Friday 21 October 2011

Maurice Rossel and Richard Glazar


I’ve been reading about these two today. Rossel was a Red Cross inspector who was fooled by a staged Theriesenstadt. The Germans had turned the three tier bunks into to two tier ones. They’d made everything look pleasant. However, I still wonder why the International Red Cross could think it in any way right for human beings to be held there against their will? He went on an unannounced visit to Auschwitz and was not shown around. There should have been some sort of clue in that. As an older man, he admits to being naïve when he was young.
 Glazar was an inmate but also employed at Treblinka. The Germans concluded that it was best to have someone experienced to deal with the killings, the corpses and the sorting of clothes and jewellery – and gold teeth. It was because he did that job that he was allowed to live. The transports slowed in 1943. If people weren’t arriving at the camp there would be no work for him and therefore he would also be killed. So, he escaped.
Particularly gruesome were his descriptions of how the old people were led directly from the trains through a sort of funnel into the “showers” where they were gassed with carbon monoxide. Presumably this is what happened to Clara Lehrs.              

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