Word: auschwitzes
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When the Nazis overran the Low Countries in 1940, they barred Dutch Physician Elie A. Cohen from practice. Cohen and his family tried to escape to Sweden, but the Gestapo caught them and sent them to Auschwitz. There, the SS gassed Cohen's wife and four-year-old son, his parents, his only sister, and about 50 other relatives. Much of the time Cohen had to do the same manual labor as other prisoners; only part of his three years, in a series of concentration camps was spent working as a doctor. Liberated in May, 1945, he weighed...
...Auschwitz, he was physician in charge of a block where psychotics, imbeciles, invalids and the aged were housed. "Because the portions of bread, cheese, sausage or margarine were never equally cut," Dr. Cohen recalls, "I could, and did, always choose the thickest. During the ladling out of the soup, the stirring was always done horizontally, so that the thick remained at the bottom. I always took care to get only the thick . . . The motivation I gave myself, namely that I had more value than the patients, didn't hold water, of course...
...Jews sent to Auschwitz, only a handful survived, and Cohen asks himself relentlessly, "Why did I survive?" The answer, he believes, lies largely in his psychological preparation for the ordeal. He had an active, personal philosophy of life. A theoretical Zionist who had put the comforts of Holland above the rigors of pioneering in Palestine, he blamed himself: "I hadn't been enough of a 'hero' to go to Palestine." Much the same, he adds, was true for the political foes of Naziism who were prisoners: "They could understand why they were in camp." Finally, Cohen knew...
...been chosen by the International Commission Against Concentration Camp Regimes, an organization of 100,000 survivors of Nazi camps, to decide whether the Russians run a similar system. Said Prosecutor David Rousset, a French writer and former Nazi prisoner: "For the first time, the men who lived at Auschwitz and Buchenwald are going to hear men who lived through Kolyma and Magadan...
...seven were no ordinary Nazis. Oswald Pohl, onetime boss of all Hitler's concentration camps (4,000,000 died in gas chambers at Auschwitz alone), had ordered the extermination of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto; Paul Blobel, Werner Braune, Otto Ohlendorf and Erich Naumann had supervised the murder of 2,000,000 people, mostly Jews, gypsies and Communist-suspects, in the conquered lands of Eastern Europe; Hans Schmidt was adjutant of Buchenwald; Georg Schallermair had run the mass murder machine at Dachau. They were the most wretched specimens of 28 Nazis condemned by a U.S. war crimes court...