Word: maidanek
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Poland, but the Nazis sought more efficient methods. Himmler's deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, summoned representatives of all major government departments to the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to inform them of what he called "the final solution." This required the creation of six giant extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Maidanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor. The Wannsee conference was called for Dec. 9 but had to be put off for six weeks because of the extraordinary news from the Pacific. On Dec. 7 the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor...
Other changes that were inherent in the peace of 1945 took longer to become fully clear. When the Soviet army liberated Maidanek and Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps in Poland, the birth of Israel in 1948 became an inevitability. The Middle East would never be the same...
...Pisar's self-appelation accurately describes his present life, it is drawn from his past, and thus encapsulizes his vision of the future. Born in Bialystok, Poland, in 1929, he lived through Soviet occupation and Nazi terror, spending four years in Maidanek, Dachau and Auschwitz and escaping death only through a combination of luck and nerve. One of the youngest survivors of the concentration camps, Pisar lost his entire family to the war and was the only student in his grammar school of 900 to survive. Although he eventually earned doctorates from Harvard and the Sorbonne and rose to intellectual...
...life sentence; another was acquitted; the rest received jail terms ranging from three to twelve years. Thus ended the longest (5½ years), and probably the last, major West German trial for Nazi war crimes against concentration camp inmates. The nine were all guards at the Maidanek concentration camp in Poland between 1941 and 1944. They had been charged with shooting, gassing, drowning or fatally beating some of the 250,000 Polish Jews, gypsies, Russian P.O.W.s and others who died there...
Best known of the defendants-and the only one to receive a life sentence was Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, 61, who was reportedly known at Maidanek as "the Mare," because of her predilection for kicking victims with her shiny jackboots. She was accused of murdering nearly 1,200 prisoners, mostly women and children, and of complicity in the deaths of 725 more. An Austrian, Hermine met Russell Ryan, then a U.S. Air Force mechanic, in Europe, married him in Canada in 1958 and later moved with him to the U.S., where she became a citizen and a resident of Queens...