This date is the date of Holocaust Memorial Day, marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, at the end of the War in 1945. Holocaust Memorial Day is an international event that remembers the millions of Jews exterminated in World War II at the hands of the Nazis, as well as the Romas, the homosexuals, those experimented on in terrible ways…
It is shocking to realise that if we held a minutes silence for each Jewish person murdered in the holocaust we would be silent for 11.5 years. This is an unbelievable amount of time – but I think it helps us to at least try to understand the magnitude of the numbers…
On FB I discovered that it was possible to be randomly allocated a victim of the Holocaust to honour in a personal act of remembrance
And so I was allocated Adele Moskowitz was born in Będzin, Poland in 1927 to Max and Chala nee Zaks. She was a student and a teenager. Prior to WWII she lived in Będzin, Poland.
Adele was murdered in the Shoah .
I can find nothing more about her – but she was murdered and tossed aside like a piece of rubbish – before she reached her 20th birthday…What life might she have had? What good might she have done?
I read on Wikipedia : From October 1940 to May 1942, about 4,000 Jewish people were deported from Będzin to slave labour in the rapidly growing number of camps.Until October 1942 the internal boundaries of the Ghetto remained unmarked. No fence was built. The area was defined by neighbourhoods of Kamionka and Mała Środula bordering theSosnowiec Ghetto, with the Jewish police placed by the SS along the perimeter. As was the case in other ghettos across occupied Poland, German authorities exterminated most of the Jews of Będzin during the murderous Operation Reinhard deporting them to Nazi death camps, primarily to nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau for gassing.
Major deportation actions took place in 1942 with 2,000 Jews sent to their death in May and 5,000 Jews in August.Another 5,000 jews of the ghettos were deported from Będzin aboard Holocaust Trains between August 1942 and June 1943.The last major deportations took place in 1943 whereas 5,000 Jews were sent away on 22 June 1943 and 8,000 around 1–3 August 1943..About 1,000 remaining Jews were deported in the subsequent months. It is estimated that of the 30,000 inhabitants of the ghetto, only 2,000 survivors remained.
As you can see, she didn’t have to be taken very far to her death…In fact, she would probably have known of Auschwitz because as I have discovered, the village (near the Prussian border) was famous for its hospitality. Everyone seemed to know that if you were detained at the border while passports or merchandise awaited approval, you could find a good shul, a good bed and a good meal here, As the site read: Before Auschwitz was haunted it was famous for hearth and home.
In fact, the site goes on to say, the village was well known as a place where Jewish people from around , wanted to go to spend their last days: Some “lived for many years in wealth and dignity in Vienna. Yet in their declining years they moved to Oshpitzin.” (the Yiddish name for Auschwitz) They said, according to the book, “It is really good to live in Vienna, but one ought to die in Oshpitzin.” So many saintly and scholarly people were buried in the Auschwitz earth that it was thought to be transformed into holy ground. “Anyone who merited to be buried there,” said an old Auschwitz legend, “would not suffer travails at the time of resurrection.” How horribly ironic.
And so, on Holocaust Memorial Day, I remembered Adele Moskowitz
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I also remembered a day spent in Budapest back in 2017
This Holocaust memorial is to honour the Jews who were killed in cold blood during Dec 1944 and Jan 1945. The memorial was erected in 2005 to commemorate the systematic killings of Hungarian Jews by Hungarian fascists (Hungary allied itself with Nazi Germany in the false hope of regaining territories lost in WW1).
The Jews were asked to line up by the river, take their shoes off facing the Danube, and shot to death in broad daylight to terrorise all Jews or anyone, ‘Goys’, wishing to save or support Jewish people. The bodies were carried away by the water, the river cleaned up the mess, the shoes were re-sold on the black market. The sculpture represents the moment just after death, when the shoes were still there, men’s, women’s, children’s, some nicer, some worn down, tattered, here and there missing a shoelace, or even a half pair, all different, yet all connected.
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View from the Teapot 