First of all, this upcoming series of entrées do not condemn politics in any way and it does not express any views for or against either side. I hope that I have handled the subject matter sensitively and I hope that it comes across as what it is supposed to be…a story of human spirit triumphing over adversity in the worst possible conditions. In a way, it’s a story in which people’s capacity to hope, love and forgive are severely tested. Although this is a time and place in history in which unimaginable horrors occurred, in no way is it meant to disrespect the people who really lived through it or to minimise the terrible things that they experienced. It does not glorify war or make little of the sufferings of innocent people. I knew from the beginning that this would be a hard entry to write, and it has proven an even harder one to research, and I hope that you will give it a chance and read it.
When I first started writing this particular series, I was not quite sure how to approach it – whether to simply observe the goings-on from the guards’ points of view or to follow the inmates as they dealt with daily life as they knew it. In the end, I took my lead from my encourager and the people who survived it, and decided to tell the story head-on, with dignity and respect. I have read hundreds of articles, accounts and testimonies both in books and on the web during my research and learned one thing – nobody beats around the bush with this subject; everybody deals with it head-on. In all the books and articles I read, whether it was written by the survivors on the websites run by Jewish and Holocaust organisations, the Yad Vashem website, the Shoah Foundation, the Remember and the Gedenkort websites, the articles dealing exclusively with the homosexual victims or memorial websites of family members, the recollections of close family friends who visited Auschwitz and Auschwitz Museum and their respective websites, and even the Dachau Camp Museum I visited – everybody faced the subject frankly, honestly and bluntly. There was no prettying it up or dumbing it down, there are no cautions about what visitors to the sites will read and very few warnings about the pictures visitors will see. They tell the truth, openly, bravely and honestly without making heroes of anybody or belittling the atrocities that happened. It is up to the visitor to decide whether to enter or not – there was certainly no entrée fee to the Camp I visited.
A great deal of these upcoming entries are true and are based on events that actually happened. Many of the events described are based on survivors’ accounts and on testimonies given at the Nuremberg Trials in Germany from 1945 to 1946. The train journey and arrival at the camp, the registration process, the “showers”, the living conditions, toilet facilities, the food, and the experiments performed on the children by Dr. Mengele are all based on facts. Some of the details of daily life in the camp are recollections from my visit to a concentration camp site called Dachau near Munich, Germany.
One elderly survivor whose account was particularly moving said, “…there was good and evil on both sides of the fences, but we saw very little of the good.” I hope you will find that opinion is true within this story too.
Only when I started researching and reading up on the background on the camp, did I realise that “Auschwitz” was actually made up of three main camps (Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II and Auschwitz III) together with at least 40 other satellite camps that were all lumped together under one collective name. Auschwitz I and II were prison and extermination camps – Auschwitz II was known as Birkenau – Auschwitz III, known as Monowitz, was a labour camp. These entries describe what took place in the Birkenau (Auschwitz II) camp, but for ease of writing and reading, I have simply referred to it generically as Auschwitz.
I have decided to name the character in the entries as Elisha, and if there ever was a Jew named Elisha involved in the Holocaust, I meant no disrespect.
-Shy Girls Get It
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