How Rosa Appel’s Survivor Testimony Debunks the Myth of Auschwitz’s Gas Chambers

Rosa Appel (born Raizel Bercovici) is an interesting case study of a so-called ‘Holocaust Survivor’ who was in the Auschwitz concentration camp who accidentally tells us the truth about what happened at the camp. To quote her autobiographical account published as a – rather clunky - translation from the original Yiddish by Ronald Knieve in the 2011 edition of the journal ‘Socialist History’.

She describes her arrival at Auschwitz as follows:

‘He said, you young people you gonna walk, you gonna walk. Well, we didn’t have to walk too much. They took us in one big room there by Auschwitz, they took us in one big room, and they start to do things to undress us completely like we were born. And some people there were cutting our hair and some people were shaving our underarms and the woman part, too, and as we talked naked another put on something yellow all over where they cut our hair. They said that gonna be good for hygenics.’ (1)

And her weekly routine as follows:

‘At the C Lager is 32 barracks. And one barrack was only for the waste. There were little beds, only from wood, one on the lower, the middle and one higher. In that bed we were sleeping about eight people, one to the head and one to the feet across. And that we had there. Every week from there they took us to a shower. And they put again on the head that yellow stuff for cleanliness. And also that time you got another something to put on whatever you catch from the floor there, from the pile of clothing there.’ (2)

The interesting point in both of these excerpts is that Appel clearly identifies that she was taken to Auschwitz’s shower block every week where the SS again put the ‘yellow stuff for cleanliness’ – this being disinfectant to kill off any lice or other disease-carrying insects – on her head, gave her a shower and then issued her with fresh disinfected clothing and then sent her back to her barracks as normal. When you remember that the central thesis behind the so-called ‘Holocaust’ is that the SS used ‘fake showers’ to secretly murder several million jews then Appel’s account begins to make sense of the origin of that thesis as I have previously explained in regards to transit camps such as Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.

To restate this simply the standard ‘Holocaust’ narrative assumes that first and second-hand witness accounts of jews being sent to ‘the showers’ and never returning means they were killed by the Germans in a program that next to no documentation survives of beyond assumed ‘hints’ in a tiny number of other unrelated documents that are deliberately not read in their wider context to prevent ‘confusion’ about their ‘true meaning’.

If you apply what Appel and other ‘Holocaust Survivor’ testimonies suggest in that they never saw the ‘gassing themselves’ but assumed people had been ‘murdered’ because ‘they never saw them again’. Then it suggests that what actually occurred was that when the Germans split up groups of jews – including families where a disproportionate amount of the ‘survivors’ come from – and they were ‘never seen again’; was that these arbitrarily-created groups were processed as Appel was – in much the same way as the ‘Holocaust Survivors’ describe the ‘gassing’ process – in that they were shaved, disinfected, showered, issued new clothes and sent to a free barracks. While the next group was similarly processed but then assigned to a different barracks with the two groups with different parts of say the same family in assuming that the other had ‘disappeared’ and ‘never saw them again’, because they were put in a separate barracks and a multitude of different things may have happened.

Maybe there was a fatal outbreak of typhus in one barracks, maybe another barracks got moved to a satellite camp, maybe the other barracks stayed to greet the Red Army and the other marched West to surrender to the Allies with each side of the same family thinking each other dead in the ‘Holocaust’ but in reality living in different blocs in the Cold War and so on.

The point is simple enough in that testimonies like Appel’s significantly undermine the whole ‘Holocaust’ narrative, because they point to a different reality than the standard narrative would have you believe. Since while they document that the SS beat those jews who stole food from the kitchen – and thus deprived the camp prisoners as a group of much needed sustenance – (3) we also learn that Block Senior’s – who may or may not have been jewish – disposed to still born children in Auschwitz’s toilets rather than send the mother’s to Auschwitz’s hospital for inmate (4) and that the jews of Auschwitz did not work on Sundays and got a whole day’s worth of rest and recreation. (5)

You didn’t hear about that in your high school text book now did you?

References

(1) Rosa Appel, Ronald Knieve (Ed.), 2011, ‘Extermination Through Labour: Life and Death in a German Slave Labour Camp’, Socialist History, Vol. 39, p. 30

(2) Ibid., p. 31

(3) Ibid., p. 35

(4) Ibid., p. 32

(5) Ibid., p. 35