International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th

A Ten Year Old's Witness to the Liberation of Auschwitz,
by Bernice Lerner:  Echo essay published in the History News Netword (HNN)

Bernice Lerner, Ed.D., is the author of All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen and The Triumph of Wounded Souls: Seven Holocaust Survivors’ Lives.

Jerzy (George) Ogurek, c. 1943-1944. This photo shows the boy's hair dyed blond to disguise his Jewishness as his family fled from Poland to Budapest (he would be known later in life as George Zimmerman) Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of George Zimmerman

By the time Red Army soldiers entered Auschwitz, on January 27, 1945, ten-year-old Jerzy (George) Ogurek had survived three months in the death camp. He defied odds—almost all of the 230,000 children deported there were murdered immediately. 

Suffering from hunger and effects of scarlet fever, wearing oversized pants and shoes—stuffed with whatever he could find to keep himself warm—he witnessed the momentous event. Following a loud explosion, two Russian soldiers, dressed in white to camouflage themselves against the snow, appeared—each with a rifle on one arm and a huge sausage on the other.

By that point, George was adept at playing by new rules. In 1943, during an aktion in Sosnowiec’s ghetto, he had hidden in a storage room between sheets of leather. When escaping with his parents and grandparents from the ghetto, he had crouched quietly beneath hay that had been piled atop a wagon’s floor.

George’s parents had decided when and to where they must run. Bribing guards and guides, and with help from various networks, they traveled from Poland to Slovakia to Hungary—then back to Slovakia—evading Nazi collaborators and murderers. George, with bleached blond hair, pretending to be Catholic, could recite the Hail Mary in German, Polish, Hungarian, or Slovak.

In October 1944, smugglers hired to help them cross the border from Slovakia to Hungary betrayed the family. At Sered, a labor and transit camp, they were identified as Jews and sent to Auschwitz II (Birkenau).

Before their arrival, a transport of two thousand men, women, and children from Sered had been gassed. Directed to shower, George’s parents were sure they would be killed. They emerged with shaven heads and prisoners’ clothes. When it was George’s turn to have a number tattooed on his arm, his father implored the engraver to make the digits small.

The Nazis clubbed to death several people from George’s transport group. Kapos randomly pulled several individuals from the rows of inmates and beat them without the slightest pretense or justification. This place had no rules.

Child survivors at Auschwitz photographed by the Red Army, 1945

The Nazi SS directed the men and women into two separate groups. George went with the men, then to a barracks for children, where eight shared a small cubicle. During Zehl Appel (roll call), everyone had to stand for hours in the bitter cold. After working all day, George’s father and grandfather visited him in the evening. Once, his father brought him lard—it was stolen from George within hours.

Falling ill, George was transferred to the medical block. Every day, he counted the corpses in front of the barracks. He watched people eat potato peels. He never saw his father and grandfather again.

In early January, the Russians bombarded area targets. In mid-January, the SS evacuated 58,000 inmates by foot or on freight trains. George foraged through storehouses of clothing and food. Periodically, SS officers returned to the camp and shot people.

On January 20, the Nazis blew up two crematoria. Further destruction of incriminating evidence followed. SS units ordered the thousands of remaining inmates—the weak and sick, including children and Russian prisoners of war, out of the barracks. Officers asked, “Who thinks they will not be able to walk ten kilometers tonight?” Those who stepped out of line were taken behind a barrack and shot.

At that moment George imagined what it would feel like to die. He decided that he was prepared to meet his fate, be it life or death. Death was worse than pain and fear, but he was reconciled to even that possibility.

At that point, George was not alone. His father’s brother, whom he had never met, had recognized him when they were both in the medical block. Together, among one thousand inmates, they trudged out of Birkenau. The columns of war weary had not gone far when their guards stopped them. They waited in the snow for an hour, after which the guards got into trucks and disappeared. The leaderless group headed back to Auschwitz I, which had brick buildings as opposed to Birkenau’s wood barracks. As they walked, they ducked their heads to avoid shells and bullets.

After the liberation, George and his uncle did not wait for the arrival of more Russian troops to come and take charge of the situation. With cigarettes—a wartime currency—George’s uncle paid a driver to take them to Krakow. On the truck’s flatbed, George felt the weight of a large Russian soldier’s head resting upon his legs. He chose to tolerate the pain and discomfort rather than wake the sleeping giant.

Fifty years later, I met with George Zimmerman, who over a 35-year career served as a professor, researcher, and administrator of Boston University’s physics department. No one with whom he worked knew what George had experienced as a child.

Comment:  David Baker
A tragic reminder about the inhumanity found in ideological extremism and the fanatical pursuit of racial superiority. In a world besotted with me-ism, a call to share with others lessons that can improve all our lives through reconnecting with the humanity that does lie within most of us, however dormant.

"Shithole countries" and the false theory of eugenics

"Eugenics (during the 1920s) offered Americans in positions of power an authoritative scientific language to substantiate their (racial) biases against those they feared as being dangerous."

Reported on the PBS News Hour website

False, racist theory of eugenics once ruled science. Let’s never let that happen again ~ Dr. Howard Markel

When Donald Trump, who was frustrated during a bipartisan immigration meeting in the White House, reportedly asked, last month, why the U.S. was protecting immigrants from “shithole countries,” he appeared to be privileging the immigration status, if not the biology, of some people from certain lands.

This harsh stereotype harkens back to an era when race mattered a great deal in terms of one’s status, rights and opportunities — all to our nation’s social detriment.

Between the late 1890s and the late 1930s, “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants” on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were obsessed with the future of their country’s gene pool and how different immigrants might taint it.

Supporting these fears was a theoretical framework called eugenics, first proposed in 1883 by Sir Frances Galton, the British polymath and naturalist, and a pioneer in many other fields such as meteorology, psychology and anthropometrics.

Galton, the younger, first cousin of Charles Darwin (who played an outsized role in influencing Sir Francis’s education and intellectual life), was born on this day in 1822.

We come today not to praise Francis Galton but to bury him along with his faulty and dangerous pseudoscience of eugenics.

Sir Francis’s social theories on who was eugenically worthy spread like wildfire among white intellectuals in almost every developed Western nation.

The word eugenics is taken from the Greek root, “eugenes,” namely good in stock or hereditarily endowed with noble qualities. Galton coined the term in his 1883 book, “Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development.”

The idea was to propose a way to ‘give to the more suitable races … a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” In a 1904 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Galton defined eugenics more succinctly as “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.” Galton also coined the phrase “nature versus nurture.”

Sir Francis’s social theories on who was eugenically worthy spread like wildfire among white intellectuals in almost every developed Western nation. For example, in July of 1912, one year after Galton’s death, the threat of inferior races polluting the Western body politic was discussed at the first International Congress of Eugenics in London. 

Sitting in the audience were Britain’s Prime Minister Lord Balfour, Winston Churchill and Charles Darwin’s son Leonard, along with the ambassadors of Greece, France and (wait for it) Norway.

During the Progressive era (1900-1920), a generation of American reformers sought to fix several social problems of the day, which included urban poverty, assimilating the huge number of immigrants coming to American shores, and public health crises such as epidemics, high infant mortality rates and explosive population growth. Many of these reformers used inappropriate eugenic explanations for their management of those deemed to be socially undesirable: so-called “mental defectives” (which included those labeled with newly-created clinical terms like “imbeciles,” “idiots,” and “morons”); the blind, deaf, mentally ill and “crippled”; orphans, unwed mothers, epileptics, Native Americans, African Americans, foreigners, poor residents from the mountains and hollows of Appalachia and many other “outsider” groups.

“Inferior races,” eugenic theorists concluded, were a drain on the economic, political and moral health of American life.

Some African American intellectuals, too, supported the theory, arguing we should focus on the “talented tenth” of every race.
One of the dirtiest realities of the American eugenics movement is that, with relatively few prominent exceptions, it is difficult to find a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant man (or woman) of means who did not endorse such theories.

As the “social Darwinist”, Herbert Spencer famously opined, it was a matter of the “survival of the fittest.” “Race suicide,” a term introduced in 1901 by the University of Wisconsin sociologist and best-selling author Edward A. Ross, was a concern that captured the American conversation all the way up to the White House. Behind his “bully pulpit,” President Theodore Roosevelt repeatedly wrung his hands over the issue.

Other influential eugenicists who fretted over the American protoplasm included grant makers from both the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, psychologist Henry H. Goddard, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, R-Mass., auto magnate Henry Ford, inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell, botanist Luther Burbank, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Robert A. Millikan, a Nobel laureate in physics, novelists Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, economist William Z. Ripley, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, advocate for the blind Helen Keller, African-American scholar W.E.B. Dubois, and the creator of the wellness movement, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.

The solution of the day was to quarantine, cordon off and prevent these “undesirables” from contaminating the “superior” mostly white, native-born citizens. Moreover, racial groups deemed “eugenically superior,” specifically White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were encouraged to reproduce at greater rates, a concept often referred to as “positive eugenics.”

Those adjudged to have “inferior genes” were discouraged from reproducing through the establishment of “negative eugenics” programs, such as state-mandated sterilization laws for “mental defectives,” restrictions against who could marry whom, birth control policies, harsh adoption laws and loud nativist calls for laws restricting the entry of “swarthy,” “unkempt” and “unassimilable” immigrants. In essence, eugenics offered Americans in positions of power an authoritative scientific language to substantiate their biases against those they feared as dangerous. Indeed, few of the “social eugenics policies” had a greater impact than the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which blocked the entry of the millions of Eastern and Southern European and Asian immigrants seeking refuge on our shores for the following 40 years. How many millions of them died or lived tortured lives in their native lands because of this stringent and prejudiced policy is difficult to enumerate.

One of the biggest fans of the American eugenics movement was Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Nazi Germany. When the world discovered the role eugenics played in Hitler’s campaign to cleanse the Third Reich of its “unfit,” it drummed a final nail into the eugenics movement coffin.

Once the theory of an armchair population biologist, eugenics too quickly transmogrified into a racist and harmful evidence base for ridding nations of those the dominant society did not like or feared. Of course, the problem was that the evidence base was false and poorly constructed.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp

If Francis Galton is remembered at all, it should be poorly, despite his other intellectual contributions. Some consider eugenics to be merely the weird, step-uncle of modern, scientifically-grounded genetics. Yet, this bit of history reminds us to constantly evaluate and test our theories for evidence of racism and prejudice before implementing them and harming the innocent.

A sign that reads "Stop" placed near a barb wire is seen at the concentration camp during a ceremony marking the 68th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz by Soviet troops and to remember the victims of the Holocaust, in Auschwitz Birkenau.

Donald Trump has failed in his role to protect Americans from falling victim to the false theory of eugenics.  When Trump wrongly called certain countries "shitholes", he instantly created a regressive culture of racial tolerance towards people who originated from those nations that he stigmatized.