TODAY WAS HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

Thanks to the foresight of my father, I am a Holocaust survivor

 

By Howie Katz

1943: Off they go to their probable deaths in the Nazi gas chambers of Auschwitz 

 

 

2023: Off they go to their probable deaths in the Hamas tunnels of Gaza

 

 

Today was Holocaust Remembrance Day. Six million Jews were murdered or starved to death by the Nazis during World War II.

The extermination of Europe's Jews was referred to as the 'final solution' by the Nazis and planned by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.

 

 

Heinrich Himmler (L) and Reinhard Heydrich planned the extermination of Europe's Jews, known as the 'final solution'

 

Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933. By 1936 the Nazi persecution of Germany's Jews was in full swing. Unlike most German Jews who believed their persecution was just a passing phase, my father saw the handwriting on the wall.

My father found a sponsor in the (department store) Macy family who sponsored us which enabled us to come to America.

Today much of the world hates Israel and the Jews. Most of the Europeans would just as soon forget the Holocaust. Ireland's schweinehund of a president took the Holocaust Remembrance occasion to castigate the Jews for the way they have fought Hamas in Gaza

Following are just a few pictures for remembering the Holocaust:

 

  This photo shows a German soldier shooting a Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, sometime between 1941 and 1943.

A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in Mizocz, Ukraine. 

 

American soldiers silently inspect some of the rail trucks loaded with dead which were found on the rail siding at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, on May 3, 1945.

Bodies lie piled against the walls of a crematory room in a German concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. 

 

Three U.S. soldiers look at bodies stuffed into an oven in a crematorium in April of 1945.

 

This heap of ashes and bones is the debris from one day's killing of inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar in Germany, shown on April 25, 1945 

 

General Dwight D. Eisenhower and other American officers in the Ohrdruf concentration camp, shortly after the liberation of the camp in April of 1945.

 

American soldiers walk by row after row of corpses lying on the ground beside barracks at the Nazi concentration camp at Nordhausen, Germany, on April 17, 1945.

 

Liberating soldiers of Lt. General George S. Patton's 3rd Army, XX Corps, are shown at Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945   

 

General Patch's 12th Armored Division, forging their way towards the Austrian border, uncovered horrors at a German prison camp at Schwabmunchen, southwest of Munich.

 

These dead victims of the Germans were removed from the Lambach concentration camp in Austria, on May 6, 1945, by German soldiers under orders of U.S. Army troops.

 

Some of the skeleton-like human remains found by men of the Third Armored Division, U.S. First Army, at the German concentration camp at Nordhausen on April 25, 1945

 

Lt. Col. Ed Seiller of Louisville, Kentucky, stands amid a pile of Holocaust victims as he speaks to 200 German civilians who were forced to see the grim conditions at the Landsberg concentration camp, on May 15, 1945.

 

Dead bodies piled up in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945.    

 

A pile of bodies left to rot in the Bergen-Belsen camp, in Bergen, Germany, found on April 20, 1945  

 

Piles of the dead at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 30, 1945. Some 100,000 people are estimated to have died in this one camp alone.

 

 

Thanks to my beloved father's foresight, I am not in one of the above photographs. Thanks to my father's foresight, I was able to write this piece. Thanks to my father's foresight, I've had the privilege of living in America since 1936.

 

And above all, thanks to my father's foresight, I am a Holocaust survivor.