We Jews have nothing in common with what is called the Orient, thank God. Our uneducated masses [Arab Jews] have ancient spiritual traditions and laws that call the Orient; they must be weaned away from them, and this is, in fact, what we are doing in every decent school, what life itself is doing with great success. We are going in Palestine, first for our national convenience, [second] to sweep out thoroughly all traces of the Oriental soul.
Za'ev Jabotinsky

Testimony of Roy Grufi
They tried to kidnap my uncle right after he was born. The nurse came in to tell my grandmother that her baby didn’t survive. My grandfather, who had the ability to be very scary when he wanted to, was not convinced. He went over to her and yelled: “Where is my son?!” and was both mad and loud enough to make the Ashkenazi nurse return his son.

Testimony of Herzel Doniari
My sister Rachel was three months old. She had a fever, so my mother took her from Nahariya to Rambam Hospital in Haifa. We lived in a shack in the transit camp and my parents didn’t speak any Hebrew. There was transportation only once a day. My mother went to visit her after a week and found her healthy. She wanted to take her home, but she was told to come back in two weeks. A week later she received a letter saying that the baby died. She asked to see a body, but there was no body. Eighteen years later an army draft notice arrived.

Remembering the thousands of children who disappeared in the “Yemenite Babies Affair” by Vincent Calvetti-Wolf
Many accounts have been written about the large waves of immigration to the State of Israel following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when Jews from across the Middle East and North Africa immigrated to the new state. Less known is the fact that during those early years, several thousand babies and young children went missing.
Nearly all of these children were born to families of recent immigrants, living in the poorly maintained and isolated absorption camps where they were settled by state authorities upon their arrival.

Around two-thirds of the missing children were from the families of immigrants from Yemen, according to Amram, an organization dedicated to documenting and raising awareness of what has come to be known as the “Yemenite Babies Affair.”
Every eighth child of a Yemenite family went missing, while “the remaining third of the children were from other Mizrahi families – Tunisian, Moroccan, Libyan, Iraqi and others – and a small number were children of families who immigrated from the Balkans.” A small number of missing children from Ashkenazi families have also been documented.

In many of these cases, a common pattern emerged. From Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber’s book “Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict: The Yemenite Babies Affair,” a “typical scenario was as follows: a baby was taken to the hospital despite parental assertions that the child was healthy. The baby was then taken to one of several institutions around the country, such as Wizo, an international women’s organization with centers in Safed, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. The parents were told that their baby had died.”

In some cases, a child who was said to have died was later returned to their family when a parent made enough of a disruption. In other cases, parents were told their child had died and been buried by hospital staff, with families never shown a burial spot or death certificate.
And in others, nurses have testified that they thought they were “doing the family a favor” by finding another, more well-off family to adopt their child.
As a result, many families of missing children have accused establishment-linked hospitals and clinics of systematically kidnapping their children and giving them to Ashkenazi families in Israel, Europe, and the United States.

“The Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan Children Affair” by The Amram Association
In the early years of the State of Israel, and especially in the fifties, thousands of babies and toddlers disappeared from their families - families of immigrants who came to Israel and were housed in transit and absorption camps. About two-thirds of the children were from families of Yemenite immigrants.
According to low estimates, in those years every eighth child of a Yemenite family disappeared. The remaining third of the children were from other Mizrachi families - Tunisian, Moroccan, Libyan, Iraqi and others – and a small number were children of families who immigrated from the Balkans.

Thousands of testimonies by parents indicate a similar method: parents were asked to give their children to nurseries or hospitals under the pretext that there “they will be given more appropriate care.” Sometimes children were violently taken by social workers or nurses, placed in ambulances and forcibly transferred to these institutions. The parents were not allowed to stay with their children and were told to go home and to return only to breastfeed their babies. A few days later the parents were told that their child had died. The parents never saw their child’s body and were not allowed to take their child to be buried. In many cases, parents did not receive a death certificate or received it much later, retroactively.
A few dozen children were returned to their parents after the latter’s fierce protests, but the fate of most of the children is unknown. Many appeals to law enforcement agencies, government offices and various officials were unsuccessful. The children were not located and proof of their deaths was not found. On the contrary: some of them were found years later in the bosom of other families.

The affair came to light again a few years later, when most of the families received draft orders from the IDF for the children pronounced as “dead.” Over the years, and only after strong public criticism, official inquiries were conducted by the state.

In June 2016 , Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Tzachi Hanegbi, a government minister, to re-examine the evidence in the three previous inquiries. Netanyahu said it would “right an historic wrong” and marked a new era of transparency. The government opened up nearly all of the archives of the inquiries putting them online.

In 2016 after having re-examined evidence given to a commission of inquiry in the late 1990s, Cabinet Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told Israeli TV: “They took the children and gave them away. I don’t know where.” The minister admitted that at least “hundreds” of children were taken without their parent’s consent, marking the first time such a public claim had been made by a government official.

Disturbing revelations followed in a special Knesset committee about medical experiments that had been conducted on the Yemenite children. Prior testimony given under oath during the previous inquiries revealed that many children had died as a consequence of medical negligence.
Further testimony revealed that four undernourished babies died after being administered an experimental protein injection.
Violating Jewish tradition, post-mortem examinations were carried out on children who were then buried in mass graves.
Children’s hearts were removed in some cases and given to US doctors researching the near absence of heart disease found in Yemen.

In 2016 after having re-examined evidence given to a commission of inquiry in the late 1990s, Cabinet Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told Israeli TV: “They took the children and gave them away. I don’t know where.” The minister admitted that at least “hundreds” of children were taken without their parent’s consent, marking the first time such a public claim had been made by a government official.

In December 2021, Haaretz exposed a draft report on the affair whose publication was being suppressed by the Ministry of Health. Written by the outgoing deputy director general and two others, it
reveals the involvement of doctors, nurses and caregivers in taking the children and acting as middlemen in their adoptions, sometimes in exchange for money. The report chronicles racist perceptions at the time of ‘backward immigrants’ from Middle Eastern and North African countries, using the pretext of it being in the ‘best interests of the children’ to justify their being taken away from their biological parents.

Pope Gregory X (1271)
Gregory, bishop, servant of the servants of God, extends greetings and the apostolic benediction to the beloved sons in Christ, the faithful Christians, to those here now and to those in the future.

Even as it is not allowed to the Jews in their assemblies presumptuously to undertake for themselves more than that which is permitted them by law, even so they ought not to suffer any disadvantage in those [privileges] which have been granted them. [This sentence, first written by Gregory I in 598, embodies the attitude of the Church to the Jew.]
Although they prefer to persist in their stubbornness rather than to recognize the words of their prophets and the mysteries of the Scriptures [which, according to the Church, foretold the coming of Jesus], and thus to arrive at a knowledge of Christian faith and salvation; nevertheless, inasmuch as they have made an appeal for our protection and help, we therefore admit their petition and offer them the shield of our protection through the clemency of Christian piety.
In so doing, we follow in the footsteps of our predecessors of blessed memory, the popes of Rome — Calixtus, Eugene, Alexander, Clement, Innocent, and Honorius.

We decree moreover that no Christian shall compel them or any one of their group to come to baptism unwillingly.
But if any one of them shall take refuge of his own accord with Christians, because of conviction, then, after his intention will have been manifest, he shall be made a Christian without any intrigue.
For, indeed, that person who is known to have come to Christian baptism not freely, but unwillingly, is not believed to posses the Christian faith.
[The Church, in principle, never approved of compulsory baptism of Jews.]

Moreover, no Christian shall presume to seize, imprison, wound, torture, mutilate, kill, or inflict violence on them; furthermore, no one shall presume, except by judicial action of the authorities of the country, to change the good customs in the land where they live for the purpose of taking their money or goods from them or from others.
In addition, no one shall disturb them in any way during the celebration of their festivals, whether by day or by night, with clubs or stones or anything else. Also no one shall exact any compulsory service of them unless it be that which they have been accustomed to render in previous times.
[Up to this point Gregory X has merely repeated the bulls of his predecessors.]

Since it happens occasionally that some Christians lose their children, the Jews are accused by their enemies of secretly carrying off and killing these same Christian children and of making sacrifices of the heart and blood of these very children. It happens, too, that the parents of these very children, or some other Christian enemies of these Jews, secretly hide these very children in order that they may be able to injure these Jews, and in order that they may be able to extort from them a certain amount of money by redeeming them from their straits.
[Following the lead of Innocent IV, 1247, Gregory attacks the ritual murder charge at length.]
And most falsely do these Christians claim that the Jews have secretly and furtively carried away these children and killed them, and that the Jews offer sacrifices from the heart and the blood of these children, since their law in this matter precisely and expressly forbids Jews to sacrifice, eat, or drink the blood, or to eat the flesh of animals having claws.
This has been demonstrated many times at our court by Jews converted to the Christian faith: nevertheless very many Jews are often seized and detained unjustly because of this.

We decree, therefore, that Christians need not be obeyed against Jews in a case or situation of this type, and we order that Jews seized under such a silly pretext be freed from imprisonment, and that they shall not be arrested henceforth on such a miserable pretext, unless — which we do not believe — they be caught in the commission of the crime.
We decree that no Christian shall stir up anything new against them, but that they should be maintained in that status and position in which they were in the time of our predecessors, from antiquity till now.

We decree in order to stop the wickedness and avarice of bad men, that no one shall dare to devastate or to destroy a cemetery of the Jews or to dig up human bodies for the sake of getting money.
[The Jews had to pay a ransom before the bodies of their dead were restored to them.]
Moreover, if any one, after having known the content of this decree, should — which we hope will not happen — attempt audaciously to act contrary to it, then let him suffer punishment in his rank and position, or let him be punished by the penalty of ex-communication, unless he makes amends for his boldness by proper recompense. Moreover, we wish that only those Jews who have not attempted to contrive anything toward the destruction of the Christian faith be fortified by support of such protection.

Given at Orvieto by the hand of the Magister John Lectator, vice-chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, on the 7th of October, n the first indiction [cycle of fifteen years], in the year 1272 of the divine incarnation, in the first year of the pontificate of our master, the Pope Gregory X.

“The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952” by Gudrun Kramer
In sum, a Jewish question as it emerged in nineteenth-century Europe did not exist in twentieth-century Egypt. Jews were not discriminated against because of their religion or race, but for political reasons.
[...]
[R]eligious resentment was secondary and only came to bear under specific political and economic circumstances.
While this is true of Christian Europe as well, where anti-Semitism did not develop autonomously either, but under specific sociopolitical conditions, there still remains a difference in scope and emphasis.
In Egypt, hostility was primarily linked to a clearly identifiable political issue, the Palestine conflict.
The polemics of Islamic and nationalist militants, which, for obvious reasons, received so much attention, should not tempt one to identify them with the sentiments of the Egyptian population at large. In the period under consideration, there were no signs of anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic feeling among the general public.
It should also be remembered that until 1956, the government did not introduce discriminatory legislation against the Jews, nor did it initiate any propaganda or persecution campaigns against the sentiments of the Egyptian population at large.
In the period under consideration, there were no signs of anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic feeling among the general public. It should also be remembered that until 1956, the government did not introduce discriminatory legislation against the Jews, nor did it initiate any propaganda or persecution campaigns against them.
The assumption that Islam is inherently intolerant, and that anti-Semitism is present at all times and places is refuted by the economic and social success of the Jewish middle and upper classes in the interwar period and even more so by the absence of popular anti-Semitism during this period and beyond.
[...]
That the Jews were driven out altogether, a few hundred people excepted, and that the Greeks or the Italians were not, was the result of the Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine.

“Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew” by Avi Shlaim
The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Until then the Jews of Iraq, among them my family, were just one of the several minorities that made up the country. We were not aliens; we were natives; and we were looked upon as natives. Unlike Europe, Iraq did not have a ‘Jewish problem’. We were not singled out for special treatment. We were a minority, not the minority. As Jewish Iraqis, our status was not fundamentally different to that of the other Iraqi minorities.
Until the rise of nationalism in the interwar period, the main criterion for differentiating between Jews and Arabs in Iraq was religion, and only as an identifying characteristic, not as a divisive one.
Zionism changed all that.

By endowing Judaism with a territorial dimension that it did not have previously, it accentuated the difference between Jews and Muslims in Arab spaces. Whether they liked it or not, from now on Jews were identified with the Jewish state.
The displacement of three-quarters of a million Palestinians by Israel intensified Muslim hostility not only towards the Zionist movement but also towards the Jews in their own country. Increasingly, the Jews were treated not as sons of Iraq but as part of an alien and usurping entity. Zionism not only turned the Palestinians into refugees; it turned the Jews of the East into strangers in their own land.
In 1947–49 it was not only the land of Palestine that was partitioned but also the past. The common past of Jews and Muslims in Iraq was superseded by the new reality of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

“To Rise Above - The Amazing Life of HaRav Dov Cohen” by Dov Cohen
A strong friendship existed among all residents of the city [Hebron] … We used to attend Arab weddings... We were welcome guests at all their happy events.
[…]
The Arabs, and even their sheikhs, used to attend Jewish weddings as a sign of friendship.
[…]
The Yeshiva students, used to go down sometimes to the village to buy products, sometimes even after midnight. In those days we walked around freely, without security patrol and without any weapons in all the Arab villages. No one had any fear.
[…]
Every month on Erev Rosh Chodesh, the yeshiva would go pray at the Cave of Machpelah [Cave of the Patriarchs]. We were welcomed there… It was well-known that when the yeshiva considered moving to a different location, the local Arab leaders stood up to prevent it.

“Past Precedents for Muslim and Jewish Peace” by Martin Gilbert
Jewish doctors, merchants and artisans lived prosperously and worked productively under Muslim rule. In Afghanistan, in the 11th and 12th centuries, Jewish communities likewise flourished; Sultan Mahmud (998-1030) assigned a Jew named Isaac to administer his lead mines and melt ore for him. One of the most successful Jews in a Muslim land in the 12th century was Abu al-Munajja Solomon ben Shaya, a government official in Egypt. As the administrator of several districts, his fame rested on the irrigation canal that he constructed over six years, bringing water to a parched agricultural landscape. So successful was he that he was given the Arabic title Sani al-Dawla (‘The Noble of the State’).

Many great Jewish thinkers, scholars and poets lived in Muslim lands. Maimonides – Musa ibn Maymun in Arabic, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon in Hebrew and known by his Hebrew acronym as the Rambam – was the greatest Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages. In 1164, having fled Muslim persecution in Fez, he settled in Egypt under the tolerant Shi’ite Fatimids, where he became a court physician. In his writings on food and diet he advocated a ‘shared convivial meal’ as a way to conquer anxiety and tension ‘and also suspicion between ethnic groups’.

Close to power in Islamic society, Maimonides spoke and wrote in Arabic and was conversant with Arab thought and culture. In Cairo, one of the great intellectual centres of the Arab world, he entered an environment that encouraged his learning and his creativity. He also served as Chief Rabbi of the Jewish community there. His fame as a physician was such that Saladin, when Sultan of Egypt, appointed him court physician.

Among Maimonides’ medical writings was Fi ‘l-Jima’a (‘On Sexual Intercourse’), a treatise on sex and aphrodisiacs concentrating heavily on dietetics, a branch of medicine in which he was a pioneer. The treatise was commissioned by Sultan Omar, the nephew of Saladin. Intended for a non-Jewish reader, it was distributed in Arabic.

A draft proclamation survives declaring Maimonides Ra’is al-Yahud, ‘Head of the Jews’, recognised by the Muslim authorities as the official representative of the Jewish community in Cairo.

The great Muslim warrior, Saladin, a Kurd and scourge of the Christian Crusaders, conquered Jerusalem in 1187 after a five-month siege. Saladin encouraged the Jews to return to the city. Some came from as far south as Yemen, others from North Africa. Between 1209 and 1211, Jews also reached Jerusalem from England, northern France and Provence. Some 300 rabbis in all were welcomed to the city by its Muslim rulers.[...]
When Abbas I became Shah of Persia in 1588 Jews were at first much favoured. During his military campaign against the Georgians in the Caucasus, Jewish soldiers fought in Abbas’s army. In appreciation of their help, he allowed them to establish a new Jewish community, Farahabad – ‘City of Joy’ – on the shore of the Caspian Sea. When Abbas moved his capital from Kazvan to Isfahan many Jews went to live there.

Each succeeding century saw Jews living in Muslim lands discover opportunity and contentment, while at the same time being subjected to outbursts of fanaticism, attack and even massacre. No Muslim country was free from periods of anti-Jewish sentiment, or devoid of times of conciliation and peaceful coexistence.

Jews flourished in Egypt and Iraq, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. But with the advent of Zionism and Britain’s promise of a Jewish national home in Palestine, growing Arab nationalism – which Britain had also encouraged – began to champion the Palestinian cause and to demand an end to Jewish immigration into Palestine.

At the same time, Islamic fundamentalism, inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, denounced all Jewish immigration to Palestine, even to those areas where Jews had been farming for many decades. They began to portray Jews in Muslim lands – few of whom were Zionists – as disloyal and alien.


“Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew” by Avi Shlaim
My father and my mother had a strong sense of belonging and a deep emotional attachment to Iraq. They had extended families, many friends, a support network, wealth and a high social status. Before the birth of Israel and the first Arab–Israeli war, the thought of leaving the country for good would have been inconceivable.
[...]
At the tender age of fourteen, my father embarked on what gradually turned into a highly successful and lucrative career as a businessman. He had a Jewish partner of roughly the same age, named Shouwa’ Obaid. They bought and sold building tools and materials: cement, cement mixers, iron bars, doors, bricks, tiles, bathroom equipment and kitchen sets. They worked hard, developed their business, seized every opportunity that came their way and prospered.
[...]
[M]y father and his partner acquired a large circle of customers that included senior public figures and cabinet ministers. King Faisal I was their most illustrious customer; his aides ordered supplies from them to build the Qasr al-Zuhur. This was the permanent residence that Faisal I had built for himself and his family after his temporary sojourn in Qasr Shashoua and this was where King Ghazi met his death. Government ministers would buy plots of land and build luxury villas on them for their families. They would get my father to supply the building materials for their homes, on their account. The credit facilities he extended were extremely generous and more often than not, the ministers failed to pay the money they owed or made only partial payments, but my father didn’t insist.

Supplying goods without insisting on payment was a form of bribe. In Iraq of those interwar years, the practice was common, based on the tacit understanding that ‘you scratch my back and I scratch yours’. The ministers would incur an obligation, and this disposed them to use their official position to return the favour when the opportunity arose. Return favours could take the form of purchasing supplies for their ministry at inflated prices, issuing import licences or granting exemption from certain categories of taxes. According to my mother, many Jewish merchants resorted to this kind of subtle or not-so-subtle way of bribing Muslim ministers and senior officials.
[...]
On his own, my father continued to prosper. In 1939, he built for himself a large, well-appointed and strikingly elegant house. A German expatriate architect friend designed it for him. The house was near the YMCA and Orosdi-Back, the famous Jewish-owned upmarket department store, and opposite the Meir Taweig synagogue in the prosperous district of Bataween, which sprawls across central Baghdad. The house was located not far from the Tigris River which flows through the middle of the city and adds to Baghdad’s architectural beauty with its array of old-fashioned bridges. The house had three floors, about ten rooms, three luxurious bathrooms and a large garden of manicured lawns, lush flower beds and tall palm trees.

Note:
The Orosdi-Back department store chain was created by two Jewish families in the middle of the 19th century. The stores were located in the Ottoman Empire’s main cities and Europe - including Teheran, Beirut, and Vienna. The descendants of the families were ennobled by the emperor Franz-Josef, and they say they are part of the old European aristocracy today.

“Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew” by Avi Shlaim
My mother was born in Baghdad on 31 July 1924. [...] My mother’s maiden name was Mas’uda Obadiah, Saida (meaning joyful) for short.

Saida recalled her childhood in Baghdad with great nostalgia. She considered herself a lucky child, pampered by her extended family. As the only girl, she was the focus of much attention. Her father doted on her. She had three considerably older brothers and seven maternal uncles some of whom traveled on business and brought her sweets, all kinds of toys and fashionable clothes.

She was also encouraged to pursue any leisure activities she liked. As an infant, she would plunge into the water at every opportunity – the origin of her passion for swimming. At the age of five, she began to have swimming lessons with the teacher who had previously coached her brothers. She was increasingly adventurous in the waters of the Tigris, jumping off bridges, doing stunts and participating in competitions. On top of this, she pursued horseback riding and dancing.
[...]
Saida received her education at the Laura Kadoorie School for Girls in Baghdad – the most renowned ‘Alliance’ school.
Alliance was the short name for the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Paris-based Jewish organisation founded in 1860 by wealthy French Jews to bring the light of the West to their co-religionists in the East. It sought to combine heritage with modernity and to excel in both general and Jewish studies.
The motto of the organisation was the rabbinic injunction ‘All Jews bear responsibility for one another.’
Its schools emphasised European languages, especially French, and modern sciences. The main language of instruction was French, the language in which History, Geography, Maths and the sciences were taught. The Alliance used secular education as a vehicle for social mobility. It had an explicit ‘mission civilisatrice’: to lift the Jews from what some regarded as the backwardness of the Arab lands.

In 1864, the first Alliance school for boys was opened in Baghdad. In 1893 a school for girls was opened. The values of the organisation were openness, tolerance and equality of opportunity, and as such it did not exclude non-Jews. As the reputation of the Alliance went up, a few Muslims and Christians began to send their children to its schools. In this Westernised, cosmopolitan environment, Saida received her elementary and secondary education.

One of her early memories was a visit to the Laura Kadoorie school by King Faisal I in the company of the Chief Rabbi and other leaders of the Jewish community. Faisal made a point of visiting every Jewish school in Baghdad in his quest to embrace minorities and to forge a unified Iraqi nation.

In Saida’s recollection, the Alliance was a happy and progressive school with particularly high standards in languages: the French teachers came from Paris, the English teachers from London, and some of the Arabic teachers from Beirut, one of the cultural centres of the Arab world. Saida did not excel in her studies, however. She was more interested in sporting activities, dancing, clubs, parties and having fun. She left school at the age of seventeen with varying degrees of competence in four languages.
[...]
Her school promoted Iraqi patriotism like any other school, with the girls all singing a paean to the goodness of Faisal I as ‘the best king in the world’.
In 1933, when Faisal died in suspicious circumstances [during a routine medical check-up in Switzerland], she and her classmates all wept, calling for Bern to be burned to the ground and the destruction of Switzerland.

The Laurie Kadoorie School for girls in Bagdad. At that time, about a third of Baghdad’s total population was Jewish.

The Laurie Kadoorie School for girls in Bagdad. At that time, about a third of Baghdad’s total population was Jewish.

“Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew” by Avi Shlaim
Saida’s Story
The participants:
Saida - author’s mother,
Haskell Saltoun -Saida’s prodigal maternal grandfather,
Isaac Shalom Yusef Obadiah - Saida’s prodigiously wealthy paternal grandfather,
Meir - Isaac’s son, Saida’s father, Mouzli - Haskell’s daughter, Saida’s mother,
Menashe Mani - Meir’s “righteous” uncle.

Haskell Saltoun, hailed from a rich family of landlords, inheriting from his father a small fortune in the shape of forty keys to forty houses. The father told Haskell that their family should be able to live from the rent for these houses alone for seven generations without having to do any other work.
Unfortunately, the patriarch failed to anticipate that his eldest son and heir would develop a taste for gambling.
[…]
Haskell’s gambling habit began following the death of his father. He used to play cards in the evenings in his palatial home with members of the prominent Muslim families in Baghdad such as the Pachachis and the Haidaris. His friends liked him because his pockets usually bulged with money.
[…]
Whenever he ran short of money, he would sell a house. Ultimately there were no houses left. He was forced to earn a living and became a saraf, a moneylender. Despite the decline in his fortunes, Haskell retained his extravagant lifestyle and his easy-going disposition. ... Meir, Saida’s father and my grandfather … was born in Bombay on 16 September 1882. His full name was Meir Isaac Shalom Obadiah. Having made his fortune and lived in India for over fifty years, Isaac decided to sell his business, realise his assets and return to Baghdad to retire. His wife was especially keen to return to Baghdad to rejoin her family. When Isaac died, he bequeathed to his four children his enormous wealth [his family - the Sassoons were global merchants and manufacturers].

As the eldest son, Meir managed the inheritance.
My mother depicted the sons as feckless, indolent and gluttons to boot. For a fair number of years, Meir and his brothers led a life of leisure. They lived in the large parental home, kept a pleasure boat on the river, ate well and consumed large quantities of Arak, a distilled Levantine spirit of the anise drinks family with an alcohol content of 40–63%. They threw parties for which they hired famous singers and spent money prodigally. According to one apocryphal story the brothers spent their days lying in hammocks tied to trees in the garden, and every now and again a servant would come around with a bottle of Arak to refill their glasses.

During this carefree phase of his life, Meir met and rather reluctantly married Mouzli Haskell Saltoun. He was an eligible bachelor, well-educated and wealthy, and most Jewish parents would have been thrilled to have him as their son-in-law. Many young women were presented to him by matchmakers, but none satisfied his exacting requirements. One day they introduced him to Mouzli, a tall girl with curly black hair, not particularly pretty but clever, lively and amusing. He was informed that Mouzli came from a good home and would be a devoted wife and mother. Meir had just come from his boat where he enjoyed singing, playing the accordion and sipping Arak. Drunk, he didn’t judge Mouzli by his previous high standards.

By chance, he knew her father, Haskell Saltoun – a great boon. Haskell, as noted earlier, was a genial, easy-going and malleable character. [...]
He assumed that Mouzli would be as sweet-natured and mild-mannered as her father and he was persuaded to get engaged to her.

Meir soon realised he had made a terrible mistake. His fiancée was difficult and argumentative. He informed the Rabbi that he had had second thoughts and wanted to annul the engagement.
The Rabbi panicked: in Baghdad in those days an engagement entailed a signed document, analogous to a marriage contract.
He ruled that if Meir wanted to annul the engagement, he would need to pay Mouzli’s family five hundred gold coins, as specified in the document, to compensate them for the disgrace.
Reluctantly, Meir took out five hundred gold coins, gave them to his maternal uncle, Menashe Mani, and asked him to hand them over to the Rabbi with a curse.

Walking along the river towards the Rabbi’s home, Menashe passed a man on a boat in the river, shouting ‘One dinar to Basra! One dinar to Basra!’
Menashe reflected: ‘Am I building a home or destroying one? This money is not for a marriage but for a divorce.’
Instead of delivering the money with a curse, he bought a ticket to Basra whence he went by boat to India and disappeared.
Meir did not have another five hundred gold coins to spare, so he went ahead with the marriage to Mouzli.
Following the birth of three sons in rapid succession, fifteen years into the marriage, Mouzli gave birth to a baby girl whom they named Mas’uda.

What is more, this decree was interpreted extensively by the Central Department of Justice to the effect that “on account of the political, criminal, and hygienic risks occasioned by Jews,” anyone helping Jews who had not “left” the ghetto was analogously punishable by death (sec. 2 of the Penal Code.)

A notable example is the circular dated July 18, 1943, issued by the Central Department of Justice (ZS, Poland 342, 204 f.) on the interpretation of the Third Decree on Residence Restrictions for Jews in the General Government of October 15, 1941 (VBLGG 1941, 595), which prescribed the death penalty for any who left the ghetto without permission and those who helped to hide Jews.

See also the circular dated May 9, 1942, issued by the Central Department of Justice, which directed the courts to punish the departure of minors as having been set up by the parents(!), who were to be sentenced to death (ZS, Poland 342, 880), sec. 2 of the Juvenile Courts Law notwithstanding (prosecution from the age of 14 years), and the principles of accessory acts.

The same thing that is going on at the Warsaw Ghetto has been happening in a hundred other cities and towns across Poland. The total number of murdered Jews has already exceeded one million and is growing every day. They are all dying – the rich and the poor, the old, women, men, teenagers, and infants.
Catholics die with the name of Jesus and Mary on their lips alongside Orthodox Jews.
They are all guilty of the crime of having been born into the Jewish Nation, which Hitler condemned to death.

The entire world watches these crimes, the worst in history, and remains silent.
The slaughter of millions of defenseless people is met with a universal, portentous silence.
The executioners remain silent, not wishing to boast of their deeds. England and America remain silent.
Even influential, international Jewry, which is sensitive to anything detrimental to its members, remains silent.
Poles also remain silent. Polish politicians, friendly to Jews, restrict themselves to diary notes. Poles antagonistic to Jews declare themselves disinterested in a matter which does not concern them.

Dying Jews are surrounded by Pilates washing their hands. [...]
We do not wish to be Pilates.
Our feelings towards Jews have not changed. We will continue to consider them as political, economic, and idealistic enemies of Poland.
Furthermore, we realize that they hate us more than the Germans, that they consider us responsible for their misfortune. Why and on what basis is a mystery of a Jewish soul; however, it is a confirmed fact.
Nonetheless, being aware of these feelings, we are not exempt from an obligation to condemn a crime.

We do not have the ability to counteract these German murders actively. We can give no advice. We cannot rescue anyone.
However, with our hearts filled with mercy, indignation, and terror, we protest.
God demands that we protest – God, who forbids us to kill.
Our Christian conscience demands that, too.
Every human being is entitled to love their neighbor. The blood of the defenseless cries for vengeance.
Whoever is not with us in this protest is not a Catholic.

“Autobiography of Rudolf Höss” - the commandant of Auschwitz
In the summer of 1941, I cannot remember the exact date, I was suddenly summoned to the Reichsführer SS, directly by his adjutant’s office.

Contrary to his usual custom, Himmler received me without his adjutant being present, and said in effect:
“The Führer has ordered that the Jewish question be solved once and for all and that we, the SS, are to implement that order.”
“The existing extermination centres in the East are not in a position to carry out the large actions which are anticipated. I have therefore ear-marked Auschwitz for this purpose, both because of its good position as regards communications and because the area can be easily isolated and camouflaged.”

“At first I thought of calling in a senior SS officer for this job, but I changed my mind in order to avoid difficulties concerning the terms of reference. I have now decided to entrust this task to you. It is difficult and onerous and calls for complete devotion notwithstanding the difficulties that may arise. You will learn further details from Sturmbannführer Eichmann of the Reich Main Security Office who will call on you in the immediate future.”

“The departments concerned will be notified by me in due course. You will treat this order as absolutely secret, even from your superiors. After your talk with Eichmann you will immediately forward to me the plans of the projected installations.”
“The Jews are the sworn enemies of the German people and must be eradicated. Every Jew that we can lay our hands on is to be destroyed now during the war, without exception. If we cannot now obliterate the biological basis of Jewry, the Jews will one day destroy the German people.”

On receiving these grave instructions, I returned forthwith to Auschwitz without reporting to my superior at Oranienburg.


“The Memoirs of Doctor Felix Kersten”
“Why, as to the Jews,” said Himmler, “I wanted to drive them out of Germany, but I did not want to kill them. I even suggested allowing them to take some part of their fortune along with them, as was done before the war. But in 1938 Goebbels had the synagogues burned, and instigated the horrible persecutions of the Jews. Goebbels kept talking to Hitler, urging it, and one day, early in the war, Hitler decided that the Jews must be totally exterminated.
“It was Goebbels who proposed to Hitler that the SS be commissioned to destroy the Jews—not I. I was indignant at the whole thing—revolted. But what could I do against Hitler’s orders? Heil Hitler! I am only a soldier who has to obey orders. The motto of the SS is, ‘Honor and loyalty are one.’
[...]
Hitler was alone responsible. He had declared many times that he alone bore the responsibility for everything done at his command.


“Autobiography of Rudolf Höss”
I had many detailed discussions with Eichmann concerning all matters connected with the “final solution of the Jewish problem”, but without ever disclosing my inner anxieties. I tried in every way to discover Eichmann’s innermost and real convictions about this “solution.” Yes, every way.

Yet even when we were quite alone together and the drink had been flowing freely, so that he was in his most expansive mood, he showed that he was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew that he could lay his hands on.
Without pity and in cold blood we must complete this extermination as rapidly as possible. Any compromise, even the slightest, would have to be paid for bitterly at a later date.
In the face of such grim determination, I was forced to bury all my human considerations as deeply as possible.
Indeed, I must freely confess that after these conversations with Eichmann I almost came to regard such emotions as a betrayal of the Fuhrer.


“Reminiscences of SS-Unterscharführer Pery Broad”
Both sides of the big entrance gate to the crematorium were wide open. Suspecting nothing the column marched in, in lines of five persons, and stood in the yard. There were three or four hundred of them. Somewhat nervously the SS guard at the entrance waited for the last man to enter the yard. Quickly he shut the gate and bolted it. Grabner and Hössler were standing on the roof of the crematorium.
Grabner spoke to the Jews, who unsuspectingly awaited their fate,
“You will now bathe and be disinfected, we don’t want any epidemics in the camp. Then you will be brought to your barracks, where you’ll get some hot soup. You will be employed in accordance with your professional qualifications. Now undress and put your clothes in front of you on the ground.”
They willingly followed these instructions, given them in a friendly, warm- hearted voice. Some looked forward to the soup, others were glad that the nerve-racking uncertainty as to their immediate future was over and that their worst expectations were not realized. Al felt relieved after their days full of anxiety.
Grabner and Hössler continued from the roof to give friendly advice, which had a calming effect upon the people, “Put your shoes close to your clothes bundle, so that you can find them after the bath.”
“Is the water warm ? Of course, warm showers.” “What is your trade? A shoemaker? We need them urgently. Report to me immediately after !”
Such words dispelled any last doubts or lingering suspicions. The first lines entered the mortuary through the hall. Everything was extremely tidy. But the special smell made some of them uneasy. They looked in vain for showers or water pipes fixed to the ceiling. The hall meanwhile was getting packed.
Several SS-men had entered with them, full of jokes and small talk. They unobtrusively kept their eyes on the entrance. As soon as the last person had entered, they disappeared without much ado. Suddenly the door was closed. It had been made tight with rubber and secured with iron fittings. Those inside heard the heavy bolts being secured. They were screwed to with screws, making the door air-tight. A deadly, paralyzing terror spread among the victims. They started to beat upon the door, in helpless rage and despair they hammered on it with their fists. Derisive laughter was the only reply. Somebody shouted through the door, “Don’t get burnt, while you make your bath!”

Several victims noticed that covers had been removed from the six holes in the ceiling They uttered a loud cry of terror when they saw a head in a gas-mask at one opening.
The “disinfectors” were at work. One of them was SS-Unterscharführer Teuer, decorated with the Cross of War Merit. With a chisel and a hammer they opened a few innocuous-looking tins which bore the inscription “Cyclon, to be used against vermin. Attention, poison! To be opened by trained personnel only!” The tins were filled to the brim with blue granules the size of peas.
Immediately after opening the tins, their contents was thrown into the holes which were quickly covered.
Meanwhile Grabner gave a sign to the driver of a lorry, which had stopped close to the crematorium. The driver started the engine and its deafening noise was louder than the death cries of the hundreds of people inside, being gassed to death. Grabner looked with the interest of a scientist at the second hand of his wrist watch. Cyclon acted swiftly. It consists of hydrocyanic acid in solid form. As soon as the tin was emptied, the prussic acid escaped from the granules. One of the men, who participated in the bestial gassing, could not refrain from lifting, for the fraction of a second, the cover of one of the vents and from spitting into the hall. Some two minutes later the screams became less loud and only an indistinct groaning was heard. The majority of the victims had already lost consciousness. Two minutes more and Grabner stopped looking at his watch.
It was over. There was complete silence. The lorry had driven away. The guards were called off, and the cleaning squad started to sort out the clothes, so tidily put down in the yard of the crematorium.
Busy SS-men and civilians working in the camp were again passing the mound, on whose artificial slopes young trees swayed peacefully in the wind. Very few knew what terrible event had taken place there only a few minutes before and what sight the mortuary below the greenery would present.

Sometime later, when the ventilators had extracted the gas, the prisoners working in the crematorium opened the door to the mortuary. The corpses, their mouths wide open, were leaning on one another. They were especially closely packed near to the door, where in their deadly fright they had crowded to force it.
The prisoners of the crematorium squad worked like robots, apathetically and without a trace of emotion. It was difficult to tug the corpses from the mortuary, as their twisted limbs had grown stiff with the gas. Thick smoke clouds poured from the chimney.


Goebbels’ diaries, Part II, Volume 2
December 13, 1941
Regarding the Jewish question, the Fuehrer is determined to clean the table. He prophesized that should the Jews once again bring about a world war, they would be annihilated. These were no empty words.
The world war has come, therefore the annihilation of the Jews has to be its inevitable consequence. The question has to be examined without any sentimentality.
We are not here to pity Jews, but to have pity for our own German people. If the German people have sacrificed about 160,000 dead in the battles in the east, the instigators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.

March 27, 1942
The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.

The Jews are Guilty!, Das Reich - November 16, 1941
The historic responsibility of world Jewry for the outbreak and widening of this war has been proven so clearly that it does not need to be talked about any further. The Jews wanted war, and now they have it. But the Führer's prophecy of 30 January 1939 to the German Reichstag is also being fulfilled: If international finance Jewry should succeed in plunging the world into war once again, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the world and thereby the victory of the Jews, rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
We are seeing the fulfillment of the prophecy. The Jews are receiving a penalty that is certainly hard, but more than deserved. World Jewry erred in adding up the forces available to it for this war, and now is gradually experiencing the annihilation that it planned for us, and would have carried out without a second thought if it had possessed the ability. It is perishing according its own law: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
Every Jew is our enemy in this historic struggle, regardless of whether he vegetates in a Polish ghetto or carries on his parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg or blows the trumpets of war in New York or Washington. All Jews by virtue of their birth and their race are part of an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany. They want its defeat and annihilation, and do all in their power to bring it about. That they can do nothing inside the Reich is hardly a sign of their loyalty, rather of the appropriate measures we took against them.
[...]
For their sake alone we must win the war. If we lose it, these harmless-looking Jewish chaps would suddenly become raging wolves. They would attack our women and children to carry out revenge. There are enough examples in history. That is what they did in Bessarabia and the Baltic states when Bolshevism marched in, even though neither the people nor their governments had done anything to them. There is no turning back in our battle against the Jews--even if we wanted to, which we do not. The Jews must be removed from the German community, for they endanger our national unity.
That is an elementary principle of racial, national and social hygiene. They will never give us rest. If they could, they would drive one nation after another into war against us. Who cares about their difficulties, they who only want to force the world to accept their bloody financial domination? The Jews are a parasitic race that feeds like a foul fungus on the cultures of healthy but ignorant peoples. There is only one effective measure: cut them out.
[...]
Some people are good, others bad. The same is true of animals. The fact that the Jew still lives among us is no proof that he belongs among us, just as a flea is not a household pet simply because it lives in a house. When Mr. Bramsig or Mrs. Knöterich feel pity for an old woman wearing the Jewish star, they should also remember that a distant nephew of this old woman by the name of Nathan Kaufmann sits in New York and has prepared a plan by which all Germans under the age of 60 will be sterilized. They should recall that a son of her distant uncle is a warmonger named Baruch or Morgenthau or Untermayer who stands behind Mr. Roosevelt, driving him to war, and that if they succeed, a fine but ignorant U.S. soldier may one day shoot dead the only son of Mr. Bramsig or Mrs. Knöterich. It will all be for the benefit of Jewry, to which this old woman also belongs, no matter how fragile and pitiable she may seem.

If we Germans have a fateful flaw in our national character, it is forgetfulness. This failing speaks well of our human decency and generosity, but not always for our political wisdom or intelligence. We think everyone else as is good natured as we are. The French threatened to dismember the Reich during the winter of 1939/40, saying that we and our families would have to stand in lines before their field kitchens to get something warm to eat. Our army defeated France in six weeks, after which we saw German soldiers giving bread and sausages to hungry French women and children, and gasoline to refugees from Paris to enable them to return home as soon as possible, there to spread at least some of their hatred against the Reich.
That's how we Germans are. Our national virtue is our national weakness. We do not want to change all that much, and as long as our world-famed good nature does no great harm, why should we? Klopstock gave us some good advice, however: Don't be too good-natured, since our enemies are not noble enough to overlook our mistakes.
If this advice applies anywhere, it apples to our relations with the Jews. Carelessness here is not only a weakness, it is disregard of duty and a crime against the security of the state. The Jews long for one thing: to reward or foolishness with bloodshed and terror. It must never come to that. One of the most effective defenses is an unforgiving, cold hardness against the destroyers of our people, against the instigators of the war, against those who would benefit if we lose, and therefore also against the victims if we win.

Therefore, we must say again and yet again:
1. The Jews are our destruction. They started this war and direct it. They want to destroy the German Reich and our people. This plan must be blocked.
2. There are no distinctions between Jews. Each Jew is a sworn enemy of the German people. If he does not make his hostility plain, it is only from cowardice and slyness, not because he loves us.
3. The Jews are to blame for each German soldier who falls in this war. They have him on their conscience and must also pay for it.
4. If someone wears the Jewish star, he is an enemy of the people. Anyone who deals with him is the same as a Jew and must be treated accordingly. He earns the contempt of the entire people, for he is a craven coward who leaves them in the lurch to stand by the enemy.
5. The Jews enjoy the protection of our enemies. That is all the proof we need to show how harmful they are for our people.
6. The Jews are the enemy's agents among us. He who stands by them aids the enemy.
7. The Jews have no right to claim equality with us. If they wish to speak on the streets, in lines outside shops or in public transportation, they should be ignored, not only because their are simply wrong, but because they are Jews who have no right to a voice in the community.
8. If the Jews appeal to your sentimentality, realize that they are hoping for your forgetfulness, and let them know that you see through them and hold them in contempt.
9. A decent enemy will deserve our generosity after we have won. The Jew however is not a decent enemy, though he tries to seem so.
10. The Jews are responsible for the war. The treatment they receive from us is hardly unjust. They have deserved it all.

It is the job of the government to deal with them. No one has the right to act on his own, but each has the duty to support the state's measures against the Jews, to defend them with others, and to avoid being misled by any Jewish tricks.
The security of the state requires that of us all.

The War and the Jews, Das Reich - May 9, 1943
Jewry wanted this war. Whether one looks to the plutocratic or the Bolshevist side of the enemy camp, one sees Jews standing in the foreground as instigators, rabble-rousers and slave drivers. They organize the enemy’s war economy and encourage plans to exterminate and destroy the Axis powers. England and the USA recruit from among them the bloodthirsty and vengeful agitators and political lunatics, and they are the source of the terror commissars of the GPU.
They are the mortar that holds the enemy coalition together. In the National Socialist Reich, they see a power that resists their drive for world domination both militarily and intellectually. That explains their rage and deep hatred. Do not think that the Old Testament tirades of their newspapers and radio are merely political propaganda. They would carry it all out to the letter, should they have the opportunity.

Our state’s security requires that we take whatever measures seem necessary to protect the German community from their threat. That leads to some difficult decisions, but they are unavoidable if we are to deal with the threat.
This war is a racial war. The Jews started it and they direct it. Their goal to destroy and exterminate our people. We are the only force standing between Jewry and world domination. If the Axis powers lose the war in Europe, no power on earth could save Europe from the Jewish-Bolshevist flood. It may seem surprising that such a small minority possesses such great power and is such a deadly danger. But it is so. International Jewry uses certain criminal methods to gain world domination that are not evident to uneducated nations.
The same is true in private life. The Jews do not enjoy economic success because they are more intelligent than non-Jews, rather because they follow a different moral code.
They attempt to conceal their methods for as long as possible, until it is too late for the affected nation to defend itself. Then it takes a revolution to dislodge them. We know how difficult and tiresome that is.
[...]
None of the Führer’s prophetic words had come so inevitably true as his prediction that if Jewry succeeded in provoking a second world war, the result would be not the annihilation of the Aryan race but rather the end of the Jewish race.
This process is of vast importance and will have unforeseeable consequences.
But it can no longer be halted. It must only be guided in the right direction. One must also be sure to strike the weapon of public deception from Jewry’s hands, which it is desperately using to save its skin.
One can already see that in the face of approaching catastrophe, the Jews are shrinking into the background. They send their pet Goy to the fore. It will not be long before they will not want to do it any longer and wash their hands in innocence.

As one has to grant, we have some experience in these matters and are taking action to be sure they do not succeed. The Jews will have to answer for their countless crimes against the happiness and peace of mankind, and one day the whole world will give them the penalty that they are suffering today in Germany.
We speak without resentment. The time is too grave to spin naive plans of revenge. This is a world problem of the first order that can be solved by the present generation, and must be solved by them. Sentimental considerations have no part here. We see Jewry as the embodiment of a general world decline. Either we will break this danger, or the peoples of the world will break under it.

No one should say that winners are boastful. At present, we are the victors only in our own nation.

19 February 1946
The prosecutor: The experiments of the Anatomical Institute in the production the soap from the corpses and tanning of human skin for industrial purposes were conducted on a wide scale. I submit a document [...] to the tribunal, which consists of the testimony of Sigmund Mazur, one of the direct participants of the production of soap from the human fat, he was helper-laboratory assistant at the Danzig Anatomical Institute. [...]

The question: Please tell us how soap was produced from the human fat at the Danzig Anatomical Institute?
The answer: In summer of 1943 in the yard of the Anatomical Institute a two-storey stone building containing three chambers was built. This building was designed for the purpose of utilizing corpses and cooking the bones, as the professor Spanner officially declared. The laboratory was defined as the institution of taking down skeletons, burning meat and superfluous bones, but in the winter 1943-1944 the year of the prof Spanner instructed us to collect the human fat which was not to be thrown away any more. This order was given to Reichert and Borkmann.
Prof Spanner gave me the recipe for the production of soap from the human fat in February 1944. According to this recipe 5 kg of the human fat appertained to be mixed with 10 litres of water and 500 to 1000 grams of the caustic soda. This mixture was cooked for two up to three hours, then it was allowed to cool. Then the soap rose to the surface, while water and settlings were under it. To this mixture a pinch of salt and soda was added and it was cooked again for two up to three hours. After cooling the soap was poured into a mould.

The prosecutor: I will present to the tribunal these moulds, in which the soap congealed, and half finished samples of soap from the human fat, found in Gdańsk.
I quote farther:
“The soap had a very unpleasant scent: the Bilzo formula was added to remove it. [...]
Borkmann and Reichert picked the fat from human corpses, and I cooked soap from the bodies of men and women. The process itself of cooking occupied from three to seven days. During production in which I personally participated, more than 25 kg of soap was produced; on this about 70 to 80 kg of human fat was used, gathered from about four hundred corpses. We gave back ready soap to prof Spanner who kept them.
The case of producing soap from corpses was a matter of concern, as far as I know, to the Nazi government. We had at the Anatomical Institute inspections of the minister of education Rust, the minister of health dr. Conti, the gauleiter of Danzig Albert Forster, the professors of medical institutes also visited the institute.
I took 4 kg of this soap for washing and cleaning clothes. [...]Reichert, Borkmann, von Bargen and our boss, prof Spanner, they also used this soap. [...]
Just like with human fat prof Spanner instructed us to collect the human skin which after cleaning from the fat was subjected the working of some chemical substances. Works connected with human skin were led under the direction of the older assistant von Bargena and prof Spannera himself. Finished skins were packed in chests and used for purposes unknown to me.”

All the witnesses were Jews.

“One, by One Facing the Holocaust” by Judith Miller
Barbie kept two German Shepherd dogs. One was trained to lunge and bite. The other was trained to mount naked women who had first been ordered on their hands and knees, a humiliation that could cut deeper than the whip, than having one’s fingernails pulled out, or one’s nipples burned with cigarettes.

Testimony of Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Rachel Hanan [1:26:20]
Besides that, you know, there were other punishments they could do to you. There were specially there were, you know, those dogs. There were those dogs in the camp.
They were very huge dogs. We were afraid of those dogs more than the Germans. Because they were trained to make, you know, to make sex with girls. So if they wanted to punish you, they would take these horrible big dogs and enforce you there to make, whatever. In any case, once it happened, it was a French lady, and she had a beautiful daughter of 16, she was really beautiful. And then, you know, they forced the girl - I don’t know what she has done wrong - to do that with the dog. The mother was watching.
The girl died because the dog was vicious and bad and big and whatever. She died on the spot. And the mother, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She went and hanged herself to the barbed wire, you know, electric, and she died as well.


Testimony of Bronislawa Limanowska (December 1945)
Once while we were laboring in the field, an S.S. man approached one of the girls and dragged her to the nearby forest. She didn’t come back again. They forced her to have sexual relations with a dog. The girl couldn’t stand it, she begged afterwards that they kill her. We heard her screams. The male and female S.S. staff guffawed sadistically about what went on in the forest and added,
“The dog found itself an excellent pleasure-object” (Der Hund fand zich ein ausgezeichnetes Lustobjekt) We trembled at the thought: who would be the next in line?
Scenes like this happened over and over. We began to fear going out to work lest we too would be put to that terrible test. We decided among us, that if another instance of that sort would occur, then our entire Kommando would revolt.
We wouldn’t allow them to use the girls for these brutal acts; better we should die than live a moment like that.
After the third incident of rape, when they just started dragging the girl away, we began a terrible screaming. We were some twenty girls. Immediately the SS staff who were with us in the field came and hauled us off to punishment in the “punishment cell.” This was a cellar divided into small cells. At the center of each was a crate to use for our bodily wastes. Four girls were shoved into each cell. The space wasn’t sufficient for us to sit down, so we had to remain standing day and night. Once a day we were given food. They kept us like this for four days and four nights. But we had some consolation: that we didn’t allow such acts to happen with us.


“Five Chimneys” by Olga Lengyel
I shall never forget the agony of one mother who told me that she was forced to undress her daughter and to look on while the girl was violated by dogs whom the Nazis had specially trained for this sport. That happened to other young girls. They were compelled to labor in the quarries for twelve or fourteen hours a day. When they dropped from exhaustion their guards’ favorite form of amusement was to urge the dogs to attack them.

In gratitude to the Iranian nation,
on whose hospitable land
approximately 121,000 Poles found rescue,
including nearly 20,000 children.
In 1942, Iran welcomed
and saved Polish exiles
deported in the years
1939–1941 by the NKVD from the Eastern Borderlands
of the Second Polish Republic
deep into the Soviet Union.
Iranian aid protected the Poles
from repressions as well as death
from hunger and disease.
The rescued
and their descendants
are grateful.
2013
Warsaw, Poland

"A Vindication of Gerald Reitlinger: New Data on the Holocaust" by Raynal Calvert
With the notable exceptions of Raul Hilberg who put the number of Jewish deaths at 5,100,000 and Gerald Reitlinger who proposed low and high estimates (4,204,400 to 4,575,400 victims) most authors concur that about 6,000,000 Jews were murdered in World War II, the majority of them with poison gas in death camps or by mobile shooting units.

The specialists of the Holocaust have generally reached their counts on a per-country basis, which poses a problem since, from 1938 onwards and after the end of the war, Europe was subject to many border changes.

The number of victims advanced often comes of subtracting the number of survivors in various countries after 1945 from their prewar populations.
The literature is thus full of double counts of victims between the USSR and Poland, and also between Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.
[...]
Making use of many sources in several languages and studying thoroughly the death tolls of death camps, shooting units or attrition in ghettos, the author has been able to find that the number of Jewish victims was very close to Gerald Reitlinger’s high estimate, proving the latter author to have been, in this respect, the most accurate Holocaust scholar.

Fisher sets out to talk with a series of esteemed Holocaust scholars, to see how it was determined that six million Jews died in the Holocaust and how this number came to be so enshrined in our minds. None of the scholars he spoke with was prepared to confirm the number. In fact, most of them are seen trying to distance themselves from it to some degree, and implying that, historically, it may not be that accurate.

Nearly all the scholars appearing in the documentary

agree that this figure has become so identified with the memory of the Holocaust that it mustn’t be touched. And some do not try to hide their dismay at Fisher’s attempt to question it. “If you’re not careful, this film could become a tool in the hands of Holocaust deniers,” one of them scolds him. The importance of this number long ago exceeded the issue of historical accuracy, the experts tell him. It long ago became one of the symbols most closely identified with the Holocaust, and it is very important that a symbol like that be preserved; it must be defended.

“I Knew Hitler” by Kurt Ludecke
But what was Hitler’s real intention regarding the problem of Jewry?
I had learned with the years to take a calmer view of the Jewish question in practical politics, and I wondered if Hitler still accepted the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy as unquestioningly as he once had.
I told him about publishing the American Guard in Brookline, and what it had taught me.
When I pointed to Arno Schickedanz’s attempt to solve the Jewish riddle in his study (Sozialparasitismus im Voelkerleben) of the biological laws determining the Jewish character - an exposition of the actual origin of the Jew as a human parasite, similar to the scientifically accepted theory of the existence of parasites in animal and plant life - Hitler interrupted me before I could finish my thought about an error in Schickedanz’s analysis.
“ Ach, der Schickedanz!” he said, and made a depreciating gesture.
He added, with a mysterious air: “I am working on a book, a work-well, you’ll see when it’s finished!”
And he looked at me as though to say that the world was soon to be presented with the last word of wisdom about everything.
Later, I was reminded of this potential brain-child when Amann mentioned it to me in awe.

“As I see things now,” I resumed, “after years of practical experience and observations in Europe and America, I wonder if it is intelligent to attack the Jewish people as a whole. I know for a fact that the Jews do not present a united front against the Gentiles, and the belief that there is a universal policy for destroying the Gentile world, thought out and enunciated in detail by a super-council, is a delusion.
I talked with Rosenberg about it the other day, and even he admits now that the authenticity of the ‘Protocols of Zion’ is doubtful.

“The Jews are, in a sense, as divided and differentiated as we Gentiles are. In the main, it’s their extraordinary status, their vulnerability combined with their peculiar Jewish intellectuality and persecution complex, that drives them together instinctively in times of crisis.
I believe we can achieve quicker results, with less risk to us, by trying to divide them further and by helping those Jews who want to escape Jewry - there are many of them - if given a chance. That can be done without jeopardizing our plan for breaking the established Jewish power in Germany.”

Hitler was again giving me his closest attention, and I began to feel that perhaps there was a chance of persuading him to adopt a more cautious policy toward the Jews. I told him I had interviewed prominent Jews in various countries, with the intention of finding out what was in the back of their minds, and I had failed to find conformity of opinion as to either their own status or their attitude towards the Gentile world.

I mentioned specifically my talk, early in 1930, with Louis Marshall, the head of the Jewish Committee to whom Henry Ford had directed his apology. Hitler sat bolt upright in his chair.
“But that would interest me very much,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

But before I could begin, there was a knock at the door - it was just a few minutes past three o’clock-and in came Heinrich Himmler, Strasser’s one-time secretary, now head of the SS, in his gorgeous black uniform with a prosaic pince-nez riding his face, which beamed now with importance; he clicked his heels, heil-hitlered, and announced that the Reichstag had recessed for half an hour and that the Fuehrer was needed at once for an important decision.

Goering, Strasser, and Frick were waiting for him in the palais of the Reichstag-President. Hitler jumped to his feet, my presence forgotten.
“We’ll get that fellow now,” he said excitedly, and stormed out. I found myself alone.
In some bewilderment, I slowly gathered my papers into my briefcase and went to my room.
Several hours later, I heard newsboys screaming extras: “Reichstag Dissolved!”


Hitler about Ludecke (30 October 1941)
We had a fellow, a man named Ludecke, who’d have made a first-rate agent for critical spots: Iran, Irak! He spoke French, English, Spanish, Italian, like a native.
He’d have been the man for the present situation. Nothing escaped him.

1. Thou shalt have no other god save thyself.

2. Do only that which serves thyself and do not sacrifice thyself for another.

3. Live life to the fullest and enjoy every moment.

4 . Love thyself above all.

5 . Do not believe - heaven is void.

6 . Do not do unto others that which pleases you.

7 . Do not uselessly burden thy mind.

8 . Harden thy heart and listen not to it.

9 . Do not get too close to others and do not allow others to get close to thee.

10. Do not be a credulous fool and do not rely on anybody.

“On Friday, September 1, 1939, my real life began to end,” Baruch Milch wrote in his diary as he sat in hiding after having lost his wife, his young son, and his faith. [...]
Written by a man who had been driven to loss of hope and disbelief in his ability to survive, the diary became [...] an indictment of the Germans and the Ukrainians.

“Notes From the Warsaw Ghetto” by Emmanual Ringelblum
For long, long months, we tormented ourselves in the midst of our suffering with the questions: Does the world know about our suffering?
And if it knows, why is it silent?
Why is the world not stirred when tens of thousands of Jews are shot in Fonari?
Why is the world silent when tens of thousands of Jews are poisoned in Chelmno?
Why is the world silent when hundreds of thousands of Jews are massacred in Galicia and other newly occupied areas?

Having posed the questions, we answered them ourselves:
Why should the world be shaken by the massacre in Vilna when the Germans slaughtered in Rostov, a similar number of Ukrainians and Jews in Kiev?
Why should the world be shaken by our suffering when rivers of blood are spilled daily on every battlefield?
In what respect is our Jewish blood more precious than that of the Russian, Chinese, English soldiers?

In 1944, Slovakian Jewish leaders received reliable warnings about the impending annihilation of the Hungarian Jews and passed the information on to their brethren in other countries.
The American Jewish leaders reacted in an uncoordinated, contradictory way - and too late. The Hungarian Jewish leaders hid the truth from the Jewish masses.


“The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary” by Randolph L. Braham
Harsh as these measures were, however, they did not shake the basic confidence of the Hungarian Jews, and especially of the assimilated ones, that they were in no physical danger. This confidence was partially based on their conviction that the conservative-aristocratic leadership, with which they had many economic and personal connections, would continue to protect them as in the past.
...
The central Jewish leadership failed to take any precautionary contingency measures and neglected to inform the local leaders or the Hungarian Jewish masses about the Final Solution program being implemented in the other parts of Europe—a program whose details and dimensions became increasingly clear to them starting in mid-1942.
[...]
While the German and Hungarian Nazis were pressing on with their Final Solution, the Jewish leaders handled the report [about the Final Solution of the Hungarian Jews] “confidentially” in order “not to create panic.”


From the sentence against Rudolf Kastner, Jerusalem, Israel (1954)
Masses of ghetto Jews boarded the deportation trains ... in total obedience, ignorant of the real destination and trusting the false declaration that they were being transferred to work camps in Hungary.
[...]
[The Nazis] could not have deceived the Jewish masses with such great efficiency had they not disseminated their false rumors through Jewish channels.
[...]
The organizers and executors of the extermination operation ... allowed Kastner and the members of the Jewish council of Budapest to save their relatives and friends.
[The Nazi protection] was an inseparable part of the maneuvers in the ‘psychological war’ to destroy the Jews,
[...]
[Kastner assisted the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews] by deliberately encouraging the leaders of Cluj to collaborate in the deportation of members of their community to Auschwitz and by deliberately avoiding his duty, as head of the Rescue Committee, to reveal to the Jews the fate awaiting them and to organize their flight over the Romanian border.
[...]
The benefit the Nazis received from the agreement with K. was a facilitation of the extermination of the Jewish masses, and the price they paid was to forgo the extermination of the privileged few.
With the agreement about the privileged, K. accepted the extermination of the ordinary people and abandoned them to their fates.


“The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary” by Randolph L. Braham
It was through Mantello that the report was distributed in Switzerland to the media and the representatives of Jewish and non-Jewish agencies. Shortly after it was brought to public attention by the Swiss press—the first major coverage of the Holocaust in the free world—a number of world leaders, including President Roosevelt, the king of Sweden, and Pope Pius XII, interceded with Horthy on behalf of the Jews of Hungary.
By that time, however, almost all of Hungary, with the notable exception of Budapest, was already judenrein.


“FDR and the Jews” by Richard Breitman, Allan J. Lichtman
Through the Swiss government, the United States sent a sharp note to the Hungarian leadership calling to their attention Roosevelt’s March 24 warning about punishing the guilty.
[...]
“Hungary has been flooded with broadcasts dealing with the persecution of the Jews,” Pehle said. American planes also dropped leaflets with Roosevelt’s March 24 statement over Hungary. It was the most concerted effort to date by the American political establishment to aid in the rescue of Jews.


“Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz” by David Kranzler
In his postwar testimony, Swiss consul Charles Lutz recalled the consternation caused by the Swiss press campaign in Hungarian government and German embassy circles:
...
As a matter of fact, under the pressure of this campaign, the deportations were really stopped.
Roosevelt’s note [i.e., warning to Horthy] was also inspired by this press campaign.
It was a combination of the Swiss press campaign and Roosevelt’s note that caused things to change in Budapest.

…
Last night, this suddenly came to me, and I don’t know what it is, but I can never find the right moment to talk to him. And then. I cry so easily at something like that, and then I can’t say everything as calmly anyway, as I want to.
…
The sun is shining, the sky is deep blue, there is a lovely wind blowing, and I am so longing for everything.
…
I believe I feel the spring in me; I feel the spring awakening; I feel it in my whole body and in my soul.
…
I have to restrain myself over and over again; I long for my Petel; I long for every boy, including Peter here.

I would like to shout at him,
“Oh, say something to me, don’t always keep just that smile, touch me, that I might get that blissful feeling inside me again like I first had it in my dream of Petel’s cheek!”
…
Oh, who knows, perhaps it won’t be long before I can share this overwhelming feeling of bliss with Peter.
From early in the morning till late at night, I really do hardly anything else but think of Peter. I sleep with his image before my eyes, dream about him, and he is still looking at me when I awake.
…
From morning till night, I look forward to seeing Peter.
…
I’m longing so longing for everything... I have to keep myself under control. ... I’m long for every boy...

I wanted to ask him if he knows what a girl actually looks like there. I don’t think that a boy is as complicated down there than a girl. You can see exactly what a naked man looks like from photographs or pictures, but you can’t with women. With them, the sexual parts, or whatever they are called, are further between the legs.
…
Before I was 11 or 12 years old, I didn’t realize that there were two inner lips as well; you couldn’t see them at all. And the funniest thing of all was that I thought that urine came out of the clitoris.
…
From the front when you stand up you can see nothing but hair, between your legs there are things like little cushions, soft, with hair on too, which pres together when you stand up so that you can’t see what’s inside. When you sit down, they divide, and inside, it looks very red and ugly and fleshy.

At the very top, between the big outer lips, there is a little fold of skin, which turns out to be a kind of little bladder on closer inspection, that is, the clitoris. Then come the smal inner lips, they are also pressed against each other just like a little pleat. When they open, there is a fleshy little stump inside, no bigger than the top of my thumb. The top of it is porous, there are different little holes in it and that’s where the urine comes out. The lower part looks as if it’s nothing but skin, but that’s where the vagina is. There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it.

The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out. The hole is so small that you can’t even put your index finger in, not easily anyway.

That’s all it is, and yet it plays such an important role!
...
My vagina is getting wider all the time, but I could also be imagining it. When I am on the w.c., I sometimes look then I can see quite definitely that the urine comes out of a little hole in the vagina, but above it there is something else, there is a hole in that too, but I don’t know what for.

“My Lvov: Holocaust Memoir of a twelve-year-old Girl” by Janina Hescheles
Mother lay in her bed; she was very pale. I lay down beside her and asked, “Why are
you so sad? There is still no Aktion.”

Mother answered, “For me it has already begun and, even though I have cyanide pills, my death will be very hard for me, because of you. What will become of me doesn’t bother me for a minute,” she burst out, crying bitterly. “Janola, save me this last agony and leave me, I don’t want to know what happens to you, I don’t want to see you next to me! Go now if you love me. Go back to that woman. The humiliation will be mine, because it’s me who asks you to go to her.”

I didn’t want to obey her, and replied, “What is there to live for? In any case, I won’t survive without documents. Mother, do you want to prolong my suffering? Won’t it be better to finish once and for all, hugging each other? What is life on my own worth to me?”
But Mother pleaded with me. “You must go! You have to avenge me and your father!”
I answered, “Will revenge restore you to me? Is it worth living just for that? Is it worth suffering so much just for that? Wouldn’t it be better to finish everything, next to you? Mother, you would save me from so much of the suffering and agony that await me.”

Struggling with Mother was difficult for me. I couldn’t look at her crying; her face was all wrinkled, just like Grandmother’s face. Her heart pounded so loudly that I could hear it. …

From the sands of Piaski, opposite us, embers would fly up from the burning bodies. An unpleasant odor hung in the air. I longed for Mother, but didn’t cry. I envied the fact that everything was over for her. I looked in the direction of the fire, in which, even now, she was perhaps going up in flames. I knew that I, too, would be incinerated there… Such thoughts became less and less frequent. I wanted to spend my final moments laughing, but our laughter was artificial.
…
Lucy burst out crying and I wanted to comfort her, but how? I understood exactly how she felt. She was now at the difficult stage that I had already passed: the struggle within myself, with my inner voice telling me to live. After returning from Auntie, this voice had become silent. I was reconciled to my fate, and had become a living corpse, so only I had the courage to go out to the Aryan side while Lucy was afraid to do so.

“Rutka’s Notebook” by Rutka Laskier (14-year-old)
Something has broken in me. When I pass by a German, everything shrinks in me. I don’t know whether it is out of fear or hatred. I would like to torture them, their women and children, who set their doggies on us, to beat and strangle them vigorously, more and more. …
And now another matter. I think my womanhood has awoken in me. That means, yesterday when I was taking a bath and the water stroked my body, I longed for someone’s hands to stroke me ... I didn’t know what it was, I have never had such sensations until now.
[…]
I saw how a soldier tore a baby, who was only a few months old, out of its mother’s hands and bashed his head against an electric pylon. The baby’s brain splashed on the wood. The mother went crazy.
I am writing this as if nothing has happened. As if I were in an army experienced in cruelty. But I’m young,
I’m 14, and I haven’t seen much in my life, and I’m already so indifferent. Now I am terrified when I see “uniforms.” I’m turning into an animal waiting to die. One can lose one’s mind thinking about this.
[…]
Janek accompanied me. While going downstairs I asked him, is kissing such a pleasant thing? And then I told him that I had already kissed before, what a taste it has (that’s completely true). He burst out laughing. (He has a nice laugh, I must admit.) He said he was curious too. Maybe, but I won’t let him kiss me. I’m afraid it would destroy something beautiful, pure … I’m also afraid that I’ll be very disappointed.
[…]
Things with Mom are getting more and more complicated.
Yesterday she saw me with Jumek, Mietek and Micka. Mom tried to get a confession out of me. She doesn’t understand that it’s difficult for me to open my heart to an adult. Maybe I could confide in Micka, but not everything. Lately, I love my parents even more. But sometimes they are so mean to me, it hurts me so much, and then I become hurtful and bad.
[…]
It’s very difficult to self-analyze. I’m persuading myself that I’m not in love with Janek, but in the meantime I miss him, and sometimes I suffer because I don’t see him and hear his voice. Sometimes I regret I was so cold towards him. I laughed at him until he bit his lips and bled ...
Actually I shouldn’t feel so hopeless.
[…]
What’s happening to you, Rutka? You’re incapable of controlling yourself. That’s not good. I must pull myself together and not wet my pillow with tears.
Because of whom or what am I crying? Because of Janek, certainly not Then because of whom?
Probably because of freedom. I am sick and tired of these gray houses, of the steady fear seen o everybody’s faces. This fear clutches on to everyone and doesn’t let go.
Today, probably Nica, Jumek, Janek will come to me. Damn it, Janek again. I decided not to think about him, but thoughts about him keep coming back. Have I really lost my head because of him? I don’t know, is this what they call love?
Yes, Janek, I fell in love with you, but I made one unforgivable mistake. I fell in love with you while you were gone.
I believe you love me too, but you were too proud to come back.

Medycyna za drutami by Władysław Fajkiel (Google translated)
We were also concerned about the behavior of the sick Banderites in our ward. In general, several dozen of them were in the camp, and some stayed as patients in our block. Among the Ukrainian prisoners was the full composition of the Ukrainian nationalist "government," headed by the "prime minister" Bandera and a large group of activists.
[…]
They were surrounded by universal hatred and contempt of almost the entire camp because everyone knew that they had thousands of murdered innocent people on their conscience. For these reasons, even in the hospital ward, fellow prisoners could not hide their animosity towards them. Nevertheless, we doctors tried to treat them as correctly as possible.

The camp authorities pretended that the entire Bandera group enjoyed a certain privilege, and to compensate, they eagerly emphasized that they were prisoners of honor (Ehrenhäftlinge).
Indeed, they were not shot or gassed; they were free from some harassment, but that was where their privileges ended. They lived in a separate block in the camp, and in the hospital, they had a separate room in the infectious disease ward.
[...]
Personally, I treated them tactfully, not wanting to worsen an already lousy atmosphere, which could be dangerous for the entire hospital. It didn't come easy to me. After all, I knew that my best friends from Lwów fell victim to their chauvinism.
[...]
Our relations with the Banderites deteriorated further, and tensions rose to a climax when one day, drunken Unterscharführer Klehr entered their room (probably by mistake) and wanted to pick some of them "for the phenolic pin." They assumed it was our job.
From that moment, reports and complaints about us to the Gestapo poured in. Then I realized that things were bad. It was necessary to act and somehow change the atmosphere.

For this purpose, I went to the camp block where the Banderites lived. I walked into the room, introduced myself, and said I'd like to speak to someone who represented their group. Then several individuals, whom the others called ministers, approached me. When I told them that I wanted to discuss the matters of their patients under my care, they replied that they would not discuss these topics with a Pole. They are honorary prisoners under the commandant's care, which is quite enough for them.

I pointed out to them that a life of mutual hatred would have a detrimental effect on us as well as on them, and the care of the commandant's office was not always enough to survive the camp.
I mentioned in passing that their "minister," Józef Bandera (brother of the "prime minister"), was also under the care of the commandant's office, but this did not ensure his safety because, as we know, one day, someone knocked him off the scaffolding at a construction site into a pit with lime, in which this honorary prisoner and even the "deputy prime minister" boiled over.
I added that for the duration of their stay in the camp, we are ready - for peace of mind - not to take any unfriendly steps against their group, but on condition that they also give up unjustified complaints and denunciations.

My speech was risky. I became even more concerned when I saw that it had by no means the intended effect.

At that moment, a happy accident came to my aid. A tall black prisoner jumped down from a third-story bed, approached me, and began to greet me warmly. At first, I couldn't recognize him. After a while, I remembered it was Michał Szewczuk, my old university friend from Lviv. Szewczuk interrupted the unpleasant and tense discussion and announced that he would visit me in the evening.

Indeed, that same day, he came with several colleagues who apologized to me for the unpleasant reception, declared that they had confidence in me, and promised that in the future, they would behave loyally and ask for continued care of their patients. I took their statement seriously, glad the danger could be averted this way.

I assigned a tactful Pole (Dr. Tadeusz Szymański) to them, and I stabilized Michał Szewczuk and Leon Mostowycz (Bandera's adjutant) as nurses in the hospital.

Since then, relations have changed quite fundamentally. It even got to the point that, in many cases, they warned me about some unfavorable intentions of the Gestapo towards the hospital - until the end of their stay in the camp (I must admit that after the evacuation of the Auschwitz camp, Szewczuk and Mostowycz helped a group of Poles in the Ebensee camp).
Since we had been convinced that the Banderites kept the treaty's terms, we also tried to deal with them loyally.