Irene (maiden name Siegelstein or similar) is on record arriving at Flossenburg Concentration Camp in March of 1945.
I’ve held onto this for a few weeks. It’s very hard to keep up with Zisblatt’s lies.
So, this must be the camp she arrived on after she claims she had her tattoo removed by Mengele, told to forget her identity and was given another, was given a lethal injection that didn’t kill her, she escaped from inside a gas chamber, and was thrown over the electrified barbed wire fence naked onto the train that went here.
Must have been a slow train, too, Auschwitz was liberated well over a month before, as far as I know.
Irene on Record at Flossenburg Concentration Camp
Until I find evidence otherwise, (I have evidence that shows that it’s questionable) I believe Irene Weisberg Zisblatt was indeed at Auschwitz. After all, she describes the Auschwitz Inmate Orchestra quite vividly in her memoirs! (she viewed listening to the choice of music as an inhuman form of torture)
However, if this was the only camp she was in, very late in the war, it would explain her lack of a tattoo.
There are problems with taking this Irene SEGELSTEIN (spelled differently) to be the author of The Fifth Diamond. Could it be someone Irene took her name/identity from?? Just a speculation.
However, this Irene was born in Dec. 1929, which would make her 14 1/2 in 1944 when Zisblatt says she was taken to Auschwitz. But Zisblatt says over and over that she was 13 years old the entire time she was there. At Volary, where an Irene Siegelstein was liberated, she gave her birthdate as 1928, which would make her 17 in 1945.
Also, her name wasn’t Irene until she got her passport or papers to emigrate to the United States, which was at least one year later. She was Chana Siegelstein, so she says. She couldn’t be listed at Flossenbuerg as Irene Segelstein, but only as Chana. Unless that information was gathered after the fact by volunteer information, like the Yad Vashem museum does it.
Irene Sieglestein or Seglestein is not an uncommon name, I’m sure.
Anyone who arrived in a camp on March 5th, 1945 was being transferred from another camp. She would not have been coming from Auschwitz on that date because Auschwitz was evacuated on January 18, 1945. So what camp was she in before? Could she have actually been at the Neuengamme camp and at Auschwitz before that? But why was she calling herself Irene?
I tend to think she was not at Auschwitz because she doesn’t use descriptive language – other than “mud” and “filth” – when her surroundings would have, in some cases at least, made a strong impression on her. She doesn’t even describe what Dr. Mengele actually looked like. The only things she gets kind of right are what she could have seen and heard during her trips there in ’94, ’95 and later.
I’ve looked at my own family’s United States census figures and there are spelling mistakes, and even children are given completely different names.
I’m 90 % positive this is her, Siegelstein is actually a more rare name for a Jew than you would think, although Siegel and Stein seperately are common.
Also, her name is spelled different in differently in different languages and countries. Tziegelshtein or Tzeigelstern, similar, etc.
The date listed is about the age she would be, around sixteen at the end of the war.
I would also have to check with her information to check the tattoo number as well.
Chana was her Hebrew name, like a Catholic name, I don’t know the specific term for either.
She just claimed that to say that her name was stripped from her…
Definitely don’t go by The Fifth Diamond, you have to start earlier, it’s closer to the truth.
I guess you have to see the 3 1/2 hour testimony of hers.
I’m going to try and upload it somewhere.
I’ve been doing some research in the Fifth Diamond book which should help on the timeline also.
Zisblatt’s birth date must be 1931, considering what she writes in her book. The first line of her Preface reads: “I was only six years old when the Third Reich started the invasion across Europe.” According to her other dates, the “invasion” began, in her mind, in 1937.
The two birth dates given on the data sheets Eric has posted for Irene Sieglestein (or Seglestein) are 1928 and 1929.
On page 79 of The Fifth Diamond (FD) she writes that in January 1945 she was 14 years old, and the 5000 prisoners of Neuengamme were set on a march, each one with only one article of clothing, pair of wooden shoes, and a thin blanket. 45 minus 31 is 14.
(On page 76, she tells how a boy commando “tossed” her over the barbed wire, electrified fence onto a train waiting on the side tracks. He wraps her in his jacket and tells her “There are open cars on the train.” She lands in a cattle car with no roof. [Photographs of the site show that the fence was too high and the tracks not close enough for this tossing to have been possible. Plus all photographs always show train cars with roofs.] The train, only moving at night, takes her and the others to Neuengamme labor camp, near Hamburg in NW Germany. By another MIRACLE, in the morning she finds her friend Sabka in the bunk below hers! She says she spent the winter of ’44-’45 at Neuengamme.)
Page 80 of FD: After about two months (now March ’45) on the “death march” from Neuengamme, only half were still alive. They enter an empty camp and spend the night, where Zisblatt experiences another MIRACLE wherein “God sent an angel” to save her. They continue marching.
Page 84: It’s now April, weather is warmer, only a few hundred prisoners left. Planes are in the sky and strafe their group – some SS are killed and wounded. In the confusion, Chana and Sabka go into the forest alone.
Page 87-88: They wander for several days through forests. One morning, a Jewish GI finds them sleeping, and he and his buddies treat them so kindly. They clean up and a Red Cross truck shows up with two beds in it, where Chana and Sabka sleep the night.
Page 89: In the morning, Sabka is dead. Soldiers said she had typhus. Instead of taking Sabka’s body to the proper authorities in the Red Cross truck outfitted with beds, the soldiers and Chana buried her in a makeshift grave, wrapped in a blanket. Was this according to army regulations??
(I am sure there is no record of this ever taking place.)
Page 95: Zisblatt writes: “I was fourteen. How could I go on without her?”
Page 97: Chana is taken in the Red Cross truck to the American hospital near Pilzen German, where she was told she was in the beginning stages of typhus.
P. 98: All other patients were young military men. General Patton gives her a special visit. She spend two months in that hospital. That brings us to JUNE 1945.
p. 99: She is assigned a guardian who took her to Salzburg and helped her register at the displaced person’s camp, but she doesn’t name this man. Odd.
p. 100-101: She remained as a DP for two years in Salzburg.
p. 103: In Oct. 1947, she received her official papers to board a ship, the “Marine Fletcher” in BremerHafen, Germany, to the US. THAT is when she was given the name “Irene” by an immigration officer!
So there you have her official book account of her liberation, which can be compared with what she says in her earlier interviews. She was never in Flossenbuerg camp, according to her. I think that is a different Irene Seglestein. But is it possible that that is why she chose the name of Irene, because she knew of other Irene Sieglesteins that she might be confused with?
@Eric Hunt
Yes, I agree that she reworked her story to make it sound better or be more accurate. But the discrepancies between what she says in ’94, then in ’95 and maybe later, then in her book in 2008 are what point up many of her lies.
It’s not a question of trying to say she is not on those lists, but according to her own story in her book, which is a carefully considered autobiography (supposedly), it doesn’t fit.
What’s important is to get all this down on the timeline, all the inconsistencies and different versions, and then publish it. It will also help you to keep it all straight, because it isn’t easy.
On her ID tatoo: Zisblatt says in the book Fifth Diamond, on page 35, that the number 61397 was tatooed on her arm. The Irene Segelstein at Flossenbuerg has an ID number of 63941.
On the “last location” data sheet you published, Irene Siegelstein from Polena, born in 1928, has an ID number of 4103, but that doesn’t sound like a tatoo number. Of course, she didn’t have a tatoo anymore at that time.
But she also didn’t have a tatoo when she left Auschwitz (if she did) either. So she wouldn’t have had one when she arrived at Flossenbuerg (if she did).
I know for a fact that the Irene Siegelstein we are talking about (zisblatt) is the one from Polena.
Yea, there will have to be separate timelines created, what we can prove happened, and where she actually was, and her story.
Just a thought – this is the youngest, perkiest looking 80 year old I’ve ever seen.
http://njjewishnews.com/njjn.com/112008/cjSurvivorTells.jpg
Just this photo alone makes me wonder, has her identity ever REALLY been confirmed? This discussion (and all the comments are good) indicates to me that it has not been established that this lady is what she says she is.
Who knows?
No way she had her tattoo removed by Mengele, I know that for a fact.
Her original testimony in 95 doesn’t mention him, yet he’s the James Bond – like villain in The Fifth Diamond, the “Angel of Death”, the most handsome, yet evil villain, always with lines of dialogue telling exactly what his diabolical plot is.
Another thought – the “evil doctor doing insane experiments on innocent victims” theme comes from Hollywood. I know Bela Lugosi in “Zombies on Broadway” is a good example of the evil doctor – do you think Hollywood would have made one comedy movie on this subject if it was really happening to Jewish people? The items made of human flesh theme comes from Satanism and the occult, I believe Cabalist Aleister Crowley was said to have a book of spells bound in human flesh.
That picture you showed is not a recent one. She is 80 now, in 2009. The videos we see of her were done in 1995 and a year or two later. She was only 66 in ’95. A lot of time actually passed between her first “coming out” in ’94 and the publishing of this book in 2008.
Just think — her publisher must have had schools already lined up for her book before it came out, since it’s already in use by some! It’s written for school-age kids — a target market. Co-written by a schoolteacher — how perfect. They are following their master plan.
Your question as to her identity is a good one though. The confusion and movement of people during the period she speaks of is why all these “camp survivors” can tell the wild stories they do — it’s impossible to check out what really happened to their families. According to them, they were all gassed to death. Those who still have their immediate family intact will say, “I had several relatives who died in the camps” or “Members of my family were killed by Hitler” without having to be specific. No one questions them. That’s how it seems possible that millions died.
Here is a site with CURRENT PICTURES of Irene Zisblatt: http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/press/atlantic/article_3d3d2f34-a5ca-5437-b43c-964990ff018d.html
Scroll halfway down the page to the video and you should see Irene’s face there. If not, it will come up when you turn it on. Then listen to the things she’s saying — she gets bolder and bolder, and all those poor kids don’t even seem to consider that they can disbelieve her. What she does obviously agrees with her — she loves it.
Thanks, Carolyn. Well, eating diamonds must be good for you if she’s going so strong in 2009. Where is Polena, I wonder? It doesn’t come up as a place name in google.