Fake Holocaust Survivors: Zoltan Matyash
According to the ‘paper of record’ the ‘New York Times’ in 2019 there was a ‘needy’ ‘Holocaust Survivor’ in Brooklyn, New York named Zoltan Matyash and they decided – for reasons I know not – to retell his ‘Holocaust’ story so as to ‘raise funds’ for him despite the facts that the ‘Holocaust’ industry – such as ‘The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany’ – has hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars squirrelled and/or unaccounted for.
Leaving that aside let’s focus on Matyash’s story.
We begin with the claim that:
‘Mr. Matyash had just turned 13 when his father, Yakob, taught him to conduct the Kohanim blessing. It was 1944, the year the Nazis occupied their town, Mukachevo, which had a large Jewish population and is now in western Ukraine. They forced the Matyash family — 20 people, including Mr. Matyash’s grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins — into a ghetto.
In the year that followed, Mr. Matyash, barely a teenager, would lose 18 of those relatives and experience the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, beginning with Auschwitz.’ (1)
Now there is a problem with this narrative in that the town/city of Mukachevo was awarded to the Hungarians as part of the First Vienna Award in 1938 and all jews without Hungarian citizenship were deported into Soviet-controlled Ukraine by the Hungarian government where they were allegedly all promptly murdered in August 1941 as part of the Kamenets-Podolski massacre by Einsatzgruppe D. (2)
This already provides a problem because Matyash is a common surname from the Ukraine meaning ‘Gift of God’, while Zoltan is indeed a Hungarian first name. The problem is this suggests that Matyash and his family may not have had Hungarian citizenship prior to 1938, but let’s be charitable and assume that they did indeed have this.
Then Matyash tells us that when he was 13 in 1944 that he was deported ‘to a ghetto’ and then to Auschwitz. This must seemingly refer to the Budapest Ghetto which is often cited as the only Hungarian ghetto which was established in November 1944 and was only extant for two months till January 1945 although the Germans had occupied Hungary since March 1944.
The problem with this really is again the timeline since if what Matyash claims is true then he was deported to the Budapest Ghetto sometime in November to December 1944 and then deported on to Auschwitz which was already being evacuated as of August 1944 before the final evacuation begin in January 1945. (3)
This seems improbable but is solvable because it appears Mukachevo did actually have its own small jewish ghetto in 1944 (since we have an alleged photo of it) (4) and indeed this could be Matyash’s ghetto although his claim to have been ‘deported’ to a ghetto makes no sense in that case (since he just moved houses presumably from outside the ghetto into the ghetto) and it is implied that from May to July 1944 these provincial ghettos were emptied via deportation directly into the Auschwitz constellation of work camps. (5)
This then makes a certain amount of sense given that Mukachevo was declared ‘Judenrein’ (literally ‘Free of Jews’) on 30th May 1944 (6) which puts Matyash and the 15,000 jews of Mukachevo on trains to Auschwitz sometime between April and May 1944.
So far so good: Matyash’s narrative is relatively okay albeit with the niggle that he claims to have been ‘deported’ to a ghetto but clearly couldn’t have been.
Next, we read how:
‘Mr. Matyash said that he and his family were greeted at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor who surveyed prisoners as they arrived to determine whether they were fit for work or were to be executed. He told Mr. Matyash’s mother and sisters to “go left,” referring to the line for the crematory.
“My father and I did not even see them leave,” Mr. Matyash said. “We were next in line, so we did not even realize they were gone. We just thought they were going to a different part of the camp.”’ (7)
Now this claim by Matyash is interesting precisely because it firstly makes the classic error of ‘Holocaust Survivors’ in claiming they were nearly all personally instructed and inspected by Dr. Josef Mengele where to go and which line they were to get into. This is perfectly possible but also unlikely given that Mengele was one of several SS doctors at the camp (8) as well as other medical personnel some of whom were jewish and others not.
Matyash claims his mother and sisters were told to go into the left line which was ‘for the crematory’… note ‘crematory’… not ‘gas chambers’ which might suggest that they were being sent to the ‘purpose-built gas chambers’ attached to Krema II-V in Auschwitz, but the choice of words is interesting because he doesn’t say ‘gas chambers’ but rather ‘crematory’ which again hints at the truth that he indirectly reveals when Matyash next states:
‘We just thought they were going to a different part of the camp.’
In other words: Matyash’s mother and sisters were moved into the left line by Dr. Mengele and this line went off in the general direction of a crematory and Matyash just assumed – rightly I would argue – that they were just being separated (as the sexes were in Auschwitz) from each other and they were going to a different part of the camp.
Put another way what Matyash is actually saying is: my mother and sisters were moved to another part of Auschwitz from my father and I, but I am assuming that because I never saw them again that they were ‘gassed’. When in truth they almost certainly died from the various diseases wracking the camp that Mengele played a big part in fighting by his implementation of strict delousing and block sanitation regimes at the camp and for which he was awarded the War Merit Cross in 1944. (8)
We can immediately see the truth of this in what Matyash records happened to him and his father when we read how:
‘Dr. Mengele asked Mr. Matyash’s age. He was 13, but Yakob said he was 18, which would make him fit for labor.
“Of course, I did not look 18, so they needed to verify if I could withstand pain,” Mr. Matyash said. “They hit me several times with an iron whip with long wires and cords coming off of it. I can still feel the lashes sometimes. I was tall but very thin, you see. But I withstood the pain. That whip saved my life.”
In short order, Mr. Matyash and his father were stripped naked, shaved, disinfected and given uniforms. Then their identification numbers were tattooed on their left arms: A-6307 for Mr. Matyash, A-6308 for his father.’ (10)
The problem with this narrative is obvious, but let’s first look at what happened to Matyash and his father which also almost certainly happened to his mother and sisters as well: he was stripped naked, disinfected and given uniforms then they were tattooed. This is relatively uncontroversial as well as in line Dr. Mengele’s known sanitation procedures that were in place at the time at Auschwitz and there is no reason not to assume that the same process was not also followed with Matyash’s mother and sisters.
Now let’s go back to Matyash’s other narrative where he claims that Dr. Mengele – who held both an M.D. and also a PhD in (Physical) Anthropology from the University of Munich – didn’t know the difference between a 13 year old and an 18 year old – which he very clearly did – and decided he was ‘fit for labour’ by hitting him with what was effectively a metal cat o’ nine tails with Matyash’s non-specifically claiming that he ‘withstood the pain’, which I rather doubt since the cat o’ nine tails was absolutely notorious among hardened nineteenth-century sailors for being intensely painful (11) so I rather doubt a skinny 13 year old boy with no significant experience of manual labour would be able to withstand it.
The truth is that this episode is almost certainly an invention of Matyash’s given that hitting someone with a metal cat o nine tails to ‘test’ their worthiness for labour is absolutely ludicrous as it proves absolutely nothing and sounds like something derived from a 1950s/1960s pirate film which it may very well have been.
One also one wonders why the tattoos given to Matyash and his father are so low numerically given there were at least 65,000 to 100,000 jewish workers at Auschwitz at this point. (12) The subject of tattoos at Auschwitz is something I will return to in a separate article, but at this point it is enough to simply point out this rather strange lacuna in the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ narrative.
Next, we read how Matyash came to the conclusion that his mother and daughters ‘went to the crematory’ that we discussed previously:
‘Not far from the barracks where they received their tattoos, Mr. Matyash said, thick smoke billowed from pits filled with burning bodies. Yakob asked a guard where his wife and daughters were.
The guard pointed to the smoke. “He said, ‘There,’” Mr. Matyash recalled.’ (13)
Basically, one guard – note that Matyash is non-specific about whether this guard was an SS member, a Pole or a Ukrainian – allegedly told Matyash’s father Yakob his wife and daughters were ‘smoke’ and while this might seem like a ‘confession’ let’s note the immediate context. The guard is referring to the large pits where human bodies were being burned which were giving off a lot of smoke.
What the guard isn’t saying is ‘your wife/mother and daughters/sisters have been gassed and are now being cremated in these pits’, but rather what’s actually referencing is that they are likely to end up as a smoke – possibly as a cruel joke/a form of gallows humour – because of the amount of dead prisoners that the German camp authorities were having to deal with due to a rampant infectious diseases – such as scarlet fever and typhus – which were raging in the Auschwitz’s women’s camp in particular during 1944 and which Dr. Mengele was primarily concerned and tasked with combatting.
So, what seems to be an ‘admission of guilt’ is actually nothing of the kind but rather cruel reference to the fact that Matyash’s mother and sisters would likely die from disease and end up with their remains being burned in the open-air burning pit which was conventional wisdom to assist in disease control and eradication at the time. (14)
Next, we read how:
‘Once he arrived at the Janinagrube subcamp, Mr. Matyash spent his days hoisting 11-pound sacks of cement on his shoulders and handling coal without gloves. After a brief transfer to Jaworzno, another Auschwitz subcamp, Mr. Matyash was forced on a nearly two-month death march through Poland and Germany in the dead of winter to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Mr. Matyash remained at Buchenwald until American troops liberated it on April 11, 1945.’ (15)
This is reasonable given the Janinagrube sub-camp within the Auschwitz concentration camp system was indeed a coal mine so Matyash’s reference to ‘handling coal without gloves’ – which is known to have happened – is a point in his favour (16) as does his reference to ‘hoisting 11-pound sacks of cement on his shoulders’ as the Jaworzno sub-camp of Auschwitz’s main role was supplying labour to construct a powerplant named ‘Wilhelm’. (17)
The so-called ‘death march’ – in reality the evacuation of prisoners before the advancing Red Army – to Buchenwald is also overstated albeit likely true as is the subsequent ‘liberation’ of the prisoners by the US army.
Thus we can see that by dissecting Matyash’s story we can actually verify details from it that are hard to fake, but we can also see where Matyash is ‘filling in’ false information/claims – knowingly or otherwise – to bulk out his story and make it seem like his experience was far more horrible than it in fact was given that all he seems to have actually done from 1944 onwards was hard labour for six months and then walk for two months as far of an evacuation column to Buchenwald.
It is as simple as that: no gas chambers required.
References
(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/neediest-cases/holocaust-survivor-struggles.html
(2) https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206423.pdf
(3) https://www.auschwitz.org/en/liberation-of-kl-auschwitz-80/
(4) https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-community-of-munkacs-an-overview
(5) https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/timeline-event/holocaust/1942-1945/deportation-of-hungarian-jews
(6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukachevo#Jewish_community
(7) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/neediest-cases/holocaust-survivor-struggles.html
(8) https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/medical-experiments/other-doctor-perpetrators/
(9) Helena Kubica, 1994, ‘The Crimes of Josef Mengele’, pp. 328-329 in Yisrael Gutman, Michael Berenbaum (Eds.), 1994, ‘Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp’, 1st Edition, Indiana University Press: Bloomington
(10) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/neediest-cases/holocaust-survivor-struggles.html
(11) https://mhnsw.au/stories/convict-sydney/cat-o-nine-tails/
(12) https://www.auschwitz.org/en/liberation-of-kl-auschwitz-80/
(13) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/neediest-cases/holocaust-survivor-struggles.html
(14) https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/8abfe496-4573-46dd-9956-0b816c100767 ; https://wedc-knowledge.lboro.ac.uk/resources/books/Emergency_Sanitation_-_Ch_09.pdf; https://time.com/3478238/ebola-liberia-burials-cremation-burned/; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1752928X2100158X
(15) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/neediest-cases/holocaust-survivor-struggles.html
(16) https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/auschwitz-sub-camps/janinagrube/
(17) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaworzno_concentration_camp#During_the_German_occupation_of_Poland