From: utzoo!decvax!yale-com!leichter
Newsgroups: net.followup
Title: Re: Jewish experience of the Holocaust
Article-I.D.: yale-com.1444
Posted: Sun May  1 10:44:19 1983
Received: Mon May  2 05:19:05 1983
References: arizona.2026

I am sorry to disappoint arizona:jim in his pursuit of the evil in men's hearts,
but the Holocaust WAS different, both qualitatively and quantitatively.  As a
Jew, both of whose parents survived the Nazis, I cannot stand by quietly and
let the memories be cheapened by ill-informed references to "holocausts"
right and left - not to mention innuendo against Israelis and, indirectly,
Jews who support Israel.  (WHO did the killing at Savra and Chattella [sic]?
Hint:  NOT Israelis.)  The Holocaust was a unique, or close to unique, histo-
rical experience, and the unique portion was almost exclusively the experience
of Jews.  I, for one,ave too little data to comment on the Turkish slaughter
of the Armenians; but how DARE you compare the systematic killing of MILLIONS
of Jews, of all ages, with the horrible - but perfectly "historical" -
murder of POLITICAL OPPONENTS - real or perceived - in Chile?  It requires an
amazing lack of perceptive ability to fail to see the distinctions - or a sad
lack of basic data.  I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that
it is the latter.  To get some data, please read "Appropriating the Holocaust"
by Henryk Grynberg, in the November 1982 issue of Commentary.  Here is a
short extract that will give you some idea of what you don't know:

"One factor obscuring the truth about the Holocaust is the confusion in termi-
nology which has bedeviled this subject from the beginning.  An example of
such confusion is the continual use of the term "concentration camps" in con-
ection with the Holocaust, as though the two were synonomous.  Since the con-
centration camps did in fact contain inmates of many different religions and
nationalities, it is only logical to conclude, as many have, that the Jewish
case was only a more extreme instance of a catastrophe which befell many other
nationalities and religions as well.

The truth is, however, that the largest part of Europe's Jews perished not in 
concentration camps but in extermination camps, and German terminology - with
its distinction between @i(Konzentrationslagern) and @i(Vernichtungs-) or
@i(Sonderslagern) - is very clear on this point.  Those Jews who did not die
in the death camps died either in the closed ghettos, where the were systema-
tically started (Warsaw, Cracow, Lodz) or else in mass executions carried out
in places like Babi Yar, Ponary, Dubno, and other points in the German-occu-
pied Soviet territories.  What the murder installations have in common is that
they wer designated exclusively for Jews.

To clarify the distinction once and for all, Treblinka (where 750,000 people
perished), Belzec (600,000), Chelmno (360,000), and Sobibor (250,000) were
strictly extermination camps, while Maidanek, with 200,000 victims, was bot a
concentration camp and an extermination camp.  The same is true of Auschwitz,
the most infamous of all.  What the visitor who enters Auschwitz through the
gate bearing the inscription @i("Arbeit macht frei") ["work will make you free"
-- Jerry] sees is Auschwitz I, the concentration camp, which housed 405,000
registered and numbered prisoners of different nationalities, including Jews;
340,000 of those inmates died here.  But about a mile and half away is another
camp - Auschwitz II, also know as Birknau (in German) an Brzezinka (in Polish).
This was the extermination camp of Aucshwitz, where about 3,500,000 people
were gassed.

According to the testimony of Rudolf Hoess at the Nuremberg trials, except for
about 20,000 Russiona prisoners of war, people gassed during his term as
commandant of Auschwitz were "Jews from Holland, Belgium, France, Poland,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and other countries."  They were never regis-
tered or numbered, and in a sense never became real prisoners.  They were
taken to the gas chambers almost straight from the train, following a quick
selection process which separated out the younger and healthier adults and the
taller teen-agers.  These were directed to the concentration-camp work force,
where they had the chance, if not ultimately to survive, then at least to live
a while longer.

The extermination camps, unlike the concentration camps, were never "liberated"-
the liberators came too late.  While there are thousands of survivors of the
concentration camps, many of whom have written accounts of their experiences,
the extermination camps left virtually no survivors, and almost nothing in the
way of eyewitness testimony.  I myself, for example, am technically a kind of
"survivor" of the death camp Treblinka, but that is only because my parents
managed to run away with me before we were loaded onto a train - the rest of
my family was murdered.  Under these circumstances, it is all too easy to
speak only of the concentration camps, and let the mute death camps fade into
oblivion."

I ended up quoting more than I had intended to, but even so I barely touched
the surface.  The article goes on just after this section to show that the
"concentration camp" had, unfortunately, a long history - the Russians had
refined those techniques.  The death camp, however, was a Nazi invention...

PLEASE, read the article before you consider yourself competent to comment -
or even have an informed opinion on - the uniqueness or lack thereof of the
Holocaust.  It's too important an issue to leave to ill-informed ramblings by
those who have no understanding of the facts.
							-- Jerry
						decvax!yale-comix!leichter
							leichter@yale