called “Our Crime Was Being Jewish” by Anthony Pitch. On all accounts, this book is dedicated to those whom perished, those who lived, those who believe, those who can’t, help turn to believe after reading, and those yet to be born. I must say the accounts listed here are incredibly difficult to read because it is real and is gut-wrenching. They were telling stories from the start of the war, for example, home invasions, the Gestapo busts, the ghetto and the concentration camps and what exactly happened inside. During the trials and interviews each person of, 358, Holocaust survivors, these are, true, insider stories of victims, those short stories told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents, siblings, and extended families sent to the gas chambers, or starving children beaten for trying to steal food, or people who saw their family, friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured.

[Readasaurus Rex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book

This was a great book. Lots of short stories and quotes from survivors of the Holocaust. It's insane how people could be so evil.

[Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot believe people actually believe the Holocaust never happened....also can't believe a lot of people don't want to talk about the absolute horrors that Jews were made to endure.

Not to be hyperbolic, but I have a personal book written by my grandmother in law which is a compilation of letters from an ex Nazi relative that he had sent her to explain how Germans..just like we are now, educated, etc....were capable of such evil, and seriously people, we need to wake up.

[NILTON TEIXEIRA · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read many novels based on the Holocaust but this is one of the hardest book that I’ve ever read. It’s very emotional. It is not a fiction book or a novel. This book is a collection of narratives or testimonials by the survivors of the Holocaust or by people that witness the Holocaust. It is not written in chronological order but it is well written and well presented. Some testimonials are just one phrase or one line, but strong enough to translate the immeasurable pain and never ending suffering of the Jewish community. This is a part of history of humanity that I will never be able to understand.

[Len · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When somebody comes over to me after I speak in a school and tells me proudly, 'I cannot read this book. I cannot go to a movie to see anything to do with the Holocaust because it's too sad', don't expect me to give you a pat on your shoulder. If we could live it, you can watch it."
-Cecile Klein-Pollack, Survivor

With that imploring, I knew I had to read this book, and it was the longest I've ever taken to finish a book.
These are the collections of hundreds of accounts, from Holocaust survivors, of some of the horrors visited upon them, and it was easily the most challenging, brutal, evil read I've ever gone through.

There is no order to the way that these recollections are laid out, representing the chaos that was their lives at the time, nor is there any set length - some are longer, some a few sentences.

Some might say, 'why would you do that?', to which I could reply that I am a person who believes in being informed of reality, no matter how dark it is, or that I firmly believe in the expression that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'.

More to the point, I suppose, once I read the quote from Cecile Klein-Pollack at the beginning of the book, I felt in a sense that I owed it to her and all of those who deserve for their stories to be known.

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a hard listen. The testimonies of the holocausts survivors are heart breaking. Even they couldn't believe what the Nazi did to them but they lived it. Communities near some of the concentration camps claimed they didn't realize what was going on. Hard to imagine. One of the survivors was visiting someone in Crowley, LA who also had invited a local catholic priest. When the priest heard that the guy was a Jew he actually told him it didn't really happen. In fact he had just told his parish that the holocaust was a lie. The poor survivor could just say it was true and he was a survivor. I just can't grasp the idea that a human being could be so cruel, hateful, and disgusting to treat another human in such a manner. I can't imagine surviving such treatment and horrors.
One American soldier and his troop came upon a group of women barely surviving in a barn. There was one woman propped up against the barn door that he kept up with and in fact went back after the war, found her and they got married. Can you imagine being an 18-19 year old soldier and see piles of naked bodies and the emancipated women and men and hear all their stories.
There are no words for what the Jews were put through just because they were born Jewish.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the title states, different survivors from all over the world tell their stories. Told in very short snippets it made this difficult subject easier for me to handle. The atrocities of the Holocaust must never be forgotten and as one survivor said, "If we could live it, you should be able to watch or listen to our stories." I listened to the audio version which was very well narrated. As much as I've read and researched WWII, I learned several new things and anyone could benefit from the new perspective this brought, if only to reiterate that several of the stories were not isolated incidents. Highly recommended.

[Angela Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a hard read but very informative. I wasn’t sure about the way it was written, but as it dealt with the survivors from the Holocaust, this was probably the best way to do it. Something everyone should read at some point, not for entertainment but for the knowledge. One way of making sure this never happens again with any nationality. The five stars is a tribute to all who helped make the information available.

[Robin Drummond · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a disjointed collection of vignettes, each a paragraph or two long. Memories from survivors, servicemen, military officers together provide a pastiche of horror. Each is as different as the individual who was interviewed.

The reader never knows very much about the individuals represented here, but they all share the impact of their witness and allow us a glimpse of their losses. It's a moving read.

[Laura Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an important book to read!

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was shocked to learn that some people believe the Holocaust is a hoax. With that faulty thinking, any historical event could be questioned, like slavery or World Wars.

[Jaime Leos · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was very difficult to read and even harder to imagine. I would read about a dozen stories at a time and just stop because I was so horrified by the true accounts of these survivors. Yet one story told at the beginning pushed me to finish this book....."When somebody comes over to me after I speak in a school and tells me proudly, 'I cannot read this book. I cannot go to a movie to see anything to do with the Holocaust because it's too sad', don't expect me to give you a pat on your shoulder. If we could live it, you can watch it."-Cecile Klein-Pollack.

These stories were told in different points of view. From the Jewish survivors, the soldiers who liberated the camps, the lawyers who presided over the war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials, and even from the Nazi leaders themselves.

Several stories haunt me such as one where the Nazis were removing Jews from a building and a mother was holding her infant child. When she refused to release her baby, the SS officer grabbed the baby's ankle and slammed its head against a wall. Another stories about how infants and toddlers were often burned alive and how people often committed suicide by running towards the electric fences. The stories are here to remind us of an era that should not be forgotten and an unforgivable sin that must not be committed again.

[Ladonna Creech · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's Quite A Page Turner!

I've stumbled upon several books about the Holocaust that were indeed atrocious, but very interesting, historically speaking, similar to this one. Yet, this book is different. It's a compilation full of personal accounts from actual victims who experienced and survived the tortures and horrors on a daily basis as well as eye witness accounts from some of the allies of the United States and British Armies. The pages within are quite graphic and full of sorrowful renditions of atrocities unheard of in this generation. By sharing in the memories of these brave souls, we are able to help keep their memories alive. This is, unfortunately, true accounts shared by real people. The Holocaust was real, despite many claims of it being fiction. These stories have helped me to be more empathetic and sensitive to the needs of my fellow man. The never-ending tortures and suffering that these people went through just blows my mind. This book brings forth a lot of emotions, so be prepared with some tissues (optional)!

[Angelica Berglund · Rating 5 out of 5]

i must say that this is a very interesting book that describe the lifes during one of our darkest days. This book is stories from different people about the Holocaust and how it was to live during it, as a jew but also american soldiers in the end of the war who came to the camps and freed the people. I found this book educational and horrifying but it was worth reading it.

I enjoyed reading the book because it gave me another point of view and showed how hard it was and is for the survivers. It is hard to wright a review about something like this because saying you enjoyed it or liked it, sounds so wrong because the subject is horrifying and it is a shame that this has happened but it was good to see this point of view and see the lifes from survivers.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye opening

The reason I rate this book so high is because it will open your eyes to things never talked about before

[Darren-lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horrific... But should be read by everyone, and never forgotten...

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

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Our Crime Was Being Jewish
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For someone who read through about a dozen individual memoirs from survivors, and a compilation as well of historical documents by inmates of Warsaw ghetto and more, during last couple of years, apart from being familiar over years with more, this book brings trepidation about immersing oneself again in the horrors perpetrated by humans who chose to turn themselves into ghouls and subject others to horrors, and a whole system that yoked them and encouraged them into this, when the opposite choice - of raising oneself nobly higher - is always possible, and while the trepidation about beginning reading this is quite real, well, one one can only say, these were humans and if one joins those that prefer denying they existed, .... no, one cant! This is the least one can do, and most, not forgetting.

At that, some of it should be familiar, and already in preface there is the name of Ruth Webber, seems familiar. Did one read her memoir? One will know, as one reads.
............

As one reads foreword, one finds this somewhat cryptic, until later, within reading a page or turning to the second.

"Pay attention to Pitch’s subtle, deliberate method; the book is fragmented, deliberately so. He has refused to impose an order of the fragments of testimonies. Pitch does not use chronology as his organizing principle, nor does he employ geographic groupings of experiences, region by region. Insights build on insights and the compiler—one can neither quite call him an author nor an editor, yet he surely is both—adds not a word to the testimonies that have been given. He presumes that fragment after fragment will not yield a fragmented understanding, but something far more integrated.

"And he is right."

And yes, that's correct. Oh, arranging by timeline and/or regions would've been good too, but lack thereof makes it universal, as it indeed was. Only, this way its less a book for someone's first introduction to holocaust than for one who, say, has read William Shirer's Rise And Fall of The Third Reich, or Upton Sinclair's World's End series, and has a clue. But as it is, this is genuine, since not a single word is added by the author-compiler-editor.
............

"THIS BOOK WAS PROMPTED BY revolting anti-Semitism in France, epitomized by the antics of a so-called comedian. He ridicules the Holocaust in a skit named Shoananas, and makes fun of a Frenchman, who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, only because he was Jewish. Yet his audiences roar with laughter. Ignorance of history cannot be justified by his birth long after the Holocaust. He is just the latest in a long line of anti-Semites, spanning thousands of years, who have targeted Jews for the “crime of being Jewish.”"

"“You heard everybody say, ‘We’ve got to survive and tell the world what is going on.’”
—Ruth Webber, Survivor

"People who say the Holocaust is a hoax cannot answer an elderly survivor who asked me, “If the Holocaust never happened, then where is my family?”"

"Women barricaded themselves indoors to prevent rape by Russian liberators who said, “We liberated you, but now you don’t want to love us?”"

"No one can dispute the chilling words of the commandant of Auschwitz, who told a postwar courtroom before he was hanged, that millions were killed during his reign of terror. Inmates, telling their stories within, wept when recalling how they had seen babies burned alive, and parents and siblings led off to their deaths under the whips of guards and the snaps of ferocious dogs. Within these pages are the damning testimonies from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, better known as the War Crimes Trials, and later from the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here are the details of those who sobbed while telling courts in Germany and Israel of their travails during the Holocaust. Personal narratives inside this book describe sights so grotesque that the storytellers would not have believed they happened if they had not seen them with their own eyes. It would have been incomprehensible to imagine that atrocities took place on such a scale."

"In the words of a lady who spoke to a man about to escape from a French train bound for Auschwitz, where she was condemned to the incinerator, “You must do it! If you get out maybe you can tell the story. Who else will tell it?”"
............

"I commanded Auschwitz until December 1, 1943, and estimate that at least 2.5 million victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning and at least another half a million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about three million. This figure represents about 70 percent or 80 percent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries.
—Rudolf Höss, Nuremberg trials, vol. 11, 4/15/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
............

"When somebody comes over to me after I speak in a school and tells me proudly, “I cannot read this book. I cannot go to a movie to see anything to do with the Holocaust because it’s too sad,” don’t expect me to give you a pat on your shoulder. If we could live it, you can watch it.
—Cecilie Klein-Pollack in an interview with Sandra Bradley for the USHMM film Testimony, RG-50.042*-0018"
............

"Mauthausen [concentration camp in] Austria was a slaughterhouse for human beings when we liberated it on May 5, 1945. I was with the Eleventh Army Division, C Battery, 492nd Armored Field Artillery Battalion. It was such a horror that I chose not to discuss it for about thirty years. I do not want this overshadowed by the repugnant neo-Nazi groups who say this thing did not happen. ... The Nazis had many marched out before we got there, to get them out of our hands. We saw some on the road about three days before, in their gray and white striped uniforms and the word Jude on their chests. They were emaciated, weighing about 60–70 pounds, covered in filth, smelling, in poor shape, and couldn’t move. We gave them our C and K rations, but some of them went into convulsions. Then our medical people fed them intravenously.
—Dix Lathrop; USHMM, RG-50.234.0119"
............

"I remember the date because January 6 was a Polish Catholic holiday, and that’s when they annihilated the rest of the Jews from the Copernicus school. I personally witnessed it. I was working in a factory in Minsk, but had documents from the underground allowing me to be on the streets after the 7:00 p.m. curfew, when we carried out our resistance activities. That morning we heard shooting, put on our factory fire brigade helmets, and raced to help put out the fire. The remnants of Minsk’s Jewish population was housed in the Copernicus school, now on fire, with smoke belching out. The roof was on the verge of collapse. Uniformed Germans, Latvians, security, and Polish police were shooting at the windows, aiming to kill anyone trying to escape. I saw partially burned bodies on the ledges of windows. Next to the school were two piles of bodies, six or seven feet high. A mother tried to throw her child out the window when someone shot her dead. A few steps from me a German, six feet plus, weighing about 250 pounds, took a little Jewish girl by the hand, led her to a wall, sat her down, even corrected her posture, and then moved back a few steps and shot her in the head. That atrocity stayed with me for many, many, many years after the war. At a moment like that, one is ready to do anything. But what could I do? Anything I did then would have resulted in all of us being killed. I could only pay them back through my acts in the underground. Too often, one hears the Holocaust never happened. Well, here is one eyewitness who saw what was going on and what happened.
—Steven Galezewski; USHMM, RG-50.030*0377"
............

"In the last days of December 1941, SS Franz Murer, a.k.a. the Butcher of Vilnius, gave a present to the ghetto: a carload of shoes belonging to the Jews executed at Ponary was brought into the ghetto. He sent these old shoes as a gift to the ghetto. Among them I recognized my mother’s.
—Abram Suzkever, Nuremberg trials, vol. 8, 2/27/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
............

"Crematorium 3’s crew refused to obey orders and barricaded themselves inside the living quarters. They put their straw mattresses to the torch and exchanged fire with the SS guards, using small weapons in their possession. The guards got reinforcements, and when it was over the crematorium was a gutted shell with several hundred prisoners dead. But the crew of crematorium 1 thought the uprising had begun. After throwing their German kapo into the burning furnace, they cut barbed wire enclosing the crematorium and dispersed to the Vistula River. The SS gave chase and every single one of the several hundred prisoners was hunted down and killed. Several days later, the crew of crematorium 2 was gassed and all that remained of the approximately fifteen hundred strong Birkenau Sonderkommandos was the crematorium 4 crew of less than one hundred men. The three crematoriums were then blown up and dismembered. Number 4 was left intact until final evacuation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. In the sudden evacuation, the remaining Sonderkommandos managed to get intermingled with the general camp population and share their fate and survival chances. I was told after the war that about thirty or forty of them survived the death marches.
—Philip Goldstein; USHMM, RG-50.233*0037"
............

"An individual crawled on his hands and knees out of one group at Dachau and said, “Thank God. Americans!” I told him to come with me. My objective was Munich. I was taken to a castle. Inside was a piano. He asked if he could play, which he did. He was a genius. The next day he came to my headquarters and asked if he could leave for his home nearby to see if anyone from his family was alive. I never saw him again.
—Ralph Miles; USHMM/University of California, Los Angeles, RG-50.005*0043"
............

"After Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, I went to school in Kosheetza, Czechoslovakia. It was quite an experience. I was eight, and apart from one other boy, I was the only Jew in my whole school. To this day I’m really sad to say I find it so difficult to understand why we were so disliked. We looked just like the rest of the kids. We did not appear Jewish in any way. We didn’t wear hats or yarmulkes or have long hair or anything like that. My only mark was my tattoo number. That branded me as a Jew. I don’t think this other fellow had a number from any camp, but he was Jewish, and they knew it. Maybe he looked more Jewish than I did, if there’s such a thing. Even at that age, the boys, who were eight, nine, or ten, were out there to beat us up. Every day after school, they waited for us. We had to run, not for our lives, because we were not old enough to really do that kind of harm to each other, but we had to run because we were going to be beaten up.
—Rene Slotkin; USHMM, made possible by a grant from Jeff and Toby Herr, RG-50.549.02*0008"
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[Dr.J.G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

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................................................................................................

Our Crime Was Being Jewish
................................................................................................
................................................................................................


For someone who read through about a dozen individual memoirs from survivors, and a compilation as well of historical documents by inmates of Warsaw ghetto and more, during last couple of years, apart from being familiar over years with more, this book brings trepidation about immersing oneself again in the horrors perpetrated by humans who chose to turn themselves into ghouls and subject others to horrors, and a whole system that yoked them and encouraged them into this, when the opposite choice - of raising oneself nobly higher - is always possible, and while the trepidation about beginning reading this is quite real, well, one one can only say, these were humans and if one joins those that prefer denying they existed, .... no, one cant! This is the least one can do, and most, not forgetting.

At that, some of it should be familiar, and already in preface there is the name of Ruth Webber, seems familiar. Did one read her memoir? One will know, as one reads.
............

As one reads foreword, one finds this somewhat cryptic, until later, within reading a page or turning to the second.

"Pay attention to Pitch’s subtle, deliberate method; the book is fragmented, deliberately so. He has refused to impose an order of the fragments of testimonies. Pitch does not use chronology as his organizing principle, nor does he employ geographic groupings of experiences, region by region. Insights build on insights and the compiler—one can neither quite call him an author nor an editor, yet he surely is both—adds not a word to the testimonies that have been given. He presumes that fragment after fragment will not yield a fragmented understanding, but something far more integrated.

"And he is right."

And yes, that's correct. Oh, arranging by timeline and/or regions would've been good too, but lack thereof makes it universal, as it indeed was. Only, this way its less a book for someone's first introduction to holocaust than for one who, say, has read William Shirer's Rise And Fall of The Third Reich, or Upton Sinclair's World's End series, and has a clue. But as it is, this is genuine, since not a single word is added by the author-compiler-editor.
............

"THIS BOOK WAS PROMPTED BY revolting anti-Semitism in France, epitomized by the antics of a so-called comedian. He ridicules the Holocaust in a skit named Shoananas, and makes fun of a Frenchman, who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, only because he was Jewish. Yet his audiences roar with laughter. Ignorance of history cannot be justified by his birth long after the Holocaust. He is just the latest in a long line of anti-Semites, spanning thousands of years, who have targeted Jews for the “crime of being Jewish.”"

"“You heard everybody say, ‘We’ve got to survive and tell the world what is going on.’”
—Ruth Webber, Survivor

"People who say the Holocaust is a hoax cannot answer an elderly survivor who asked me, “If the Holocaust never happened, then where is my family?”"

"Women barricaded themselves indoors to prevent rape by Russian liberators who said, “We liberated you, but now you don’t want to love us?”"

"No one can dispute the chilling words of the commandant of Auschwitz, who told a postwar courtroom before he was hanged, that millions were killed during his reign of terror. Inmates, telling their stories within, wept when recalling how they had seen babies burned alive, and parents and siblings led off to their deaths under the whips of guards and the snaps of ferocious dogs. Within these pages are the damning testimonies from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, better known as the War Crimes Trials, and later from the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here are the details of those who sobbed while telling courts in Germany and Israel of their travails during the Holocaust. Personal narratives inside this book describe sights so grotesque that the storytellers would not have believed they happened if they had not seen them with their own eyes. It would have been incomprehensible to imagine that atrocities took place on such a scale."

"In the words of a lady who spoke to a man about to escape from a French train bound for Auschwitz, where she was condemned to the incinerator, “You must do it! If you get out maybe you can tell the story. Who else will tell it?”"
............

"I commanded Auschwitz until December 1, 1943, and estimate that at least 2.5 million victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning and at least another half a million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about three million. This figure represents about 70 percent or 80 percent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries.
—Rudolf Höss, Nuremberg trials, vol. 11, 4/15/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
............

"When somebody comes over to me after I speak in a school and tells me proudly, “I cannot read this book. I cannot go to a movie to see anything to do with the Holocaust because it’s too sad,” don’t expect me to give you a pat on your shoulder. If we could live it, you can watch it.
—Cecilie Klein-Pollack in an interview with Sandra Bradley for the USHMM film Testimony, RG-50.042*-0018"
............

"Mauthausen [concentration camp in] Austria was a slaughterhouse for human beings when we liberated it on May 5, 1945. I was with the Eleventh Army Division, C Battery, 492nd Armored Field Artillery Battalion. It was such a horror that I chose not to discuss it for about thirty years. I do not want this overshadowed by the repugnant neo-Nazi groups who say this thing did not happen. ... The Nazis had many marched out before we got there, to get them out of our hands. We saw some on the road about three days before, in their gray and white striped uniforms and the word Jude on their chests. They were emaciated, weighing about 60–70 pounds, covered in filth, smelling, in poor shape, and couldn’t move. We gave them our C and K rations, but some of them went into convulsions. Then our medical people fed them intravenously.
—Dix Lathrop; USHMM, RG-50.234.0119"
............

"I remember the date because January 6 was a Polish Catholic holiday, and that’s when they annihilated the rest of the Jews from the Copernicus school. I personally witnessed it. I was working in a factory in Minsk, but had documents from the underground allowing me to be on the streets after the 7:00 p.m. curfew, when we carried out our resistance activities. That morning we heard shooting, put on our factory fire brigade helmets, and raced to help put out the fire. The remnants of Minsk’s Jewish population was housed in the Copernicus school, now on fire, with smoke belching out. The roof was on the verge of collapse. Uniformed Germans, Latvians, security, and Polish police were shooting at the windows, aiming to kill anyone trying to escape. I saw partially burned bodies on the ledges of windows. Next to the school were two piles of bodies, six or seven feet high. A mother tried to throw her child out the window when someone shot her dead. A few steps from me a German, six feet plus, weighing about 250 pounds, took a little Jewish girl by the hand, led her to a wall, sat her down, even corrected her posture, and then moved back a few steps and shot her in the head. That atrocity stayed with me for many, many, many years after the war. At a moment like that, one is ready to do anything. But what could I do? Anything I did then would have resulted in all of us being killed. I could only pay them back through my acts in the underground. Too often, one hears the Holocaust never happened. Well, here is one eyewitness who saw what was going on and what happened.
—Steven Galezewski; USHMM, RG-50.030*0377"
............

"In the last days of December 1941, SS Franz Murer, a.k.a. the Butcher of Vilnius, gave a present to the ghetto: a carload of shoes belonging to the Jews executed at Ponary was brought into the ghetto. He sent these old shoes as a gift to the ghetto. Among them I recognized my mother’s.
—Abram Suzkever, Nuremberg trials, vol. 8, 2/27/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
............

"Crematorium 3’s crew refused to obey orders and barricaded themselves inside the living quarters. They put their straw mattresses to the torch and exchanged fire with the SS guards, using small weapons in their possession. The guards got reinforcements, and when it was over the crematorium was a gutted shell with several hundred prisoners dead. But the crew of crematorium 1 thought the uprising had begun. After throwing their German kapo into the burning furnace, they cut barbed wire enclosing the crematorium and dispersed to the Vistula River. The SS gave chase and every single one of the several hundred prisoners was hunted down and killed. Several days later, the crew of crematorium 2 was gassed and all that remained of the approximately fifteen hundred strong Birkenau Sonderkommandos was the crematorium 4 crew of less than one hundred men. The three crematoriums were then blown up and dismembered. Number 4 was left intact until final evacuation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. In the sudden evacuation, the remaining Sonderkommandos managed to get intermingled with the general camp population and share their fate and survival chances. I was told after the war that about thirty or forty of them survived the death marches.
—Philip Goldstein; USHMM, RG-50.233*0037"
............

"An individual crawled on his hands and knees out of one group at Dachau and said, “Thank God. Americans!” I told him to come with me. My objective was Munich. I was taken to a castle. Inside was a piano. He asked if he could play, which he did. He was a genius. The next day he came to my headquarters and asked if he could leave for his home nearby to see if anyone from his family was alive. I never saw him again.
—Ralph Miles; USHMM/University of California, Los Angeles, RG-50.005*0043"
............

"After Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, I went to school in Kosheetza, Czechoslovakia. It was quite an experience. I was eight, and apart from one other boy, I was the only Jew in my whole school. To this day I’m really sad to say I find it so difficult to understand why we were so disliked. We looked just like the rest of the kids. We did not appear Jewish in any way. We didn’t wear hats or yarmulkes or have long hair or anything like that. My only mark was my tattoo number. That branded me as a Jew. I don’t think this other fellow had a number from any camp, but he was Jewish, and they knew it. Maybe he looked more Jewish than I did, if there’s such a thing. Even at that age, the boys, who were eight, nine, or ten, were out there to beat us up. Every day after school, they waited for us. We had to run, not for our lives, because we were not old enough to really do that kind of harm to each other, but we had to run because we were going to be beaten up.
—Rene Slotkin; USHMM, made possible by a grant from Jeff and Toby Herr, RG-50.549.02*0008"
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[Dr.J.G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

................................................................................................
................................................................................................

Our Crime Was Being Jewish
................................................................................................
................................................................................................


For someone who read through about a dozen individual memoirs from survivors, and a compilation as well of historical documents by inmates of Warsaw ghetto and more, during last couple of years, apart from being familiar over years with more, this book brings trepidation about immersing oneself again in the horrors perpetrated by humans who chose to turn themselves into ghouls and subject others to horrors, and a whole system that yoked them and encouraged them into this, when the opposite choice - of raising oneself nobly higher - is always possible, and while the trepidation about beginning reading this is quite real, well, one one can only say, these were humans and if one joins those that prefer denying they existed, .... no, one cant! This is the least one can do, and most, not forgetting.

At that, some of it should be familiar, and already in preface there is the name of Ruth Webber, seems familiar. Did one read her memoir? One will know, as one reads.
............

As one reads foreword, one finds this somewhat cryptic, until later, within reading a page or turning to the second.

"Pay attention to Pitch’s subtle, deliberate method; the book is fragmented, deliberately so. He has refused to impose an order of the fragments of testimonies. Pitch does not use chronology as his organizing principle, nor does he employ geographic groupings of experiences, region by region. Insights build on insights and the compiler—one can neither quite call him an author nor an editor, yet he surely is both—adds not a word to the testimonies that have been given. He presumes that fragment after fragment will not yield a fragmented understanding, but something far more integrated.

"And he is right."

And yes, that's correct. Oh, arranging by timeline and/or regions would've been good too, but lack thereof makes it universal, as it indeed was. Only, this way its less a book for someone's first introduction to holocaust than for one who, say, has read William Shirer's Rise And Fall of The Third Reich, or Upton Sinclair's World's End series, and has a clue. But as it is, this is genuine, since not a single word is added by the author-compiler-editor.
............

"THIS BOOK WAS PROMPTED BY revolting anti-Semitism in France, epitomized by the antics of a so-called comedian. He ridicules the Holocaust in a skit named Shoananas, and makes fun of a Frenchman, who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, only because he was Jewish. Yet his audiences roar with laughter. Ignorance of history cannot be justified by his birth long after the Holocaust. He is just the latest in a long line of anti-Semites, spanning thousands of years, who have targeted Jews for the “crime of being Jewish.”"

"“You heard everybody say, ‘We’ve got to survive and tell the world what is going on.’”
—Ruth Webber, Survivor

"People who say the Holocaust is a hoax cannot answer an elderly survivor who asked me, “If the Holocaust never happened, then where is my family?”"

"Women barricaded themselves indoors to prevent rape by Russian liberators who said, “We liberated you, but now you don’t want to love us?”"

"No one can dispute the chilling words of the commandant of Auschwitz, who told a postwar courtroom before he was hanged, that millions were killed during his reign of terror. Inmates, telling their stories within, wept when recalling how they had seen babies burned alive, and parents and siblings led off to their deaths under the whips of guards and the snaps of ferocious dogs. Within these pages are the damning testimonies from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, better known as the War Crimes Trials, and later from the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here are the details of those who sobbed while telling courts in Germany and Israel of their travails during the Holocaust. Personal narratives inside this book describe sights so grotesque that the storytellers would not have believed they happened if they had not seen them with their own eyes. It would have been incomprehensible to imagine that atrocities took place on such a scale."

"In the words of a lady who spoke to a man about to escape from a French train bound for Auschwitz, where she was condemned to the incinerator, “You must do it! If you get out maybe you can tell the story. Who else will tell it?”"
............

"I commanded Auschwitz until December 1, 1943, and estimate that at least 2.5 million victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning and at least another half a million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about three million. This figure represents about 70 percent or 80 percent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries.
—Rudolf Höss, Nuremberg trials, vol. 11, 4/15/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
............

"When somebody comes over to me after I speak in a school and tells me proudly, “I cannot read this book. I cannot go to a movie to see anything to do with the Holocaust because it’s too sad,” don’t expect me to give you a pat on your shoulder. If we could live it, you can watch it.
—Cecilie Klein-Pollack in an interview with Sandra Bradley for the USHMM film Testimony, RG-50.042*-0018"
............

"Mauthausen [concentration camp in] Austria was a slaughterhouse for human beings when we liberated it on May 5, 1945. I was with the Eleventh Army Division, C Battery, 492nd Armored Field Artillery Battalion. It was such a horror that I chose not to discuss it for about thirty years. I do not want this overshadowed by the repugnant neo-Nazi groups who say this thing did not happen. ... The Nazis had many marched out before we got there, to get them out of our hands. We saw some on the road about three days before, in their gray and white striped uniforms and the word Jude on their chests. They were emaciated, weighing about 60–70 pounds, covered in filth, smelling, in poor shape, and couldn’t move. We gave them our C and K rations, but some of them went into convulsions. Then our medical people fed them intravenously.
—Dix Lathrop; USHMM, RG-50.234.0119"
............

"I remember the date because January 6 was a Polish Catholic holiday, and that’s when they annihilated the rest of the Jews from the Copernicus school. I personally witnessed it. I was working in a factory in Minsk, but had documents from the underground allowing me to be on the streets after the 7:00 p.m. curfew, when we carried out our resistance activities. That morning we heard shooting, put on our factory fire brigade helmets, and raced to help put out the fire. The remnants of Minsk’s Jewish population was housed in the Copernicus school, now on fire, with smoke belching out. The roof was on the verge of collapse. Uniformed Germans, Latvians, security, and Polish police were shooting at the windows, aiming to kill anyone trying to escape. I saw partially burned bodies on the ledges of windows. Next to the school were two piles of bodies, six or seven feet high. A mother tried to throw her child out the window when someone shot her dead. A few steps from me a German, six feet plus, weighing about 250 pounds, took a little Jewish girl by the hand, led her to a wall, sat her down, even corrected her posture, and then moved back a few steps and shot her in the head. That atrocity stayed with me for many, many, many years after the war. At a moment like that, one is ready to do anything. But what could I do? Anything I did then would have resulted in all of us being killed. I could only pay them back through my acts in the underground. Too often, one hears the Holocaust never happened. Well, here is one eyewitness who saw what was going on and what happened.
—Steven Galezewski; USHMM, RG-50.030*0377"
............

"In the last days of December 1941, SS Franz Murer, a.k.a. the Butcher of Vilnius, gave a present to the ghetto: a carload of shoes belonging to the Jews executed at Ponary was brought into the ghetto. He sent these old shoes as a gift to the ghetto. Among them I recognized my mother’s.
—Abram Suzkever, Nuremberg trials, vol. 8, 2/27/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
............

"Crematorium 3’s crew refused to obey orders and barricaded themselves inside the living quarters. They put their straw mattresses to the torch and exchanged fire with the SS guards, using small weapons in their possession. The guards got reinforcements, and when it was over the crematorium was a gutted shell with several hundred prisoners dead. But the crew of crematorium 1 thought the uprising had begun. After throwing their German kapo into the burning furnace, they cut barbed wire enclosing the crematorium and dispersed to the Vistula River. The SS gave chase and every single one of the several hundred prisoners was hunted down and killed. Several days later, the crew of crematorium 2 was gassed and all that remained of the approximately fifteen hundred strong Birkenau Sonderkommandos was the crematorium 4 crew of less than one hundred men. The three crematoriums were then blown up and dismembered. Number 4 was left intact until final evacuation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. In the sudden evacuation, the remaining Sonderkommandos managed to get intermingled with the general camp population and share their fate and survival chances. I was told after the war that about thirty or forty of them survived the death marches.
—Philip Goldstein; USHMM, RG-50.233*0037"
............

"An individual crawled on his hands and knees out of one group at Dachau and said, “Thank God. Americans!” I told him to come with me. My objective was Munich. I was taken to a castle. Inside was a piano. He asked if he could play, which he did. He was a genius. The next day he came to my headquarters and asked if he could leave for his home nearby to see if anyone from his family was alive. I never saw him again.
—Ralph Miles; USHMM/University of California, Los Angeles, RG-50.005*0043"
............

"After Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, I went to school in Kosheetza, Czechoslovakia. It was quite an experience. I was eight, and apart from one other boy, I was the only Jew in my whole school. To this day I’m really sad to say I find it so difficult to understand why we were so disliked. We looked just like the rest of the kids. We did not appear Jewish in any way. We didn’t wear hats or yarmulkes or have long hair or anything like that. My only mark was my tattoo number. That branded me as a Jew. I don’t think this other fellow had a number from any camp, but he was Jewish, and they knew it. Maybe he looked more Jewish than I did, if there’s such a thing. Even at that age, the boys, who were eight, nine, or ten, were out there to beat us up. Every day after school, they waited for us. We had to run, not for our lives, because we were not old enough to really do that kind of harm to each other, but we had to run because we were going to be beaten up.
—Rene Slotkin; USHMM, made possible by a grant from Jeff and Toby Herr, RG-50.549.02*0008"
............
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............

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

................................................................................................
................................................................................................

Our Crime Was Being Jewish
................................................................................................
................................................................................................


For someone who read through about a dozen individual memoirs from survivors, and a compilation as well of historical documents by inmates of Warsaw ghetto and more, during last couple of years, apart from being familiar over years with more, this book brings trepidation about immersing oneself again in the horrors perpetrated by humans who chose to turn themselves into ghouls and subject others to horrors, and a whole system that yoked them and encouraged them into this, when the opposite choice - of raising oneself nobly higher - is always possible, and while the trepidation about beginning reading this is quite real, well, one one can only say, these were humans and if one joins those that prefer denying they existed, .... no, one cant! This is the least one can do, and most, not forgetting.

At that, some of it should be familiar, and already in preface there is the name of Ruth Webber, seems familiar. Did one read her memoir? One will know, as one reads.
............

As one reads foreword, one finds this somewhat cryptic, until later, within reading a page or turning to the second.

"Pay attention to Pitch’s subtle, deliberate method; the book is fragmented, deliberately so. He has refused to impose an order of the fragments of testimonies. Pitch does not use chronology as his organizing principle, nor does he employ geographic groupings of experiences, region by region. Insights build on insights and the compiler—one can neither quite call him an author nor an editor, yet he surely is both—adds not a word to the testimonies that have been given. He presumes that fragment after fragment will not yield a fragmented understanding, but something far more integrated.

"And he is right."

And yes, that's correct. Oh, arranging by timeline and/or regions would've been good too, but lack thereof makes it universal, as it indeed was. Only, this way its less a book for someone's first introduction to holocaust than for one who, say, has read William Shirer's Rise And Fall of The Third Reich, or Upton Sinclair's World's End series, and has a clue. But as it is, this is genuine, since not a single word is added by the author-compiler-editor.
............

"THIS BOOK WAS PROMPTED BY revolting anti-Semitism in France, epitomized by the antics of a so-called comedian. He ridicules the Holocaust in a skit named Shoananas, and makes fun of a Frenchman, who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, only because he was Jewish. Yet his audiences roar with laughter. Ignorance of history cannot be justified by his birth long after the Holocaust. He is just the latest in a long line of anti-Semites, spanning thousands of years, who have targeted Jews for the “crime of being Jewish.”"

"“You heard everybody say, ‘We’ve got to survive and tell the world what is going on.’”
—Ruth Webber, Survivor

"People who say the Holocaust is a hoax cannot answer an elderly survivor who asked me, “If the Holocaust never happened, then where is my family?”"

"Women barricaded themselves indoors to prevent rape by Russian liberators who said, “We liberated you, but now you don’t want to love us?”"

"No one can dispute the chilling words of the commandant of Auschwitz, who told a postwar courtroom before he was hanged, that millions were killed during his reign of terror. Inmates, telling their stories within, wept when recalling how they had seen babies burned alive, and parents and siblings led off to their deaths under the whips of guards and the snaps of ferocious dogs. Within these pages are the damning testimonies from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, better known as the War Crimes Trials, and later from the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here are the details of those who sobbed while telling courts in Germany and Israel of their travails during the Holocaust. Personal narratives inside this book describe sights so grotesque that the storytellers would not have believed they happened if they had not seen them with their own eyes. It would have been incomprehensible to imagine that atrocities took place on such a scale."

"In the words of a lady who spoke to a man about to escape from a French train bound for Auschwitz, where she was condemned to the incinerator, “You must do it! If you get out maybe you can tell the story. Who else will tell it?”"
............

"I commanded Auschwitz until December 1, 1943, and estimate that at least 2.5 million victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning and at least another half a million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about three million. This figure represents about 70 percent or 80 percent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries.
—Rudolf Höss, Nuremberg trials, vol. 11, 4/15/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
............

"When somebody comes over to me after I speak in a school and tells me proudly, “I cannot read this book. I cannot go to a movie to see anything to do with the Holocaust because it’s too sad,” don’t expect me to give you a pat on your shoulder. If we could live it, you can watch it.
—Cecilie Klein-Pollack in an interview with Sandra Bradley for the USHMM film Testimony, RG-50.042*-0018"
............

"Mauthausen [concentration camp in] Austria was a slaughterhouse for human beings when we liberated it on May 5, 1945. I was with the Eleventh Army Division, C Battery, 492nd Armored Field Artillery Battalion. It was such a horror that I chose not to discuss it for about thirty years. I do not want this overshadowed by the repugnant neo-Nazi groups who say this thing did not happen. ... The Nazis had many marched out before we got there, to get them out of our hands. We saw some on the road about three days before, in their gray and white striped uniforms and the word Jude on their chests. They were emaciated, weighing about 60–70 pounds, covered in filth, smelling, in poor shape, and couldn’t move. We gave them our C and K rations, but some of them went into convulsions. Then our medical people fed them intravenously.
—Dix Lathrop; USHMM, RG-50.234.0119"
............

"I remember the date because January 6 was a Polish Catholic holiday, and that’s when they annihilated the rest of the Jews from the Copernicus school. I personally witnessed it. I was working in a factory in Minsk, but had documents from the underground allowing me to be on the streets after the 7:00 p.m. curfew, when we carried out our resistance activities. That morning we heard shooting, put on our factory fire brigade helmets, and raced to help put out the fire. The remnants of Minsk’s Jewish population was housed in the Copernicus school, now on fire, with smoke belching out. The roof was on the verge of collapse. Uniformed Germans, Latvians, security, and Polish police were shooting at the windows, aiming to kill anyone trying to escape. I saw partially burned bodies on the ledges of windows. Next to the school were two piles of bodies, six or seven feet high. A mother tried to throw her child out the window when someone shot her dead. A few steps from me a German, six feet plus, weighing about 250 pounds, took a little Jewish girl by the hand, led her to a wall, sat her down, even corrected her posture, and then moved back a few steps and shot her in the head. That atrocity stayed with me for many, many, many years after the war. At a moment like that, one is ready to do anything. But what could I do? Anything I did then would have resulted in all of us being killed. I could only pay them back through my acts in the underground. Too often, one hears the Holocaust never happened. Well, here is one eyewitness who saw what was going on and what happened.
—Steven Galezewski; USHMM, RG-50.030*0377"
............

"In the last days of December 1941, SS Franz Murer, a.k.a. the Butcher of Vilnius, gave a present to the ghetto: a carload of shoes belonging to the Jews executed at Ponary was brought into the ghetto. He sent these old shoes as a gift to the ghetto. Among them I recognized my mother’s.
—Abram Suzkever, Nuremberg trials, vol. 8, 2/27/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
............

"Crematorium 3’s crew refused to obey orders and barricaded themselves inside the living quarters. They put their straw mattresses to the torch and exchanged fire with the SS guards, using small weapons in their possession. The guards got reinforcements, and when it was over the crematorium was a gutted shell with several hundred prisoners dead. But the crew of crematorium 1 thought the uprising had begun. After throwing their German kapo into the burning furnace, they cut barbed wire enclosing the crematorium and dispersed to the Vistula River. The SS gave chase and every single one of the several hundred prisoners was hunted down and killed. Several days later, the crew of crematorium 2 was gassed and all that remained of the approximately fifteen hundred strong Birkenau Sonderkommandos was the crematorium 4 crew of less than one hundred men. The three crematoriums were then blown up and dismembered. Number 4 was left intact until final evacuation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. In the sudden evacuation, the remaining Sonderkommandos managed to get intermingled with the general camp population and share their fate and survival chances. I was told after the war that about thirty or forty of them survived the death marches.
—Philip Goldstein; USHMM, RG-50.233*0037"
............

"An individual crawled on his hands and knees out of one group at Dachau and said, “Thank God. Americans!” I told him to come with me. My objective was Munich. I was taken to a castle. Inside was a piano. He asked if he could play, which he did. He was a genius. The next day he came to my headquarters and asked if he could leave for his home nearby to see if anyone from his family was alive. I never saw him again.
—Ralph Miles; USHMM/University of California, Los Angeles, RG-50.005*0043"
............

"After Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, I went to school in Kosheetza, Czechoslovakia. It was quite an experience. I was eight, and apart from one other boy, I was the only Jew in my whole school. To this day I’m really sad to say I find it so difficult to understand why we were so disliked. We looked just like the rest of the kids. We did not appear Jewish in any way. We didn’t wear hats or yarmulkes or have long hair or anything like that. My only mark was my tattoo number. That branded me as a Jew. I don’t think this other fellow had a number from any camp, but he was Jewish, and they knew it. Maybe he looked more Jewish than I did, if there’s such a thing. Even at that age, the boys, who were eight, nine, or ten, were out there to beat us up. Every day after school, they waited for us. We had to run, not for our lives, because we were not old enough to really do that kind of harm to each other, but we had to run because we were going to be beaten up.
—Rene Slotkin; USHMM, made possible by a grant from Jeff and Toby Herr, RG-50.549.02*0008"
............
............
............
............
............
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............
............
............
............
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............
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............
............
............
............
............
............

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

................................................................................................
................................................................................................

Our Crime Was Being Jewish
................................................................................................
................................................................................................


For someone who read through about a dozen individual memoirs from survivors, and a compilation as well of historical documents by inmates of Warsaw ghetto and more, during last couple of years, apart from being familiar over years with more, this book brings trepidation about immersing oneself again in the horrors perpetrated by humans who chose to turn themselves into ghouls and subject others to horrors, and a whole system that yoked them and encouraged them into this, when the opposite choice - of raising oneself nobly higher - is always possible, and while the trepidation about beginning reading this is quite real, well, one one can only say, these were humans and if one joins those that prefer denying they existed, .... no, one cant! This is the least one can do, and most, not forgetting.

At that, some of it should be familiar, and already in preface there is the name of Ruth Webber, seems familiar. Did one read her memoir? One will know, as one reads.
............

As one reads foreword, one finds this somewhat cryptic, until later, within reading a page or turning to the second.

"Pay attention to Pitch’s subtle, deliberate method; the book is fragmented, deliberately so. He has refused to impose an order of the fragments of testimonies. Pitch does not use chronology as his organizing principle, nor does he employ geographic groupings of experiences, region by region. Insights build on insights and the compiler—one can neither quite call him an author nor an editor, yet he surely is both—adds not a word to the testimonies that have been given. He presumes that fragment after fragment will not yield a fragmented understanding, but something far more integrated.

"And he is right."

And yes, that's correct. Oh, arranging by timeline and/or regions would've been good too, but lack thereof makes it universal, as it indeed was. Only, this way its less a book for someone's first introduction to holocaust than for one who, say, has read William Shirer's Rise And Fall of The Third Reich, or Upton Sinclair's World's End series, and has a clue. But as it is, this is genuine, since not a single word is added by the author-compiler-editor.
............

"THIS BOOK WAS PROMPTED BY revolting anti-Semitism in France, epitomized by the antics of a so-called comedian. He ridicules the Holocaust in a skit named Shoananas, and makes fun of a Frenchman, who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, only because he was Jewish. Yet his audiences roar with laughter. Ignorance of history cannot be justified by his birth long after the Holocaust. He is just the latest in a long line of anti-Semites, spanning thousands of years, who have targeted Jews for the “crime of being Jewish.”"

"“You heard everybody say, ‘We’ve got to survive and tell the world what is going on.’”
—Ruth Webber, Survivor

"People who say the Holocaust is a hoax cannot answer an elderly survivor who asked me, “If the Holocaust never happened, then where is my family?”"

"Women barricaded themselves indoors to prevent rape by Russian liberators who said, “We liberated you, but now you don’t want to love us?”"

"No one can dispute the chilling words of the commandant of Auschwitz, who told a postwar courtroom before he was hanged, that millions were killed during his reign of terror. Inmates, telling their stories within, wept when recalling how they had seen babies burned alive, and parents and siblings led off to their deaths under the whips of guards and the snaps of ferocious dogs. Within these pages are the damning testimonies from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, better known as the War Crimes Trials, and later from the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here are the details of those who sobbed while telling courts in Germany and Israel of their travails during the Holocaust. Personal narratives inside this book describe sights so grotesque that the storytellers would not have believed they happened if they had not seen them with their own eyes. It would have been incomprehensible to imagine that atrocities took place on such a scale."

"In the words of a lady who spoke to a man about to escape from a French train bound for Auschwitz, where she was condemned to the incinerator, “You must do it! If you get out maybe you can tell the story. Who else will tell it?”"
............

"I commanded Auschwitz until December 1, 1943, and estimate that at least 2.5 million victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning and at least another half a million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about three million. This figure represents about 70 percent or 80 percent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries.
—Rudolf Höss, Nuremberg trials, vol. 11, 4/15/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
............

"When somebody comes over to me after I speak in a school and tells me proudly, “I cannot read this book. I cannot go to a movie to see anything to do with the Holocaust because it’s too sad,” don’t expect me to give you a pat on your shoulder. If we could live it, you can watch it.
—Cecilie Klein-Pollack in an interview with Sandra Bradley for the USHMM film Testimony, RG-50.042*-0018"
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"Mauthausen [concentration camp in] Austria was a slaughterhouse for human beings when we liberated it on May 5, 1945. I was with the Eleventh Army Division, C Battery, 492nd Armored Field Artillery Battalion. It was such a horror that I chose not to discuss it for about thirty years. I do not want this overshadowed by the repugnant neo-Nazi groups who say this thing did not happen. ... The Nazis had many marched out before we got there, to get them out of our hands. We saw some on the road about three days before, in their gray and white striped uniforms and the word Jude on their chests. They were emaciated, weighing about 60–70 pounds, covered in filth, smelling, in poor shape, and couldn’t move. We gave them our C and K rations, but some of them went into convulsions. Then our medical people fed them intravenously.
—Dix Lathrop; USHMM, RG-50.234.0119"
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"I remember the date because January 6 was a Polish Catholic holiday, and that’s when they annihilated the rest of the Jews from the Copernicus school. I personally witnessed it. I was working in a factory in Minsk, but had documents from the underground allowing me to be on the streets after the 7:00 p.m. curfew, when we carried out our resistance activities. That morning we heard shooting, put on our factory fire brigade helmets, and raced to help put out the fire. The remnants of Minsk’s Jewish population was housed in the Copernicus school, now on fire, with smoke belching out. The roof was on the verge of collapse. Uniformed Germans, Latvians, security, and Polish police were shooting at the windows, aiming to kill anyone trying to escape. I saw partially burned bodies on the ledges of windows. Next to the school were two piles of bodies, six or seven feet high. A mother tried to throw her child out the window when someone shot her dead. A few steps from me a German, six feet plus, weighing about 250 pounds, took a little Jewish girl by the hand, led her to a wall, sat her down, even corrected her posture, and then moved back a few steps and shot her in the head. That atrocity stayed with me for many, many, many years after the war. At a moment like that, one is ready to do anything. But what could I do? Anything I did then would have resulted in all of us being killed. I could only pay them back through my acts in the underground. Too often, one hears the Holocaust never happened. Well, here is one eyewitness who saw what was going on and what happened.
—Steven Galezewski; USHMM, RG-50.030*0377"
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"In the last days of December 1941, SS Franz Murer, a.k.a. the Butcher of Vilnius, gave a present to the ghetto: a carload of shoes belonging to the Jews executed at Ponary was brought into the ghetto. He sent these old shoes as a gift to the ghetto. Among them I recognized my mother’s.
—Abram Suzkever, Nuremberg trials, vol. 8, 2/27/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
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"Crematorium 3’s crew refused to obey orders and barricaded themselves inside the living quarters. They put their straw mattresses to the torch and exchanged fire with the SS guards, using small weapons in their possession. The guards got reinforcements, and when it was over the crematorium was a gutted shell with several hundred prisoners dead. But the crew of crematorium 1 thought the uprising had begun. After throwing their German kapo into the burning furnace, they cut barbed wire enclosing the crematorium and dispersed to the Vistula River. The SS gave chase and every single one of the several hundred prisoners was hunted down and killed. Several days later, the crew of crematorium 2 was gassed and all that remained of the approximately fifteen hundred strong Birkenau Sonderkommandos was the crematorium 4 crew of less than one hundred men. The three crematoriums were then blown up and dismembered. Number 4 was left intact until final evacuation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. In the sudden evacuation, the remaining Sonderkommandos managed to get intermingled with the general camp population and share their fate and survival chances. I was told after the war that about thirty or forty of them survived the death marches.
—Philip Goldstein; USHMM, RG-50.233*0037"
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"An individual crawled on his hands and knees out of one group at Dachau and said, “Thank God. Americans!” I told him to come with me. My objective was Munich. I was taken to a castle. Inside was a piano. He asked if he could play, which he did. He was a genius. The next day he came to my headquarters and asked if he could leave for his home nearby to see if anyone from his family was alive. I never saw him again.
—Ralph Miles; USHMM/University of California, Los Angeles, RG-50.005*0043"
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"After Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, I went to school in Kosheetza, Czechoslovakia. It was quite an experience. I was eight, and apart from one other boy, I was the only Jew in my whole school. To this day I’m really sad to say I find it so difficult to understand why we were so disliked. We looked just like the rest of the kids. We did not appear Jewish in any way. We didn’t wear hats or yarmulkes or have long hair or anything like that. My only mark was my tattoo number. That branded me as a Jew. I don’t think this other fellow had a number from any camp, but he was Jewish, and they knew it. Maybe he looked more Jewish than I did, if there’s such a thing. Even at that age, the boys, who were eight, nine, or ten, were out there to beat us up. Every day after school, they waited for us. We had to run, not for our lives, because we were not old enough to really do that kind of harm to each other, but we had to run because we were going to be beaten up.
—Rene Slotkin; USHMM, made possible by a grant from Jeff and Toby Herr, RG-50.549.02*0008"
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[AttackGirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

So lying, stealing, killing each other, cannibalism, rape all of after liberation how would you wish to die? Peacefully or laying in a pile waiting to be eating or knowing your skin will be stripped to be made into human skin bags etc. listen carefully to the stories in the mode of understanding these being were not human, then as it happening to you, then from a remote place hearing stories. Even now each military man rescuing others demand rewards of sex is that also rape and yet we demand Japan pay the “comfort women”. Do you not hear the same comments from these people as from those holding the guns and weapons? Are we not setting our world up for this now massive refugee movements as they gang rape the women and boys…

Think is the the cycle of the planet? The normal behavior of the life forms we call human. Perhaps time for “the church” to tell the truth about history and life forms. Perhaps time to only eat plants, perhaps time for the DNA companies to release the truth about the difference instead of similarities so we learn to respect all life forms and find alternative options for survival.

Perhaps you still have not realized you are at the toss of a coin the guard or the prisoner

The holocaust museum in DC has guest speakers aka survivors always telling their stories and answering questions.

What is the number up to now 6 million souls dead and already people deny the existence and tell me what do you know of Genghis Khan and he brought about religious tolerance and killed more than 60 million. So….

Do you wonder why the “healthy” process for all men is circumcision…. Or perhaps a better way to hide truths. All you Christians have you read your Bible how many did the Jews slaughter?

All the stories from grants…. Where did the money come from the bankers who failed the stock market, or those who caused the housing crash or perhaps those who had the day off from the twin towers on Sept 11…

Perhaps it’s just the process of tribes? No comments of the secret decisions of the governments to move the masses and moving them eventually to death, years of waiting, the payments to Germany to deal with the Jewish problem. But what is there to fear now they have openly started their war machine 3x the budget prepping now for the face to face war as Putin is patient as everyone preps instead of just rolling across the lands and taking everything immediately no it’s years of prepping then years of combat and years of recovery then years of this…

[Rachael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our Crime Was Being Jewish: Hundreds of Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Stories by Anthony Pitch

Anthony Pitch's Our Crime Was Being Jewish is a haunting and deeply moving collection of firsthand accounts from Holocaust survivors. This nonfiction audiobook stitches together 576 memories from 358 survivors, offering an unflinching portrayal of the horrors of the Holocaust through their eyes. The stories span from the invasion of homes and ghetto life to the unimaginable atrocities of concentration camps and, ultimately, liberation.

What makes this collection particularly powerful is its raw, unfiltered nature. Each vignette feels intensely personal, ranging from a few sentences to more detailed recollections. Through these vivid snapshots, the listener gains insight into the unfathomable pain, courage, and humanity of those who lived through one of history's darkest periods. The inclusion of stories from American liberators, interwoven with survivors’ experiences, adds a poignant dimension, offering a broader perspective of these harrowing events.

The lack of organization in the narrative might frustrate some listeners, as the stories are presented without clear grouping or thematic structure. While the author explains this choice in the preface, aiming to evoke the confusion and chaos experienced by Holocaust victims, it can make it challenging to follow individual narratives or trace a chronological progression. This editorial decision adds a layer of authenticity but also leaves a yearning for deeper exploration of certain stories, some of which reappear sporadically throughout the book.

Despite this, Our Crime Was Being Jewish achieves its goal: to preserve the voices of those who suffered, ensuring that their stories are neither forgotten nor ignored. Listening to these accounts is a sobering, reflective experience that emphasizes the importance of remembrance and vigilance in preventing history from repeating itself.

A compelling and essential read for anyone seeking to understand the Holocaust, this book serves as a stark reminder of the resilience of the human spirit amidst unimaginable cruelty.

[Cate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heart-wrenchng stories of horrific suffering. It's so important these stories are told and remembered

My only issue with this book is in the formatting/editing. I understand why they've chosen not to include commentary but the compilers claim they didn't organise or categorise the stories to reflect the chaotic lives of the victims, but it feels lazy. Even roughly grouping similar stories together (either by nationality, place, date, or type such as pre-war, ghetto, transports, selection, camp life, liberation, post-war, Nazi trials) without category headings would have made this more readable and could have been done in a way that still showed how victims' lives were distorted and destroyed. As it is, it jumps from a post-war reflection to a ghetto story, to one about Auschwitz selections, then back to a story about Eichmann's trial, then to the transports... This is confusing, and even more so if you're relatively new to finding out about the Holocaust. It therefore also negates one of the most valuable elements of Holocaust memoir, which is education. It's really difficult to glean any sort of timeline, settings, or facts from this book. But then, perhaps that's the point as it's focused on human experience and memory.

Next, I can't understand why they've broken up individuals' stories; some people have their stories split into numerous chunks across the whole book. I don't know if this is simply to keep each entry short for impact, but it feels disrespectful to individual experiences by suggesting the whole experiences of people themselves don't matter, only the number of shock stories. It just seems like it's been done to make it look like there are a greater number of victims. There's already millions, so doing this to make it look like there's more separate entries feels disingenuous. I think if I was compiling this book, I'd be trying to include a recollection from as many individuals possible, rather than multiple entries from fewer people.