Left out bits of information, and exaggeration have given credibility to that which was not.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the camps did not happen, I'm just saying there was an exaggeration of it's context.
In a book called "Stories of the Holocaust" written by those that had been there, an enormous amount of them had no idea that there was a crematorium right under there nose. They talk of play productions and concerts.
Certainly they had not to eat, but then who actually did, during WWII?
When I first learned of the Holocaust in the 7Th grade, it was though the emotional writing of a teenage girl named Anne Frank. I took those emotions at the time, as an admission of fact, and I was dead wrong.
I was proven wrong by reading "I will bear witness" by Victor Kemperer, who was also a Jew married to an Aryan.
The understanding, that came from reading of the facts, rather than through that of the emotions of a child, was phenomenal.
I suggest you all, as I did.....begin again
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp
Auschwitz concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager Auschwitz [ˈaʊʃvɪts] ( listen)) was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or base camp); Auschwitz II–Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp); Auschwitz III–Monowitz, also known as Buna–Monowitz (a labor camp); and 45 satellite camps.[1]
Auschwitz had for a long time been a German name for Oświęcim, the town by and around which the camps were located; the name "Auschwitz" was made the official name again by the Germans after they invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (= "birch forest"), referred originally to a small Polish village that was destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp.
Auschwitz II–Birkenau was designated by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Germany's Minister of the Interior, as the place of the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe". From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe.[2] The camp's first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there (2.5 million gassed, and 500,000 from disease and starvation).[3] . Today the accepted figure is 1.3 million, around 90 percent of them Jewish.[4][5] Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, some 400 Jehovah's Witnesses and tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities.[6][7] Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious disease, individual executions, and medical experiments.[8]
On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Executions are NOT extermination
It could hardly have been a riskier mission: infiltrate Auschwitz to chronicle Nazi atrocities. Witold Pilecki survived nearly three years as an inmate in the death camp, managing to smuggle out word of executions before making a daring escape. But the Polish resistance hero was crushed by the post-war communist regime — tried on trumped-up charges and executed.
Six decades on, Poland hopes Pilecki's remains will be identified among the entangled skeletons and shattered skulls of resistance fighters being excavated from a mass grave on the edge of Warsaw's Powazki Military Cemetery. The exhumations are part of a movement in the resurgent, democratic nation to officially recognize its war-time heroes and 20th century tragedies.
"He was unique in the world," said Zofia Pilecka-Optulowicz, paying tribute to her father's 1940 decision to walk straight into a Nazi street roundup with the aim of getting inside the extermination camp. "I would like to have a place where I can light a candle for him."
More than 100 skeletons, mostly of men, have been dug
