Mystery of message in a bottle found at Auschwitz solved

[Nagishkaw 510]

WARSAW (AFP) – Sixty-five years ago Waclaw Sobczak hid a message in a bottle between the bricks of a wall in a building of the Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, a last sign of life as he prepared to die.

"I put the bottle in the wall," Sobczak, 84, who survived Auschwitz but still bears the ID number -- 145664 -- the Nazis tattooed on his forearm, told AFP via telephone from his home in Wrabczyn, western Poland.

"It was an attempt to leave a trace of our existence as we thought we were going to die," said Sobczak, sent to Auschwitz in 1943 as a slave labourer.

The note in the bottle written September 20, 1944 included Sobczak's name and Auschwitz ID number along with those of five other fellow Poles and one Frenchman, all Auschwitz slaves at the time aged 18 to 20.

It was found in April by chance by workers demolishing a wall in what is now a school, but was part of the death camp during World War II.

Since, it has emerged that three of the men on the list are still alive.

"We were taught how to be masons by engineers and master masons, primarily French Jews," said Karol Czekalski, 83, another of the Poles named on the list, which was formally handed over to the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in southern Poland, this month.

"From the spring of 1944 some of the apprentices were deemed ready to work," he added. "They joined the 'Luftschutzbunkerbau' responsible for building anti-air raid bunkers."

"We were used for various jobs: plastering, laying tiles... Finally we were chosen to construct this building. It took 8 or 15 days. I vaguely remember some faces. I am certain there was a Frenchman among us," Sobczak recalled, but admitted he cannot remember who came up with idea to write the message.

"Someone found a bottle. I put it in the wall," he said.

The Frenchman on the list was Albert Veissid, now a sprightly 84 and living at Allauch in southeastern France.

"It's incredible. I remember everything from the camp, from A to Z. As I speak to you now, I can see the images before my eyes," he told AFP after the bottle surfaced.

"But this bottle business is an enigma. The biggest surprise of my life," said the former fairground worker, who was arrested by collaborationist French authorities in 1943 and deported to Poland the following year.

Veissid said that while it was a mystery to him how his name appeared on the list, he remembered meeting the six Poles in question while working as a builder at the camp.

"It's true I did them some favours. There was food supplied upstairs and they used to steal tubs of marmalade, which I would hide downstairs," he said.

"Maybe they wrote my name in the bottle as a way of thanking me."

After news of the bottle's discovery spread, a Swedish woman identified the man who wrote the list -- Bronislaw Jankowiak, Auschwitz ID number 121213 -- as her father.

Told about the discovery of the bottled message by relatives in Poland, Irene Jankowiak, 49, said she was stunned.

"I recognised the handwriting. It must be my father's handwriting," Jankowiak told AFP by telephone from her home in Uppsala, north of Stockholm.

"We have compared it to other things he has written, we have old letters and things that he wrote in 1945 in a diary so I'm 100 percent sure actually," she said after seeing photos of the list in published in the local media.

Born in 1926 in Poznan, Bronislaw Jankowiak, a Catholic Pole who was sent to the camp in 1943, fled to Sweden in 1945 where he worked in a factory for typewriters and calculators in Aatvidaberg, in southern Sweden, and died in 1997.

"I think it made him suffer, he wanted to forget it. We asked our parents to write, to leave testimony, but they never wanted to," Irene's sister Margareta told AFP.

Nazi Germany systematically killed more than one million people, mostly European Jews, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp located in the then Nazi-occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim between 1940 and 1945.

Among the camp's other victims were tens of thousands of non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, gypsies, and anti-Nazi resistance fighters from across Europe.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945, three months before Nazi Germany was finally defeated by the Allies.

The infamous site was part of German dictator Adolf Hitler's plan of genocide against European Jews, six million of whom perished at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090509/lf_af...historyjewswwii

[lostinblue 1,989]

Would this be the proof needed for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad .I doubt it.We had a man on the local radio show last week who was in the camps with his twin sister(7 or 8 years old) and their parents. all survived. Average survival length was 3 months. 600 calories a day on turnip mash with a treat if you were lucky a small amount of horse meat.His whole family did survive. It is sad many people have little understanding of what is in past history.

[Nagishkaw 510]

I've been fascinated with the death camps since I was a child. You are right, it is sad that people have little or no understandings about past history.

[scandal 951]

I've been fascinated with the death camps since I was a child. You are right, it is sad that people have little or no understandings about past history.

My paternal grandmother lost most of her family in the Shoah. Only she and her brother migrated to Canada. Her parents, other brothers and sisters and their families were all wiped out.

My maternal grandmother was somewhat luckier - she and 2 brothers were in Israel during the Holocaust. "Only" one brother, his wife, and their seven children were murdered.

My maternal grandfather had one brother that was an inmate at Dachau and escaped - he fled, made it to Vienna, apparently killed an SS officer on the streets of Vienna with his bare hands (so goes the family story, anyway...) and made his way to America where he became a Rabbi.

I feel blessed and fortunate to live in a place and time where for me, personally, life is good and easy. Had I been born a generation earlier in the places my forebears were born, all would have been different.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

I've been fascinated with the death camps since I was a child. You are right, it is sad that people have little or no understandings about past history.

Same here.

[~PalmTreeGurl~ 154]

My adopted grandmother is from Germany. She was born in 1935 and can remember so many things of the days of Hitler. The bombings, lack of food, the shelters, the airplanes over head, a bomb shelter they were in and then got bombed later on that afternoon after they got pulled out of there. You can see the pain in her eyes when its discussed. I remember going to a holocaust museum in Texas about 10 years ago and it broke my heart terribly to see all those pictures of starving people and bones in ovens. It had to have been a million times worse to live during those days.

[jundp 191]

I've been fascinated with the death camps since I was a child. You are right, it is sad that people have little or no understandings about past history.

Me too. I just came back from a Holocaust Educator's Conference in Berlin, Nagi. I'm working towards achieving the title of Master Teacher in Holocaust Education. It's both fascinating and frightening, but so important I think, for us as a civilization, to remember and do what we can to prevent these atrocities from happening again. It's too late for some, unfortunately.

[Nikita2Charles 32]

Great stories, It's always interested reading about the Jewish holocaust but nobody ever mentioned or hardly talk about the AFRICAN HOLOCAUST.

[Nagishkaw 510]

I think today too many people use the word holocaust so liberally. I believe there were but three real holocaust's in all. 1) the Armenian holocaust , 2) the Jewish holocaust, and 3) Rwanda .

[lostinblue 1,989]

I think today too many people use the word holocaust so liberally. I believe there were but three real holocaust's in all. 1) the Armenian holocaust , 2) the Jewish holocaust, and 3) Rwanda .

http://www2.canada.com/reginaleaderpost/ne...14-709cddce4a38

When Rose Kinal was just nine, Soviet agents came to the small Ukrainian town where she lived and took away the life she had known.

"They took everything," she said. "Land, animals, food ... everything."

Kinal, now 85, is a survivor of the Holodomor, a devastating famine perpetrated on the Ukrainian people between 1932 and 1933.

Under the direction of Josef Stalin, the Soviet regime imposed excessive grain quotas on the Ukraine, a region regarded as the agricultural heartland of the former Soviet Union.

Staunchly nationalist, many Ukrainians resisted collective farming. Those that did were blacklisted -- their towns and villages were cordoned off by soldiers and their food supplies confiscated.

Kinal remembers soldiers tapping on walls and floors to make sure they weren't missing any hidden stockpiles of food.

Death toll estimates vary widely for the famine, but according to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, seven to 10 million Ukrainians, one-third of them children, died during the Holodomor.

At its peak, starvation was claiming the lives of 25,000 Ukrainians every day.

Those that survived did so under a veil of silence and terror. Informers were everywhere and many who opposed Stalin's policies were arrested or went missing.

Vasil Szalasznyi, Kinal's friend and the son of a Holodomor survivor, recalls the story of an old widow who disappeared from his parents' town after refusing to hand over her cow to the Soviets.

"That story kind of stuck with me as a little kid," Szalasznyi said. "How could you do that to an old lady?"

Kinal's father -- a vocal Ukrainian nationalist -- was among those arrested by the Communists. Like so many others, he never returned.

"I don't know where my father is buried," Kinal said.

After her father's disappearance, Kinal and her siblings were put in the care of her grandfather but he soon succumbed to the famine. Left to fend for themselves, the children subsisted on whatever they could catch from a nearby river.

Beaten by Soviet soldiers if they were caught fishing, Kinal says her brothers set up nets in the river in the middle of the night, and supplemented their meager catches by foraging for crayfish.

Referring to herself as "walking history," Kinal has no shortage of stories and memories from the famine. She recalls the thrill of stealing seeds from a Soviet-controlled farm and fights back tears when discussing how the Communists tore the cross off of her church and converted the building into a grain silo.

On Saturday, members of the Saskatoon community, some Ukrainian, others not, gathered to mark the 75th anniversary of the famine.

http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/

The Artificial Famine/Genocide

(Holodomor) in Ukraine

1932-33

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Introduction

A Man-Made Famine/Genocide raged through Ukraine, the ethnic-Ukrainian region of northern Caucasus (i.e. Kuban), and the lower Volga River region in 1932-33. This resulted in the death of between 7 to 10 million people, mainly Ukrainians. This was instigated by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his henchman Lazar Kaganovich. The main goal of this artificial famine/genocide was to break the spirit of the Ukrainian farmer/peasant and to force them into collectivization and was used as an effective tool to break the renaissance of Ukrainian culture that was occuring under approval of the communist government in Ukraine. Moscow perceived this as a threat to a Russo-Centric Soviet rule and therefore acted to crush this cultural renaissance in a most brutal sadistic manner. The resulting goal of this artificial famine/genocide was to "ethnically cleanse" Ukrainians from vast territories.

In 1932, the Soviets increased the grain procurement quota for Ukraine by 44%. They were aware that this extraordinarly high quota would result in a grain shortage, therefore resulting in the inability of the Ukrainian peasant to feed themselves. Soviet law was quite clear in that no grain could be given to feed the peasants until the quota was met. Communist party officials with the aid of military troops, OGPU, NKVD secret police units were used to move against peasants who may be hiding grain from the Soviet government. Even worse, an internal passport system was implemented to restrict movements of Ukrainian peasants so that they could not travel in search of food. Ukrainian grain was collected and stored in grain elevators that were guarded by military units & NKVD secret police units while Ukrainians were starving in the immediate area. The actions of this Moscow instigated action was a deliberate act of genocide against the Ukrainian peasant.

The news of this act of brutality managed to get out to the West inluding Germany (thru observations from their consulate in Kharkiv), Britain (by various journalists including Gareth Jones & Malcom Muggeridge), Canada (the Ukrainian community) & the United States. The Russo-centric Soviet Union managed to control the message in the United States by co-opting the New York Times reporter Walter Duranty who falsified his reporting on the conditions in Ukraine and won a Pulitzer Prize for doing that). To this day, The New York Times refuses to acknowledge the act of deliberate fraud perpetrated by Walter Duranty, and refuse to this very day to return the Pulitzer Prize on moral and ethical grounds. By refusing to do so suggests they may tacitely approve what Duranty did.

In recent years President Viktor Yushchenko had ordered the release of old NKVD/KGB records on the Famine. With this information it has become very apparent that this Famine was a deliberate act of Genocide, a method to ethnically cleanse Ukrainians from the territories of Ukraine and parts of Russia (where Ukrainians were in the majority such as Kuban). At first only several thousand documents were released. Recently another batch of 25,000 documents is being declassified. As more documents are released this event in Ukrainian history has taken on a very ominous tone.

On November 28th 2006, the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine) had passed a Law defining the Holodomor as a deliberate Act of Genocide. Since then many nations have recognized that the Holodomor was an act of Genocide against the Ukrainian people and they include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Estonia, Ecuador, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Poland and the United States. Other countries have made a Holodomor declaration and they include Argentina, Czech Republic, Chile, Slovak Republic, Spain, Balearic Islands (Spain) and the Vatican. Russia is in complete denial and is exercizing political influence to deny that this event occured and that it was a deliberate act. In fact in Russia it was made illegal to commemorate this event.

The success of using food as a weapon to control/punish/eliminate a people was first used by the Soviet Communists. Since then this has become a standard tool in the arsenal of communist regimes to control/punish/eliminate people, and has been used by such regimes such as China, North Korea, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Zimbabwe amongst others.

These series of pages are intended to educate the general populace about this little known event in Ukrainian history. InfoUkes hopes to add to this series of pages over time.

The InfoUkes Inc. Staff

Updated April 26th 2009

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Table of Contents

Black Famine in Ukraine 1932-33: A Struggle for Existence

Andrew Gregorovich, Forum: A Ukrainian Review

No. 24, 1974

Famine Film: "Harvest of Despair"

Leonard Klady, Forum: A Ukrainian Review

No. 61, Spring 1985

The Last Stand of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide Deniers

Dr. Roman Serbyn

Denied, Defiled, Or Ignored

The Ukrainian Famine Of 1932-33

Fifty Years Later

Orysia Tracz

Famine-Genocide Deniers (Revisionists)

Bibliography on the Ukrainian Famine/Genocide (Holodomor)

The Ukrainian Weekly on the Great Famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine

Other Ukrainian Famine-Genocide (Holodomor) Links

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Nagishkaw 510]

I remember reading that Nikita Khrushchev saw just sole's of people's feet laying under a bridge and that one woman spoke of eating her own children during such famine. I have read many horror stories concerning the Ukraine famine, but that one stuck in my head for some odd reason.

[scandal 951]

I think today too many people use the word holocaust so liberally. I believe there were but three real holocaust's in all. 1) the Armenian holocaust , 2) the Jewish holocaust, and 3) Rwanda .

Here is Wikipedia on the subject of the use of the word 'Holocaust' to refer to genocides other than the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis:

By the way, the word 'holocaust' (uncapitalized) can be used to refer to any catastrophic event. Capitalized - 'Holocaust' - it refers to the specific historical genocide (or genocides).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust#Use...-Jewish_victims

Use of the term Holocaust for Jewish and non-Jewish victims

While the terms "Shoah" and "Final Solution" always refer to the fate of the Jews during the Nazi rule, the term Holocaust is sometimes used in a wider sense to describe other genocides of the Nazi and other regimes.

The Columbia Encyclopedia defines "Holocaust" as "name given to the period of persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany".[18] The Compact Oxford English Dictionary[19] and Microsoft Encarta[20] give similar definitions. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines "Holocaust" as "the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II",[1]

Scholars are divided on whether the term Holocaust should be applied to all victims of the Nazi mass murder campaign, with some using it synonymously with "Shoah" or "Final Solution of the Jewish Question", and others including the killing of Romani peoples (Roma and Sinti), Poles, the deaths of Soviet prisoners of war, Slavs, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and political opponents.[21]

Yehuda Bauer contends that the Holocaust should include only Jews because it was intent of the Nazis to exterminate all Jews, the other groups were not to be totally annihilated.[22] Besides Bauer,[23] scholars Xu Xin,[24] Ben Kiernan,[25] Edward Kissi,[26] Simone Veil,[27] Monika Richarz,[28] and Francis Deng[29] refer solely to the destruction of the European Jewry when using the term "Holocaust".

Inclusion of non-Jewish victims of the Nazis in the Holocaust is objected to by many persons including Elie Wiesel, and by organizations such as Yad Vashem established to commemorate Holocaust.[30] They say that the word was originally meant to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such totality and specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.[30]

Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann maintain that although all Jews were victims, the Holocaust transcended the confines of the Jewish community - other people shared the tragic fate of victimhood.[31] László Teleki applies the term "Holocaust" to both the murder of Jews and Romani peoples by the Nazis.[32]

Sometimes, the term "Holocaust" is used to describe events that have no connection with World War II. The terms Rwandan Holocaust and Cambodian Holocaust are used to refer to the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and the mass killings by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia respectively, and African Holocaust is used to describe the slave trade and the colonization of Africa, also known as the Maafa.[33]

[peejay 327]

Not to diminish what happened in The Holocaust, but when it comes to mass deaths Mao was the worst of the worst. Followed by Stalin. Hitler is included in the rogue's gallery as well for his crimes.

One of the best new books on the subject of Nazi rule in Europe I found at the public library. It is an interesting read:

Hitler's empire : how the Nazis ruled Europe / Mark Mazower.

[jundp 191]

Not to diminish what happened in The Holocaust, but when it comes to mass deaths Mao was the worst of the worst. Followed by Stalin. Hitler is included in the rogue's gallery as well for his crimes.

I agree with you Peejay (omg...hell froze). I always think of the Holocaust (capital H) as referencing the atrocities of WWII and genocide as referring to the others. I think part of the reason why the genocide of WWII has gained so much attention is because the direct result of it was the UDHR. As well, a minimum of 11 million people were selected for extermination (not counting soldiers) and it was so well publicized after the war. I think many in the world still don't know of Mao and Stalin and what they did.