Archive for August 2008
Essay on the Holocaust in Croatia
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Essays & Editorials [home] The Department of History, University of Northampton & The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team |
Guest Publication by
Matthew Feldman
[photos added to enhance the text]
[Please note that editorials posted in this section are the sole viewpoints of the individual author and do not necessarily
represent any collective opinion of the Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, or the University of Northampton]
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Duro Schwartz, surviving what he called the ‘inferno’ of Jasenovac through circumstance and vocational utility, composed a detailed memoir about his travails in the Ustaše’s most notorious camp in 1945. After witnessing a catalogue of scarcely believable actions savagely and ritually carried out over his eight months of imprisonment between Autumn 1941 and Spring 1942, Schwartz concluded:
‘If all those who had gone through the camp could join their voices and the despair in their hearts into one voice and one despair, the thunder and horror of the day of judgment would make itself heard’. This chilling account, which could only be written due to Schwartz’s release on account of his marriage to a non-Jewish woman, was still bound to fall short in the eyes of the author, for ‘human language is not powerful enough to even approximate the reality of existence there’.[2]
Read more about Jasenovac [here]
Despite noting the necessity of trying to speak about an ultimately inexplicable horror – a paradox noted in the accounts of many Holocaust survivors – this did not stop Schwartz from recording, hiding, and later writing up his notes on everyday life at Jasenovac. Another excerpt from his testimonial serves to evoke the brutality of Ustaša guards toward, especially, Jews, Serbs, and Roma and Sinti travellers:
Read the full essay here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/essays&editorials/croationholocaust.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
The Warsaw Ghetto and The Stroop Report ” The Boy in the Photo”
The Warsaw Ghetto & The Stroop Report
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The above photo is one of the most iconic photographs of the Holocaust, the German Guard pointing the machine gun is known, the little boy is not known, but some of the other people captured in this photo, have been identified.
The photo was included in the infamous Stroop Report – “The Warsaw Ghetto no longer exists.”
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Extracts from the book by Richard Raskin
The Boy in the Photograph
There are four possible identities for the little boy at gunpoint.
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Artur Dab Siemiatek
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The destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto |
It was advanced as early as 1950, but documentation was first found in 1977-78, one source was responsible for making the claim, a woman named Jadwiga Piesecka, who was a resident of Warsaw.
According to a statement she signed on 24 January 1977, the boy in the photograph was named Artur Siemiatek born in Lowicz in 1935.
He was the son of Leon Siemiatek, and Sara Dab and the grandson of the signatory’s brother Josef Dab.
A similar attestation was signed the following year in Paris by Jadwiga Piesecka’s husband, Henryk Piasecki, dated 28 December 1978.
Read the full article here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/boy.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
