'Gate to Hell'

Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, holds the hand of a Holocaust survivor as they take part in a Peace March at the Nazi Concentration Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau on 30 April 2008 in Krakow, Poland.

From 1942 Auschwitz became the biggest center for the mass extermination of Jews. Figures vary but a conservative estimate puts the number of murdered Jews at an approximate 1.5 million.

The entrance to Auschwitz I.The now notorious motto over the gate, "Arbeit macht frei" translates to: "Work makes you free." This is probably the most famous gate, associated to the Jewish Holocaust.
Auschwitz-Birkenau became the killing center where the largest numbers of European Jews were killed during the Holocaust. After an experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners, mass murder became a daily routine. By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with some estimates running as high as three million persons eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning ...

9 out of 10 were Jews. In addition, Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and prisoners of all nationalities died in the gas chambers. Between May 14 and July 8,1944, 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 148 trains. This was probably the largest single mass deportation during the Holocaust.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nazi Germany's largest concentration and extermination camp facility, was located nearby the provincial Polish town of Oshwiecim in Galacia, and was established by order of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler on 27 April 1940. Private diaries of Goebbels and Himmler unearthed from the secret Soviet archives show that Adolf Hitler personally ordered the mass extermination of the Jews during a meeting of Nazi German regional governors in the chancellery. As Goebbels wrote "With regards to the Jewish question, the Fuhrer decided to make a clean sweep ..."

At Auschwitz children were often killed upon arrival. Children born in the camp were generally killed on the spot. Near the end of the war, in order to cut expenses and save gas, cost-accountant considerations led to an order to place living children directly into the ovens or throw them into open burning pits.

So called camp doctors, especially the notorious Josef Mengele, would torture and inflict incredible suffering on Jewish children, Gypsy children and many others. Patients were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death, and exposed to various other traumas.

During World War 2 only one man managed to get prisoners out of Auschwitz his name was Oskar Schindler.

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Commentary

Shedding the Tears

By HRM Deborah

When I was a young girl, I had the opportunity to know someone that had survived Auschwitz, while they had lost their whole family.

Even to this very day, I had never wished for the Jewish people to ever suffer this type of atrocity ever again. I will even go so far as to say, that both the Jewish and Palestinian people never suffer the sorrow of any heinous violence perpetrated against them, because they are Semantic in origin.

It has been in my thoughts a lot these days, how several times throughout history, that the Jewish and Palestinian people was subjected to suffering by some means together.

Even at this very time, there are people that wish to harm the Jewish and Palestinian people through lies and other types of manipulation, that is not only a falsehood, but also an outright despicable situation.

Especially in regards to the Palestinian people, saying they are a people of violence and wish harm to others, when this is the farthest from the truth; even to go so far as using terminology to sway certain people, to wish to hurt the Palestinian people.

For thousands of years the Palestinian people have always been a people that believed in love as well as peace and this virtue has never changed even to this very day.

Furthermore, accusing the Palestinian people of wishing to harm anyone is not only an insult, that while it is not true, is deployable to say the least.

May one day, the people of the world, learn to love and have peace for each other, so no one would ever wish to cause any harm to another, no matter who they are.