Archive | 2023/01/16

Marsze śmierci wyruszyły 78 lat temu z niemieckiego obozu Auschwitz

Pociąg z ewakuowanymi więźniami KL Auschwitz. Styczeń 1945 r. Kolin, Czechy. Fot. Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau


Marsze śmierci wyruszyły 78 lat temu z niemieckiego obozu Auschwitz

Marek Szafrański


78 lat temu Niemcy rozpoczęli ewakuację obozu Auschwitz i jego podobozów. Od 17 do 21 stycznia w marszach śmierci wyprowadzili do obozów w głębi Rzeszy ok. 56 tys. więźniów. Po drodze życie straciło co najmniej 9 tys. z nich.

Wydarzenia sprzed 78 lat upamiętni w czwartek Fundacja Pobliskie Miejsca Pamięci Auschwitz-Birkenau z Brzeszcz. Jej prezes Agnieszka Molenda-Kopijasz przypomniała, że od 17 do 21 stycznia główną drogą przez tę miejscowość przeszło około 25 tys. więźniów.

„Wielu z nich nie wytrzymało już na początku. Ginęli z wycieńczenia lub od kul esesmanów. 19 stycznia 1945 r. niemiecki burmistrz Brzeszcz nakazał mieszkańcom pochowanie zwłok zmarłych więźniów leżących na trasie ewakuacji, począwszy od Rajska przez Brzeszcze aż po koniec Jawiszowic. Zebrano 18 ciał. Brzeszcze stały się miejscem pochówku i pierwszej zbiorowej mogiły ofiar ewakuacyjnego marszu śmierci. Następna mogiła znajduje się w Miedźnej” – powiedziała Molenda-Kopijasz.

W czwartek przedstawiciele fundacji wspólnie z władzami Brzeszcz złożą kwiaty na miejscowym cmentarzu, gdzie jest mogiła ofiar. 19 stycznia 1945 r. pochowano tam 18 więźniów: Alfreda Kohna, Balthasara Sauera, Richarda Wernera, Annę Weiss i 14 bezimiennych więźniów kompleksu obozowego Auschwitz.

Niemcy przygotowywali ewakuację kompleksu obozowego już pod koniec 1944 r. Zadecydowali, że rozpocznie się w sytuacji bezpośredniego zagrożenia wkroczeniem armii sowieckiej. Kolumny więźniów miały się składać wyłącznie ze zdrowych ludzi, którzy podołają trudom długiego marszu. Wśród ewakuowanych było jednak sporo chorych, którzy obawiali się, że pozostanie w obozie będzie oznaczało śmierć.

Niemcy przygotowywali ewakuację kompleksu obozowego już pod koniec 1944 r. Zadecydowali, że rozpocznie się w sytuacji bezpośredniego zagrożenia wkroczeniem armii sowieckiej. Kolumny więźniów miały się składać wyłącznie ze zdrowych ludzi, którzy podołają trudom długiego marszu. Wśród ewakuowanych było jednak sporo chorych, którzy obawiali się, że pozostanie w obozie będzie oznaczało śmierć.

Pierwsze kolumny wymaszerowały 17 stycznia z podobozów Neu Dachs w Jaworznie oraz Sosnowitz. Ostatnia wyszła 21 stycznia z podobozu Blechhammer w Blachowni Śląskiej. Trasy marszów wiodły do Wodzisławia i Gliwic. Najdłuższą, która liczyła 250 km, pokonało 3,2 tys. więźniów z podobozu w Jaworznie. Szli do KL Gross Rosen na Dolnym Śląsku. Kolumny konwojowali uzbrojeni esesmani.

„Szliśmy całymi dniami (…). Nocą zatrzymywaliśmy się w wioskach i osadach. (…) Wielu umierało z zimna, na ogół nocą, część miała odmrożone stopy. Jeśli ktoś nie mógł iść, był zabijany przez Niemców. Powłóczyliśmy nogami, chciało nam się pić, byliśmy wygłodzeni, ale musieliśmy iść, iść, iść” – mówił po wojnie Szlomo Venezia, były więzień, członek Sonderkommando, specjalnej grupy więźniów, głównie Żydów, wykorzystywanych przez SS do usuwania ciał ofiar zagłady.

Podczas marszów zginęło co najmniej 9 tys. więźniów. Umierali z zimna, zmęczenia lub zostali zastrzeleni przez Niemców. Wśród zabitych był Stanisław Bytnar, więziony w Auschwitz II-Birkenau ojciec Jana Bytnara “Rudego”, żołnierza Szarych Szeregów, jednego z bohaterów książki Aleksandra Kamińskiego “Kamienie na szaniec”. Został aresztowany przez Niemców wraz z synem w marcu 1943 r. Z więzienia na Pawiaku trafił do obozu. Zastrzelili go konwojenci SS.

W kompleksie KL Auschwitz Niemcy pozostawili ok. 7 tys. skrajnie wyczerpanych więźniów. 27 stycznia 1945 r. oswobodzili ich żołnierze Armii Czerwonej.

Na trasie dochodziło do masakr. W nocy z 21 na 22 stycznia na stacji kolejowej w Leszczynach koło Rybnika został zatrzymany pociąg z Gliwic z 2,5 tys. więźniów. Po południu rozkazano im opuścić wagony. Z powodu wycieńczenia część z nich nie była w stanie wykonać rozkazu. Niemcy zaczęli strzelać w otwarte drzwi wagonów. Zginęło ponad 300 osób. Ocalałych pognano na zachód.

Ofiary marszów chowano po drodze. Wśród nich były dzieci. Najmłodszą ofiarą marszu był Ireneusz Rowiński. Jego matka Leokadia uciekła z kolumny podczas nocnego postoju w Pszczynie i wraz z dwoma Żydówkami schroniła się u mieszkanki wsi. 21 stycznia urodziła. Dziecko było sine i źle oddychało. Chłopiec zmarł dziewięć dni później. W 2011 r. na pomniku przy zbiorowym grobie ofiar marszu śmierci na pszczyńskim cmentarzu wmurowano tablicę upamiętniającą Ireneusza.

Mieszkańcy okolic, przez które przechodziły marsze – Polacy i Czesi – pomagali więźniom, którzy zdołali zbiec z kolumny. Ukrywali ich i karmili.

Więźniowie, którzy doszli do Wodzisławia lub Gliwic, wywożeni byli – mimo trzaskającego mrozu – otwartymi wagonami kolejowymi do obozów Mauthausen i Buchenwald. Wielu z tych, którzy przeżyli marsze, zginęło w obozach w głębi Rzeszy.

W kompleksie KL Auschwitz Niemcy pozostawili ok. 7 tys. skrajnie wyczerpanych więźniów. 27 stycznia 1945 r. oswobodzili ich żołnierze Armii Czerwonej. (PAP)


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Harvard didn’t cancel Kenneth Roth; it decided not to honor an antisemite

Harvard didn’t cancel Kenneth Roth; it decided not to honor an antisemite

JONATHAN S. TOBIN


Then-director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth at the Media Security Conference in Munich, Feb. 19, 2017. Credit: Kuhlmann/MSC via Wikimedia Commons.

Denying a fellowship to the man who transformed Human Rights Watch into an anti-Zionist propaganda machine is justified, not a blow to free speech.
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 Cancel culture in academia is a serious problem. There is no sector of American society in which dissent is so routinely crushed, or where free speech is most endangered, as the country’s leading institutions of higher learning. So, the story that someone was supposedly denied a fellowship at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government because of his political beliefs seems to fit into a familiar pattern of shunning and silencing those who don’t adhere to the orthodoxies worshipped by the elites.

That’s what leading outlets of liberal opinion, and even a group well-known for its battle for free speech on college campuses, are claiming has happened to Kenneth Roth. According to the former head of Human Rights Watch (HRW) and his influential supporters, he was snubbed by Harvard because of his “criticism” of Israel.

The conceit of his whiny lament in The Guardian and a dishonest editorial in The Boston Globe lies not only in the assertion that Harvard treated Roth unjustly. More outrageous are the claims by both pieces that the university’s behavior is a symptom of the way criticism of Israel and other left-wing causes are shut down by “wealthy donors”—a thinly disguised attempt by The Globe to throw shade at the Jews—and right-wing extremists.

This narrative is not just misleading and deeply unfair to Kennedy School Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf; it turns the discussion about the attitude toward anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment on college campuses on its head. Indeed, far from being an example of how supposedly courageous truth-tellers about Israeli atrocities are being muzzled by the all-powerful “Israel lobby,” Harvard’s move is a rare instance of a leading academic institution’s taking a stand against antisemitism, rather than tolerating it.

Pro-Israel voices are silenced

At universities and colleges around the United States, the field of Middle East Studies—and now even Israel Studies—is being taught by professors openly hostile to Zionism and the Jewish state. And it’s not exactly a secret that scholars seeking tenure in those departments, or any in the liberal arts for that matter, know that they must keep secret any sign of support for Israel or any belief or affiliation that might contradict reigning leftist/intersectional dogma.

This is the case even at the Kennedy School, as is ironically evident in Roth’s allegations. These include the claim that Elmendorf told scholar Kathryn Sikkink that he rejected Roth over “criticism of Israel.” Yet, Sikkink herself is a malicious foe of Israel who, as the left-wing magazine The Nation reported in its article about the controversy, used HRW’s biased research to put forward her own argument falsely claiming that Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is among the world’s most repressive nations.

The issue at Harvard—or anywhere else in academia—isn’t that anti-Israel scholars can’t get jobs or be given a platform for expounding their ideas. As it happens, Roth already has a fellowship in hand at another Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania, which granted him the title of “Global Justice and Human Rights Visiting Fellow,” an honor that makes a mockery of both concepts.

Indeed, Zionists with prestigious academic appointments are not so much outliers as they are an endangered species, while those prepared, like Roth, to falsely smear Israel as an “apartheid state” or to treat the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet as a crime which must be erased, are smack in the mainstream.

Seen in that light, the effort on Roth’s behalf isn’t so much wrongheaded as it is a case of the left-wing academic and media establishment trying to gaslight the American people into thinking that it is those who lie about Israel who are being persecuted, rather than the other way around.

By deciding to deny Roth the honor of a fellowship, the Kennedy School wasn’t punishing him for holding a minority opinion; it was rightly seeking to distance itself from a person who—despite his Jewish origins and the fawning support he gets from the liberal corporate media and left-wing activist groups like the American Civil Liberties Union—one of the leading proponents of antisemitic attacks on the state of Israel.

Contrary to the disingenuous talk about his merely being a critic of Israel, Roth turned HRW, a group that prior to his becoming its head, was respected as an unbiased advocate for human rights around world, into an organization obsessed with the cause of delegitimizing Israel and valorizing those seeking its destruction.

Human Rights Watch’s anti-Israel propaganda

HRW’s irresponsible and mendacious anti-Israel activism is a matter of record, not merely the opinion, as Roth’s supporters claim, of right-wing troublemakers. A good summary was published by NGO Monitor, an important non-profit organization that keeps tab on groups that specialize in fomenting antisemitism while operating under the cover of the cause of human rights.

Most devastating was the criticism of Roth made by the late Robert Bernstein, HRW’s founder, who wrote in The New York Times that Roth isn’t just prejudiced against Israel. He’s a captive of leftist ideology about colonialism, racism and white privilege. This, according to Bernstein, caused Roth to erase any distinctions between democratic countries like the United States and Israel—which may certainly be flawed and worthy of criticism for some of their policies—and authoritarian and totalitarian states whose very purpose is to eliminate human rights. In Bernstein’s words, Roth “cast aside the distinction between open and closed societies.”

It is true that Roth and HRW have spoken up against genuine human-rights violators like China, Russia and various dictatorships and Muslim theocracies for their offenses. But treating a genuinely democratic country like Israel, where the rule of law prevails and which is under siege from forces bent on its destruction, as the moral equivalent of those nations undermines the entire concept of human-rights activism or justice.

In Bernstein’s view, Roth had hijacked HRW and turned it into an anti-Israel activist group that focused disproportionately on efforts to support the Palestinian war on Zionism. Like others who smear Israel, Roth ignored the fact that the anomalous situation in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) is due almost entirely to the Palestinians’ repeated rejection of peace, support of terrorism and refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn.

Along with other so-called human-rights and international organizations like the UN Human Rights Council, HRW was part of a network of activists dedicated to demonizing Israel and Zionism. HRW is an avid supporter of the antisemitic BDS movement and “lawfare” efforts aimed at manipulating international law to make Israel a pariah. It is in this context that the onslaught against Harvard must be understood.

Some of Roth’s calumnies against Israel are particularly egregious. It wasn’t enough for him to spread falsehoods about Israel’s being an “apartheid state,” or to make dishonest claims about its murder of civilians. He even spread the blood libel that it was engaged in a racist attempt to deny COVID-19 vaccines to Palestinians, when it was the Palestinian Authority that refused the Israeli government’s offers of help in providing shots for Arabs living in the disputed territories under the despotic rule of Mahmoud Abbas.

Yet, what also needs to be understood about the effort to turn Roth into a martyr for academic freedom is that the debate isn’t merely about his despicable record of anti-Israel bias. It’s part of the vicious campaign to delegitimize Israel and Zionism that was the centerpiece of HRW’s activity during his long tenure there.

Roth is a prodigious fundraiser. HRW was rewarded for his calumnies against Israel with a $100 million grant from left-wing billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. Though some on the left treat any criticism of Soros as evidence of Jew hatred, his support for anti-Israel and even antisemitic activism aimed at supporting the Jewish state’s destruction renders their claims risible.

But Roth is also a terrible hypocrite when it comes to raising money. He solicited a $470,000 donation from a Saudi billionaire, and in return promised not to advocate for LGBTQ rights in Muslim countries. Many on the left consider those who cite the fact that Israel is the one country in the Middle East where gays have equal rights (Amir Ohana, the new speaker of Israel’s Knesset, is gay) to be “pinkwashing.” But Roth was prepared to sacrifice the rights of Muslim gays in order to get more cash with which to attack the Jewish state’s existence.

An honest assessment of Roth’s record must lead to the conclusion that he isn’t a “critic” of Israel’s, but rather someone who regards its existence as a crime that must be atoned for by its destruction. His lies about Israel and willingness to deny Jews rights he wouldn’t deny to anyone else isn’t merely a controversial opinion; it’s a virulent variant of antisemitism.

He wouldn’t be the only one with such vile opinions to be given a prestigious perch at an elite university. But it is to the credit of Harvard’s Kennedy School that it drew the line at giving him the kind of honor he clearly doesn’t deserve.

Contrary to the arguments of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a group that has stood up in the past for conservatives, the issue at Harvard isn’t the defense of academic freedom, but normalizing Jew-hatred.

In a saner environment than the one that currently exists in academia and the establishment media, it would be the University of Pennsylvania under fire from faculty, students, alumni and the public for honoring an antisemite like Roth. Instead, it is Harvard’s Elmendorf who is under intolerable pressure to reverse his stand and give Roth yet another platform to advance his campaign to treat Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, as racism.

That the organized Jewish community has had little to say about Roth and the attacks on Harvard’s stand against antisemitism also provides more proof of the failure of American-Jewish leaders and their preference for liberal causes that do nothing to protect the rights or the security of the community they purport to represent.

Rather than meekly accept his claims of martyrdom, those who profess to care about fighting Jew-hatred need to put aside political differences and join in an effort to call him out for his lies. If Harvard is ultimately forced to surrender on this issue, it will be a triumph for Roth’s brand of left-wing antisemitism that is a growing threat to the ability of Jews to speak up for Israel and Zionism in the public square, and especially in academia.

Indeed, it isn’t Kenneth Roth who’s being canceled, but all those who are willing to tell the truth about the leftist war on Israel and the Jews.


Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.


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The era of self-righteous indignation – and politically correct antisemitism

The era of self-righteous indignation – and politically correct antisemitism

Elder of Ziyon


Terrorist – Leila Khaled (Arabicليلى خالدArabic pronunciation: [ˈlajla ˈxaːled] born April 9, 1944) and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Khaled came to public attention for her role in the TWA Flight 840 hijacking in 1969 and one of the four simultaneous Dawson’s Field hijackings the following year as part of the campaign of Black September in Jordan. The first woman to hijack an airplane,[2] she was later released in a prisoner exchange for civilian hostages kidnapped by other PFLP members.[3][4]

As the story of classified papers being discovered in Joe Biden’s private residences snowballs, it is fun to watch the hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle. The people who are filled with anger at Biden were nonchalant when Donald Trump was found to have done the exact same thing, and those who were in the forefront of being angry at Trump are muted now.

It is fairly obvious that neither side really believes that national secrets that jeopardize the security of the United States were revealed in either case. Both episodes are excuses to score political points, to attack and injure the hated enemy. 

The classified papers are a prop, an excuse to act morally righteous. But there is no morality involved here – if there was, then there should be an identical response to both episodes. 

How many people have responded the same in both cases? I haven’t seen any. (I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of either situation – the laws are there for a reason – but it seems highly unlikely that in either case there was a malicious intent.)

The partisan nature of the responses to both episodes is proof that morality isn’t the driver, but smugness. It isn’t righteous indignation, it is self-righteous indignation. It isn’t virtuous, it is virtue signaling. It is a message to the world – my political enemy is beneath contempt while  I am morally superior. He does despicable things that my side would never do (and if it does, it is completely different.)

The self-righteous indignation allows me to hate my opponent without the opprobrium normally associated with the emotion of hate.

It occurs to me that this same psyche is the norm for anti-Zionists. They claim to be righteous; they claim to be moral, they claim that their outrage is a reflection of their pristine values. But when it comes to Israel, the posturing is not merely to feel morally superior – it is to actively attack “Israelis” (meaning, today’s eternal Jews) while wearing the mantle of morality.

It is politically acceptable antisemitism.

The proof is clear to those who care to open their eyes. The people who claim to be defending Palestinian rights do nothing to help Palestinian attain those rights. These moral posers don’t support peace; they justify the most heinous terror attacks against Jews, they don’t say a word about Palestinians being attacked or discriminated against in other Arab countries, they were silent when Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait and Iraq and Libya. Palestinian lives matter – but only when Jews can be blamed. Otherwise, they are just cannon fodder to be placed in limbo until the final battle to destroy the Jewish state. 

Antisemitism has always had a measure of self-righteousness – attacking Jews was the most principled thing anyone could do. Martin Luther told  his followers to burn synagogues and Jewish schools, calling it “sharp mercy.” Hitler framed Jews as a cancerous danger to Germany that must be excised – and that philosophy became part of mainstream German medical ethics. 

Morally sanctioned hate has an almost irresistible attraction. Imagine the psychic rewards of being not only allowed to but encouraged to express and act upon your worst instincts, assured that it is for the greater good! 

Jews become the focal point of hate for everything the self-righteous find reprehensible.  Climate change? US police brutality? Ocean pollution? Domestic abuse of women? Your favorite antisemite not getting the job he wanted? Anything and everything can and has been blamed on the Jews and Israel – and always couched in moral terms.

The more vicious your attacks, the more you are elevated within your circle. That’s how Leila Khaled and Rasmea Odeh become heroes in the West.  <

Today, when more people act smugly virtuous than ever before, Jews are again the target. As they have been for centuries.


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