The Daily, University of Washington, Seattle
Wednesday, October 12, 1994 / Vol. 102, No. 13
Opinion Letters – Columns – Editorials
Knowledge of the Holocaust Will Drown Out Its Deniers
Editor:
As the artist whose drawings are the interpretative focal point of the Museum and History exhibit “A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto,” and who arranged The Daily feature and interview (Oct. 7) with Greek Jewish Holocaust survivor Carlos Hanon, please accept my thanks for your interest in covering his experiences for your readers.
With Holocaust deniers making further gains in convincing many Americans that the the Holocaust may not have happened, it is imperative that educators and the media, including student-run newspapers at universities, pursue historical accuracy about this all-too-recent event, however remote it may seem in 1994. Your description of the both the genocide against the Jews of Europe, especially pertaining to the Jews of Greece, and of Warsaw and Cracow, Poland, are incorrect, and certain events in Carlos’ experiences are misstated. Lest any Holocaust denier seek to use your article in pursuit of an anti-Semitic agenda and race-hatred, please allow me to clarify and correct where necessary.
There were 76,500 Jews in Greece before the Holocaust and 56,000 in Carlos’ home city of Salonika. Fifty-thousand of the Jews of Salonika were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, in southern Poland. Carlos himself was on the first transport from Salonika, which had 1,200 or so Jews in its cattle cars. Of those, 1,020 were gassed to death upon their arrival, including all of Carlos’ siblings, brothers and sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews, and parents. Of the remaining 180 who were spared immediate death at the “selections” which separated the latter for slave labor, 60 were women and 120 were men. Carlos was the only one alive at the war’s end.
The German invasion of Greece was in 1942, and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in Poland was in 1943. It was after the uprising and destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, in 1944, that Carlos and 2,000 other Greek Jewish inmates at Birkenau (the larger companion camp to Auschwitz) were taken to the site of what was the Warsaw Ghetto. There they were put to work as slaves laborers retrieving usable metal for German industry and bricks for construction, and pulling out the badly decomposed bodies of Jews who had died in the uprising and the ghetto’s destruction.
The guard towers and prison camp Carlos and his fellow prisoners hauled bricks to were not at Auschwitz, but at the prison camp in which these prisoners were kept were not at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. The ghetto site itself was sealed off with fences around its perimeter and with armed guards, and the camp itself was outside of the site of the ghetto’s ruins. It was only as the Russian Army advanced into eastern Poland that the Germans retreated, taking concentration and death camp prisoners fit enough to walk into Germany west with them. Some of the camps were demolished by the Germans; others, like Auschwitz, were left standing.
Carlos walked with thousands of other prisoners westward into Germany, where many were slave laborers for German industry. He spent only one night at Dachau concentration camp before being relocated to two other camps. He was liberated by American forces in 1945.
Lastly, there were over 1,000 concentration, slave-labor, and transit camps in Europe, but only five death camps. The difference is significant, but you are not alone among the press in erroneously describing death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka as concentration camps. Auschwitz and Birkenau, which I visited in 1984 and 1985, were huge city-sized camps which were built for the primarily purpose of murdering thousands of children, women, and men every day, year-round on their arrival from trains across Europe. They also contained vast sections of ever replacement slave laborers, many thousands of whom “worked” for prominent companies, which sed them for highly profitable operations.
When Carlos spoke of barbecue day and night at Auschwitz, he wasn’t talking about salmon and burgers. He was talking about the incinerators which spit out the ashes of Jews and other inmates after they had been gassed to death. As he stated, we “know nothing.” But maybe we can learn something about a genocide beyond the capacity of any of us to imagine, in the hope that we can prevent the next Holocaust.
- Kenneth Akiva Segan