From Irene Zisblatt’s 3 hour, 26 minute 1995 testimony to Steven Spielberg’s USC Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation -
Zisblatt claims to have been in Auschwitz, then Neungamme, goes on a “Death March” and is liberated by General Patton in Pilzen, although the pesky Red Cross then claims otherwise.
Zisblatt Claims she was on a "Death March" from Nuengamme to Pilzen
Here's what the Red Cross International Tracing Service Says
The following reply from the Red Cross International Tracing Service is odd. It begins “….we are not able to determine whether …refers to the abovenamed :”
Document from the Red Cross Zisblatt is holding proves she is a liar.
From my research, after Segelstein was in Auschwitz, sent to Gross Rosen, to Flossenburg, Zisblatt (from two Jewish sources, including the World Jewish Congress) then went to a hospital in Volary, Czechoslovakia, where she was actually liberated. (She claims General Patton liberated her in Pilzen, Czechoslvakia, which is a lie she stole from the book Heroes of the Holocaust)
Timeline (culled from the confusing codswallop on Wikipedia under Auschwitz, “Evacuation and liberation”) –
Septermber 28, 1944 – little Iren, almost 15 years old, registered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
October 30, 1944 – The last selection [for death by gassing?] took place on this day.
November 1944 – Heinrich Himmler ordered the crematoria destroyed before the Red Army reached the camp.
January 1945 – The gas chambers of Birkenau were blown up by the SS.
January 17, 1945 – Nazi personnel started to evacuate the facility; nearly 60,000 prisoners, most of those remaining, were forced on a death march to the camp toward Wodzisław Śląski (German: Loslau).
January 20 1945 – the SS command sent orders to murder all the prisoners remaining in the camp, but in the chaos of the Nazi retreat the order was never carried out.
January 27, 1945 – Those too weak or sick to walk were left behind; about 7,500 prisoners were liberated by the 322nd Rifle Division of the [Communist] Red Army on this day.
April 1945 – British liberate Bergen Belsen. (Some 20,000 Auschwitz prisoners had “made it” to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany). Among the artifacts of automated murder found by the Communists were 348,820 men’s suits and 836,255 women’s garments.
I can’t find anything about Chana Siegelstein/Zisblatt’s birthplace, the “small village of Polena in Hungary” in google, but Irene Segelstern’s birthplace is now a metropolis in Poland.
From Wikipedia -
Sosnowiec [sɔsˈnɔvjɛt͡s] ( listen) is a city in Zagłębie Dąbrowskie in southern Poland, near Katowice. The central district of the Upper Silesian Metropolitan Union – it is a metropolis with the population of 2 million people and is located in the Silesian Highlands, on the Brynica river (tributary of the Vistula)…
Sosonowiec suffered war damages during both military conflicts in the 20th century, the First World War, which caused mainly destruction to industry, and during World War II, which brought about the terror of executions, which however, did not diminish the courage of Sosnowiec people, many of whom were active in the resistance.
* Thousands of Jews were deported from Sosnowiec ghetto to Auschwitz in June 1943. The Ghetto was liquidated two months later and almost all remaining Jews (around 15,000) were also deported to Auschwitz. Previously there had been considerable underground activity among them. January 1945 brought about the liberation of the city, which gave it a chance for gradual rebuilding and further development…
Notable people – [they don't claim Zisblatt!]
Edward Gierek
Jędrzej Giertych
Vladek Spiegelman
Włodzimierz Sedlak
Paul Godwin
Jan Kiepura
Władysław Szpilman
Marcin Oles
Bartlomiej Oles
Thank you, Kindly, for your diligence. I want to make a few comments to what you presented from Wiki. I will put my comments in capital letters.
November 1944 – Heinrich Himmler ordered the crematoria destroyed before the Red Army reached the camp.
THEN WHY WERE THEY STILL THERE?! IT’S MY AND OTHERS’ UNDERSTANDING THAT THE SS JUST REMOVED THE CREMATORY OVENS AND OTHER VALUABLE FIXTURES AND SHIPPED THEM TO GERMANY, BUT LEFT THE BUILDINGS INTACT.
January 1945 – The gas chambers of Birkenau were blown up by the SS.
THIS IS A CLAIM MADE BY THE SOVIETS WITH NO PROOF. BUT THERE IS PROOF THAT THEY DID NOT [BELOW].
January 17, 1945 – Nazi personnel started to evacuate the facility; nearly 60,000 prisoners, most of those remaining, were forced on a death march to the camp toward Wodzisław Śląski (German: Loslau).
YES, AND THE CAMP WAS EVACUATED OF ALL GERMANS AND THE PRISONERS WHO WERE TO ACCOMPANY THEM BY THE 18TH.
January 20 1945 – the SS command sent orders to murder all the prisoners remaining in the camp, but in the chaos of the Nazi retreat the order was never carried out.
THAT’S STUPID. WHY DIDN’T THEY MURDER THEM BEFORE THEY LEFT. ONCE AGAIN, THEY HAVE THE SS BEHAVING LIKE THE KEYSTONE COPS. THIS IS JUST ANOTHER “STORY” WITH NO BASIS IN FACT.
January 27, 1945 – Those too weak or sick to walk were left behind; about 7,500 prisoners were liberated by the 322nd Rifle Division of the [Communist] Red Army on this day.
THE RED ARMY ARRIVED ON THE 27TH. THERE IS A FILM MADE BY A SOLDIER IN THE POLISH ARMY, BY THE NAME OF Henryk Makarewicz, THAT WAS MADE SHORTLY AFTER LIBERATION [CAN'T SAY EXACTLY WHEN] THAT SHOWS THE CLOTHING WAREHOUSES BURNING [the SS supposedly set them on fire before they left 10 TO 15 days before, but they were still burning brightly?] AND TWO TALL CHIMNEYS IN THE BACKGROUND WHICH WOULD BE KREMAS IV AND V.
SO THE GERMANS BLEW UP THE ‘GAS CHAMBERS’ BUT THE CHIMNEYS WERE STILL STANDING WHEN THE RUSSIANS ARRIVED? THAT’S WHAT THEY CLAIM TO EXPLAIN THIS VISUAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PROOF THAT STRONGLY SUGGESTS (!) THAT THE SOVIETS BLEW UP THE KREMATORIUMS … BECAUSE … THEY CONTAINED SHOWER ROOMS WITH RUNNING WATER, AND MORGUES, AND NO GAS CHAMBERS.
THE PROOF THAT THE HOLO IS A HOAX IS ALL RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES ALL THE TIME, BUT WE BELIEVE WHAT WE ARE TOLD RATHER THAN ADMIT WHAT WE SEE.
MORE ON THE LIBERATION PHOTOS
All the photographs of the Auschwitz-Birkenau liberation were staged in February and later, well after the actual liberation, because the first soldiers to arrive didn’t have cameras with them.
Some of the most famous photos were taken months later; the survivors had become actors, donning the striped uniforms and playing the role of prisoner once again. This includes photos of the children.
Certainly the film made by the Polish soldier I described could not have been filmed until February, yet the clothing warehouses called “Canada” that were supposedly set on fire by the Nazis were burning in the film and the Crematorium chimneys can be clearly seen. I repeat this because it cannot be repeated enough. You can see a picture of this at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/Liberation.html
a little more than halfway down the page.
I would say all the photos on this page are staged.
I was wondering what kind of climate Poland has, these half-naked prisoners were running all about the countryside in the middle of winter, and so many survived. They never say the mileage covered, but it seems to me not too many people would last more than a snowy night. I see by the photos, they had snow and big long icicles. Freezing weather.
One thing I want to say, my mother told me that nobody in America thought they were fighting World War II to save the Jews. She said all that came out later, after the war.
(She lived in a city on the West Coast, was bright, and was NOT deprived of the mass media. ) That scrapbooks page says that it was “known” about the gas chambers in 1942. It may have been “rumored” in some places about the gas chambers, but it was not generally known. I have an old encyclopedia from ’45 or so that actually says, “Now we know the rumors were true.”
I’m basically opposed to “studying” books that are all bushwah, but I’m being drawn into it. I’m going to dig out some of my old books from 1944-1945 and tell you what they said at the time. I thought I read that WE, the liberators, burned one of the major camps to the ground.
Poland has a cold winter climate – the idea that people like Irene went on 2-3 month death marches with only a thin blanket, no shoes and only snow to eat is preposterous.
Plus, photographs show prisoners dressed warmly and no prisoners out in the snow in skimpy clothing.
You are so right that no one, in America or anywhere else, thought they were fighting to help or save the Jews. If they did, there would have been no fight, no war. But the ONLY thing the Jews were interested in about the war was the Jews!
There were some news stories carried in a British newspaper, reporting the rumors with bold headlines. That might have been already in ’42. They were reports from the Auschwitz underground “within the camp”, mostly Polish Communists, sent to the Polish govt. in exile in London via wireless sets the prisoners had. The governments knew they were lies, war propaganda, so didn’t pay any attention.
Very much looking forward to what you tell us from your old books. Yes, the Allies did a lot of burning down camp structures. Why do you think there is nothing there anymore?
Auschwitz 1, with it’s beautiful brick barracks, is the only one that’s pretty much intact. I’ll bet you didn’t know that the large, impressive Visitor Center is the original Administration building for the camp. This building had something like 12-15 delousing chambers for clothing that used Zyclon-B. The theater room that today shows Soviet propaganda films to visitors before they tour the memorial museum “camp” was in use in the ’40′s showing movies to inmates. All true!
The first problem with the book, before you even get to the camps, is that this is basically a retarded child’s “memoirs” of World War II. She is not responsible for anything that she is saying, because she is so young, isolated, terrified, in denial, etc.
No, that is not a problem, Mr. K. The book is not written by a child, but by an almost 80 year old woman (quite sane and keeping up a demanding personal appearance schedule) and a middle-aged (I guess) public school teacher — who teaches writing to high school students! Zisblatt has had plenty of time to recover and think about what really happened.
No, these people can’t get off the hook by issues of “memory” including failing memory. They know exactly what they’re doing; in fact, the book was changed from the original testimony for Spielberg’s Shoah project, which was full of lies already, but then, with malice aforethought, got even worse.
The issue is not what she wants to believe in her memory hole, but whether sick fantasies of hideous atrocities (like the worst kind of pornography) should be forced on gullible school children as fact. And not just once but over and over through their school career, and not just in the U.S. but all over the world.
The issue with Spielberg is that he produced a propaganda film that he knows is deceptive and defamatory, even encouraged his testifiers to exaggerate and lie, and called it a documentary. This is accepted practice so he thinks nothing of it.
These people cannot be excused, not by low character or low IQ either. That’s why the book publishers are also guilty. As we know by reading it, all you have to do is READ this book to know it’s nonsense. So the book publishers know it too, yet they classify it as non-fiction.
Carolyn, I agree with every point you make. All I meant to say is that Zisblatt is a horrible historian, so how does she get away with this? Well, she only went to school to the third grade. She didn’t have a radio. She didn’t pay any attention to politics.
I guess nobody reads this book for the history, they read it for the fairy tale adventures and the “lesson” on anti-Semitism.
I was just reading the comments on amazon.com, an historian named Serrano makes a nice attack on the Hungarian “history” in the book. Of course, she gets attacked herself, for knocking Zisblatt.
Looking at the map with the pencil pointing, we can clearly see Auschwitz, Gross Rosen and Flossenbuerg (along a somewhat direct path) … and also Buchenwald.
Earlier this year, I traveled by train from Dresden (where Buchenwald is located) to Krakow, Poland (where Auschwitz is only a few miles away). I was on the train for about 9 hours, but I had to change trains halfway which took at least 1/2 hour.
Therefore, the trip from Auschwitz to Gross Rosen would not be more than a few hours by train; if the train was very slow, at most a day. From Gross Rosen to Flossenbuerg no more than another day.
There would have been no 5 day trips with no food and only a can for everyone to relieve themselves in.