Photoessay #2897- Transportzyklonbkrematoria

Or circling around the Holocaust.  I am thinking of taking the UW class next quarter.  The whole subject is horrifying and denigrating.

I've read several books by Gerd Kotman, a historian and survivor.  He was a Jewish child in Hamburg, send to England as part of the Kindertransport operation (Jewish children were sent to host families for the duration of the war).  Amazingly, his parents also survived and the family was able to move to the United States.  About my parents age.  He became a labor historian and also an early Holocaust historian.

This word (which didn't seem to catch on) refers to the direct genocidal activity of the Nazis regarding transporting people to the death camps, gassing them with Zyklon gas and then the bodies to crematoria.  No messing around, with this operation, the idea was to kill as many Jews as efficiently as possible.  This differentiates this effort with the many other parts of Nazi terrorism to inferior racial groups.

I came upon his books "The Hunter and the Hunted", a group of excepts of memoirs and primary sources published in 1973 and his memoir "Nightmare's Fairy Tale" published in 2005.

He's troubled, we're all troubled not only about the facts of the oppression but about all of the witnesses, whether alive at that time or not.  People who might have stopped it, slanted interpretations, dismissal as just another pogrom.

Everybody, all Jews, all non-Jews, those that died, those that didn't.  How do any of us make sense of it?

Picture of a chart of different badges used at Dachau.  I don't know what they mean and I don't care.  Just the existence is chilling enough.