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"I Never Saw Another Butterfly" is a collection of poems and drawings from children who lived in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Terezin, located in what is now the Czech Republic.

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The Theresienstadt "camp-ghetto" existed for three and a half years, between November 24, 1941 and May 9, 1945. During its existence, Theresienstadt served three purposes:

Theresienstadt served as a transit camp for Czech Jews whom the Germans deported to killing centers, concentration camps, and forced-labor camps in German-occupied Poland, Belorussia, and the Baltic States.

It was a ghetto-labor camp. The SS deported and then incarcerated there certain categories of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews, based on their age, disability as a result of past military service, or domestic celebrity in the arts and other cultural life. To disguise the physical annihilation of the Jews deported from the Greater German Reich, the Nazi regime employed the general fiction, primarily inside Germany, that the deported Jews would be deployed at productive labor in the East. Since it seemed implausible that elderly Jews could be used for forced labor, the Nazis used Theresienstadt to hide the nature of the deportations.

Theresienstadt served as a holding pen for Jews in the above-mentioned groups. It was expected that the poor conditions there would hasten the deaths of many deportees, until the SS and police could deport the survivors to killing centers in the East.

Theresienstadt served as a "settlement," an assembly camp, and a concentration camp. It had recognizable features of both ghettos and concentration camps. In its function as a tool of deception, Theresienstadt was unique.

Nazi Deception

Theresienstadt served an important propaganda function for the Germans. The publicly stated purpose for the deportation of the Jews from Germany was their "resettlement to the east," where they would be compelled to perform forced labor. Since it seemed implausible that elderly Jews could be used for forced labor, the Nazis used the Theresienstadt ghetto to hide the nature of the deportations. In Nazi propaganda, Theresienstadt was cynically described as a " spa town" where elderly German Jews could "retire" in safety. The deportations to Theresienstadt were, however, part of the Nazi strategy of deception. The ghetto was in reality a collection center for deportations to ghettos and killing centers in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe.

Succumbing to pressure following the deportation of Danish Jews to Theresienstadt, the Germans permitted the International Red Cross to visit in June 1944. It was all an elaborate hoax. The Germans intensified deportations from the ghetto shortly before the visit, and the ghetto itself was "beautified." Gardens were planted, houses painted, and barracks renovated. The Nazis staged social and cultural events for the visiting dignitaries. Once the visit was over, the Germans resumed deportations from Theresienstadt, which did not end until October 1944.

Deportations from Theresienstadt

Beginning in 1942, SS authorities deported Jews from Theresienstadt to other ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe. German authorities either murdered the Jews upon their arrival in the ghettos of Riga, Warsaw, Lodz, Minsk, and Bialystok, or deported them further to killing centers. Transports also left Theresienstadt directly for the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka. In the ghetto itself, tens of thousands of people died, mostly from disease or starvation. In 1942, the death rate within the ghetto was so high that the Germans built-to the south of the ghetto-a crematorium capable of handling almost 200 bodies a day.

Of the approximately 140,000 Jews transferred to Theresienstadt, nearly 90,000 were deported to points further east and almost certain death. Roughly 33,000 died in Theresienstadt itself.

Cultural Life at Theresienstadt

Despite the terrible living conditions and the constant threat of deportation, Theresienstadt had a highly developed cultural life. Outstanding Jewish artists, mainly from Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany, created drawings and paintings, some of them clandestine depictions of the ghetto's harsh reality. Writers, professors, musicians, and actors gave lectures, concerts, and theater performances. The ghetto maintained a lending library of 60,000 volumes.

Fifteen thousand children passed through Theresienstadt. Although forbidden to do so, they attended school. They painted pictures, wrote poetry, and otherwise tried to maintain a vestige of normalcy. Approximately 90 percent of these children perished in killing centers.

Conditions in the camp were harsh. Potatoes were as valuable as diamonds. I was hungry, scared and sick most of the time. For my eighth birthday, my parents gave me a tiny potato cake with a hint of sugar; for my ninth birthday, an outfit sewn from rags for my doll; and for my tenth birthday, a poem written by my mother.
- Inge Auerbacher

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The Theresienstadt "camp-ghetto" existed for three and a half years, between November 24, 1941 and May 9, 1945. During its existence, Theresienstadt served three purposes: Theresienstadt served as a transit camp for Czech Jews whom the Germans deported to killing centers, concentration camps, and forced-labor camps in German-occupied Poland, Belorussia, and the Baltic States.

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Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize acceptance speech

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Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize acceptance speech

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Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe's beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again. Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know -- that they, too, would remember, and bear witness. And now, I stand before you, Mr. President -- Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others -- and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people. Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary -- or Mrs. Clinton -- for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here. We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations -- Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin -- bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference. What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means "no difference." A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one's sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals? Of course, indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction. Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the "Muselmanner," as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it. Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God -- not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering. In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own. Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century's wide-ranging experiments in good and evil. In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps -- and I'm glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance -- but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did. And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler's armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies. If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once. And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader -- and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us. No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history -- I must say it -- his image in Jewish history is flawed. The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo -- maybe 1,000 Jews -- was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back. I don't understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn't he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people -- in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don't understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims? But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the "Righteous Gentiles," whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war? Why did some of America's largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler's Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference? And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel's peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it. And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene. Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today's justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same? What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them -- so many of them -- could be saved. And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope. Elie Wiesel - April 12, 1999

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The History Place - Great Speeches Collection: Elie Wiesel Speech The Perils of Indifference

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Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe's beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald.

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For the past two weeks, Americans have debated whether the notoriously cramped and dirty detention centers on the southern border can be called "concentration camps." For at least one Holocaust survivor, the answer is a resounding yes.

Ruth Bloch was 17 years old when she was separated from her family. While living in Holland in 1942, her father, mother, and brother were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where they were eventually killed. Bloch remained in Holland working as a seamstress at a fur factory, sewing fur-lined coats for German troops. She was eventually sent to Vught concentration camp in Holland in 1943, before being eventually transported to Auschwitz.

Now, at 93, she told The Daily Beast that she looks back at that time and can relate to the thousands of migrants, including small children, being held at camps after crossing the border into the U.S. to seek refuge.

"I feel because I have been in a concentration camp, I do understand that this is beyond human behavior. It's because I know from my own experience what it means," she said. "It means you are not allowed to think, and you're always under the thumb of the authorities, the ones in power."

Over the past several months, the number of migrants crossing the border has surged-according to U.S. Border patrol, 132,887 migrants, including 11,507 unaccompanied children, were apprehended at the border in May, the highest since 2006.

But the resources to handle the detained migrants are severely lacking. In a report by the Department of Homeland Security's independent watchdog, " dangerous overcrowding " was observed inside the camps, and children lacked access to shower facilities, clean clothes, and hot meals.

When a team of lawyers visited a Customs and Border Protection facility in Clint, Texas last month, they reported unsanitary conditions and lack of basic toiletries like soap and toothpaste. Some children were left to care for themselves and others, including babies. Children were "incredibly sad and being traumatized," according to a lawyer who visited the Clint site.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called the detention centers "concentration camps on our southern border," she was met with pushback from Republicans as well as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which claimed the analogy diminished the memory of those lost during the Holocaust. But a growing number of Holocaust and genocide experts have signed an open letter supporting the congresswoman, urging the museum to retract their statement.

Asked whether she found the comparison offensive, Bloch said: "No, I identify."

Bloch said the conditions reported at the border camps sound painfully similar to her own. "It's the same conditions I lived through-we never had soap, but we had water, cold water, and not necessarily a shower. No toilet paper. It was inhuman."

"[In concentration camps] people have no control over their lives," she continued. "You have to go to sleep when the light goes out, you have to eat when they want you to eat. You can't express your own thoughts, because you might get penalized for that."

Bloch said migrants today and Jews during World War II faced the same stark choice: Leave and face great danger, or stay and die.

"The people coming here now come out of desperation because they cannot live where they were born. It's either to live or not to live," she said. "[Back then], many parents sent their children before they sent themselves, into a different country if it was possible. Everybody tried. I think anyone like me who has gone through the Holocaust should know that these people have the exact same history."

While she was sent to the concentration camps and denied opportunities because of her Jewish identity, the migrants today are also denied asylum because of their background, Bloch said.

"It's mainly because of their color and where they're coming from. But as a rule, humans are not very nice. People like to always look down on somebody else," she said. "Instead of when you look down to pull that person up, they shove them down more. They don't want to identify as human beings with those people and that's a bad attitude. But it's a human thing."

And for the children held in the camps, Bloch said the United States is shutting the door on a generation who will eventually lose hope in the American dream.

"What you hear of the people in these camps, the kids have to take care of themselves, under the guards who watch them. There is no love," she lamented. "What will become of them, I don't know. If they're lucky, they can spend a normal life, but I doubt it. It depends on how long they are in this situation. It will change their lives."

After the Holocaust, Bloch met her husband, and they moved to Amsterdam, but quickly realized there was nothing left for them there.

"My family didn't come back, and we felt whomever we knew, all of these people were not there anymore. There was nothing that held you. There was no family, there was nothing. So we said, let's start anew and let's go to America," she recounted.

They arrived in the U.S. in 1948 and started an antique-dealing business. While thinking of how she was received at the time, she grew emotional.

"I was happy to come to America, and I was welcomed to America and I gave back to America by being productive, and I think these people should have the same right, who don't have the chance to ever get it," she said. "They come with nothing-from nothing, to nothing."

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illegal immigration to the united states

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Holocaust Survivor: Yes, the Border Detention Centers Are Like Concentration Camps

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For the past two weeks, Americans have debated whether the notoriously cramped and dirty detention centers on the southern border can be called "concentration camps." For at least one Holocaust survivor, the answer is a resounding yes. Ruth Bloch was 17 years old when she was separated from her family.

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Soviet and German Occupation of Bialystok

According to the terms of the German-Soviet Pact of 1939, Bialystok, a city in northeastern Poland, was assigned to the Soviet zone of occupation. Soviet forces entered Bialystok in September 1939, and held it until the German army occupied the city in June 1941 following the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

In the early days of the German occupation, Einsatzgruppe detachments and Order Police battalions rounded up and killed thousands of Jews in Bialystok.

Establishment of a Ghetto in Bialystok

In August 1941, the Germans ordered the establishment of a ghetto in Bialystok. About 50,000 Jews from the city and the surrounding region were confined in a small area of Bialystok city.

The ghetto had two sections, divided by the Biala River. Most Jews in the Bialystok ghetto worked in forced-labor projects, primarily in large textile factories located within the ghetto boundaries. The Germans also sometimes used Jews in forced-labor projects outside the ghetto.

Deportations from Bialystok to Treblinka

In February 1943, approximately 10,000 Bialystok Jews were deported to the Treblinka killing center. During the deportations, hundreds of Jews, mainly those deemed too weak or sick to travel, were killed.

In August 1943, the Germans mounted an operation to destroy the Bialystok ghetto. German forces and local police auxiliaries surrounded the ghetto and began to round up Jews systematically for deportation to the Treblinka killing center. Approximately 7,600 Jews were held in a central transit camp in the city before deportation to Treblinka. Those deemed fit to work were sent to the Majdanek camp. In Majdanek, after another screening for ability to work, they were transported to the Poniatowa, Blizyn, or Auschwitz camps. Those deemed too weak to work were murdered at Majdanek. More than 1,000 Jewish children were sent first to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Bohemia, and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were killed.

Uprising

During the August 1943 deportations, when all hope for survival within the ghetto was abandoned, the Bialystok ghetto underground staged an uprising against the Germans. In an unsuccessful attempt to break out of the ghetto and join partisans in the nearby forests, armed Jews attacked German forces near the ghetto fence along Smolna Street. The fighting in the northeastern section of the ghetto lasted for five days; hundreds of Jews died in this battle. Seventy-one Jewish fighters were killed after being discovered in a bunker and captured by the Germans. More than a hundred Jews managed to escape from the ghetto and join partisan groups in the Bialystok area.

Liberation

The Soviet army liberated Bialystok in August 1944.

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According to the terms of the German-Soviet Pact of 1939, Bialystok, a city in northeastern Poland, was assigned to the Soviet zone of occupation. Soviet forces entered Bialystok in September 1939, and held it until the German army occupied the city in June 1941 following the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

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While I was in the camp the need to tell the story was so strong that I began to describe my experiences there, on the spot, in that German laboratory laden with freezing cold, the war, and vigilant eyes; and yet I knew that I would not be able under any circumstances to hold onto those haphazardly scribbled notes. As soon as I returned to Italy, I felt compelled to write, and within a few months I wrote Survival in Auschwitz. Some 15 years later, I wrote The Reawakening, which is the natural continuation of its older brother. I have been asked many questions about those books, which I propose to reply to here.

In your books there are no expressions of hate for the Germans, nor the desire for revenge. Have you forgiven them?

I regard hatred as bestial and crude, and prefer that my actions and thoughts be the product, as far as possible, of reason. Much less do I accept hatred directed collectively at an ethnic group, for example at all the Germans. If I accepted it, I would feel that I was following the precepts of Nazism, which was founded precisely on national and racial hatred. I must admit that if I had in front of me one of our persecutors of those days, certain known faces, certain old lies, I would be tempted to hate, and with violence too; but exactly because I am not a fascist or a Nazi, I refuse to give way to this temptation.

I believe in reason and discussion as the supreme instruments of progress. Thus, when describing the tragic world of Auschwitz, I have deliberately assumed the calm and sober language of the witness, not the lamenting tones of the victim or the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge. I thought that my account would be more credible and useful the more it appeared objective, the less it sounded overly emotional; only in this way does a witness in matters of justice perform his task, which is that of preparing the ground for the judge. The judges are my readers.

All the same, I would not want my abstaining from explicit judgment to be confused with an indiscriminate pardon. No, I have not forgiven any of the culprits, nor am I willing to forgive a single one of them, unless he has shown (with deeds, not words, and not too long afterwards) that he has become conscious of the crimes and the errors, and is determined to condemn them, to uproot them from his conscience and form that of others, because an enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.

Did the Germans know what was happening?

How is it possible that the extermination of millions of human beings could have been carried out in the heart of Europe without anyone's knowledge?

The world in which we Westerners live today has grave faults and dangers, but when compared to the countries and times in which democracy is smothered it has a tremendous advantage: everyone can know everything about everything. Information today is the "fourth estate." In an authoritarian state it is not like this. There is only one Truth, proclaimed from above. The newspapers are all alike; they all repeat the same one truth. Propaganda is substituted for information. It is clear that under these conditions it becomes possible (though not always easy: it is never quite easy to do deep violence to human nature) to erase quite large chunks of reality.

Still, it was not possible to hide the existence of the enormous concentration camp apparatus from the German people. What's more, it was not (from the Nazi point of view) even desirable. Creating and maintaining an atmosphere of undefined terror in the country was one of the aims of Nazism. It was just as well for people to know that opposing Hitler was extremely dangerous. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Germans were confined in the camps from the very first months of Nazism: Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, Jews, Protestants, Catholics. The whole country knew it, knew that in the camps people were suffering and dying.

It is true that the great mass of Germans remained unaware of the most atrocious details of what happened later in the camps: the methodological industrialized extermination on a scale of millions, the gas chambers, the cremation furnaces, the vile despoiling of corpses-all this was not supposed to be known, and in effect few did know it, up to the end of the war. Among other precautions, in order to keep the secret, only cautious and cynical euphemisms were employed by the official language: one did not write "extermination" but "final solution," not "deportation" but "transfer," not "killing by gas" but "special treatment." Not without reason, Hitler feared that this horrendous news, if it were divulged, would compromise the blind faith that the country had in him, as well as the morale of the fighting troops.

And yet varied sources of information were available to most Germans. Knowing and making things known was one way of keeping one's distance from Nazism. But most Germans didn't know because they didn't want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know. It is certainly true that the German people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. In Hitler's Germany a particular code was widespread-those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers. Shutting his mouth, his eyes, and his ears, the typical German citizen built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence of not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door.

Were there prisoners who escaped from the camps? How is it that there were no large-scale revolts?

These are among the questions most frequently put to me. They must spring, therefore, from some particularly important curiosity or need. My interpretation is optimistic: today's young people feel that freedom is a privilege that one cannot do without, no matter what. For them, consequently, the idea of prison is immediately linked to the idea of escape or revolt. The concept of escape as a moral obligation is constantly reinforced by romantic literature, by popular literature, and by the cinema, in which the hero, unjustly (or even justly) imprisoned, always tries to escape, even in the least likely circumstances-and his attempt is invariably crowned with success. Perhaps it is good that the prisoner's condition, the condition of non-liberty, is felt to be something improper, abnormal, like an illness that has to be cured by escape or rebellion.

Unfortunately, this picture resembles very little the truth about the concentration camps. Only a few hundred prisoners tried to escape, for example, from Auschwitz; of those, perhaps a few score succeeded. Escape was difficult and extremely dangerous. The prisoners were debilitated, besides being demoralized, by hunger and ill-treatment. Their heads were shaved, their striped clothing was immediately recognizable, and their wooden clogs made silent and rapid walking impossible. They had no money, and in general they did not speak Polish, the local language; nor did they have contacts in the area, which was unfamiliar to them. On top of all that, fierce reprisals were employed to discourage escape attempts. Anyone caught trying to escape was publicly hanged (often after cruel torture) in the square where the roll calls took place. When an escape was discovered, friends of the fugitive were considered accomplices and starved to death; all the other prisoners were forced to stand for 24 hours; sometimes the parents of the "guilty" were arrested and deported to camps.

The SS guards who killed a prisoner in the course of an escape attempt were granted special leaves. As a result, it often happened that an SS guard fired at a prisoners who had no intention of escaping, solely to qualify for leave. This fact artificially swelled the official number of escape attempts recorded in the statistics. As I have said, the actual number was very small, made up almost exclusively of a small number of "Aryan" (that is, non-Jewish) Polish prisoners who lived not far from the camp and consequently had a clear goal and the assurance that they would be protected by the population. In the other camps things took place in a similar way.

As for the lack of rebellion, the story is somewhat different. First of all, it is necessary to remember that uprisings have been definitively verified in certain camps: Treblinka, Sobibor, even Birkenau, which was one of the Auschwitz dependencies. They did not have much numerical weight. Like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, they represented, rather, examples of extraordinary moral force. In every instance they were planned and led by prisoners who were privileged in some way, and consequently in better physical and spiritual condition than the average camp prisoner. This is not all that surprising: only at first glance does it seem paradoxical that the people who rebelled were those who suffered the least. Even outside the camps, struggles are rarely waged by the oppressed. The people in rags do not revolt.

In the camps for political prisoners, or where political prisoners were in the majority, the conspiratorial experience was not uncommon, and often resulted in quite effective defense activities, rather than in open revolt. Depending upon the camps and the times, prisoners succeeded, for example, in blackmailing or corrupting the SS, thus curbing their indiscriminate power; in sabotaging the work of the German war industries; in organizing escapes; in communicating via the radio with the Allies and furnishing them with accounts of the horrendous conditions in the camps; in improving the treatment of the sick, substituting prisoner doctors for the SS ones; in "guiding" the selections, sending to death spies and traitors and saving prisoners who survival had some special importance; in preparing, even in military ways, to resist in case the Nazis decided, with the Front coming closer, to liquidate the camps (as in fact they did decide).

In camps with a majority of Jews, like Auschwitz, an active or passive defense was particularly difficult. The prisoners were, for the most part, devoid of any kind of organizational or military experience. They came from every country in Europe, and spoke different languages. They had suffered greater starvation, and were weaker and more exhausted than the rest; they often had behind them a long history of hunger, persecution, and humiliation in the ghettos. The length of their stays in the camps were tragically brief. They were, in short, a fluctuating population, continually decimated by death, and renewed by the endless arrival of new convoys.

You may wonder why the prisoners who had just gotten off the trains did not revolt, waiting as they did for hours (sometimes for days!) to enter the gas chambers. I must add that the Germans had perfected a diabolically clever and versatile system of collective death. In most cases the new arrivals did not know what awaited them. They were received with cold efficiency but without brutality, invited to undress for "the shower." Sometimes they were handed soap and towels, and were promised hot coffee after their showers. The gas chambers were camouflaged as shower rooms, with pipes, faucets, dressing rooms, clothes hooks, benches, and so forth. If prisoners showed the smallest sign of knowing or suspecting the imminent fate, the SS and their collaborators used surprise tactics-intervening with extreme brutality, with shouts, threats, kicks, shots; loosing their dogs, which were trained to tear people to pieces, against people who were confused, desperate, weakened by five or ten days of traveling in sealed railroad cars.

Thus the statement that has sometimes been made-that cowardice kept the Jews from revolting-is absurd and insulting. Let it suffice to remember that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were tested on a group of 300 Russian prisoners of war-young, army-trained, politically indoctrinated, and not hampered by the presence of women and children-and even they did not revolt.

I would like to add one final thought. The deeply rooted consciousness that you must not consent to oppression, but instead must resist it, was not widespread in fascist Europe, and it was particularly weak in Italy. It was the patrimony of a restricted circle of politically active people. But fascism and Nazism had isolated, expelled, terrorized, or destroyed these people outright. You must not forget that the first victims of the German camps, in the hundreds of thousands, were the cadres of the anti-Nazi political parties. Lacking their contribution, the popular will to resist sprang up again only much later.

Did you return to Auschwitz after the liberation?
I returned to Auschwitz twice in 1965, and in 1982. I didn't feel anything much when I visited the central camp of the Auschwitz complex, which consisted of some 40 camps. The Polish government has transformed it into a kind of national monument. The huts have been cleaned and painted, trees have been planted and flower beds laid out. There is a museum in which pitiful relics are displayed-tons of human hair, hundreds of thousands of eyeglasses, combs, shaving brushes, dolls, baby shoes-but it still remains, eternally, a museum, something static, rearranged contrived. To me, the entire camp seemed like a museum. As for my camp, called Monowitz, about seven kilometers to the east of Auschwitz, it no longer exists. The rubber factory to which it was annexed, now in Polish hands, has so grown that it occupies the whole area.

I did, instead, experience a feeling of violent anguish when I entered the Birkenau camp, which I had never seen as a prisoner. Here nothing has changed. There was mud, and there still is mud, or suffocating summer dust. The blocks of huts (those that weren't burned when the war reached and passed this area) have remained as they were-low, dirty, with drafty wooden sides and beaten earth floors. There are no bunks but bare planks, all the way to the ceiling. Here nothing has been prettied up. With me was a friend of mine, Giuliani Tedeschi, a survivor of Birkenau. She pointed out to me that on every plank, 1.8 by two meters, up to nine women slept. She showed me that from the tiny window you could see the ruins of the cremation furnace. In her day, you saw the flames issuing from the chimney. She asked the older women: "What is that fire?" and they had replied: "It is we who are burning."

Face-to-face with the sad evocative power of those places, each of us survivors behaves in a different manner, but it is possible to describe two typical categories. Those who refuse to go back, or even to discuss the matter, belong to the first category, as do those who would like to forget but do not succeed in doing so, and are tormented by nightmares, and those who have instead forgotten, dismissed everything, and begun again to live, starting from zero. I have noticed that in general all of these are individuals who ended up in the camps through bad luck, that is, without a precise political or moral commitment. For them the suffering was a traumatic experience but devoid of meaning, like a misfortune or an illness. The memory is for them a kind of extraneous thing, a painful mass that intruded into their lives, which they have sought (or still seek) to eliminate.

The second category is composed of ex-political prisoners, or those who possessed at least a measure of political preparation, or religious conviction, or a strong moral consciousness. For these survivors, remembering is a duty. They do not want to forget, and even more they do not want the world to forget, because they have understood that their experience was not meaningless, that the camps were not an accident, an unforeseen historical happening.
Why do you speak only about German camps and not the Russian ones as well?
I can bear witness to the things that I endured and saw. My books are not storybooks. In writing them I limited myself strictly to reporting facts of which I had direct experience, excluding those I learned later from books or newspapers. For this reason I do not generally speak about the Russian camps. Fortunately I was never in them; and so I can only repeat the things I have read, which is to say the same things known to everyone interested in the subject.

Still, I do not want to, nor can I, evade the duty, which every man has, of making a judgment and formulating an opinion. Aside from the obvious similarities between the German camps and the Russian camps, I think I can observe substantial differences. The principal difference lies in the finality.

The German camps constitute something unique in the history of humanity, bloody as it is. To the ancient aim of eliminating or terrifying political adversaries, they set a modern and monstrous goal, that of erasing entire peoples and cultures form the world. Starting roughly in 1941, they became gigantic death machines. Gas chambers and crematories were deliberately planned to destroy lives and human bodies on a scale of millions. The appalling record belongs to Auschwitz, with 24,000 dead in a single day, in August 1944.

The Soviet camps were not and are not, certainly, pleasant places, but in them the death of the prisoners was not-even in the darkest years of Stalinism-expressly sought. It was a very frequent occurrence, and it was tolerated with brutal indifference, but basically it was not expressly intended. It was a by-product, rather, of hunger, cold, infections, hard labor.

In this lugubrious comparison between two models of hell, I must also add the fact that one entered the German camps, in general, never to emerge. No outcome but death was foreseen. In the Soviet camps, a possible limit to incarceration always existed. In Stalin's day many of the "guilty" were given terribly long sentences (as much as 15 or 20 years), but hope of freedom, however faint, remained.

From this fundamental difference, others issue. The relationships between guards and prisoners were less inhuman in the Soviet Union. They all belonged to the same nation and spoke the same language, they were not graded "Supermen" and "Non-men" as they were under Nazism. The sick were treated, though inadequately. Confronted with overly hard work, an individual or collective protest was not unthinkable. Corporal punishment was rare, and not too cruel. It was possible to receive letters and packages with foodstuffs. Human personality, in short, was no denied, and was not totally lost. As a general consequence the mortality figures were very different under the two systems. In the Soviet Union in the harshest periods, around 30 percent of those who entered died. This is an intolerably high figure. But in the German camps, mortality amounted to between 90 and 98 percent.

It is possible, finally, to picture a socialism without prison camps; in many parts of the world it has been realized. A Nazism without camps, however, is unimaginable.
How can the Nazis' fanatical hatred of the Jews be explained?
It can be said that anti-Semitism is one particular case of intolerance; that for centuries it had a prevailingly religious character; that in the Third Reich it was exacerbated by the nationalistic and military predisposition of the German people and by the "differentness" of the Jewish people; that it was easily disseminated in all of Germany-and in a good part of Europe-thanks to the efficiency of the fascist and Nazi propaganda, which needed a scapegoat on which to load all guilts and resentments; that the phenomenon was heightened to paroxysm by Hitler, a maniacal dictator.

But these commonly accepted explanations do not satisfy me. They are reductive-not commensurate with, nor proportionate to, the facts that need explaining. In rereading the chronicles of Nazism, from its murky beginnings to its convulsed end, I cannot avoid the impression of a general atmosphere of uncontrolled madness. Thus I prefer the humility with which some of the most serious historians confess to not understanding the furious anti-Semitism of Hitler and of Germany back of him.

Perhaps one cannot-what is more, one must not-understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain. Understanding a proposal or a form of human behavior means containing it, containing its author, putting oneself in his place, identifying with him. No normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and the endless others. This dismays us, but at the same time it provides a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words and their deeds cannot be comprehensible to us. They are nonhuman words and deeds, really counter-human, without historic precedents, difficult to compare even with the cruelest events of the biological struggle for existence.

The war can be explained, but Auschwitz has nothing to do with the war; it was not an episode in it, nor an extreme form of it. War is always a terrible fact, to be deprecated; but it is in us, it has its rationality, we "understand" it. There is no rationality in the Nazi hatred. It is a hate that is not in us; it is outside man, it is a poison fruit sprung form the deadly trunk of fascism, although outside and beyond fascism itself. If understanding is impossible, however, knowledge is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Conscience can be seduced and obscured again: even our consciences.

For this reason, it is the duty of everyone to meditate on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, that Hitler and Mussolini, when they spoke in public, were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were "charismatic leaders"; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the credibility or the soundness of the things they said, but from the suggestive way in which they said them. And we must remember that their faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is well to regard all prophets with suspicion. Yet it is clear that this formula is too simple to suffice in every case. A new fascism, with its trail of intolerance, abuse, and servitude, can be born outside our country and imported into it, walking on tiptoe and calling itself by other names; or it can loose itself from within with such violence that it routs all defenses. At that point, wise counsel no longer serves, and, and one must find the strength to resist. But then, too, the memory of what happened in the heart of Europe, not very long ago, can serve as support and warning.

This interview was translated from Italian into English by Ruth Feldman.

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Primo Levi's Heartbreaking, Heroic Answers to the Most Common Questions He Was Asked About "Survival in Auschwitz"

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While I was in the camp the need to tell the story was so strong that I began to describe my experiences there, on the spot, in that German laboratory laden with freezing cold, the war, and vigilant eyes; and yet I knew that I would not be able under any circumstances to hold onto those haphazardly scribbled notes.

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ver the last decade, migration has become an urgent political issue. The 2010s have been marked not only by the global movement of people across national borders but also attempts by governments to erect walls and fences in their path. We've seen nationalism winning votes and the worldview of the far right mainstreamed.

"Flow", "flood" and "crisis". Media imagery and language has shaped public opinion. Of course, migration from the global south to the north - intimately connected to the legacy of colonialism and the west's military machinations - has been happening for decades. But the 2010s has seen a higher number of people from the south moving towards the north. In particular, Europe has seen hundreds of thousands of people from Africa, the Middle East and south Asia, fleeing chronic poverty, political instability, wars, and the climate crisis in countries often laid to ruin by western-backed institutions.

Libya had always been the migratory destination for many sub-Saharan Africans because of its employment opportunities. Following the suppression of the 2011 Arab spring and Nato's intervention in Libya, a lawless society emerged, with racial hatred against sub-Saharan Africans unleashed. Many escaped forced labour and torture, climbed into dinghies and began the dangerous sea journey across the central Mediterranean. But when they landed in Europe, they didn't come to safety. Instead, they found themselves in the centre of a white, Eurocentric discourse - a "problem" to be blamed for society's ills.

Throughout this time, when tens of thousands died at sea trying to reach Europe, Europe has imagined itself to be the victim of a migrant or refugee "crisis". The concept of a "crisis" caused by the movement of people into the European continent has always been embedded in the Eurocentric way of seeing things. This rupture brought about by the arrival of the "other" creates anxiety and fear in the European mind, as the sociologist Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez has pointed out - thus the need to create neverending irrational, ideological justifications for that anxiety and fear.

'Since Italy's then-interior minister Marco Minniti's agreement with Libya in 2017, Italy has fended Africans away from European waters.' Photograph: Simona Granati/Corbis via Getty Images

This can be seen in the way migration into Europe has been portrayed as an "invasion" of different cultures and a "clash of civilisations" - in a way that is similar to the justifications of the colonial era where the colonised were cast as racially inferior beings. Colonialism still casts its shadow over the immigration debate. For Europe, the "other" challenges its "way of being" as its presence is a reflection of Europe's past imperialism, upon which much of the continent's wealth was built.

In the past decade, we've seen anti-migrant policies and racism flourish across the world. The EU implemented the hotspot system, filtering people and categorising them as asylum seekers or "economic migrants". Europe's patrolling of its southern borders intensified, resulting in deals with Turkey and Libya. Since Italy's then-interior minister Marco Minniti's agreement with Libya in 2017, Italy has supplied technical support to the Libyan coastguard, fending Africans away from European waters.

Restrictions were also imposed on NGO search-and-rescue activity in the Mediterranean. These policies under the centre-left Democratic party (PD) were later continued and elaborated on by the hard-right Matteo Salvini of the League from the summer of 2018 - and now carry on under the PD/Five Star coalition. Thousands have died as a result.

Back in the 1970s, the critic and writer John Berger depicted Turkish migration to Germany in A Seventh Man, which charted migrant workers' journeys in Europe through their departure, work and return. The "return" represented the future, where a worker could travel freely and see lives improved for his family when he visited home. But in the 2010s, this cycle has been disrupted - many migrants' and asylum seekers' irregular status prevent them from visiting home. Instead, they are forced to live invisible lives, illegalised, entrapped and segregated.

In Britain, the Conservative government has persistently refused to receive refugees - only 3% of asylum applications in Europe are lodged in Britain because refugees are commonly denied entry. In 2016, when the refugee numbers were at their highest across the continent, Britain only received 38,517 applications for asylum, compared with 722,370 applications in Germany, 123,432 in Italy and 85,244 in France. Britain, simply put, has one of the lowest refugee acceptance rates in Europe.

Plenty of efforts have also been made - see the Home Office's "hostile environment" - to make life unbearable for asylum seekers and migrants in Britain. Over the decade, I have witnessed asylum seekers leading a subhuman existence, deprived of rights to work (despite the substandard state support) and made to pay for healthcare. They live in desperate limbo, pushed into the world of exploitation and forced labour. As a Chinese builder said to me: "If you didn't die in the back of a lorry, you could die working here."

And there are many migrants who are effectively imprisoned. Throughout this decade, I have visited many people detained in Dover and Yarl's Wood removal centres, held without time limit, and despite committing no crime. Today, Britain remains the only European country to practice the indefinite detention of asylum seekers and migrants. Over this Christmas, 1,826 people were incarcerated in these centres.

While large numbers of people across the globe continue to be denied freedom of movement and illegalised, their determination to survive will not be defeated by walls and borders. Migrant protest movements such as the black vests ( gilets noirs) in France and the black sardines ( sardine nere) in Italy show that there is plenty of resolve and a willingness to fight back. We can join them by fighting for the regularisation of people's immigration status - but also by challenging the system that enables their marginalisation and racial segregation. We must offer a different way of seeing migration; a real alternative that addresses colonialism and the massively unequal world that it has created.

Hsiao-Hung Pai is a journalist and the author of Chinese Whispers: The Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour

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The refugee 'crisis' showed Europe's worst side to the world | Hsiao-Hung Pai

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ver the last decade, migration has become an urgent political issue. The 2010s have been marked not only by the global movement of people across national borders but also attempts by governments to erect walls and fences in their path. We've seen nationalism winning votes and the worldview of the far right mainstreamed.

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The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads

To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

We’ve suffered here more than enough,

Here in this clot of grief and shame,

Wanting a badge of blindness

To be a proof for their own children.

A fourth year of waiting, like standing above a swamp

From which any moment might gush forth a spring.

Meanwhile, the rivers flow another way,

Another way,

Not letting you die, not letting you live.

And the cannons don’t scream and the guns don’t bark

And you don’t see blood here.

Nothing, only silent hunger.

Children steal the bread here and ask and ask

and ask

And all would wish to sleep, to keep silent, and

just to go to sleep again...

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads

To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

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The city of Warsaw, capital of Poland, flanks both banks of the Vistula River. A city of 1.3 million inhabitants, Warsaw was the capital of the resurrected Polish state in 1919. Before World War II, the city was a major center of Jewish life and culture in Poland. Warsaw's prewar Jewish population of more than 350,000 constituted about 30 percent of the city's total population. The Warsaw Jewish community was the largest in both Poland and Europe, and was the second largest in the world, second only to New York City.

Following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment. German troops entered Warsaw on September 29, shortly after its surrender.

Less than a week later, German officials ordered the establishment of a Jewish council ( Judenrat) under the leadership of a Jewish engineer named Adam Czerniaków. As chairman of the Jewish council, Czerniaków had to administer the soon-to-be established ghetto and to implement German orders. On November 23, 1939, German civilian occupation authorities required Warsaw's Jews to identify themselves by wearing white armbands with a blue Star of David. The German authorities closed Jewish schools, confiscated Jewish-owned property, and conscripted Jewish men into forced labor and dissolved prewar Jewish organizations.

Warsaw Ghetto

On October 12, 1940, the Germans decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. The ghetto was enclosed by a wall that was over 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire, and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw. The population of the ghetto, increased by Jews compelled to move in from nearby towns, was estimated to be over 400,000 Jews. German authorities forced ghetto residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room.

Conditions in the Ghetto

The Jewish council offices were located on Grzybowska Street in the southern part of the ghetto. Jewish organizations inside the ghetto tried to meet the needs of the ghetto residents as they struggled to survive. Among the welfare organizations active in the ghetto were the Jewish Mutual Aid Society, the Federation of Associations in Poland for the Care of Orphans, and the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training. Financed until late 1941 primarily by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, these organizations attempted to keep alive a population that suffered severely from starvation, exposure, and infectious disease.

The hunger in the ghetto was so great, was so bad, that people were laying on the streets and dying, little children went around begging...
- Abraham Lewent

Food allotments rationed to the ghetto by the German civilian authorities were not sufficient to sustain life. In 1941 the average Jew in the ghetto subsisted on 1,125 calories a day. Czerniaków wrote in his diary entry for May 8, 1941: "Children starving to death." Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. Widespread smuggling of food and medicines into the ghetto supplemented the miserable official allotments and kept the death rate from increasing still further.

Documenting Life in the Ghetto

Emanuel Ringelblum, a Warsaw-based historian prominent in Jewish self-aid efforts, founded a clandestine organization that aimed to provide an accurate record of events taking place in German-occupied Poland while the ghetto existed. This record came to be known as the "Oneg Shabbat" ("In Celebration of Sabbath," also known as the Ringelblum Archive). Only partly recovered after the war, the Ringelblum Archive remains an invaluable source about life in the ghetto and German policy toward the Jews of Poland.

Deportations and Uprising

From July 22 until September 12, 1942, German SS and police units, assisted by auxiliaries, carried out mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center. During this period, the Germans deported about 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka; they killed approximately 35,000 Jews inside the ghetto during the operation.

In January 1943, SS and police units returned to Warsaw, this time with the intent of deporting thousands of the remaining approximately 70,000-80,000 Jews in the ghetto to forced-labor camps for Jews in Lublin District of the Government General. This time, however, many of the Jews, understandably believing that the SS and police would deport them to the Treblinka killing center, resisted deportation, some of them using small arms smuggled into the ghetto. After seizing approximately 5,000 Jews, the SS and police units halted the operation and withdrew.

On April 19, 1943, a new SS and police force appeared outside the ghetto walls, intending to liquidate the ghetto and deport the remaining inhabitants to the forced labor camps in Lublin district. The ghetto inhabitants offered organized resistance in the first days of the operation, inflicting casualties on the well-armed and equipped SS and police units. They continued to resist deportation as individuals or in small groups for four weeks before the Germans ended the operation on May 16. The SS and police deported approximately 42,000 Warsaw ghetto survivors captured during the uprising to the forced-labor camps at Poniatowa and Trawniki and to the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp. At least 7,000 Jews died fighting or in hiding in the ghetto, while the SS and police sent another 7,000 to the Treblinka killing center.

For months after the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, individual Jews continued to hide themselves in the ruins and, on occasion, attacked German police officials on patrol. Perhaps as many as 20,000 Warsaw Jews continued to live in hiding on the so-called Aryan side of Warsaw after the liquidation of the ghetto.

Liberation of Warsaw

On August 1, 1944, the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa; AK), a non-Communist underground resistance army with units stationed throughout German-occupied Poland, rose against the German occupation authorities in an effort to liberate Warsaw. The impetus for the uprising was the appearance of Soviet forces along the east bank of the Vistula River. The Soviets failed to intervene; the Germans eventually crushed the revolt and razed the center of the city to the ground in October 1944. Though they treated captured Home Army combatants as prisoners of war, the Germans sent thousands of captured Polish civilians to concentration camps in the Reich. 166,000 people lost their lives in the uprising, including perhaps as many as 17,000 Polish Jews who had either fought with the AK or had been discovered in hiding.

When Soviet troops resumed their offensive on January 17, 1945, they liberated a devastated Warsaw. According to Polish data, only about 174,000 people were left in the city, less than six per cent of the prewar population. Approximately 11,500 of the survivors were Jews.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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The city of Warsaw, capital of Poland, flanks both banks of the Vistula River. A city of 1.3 million inhabitants, Warsaw was the capital of the resurrected Polish state in 1919. Before World War II, the city was a major center of Jewish life and culture in Poland.

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The houses belonged to two Palestinian prisoners accused of carrying out an attack in the occupied West Bank last year.

The policy of homes demolitions is considered as 'collective punishment' by human rights groups such as B'tselem [Alaa Badarneh/EPA]

Israeli forces have demolished homes of two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Walid Hanatsheh and Yazan Mughamis are currently in custody and facing trial over allegations of carrying out an attack in the West Bank last year which killed an Israeli citizen and injured another.

Witnesses told local media that armed Israeli vehicles stormed into the town of Birzeit on Thursday, cordoned off the area surrounding Mughamis's house before tearing it down.

Israeli forces used jackhammers to demolish the walls of Hanatsheh's apartment in Ramallah.

During the demolition, dozens of Palestinians confronted armed Israeli soldiers. According to local media reports, Palestinians burned tyres and threw stones in a bid to halt the demolition.

Israeli forces responded with firing tear gas and stun grenades.

Local media also reported that the families were notified of the demolition order in October.

Human rights organisations term the policy of home demolitions as "collective punishment". According to Israeli rights group B'tselem, "over the years, Israel has demolished hundreds of houses as part of this policy, leaving thousands of Palestinians homeless".

Israel says it employs demolishing family homes as a "mean of deterrence" to stop attacks by Palestinians, who say they are resisting Israeli occupation and encroachment on Palestinian land.

Although Israel usually carries out home demolition orders in occupied East Jerusalem, it also uses the policy to destroy homes in the West Bank located close to the separation wall that cuts through parts of it.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - besieged since 2007 - during the six-day Arab-Israeli war in 1967.

Shortly after capturing East Jerusalem, Israel expanded the municipal boundaries of the city to take in large areas of land on which it later constructed Jewish settlements.

At the same time, it sharply limited the expansion of Palestinian neighbourhoods, forcing many in the increasingly crowded areas to build illegally.

Palestinian leaders want the territories to be part of their future state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, while Israel considers the entire city of Jerusalem to be its capital.

The increase in demolition comes amid a sharp rise in Jewish settlement activity in East Jerusalem and the West Bank since US President Donald Trump took office, whose recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital in 2017 caused a massive uproar.

Last year, the Trump administration said it would no longer consider Israeli settlements in the occupied territories illegal - though they are considered as such under international law.

According to a report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2019 saw a 45 percent increase in demolitions and confiscations of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank compared with the previous year.

The figures, published in January 2020, showed that a total of 393 Palestinian structures were destroyed or confiscated in Area C, which is under full Israeli control, compared with 271 structures in 2018.

The number of Palestinians displaced from their homes also increased to 507 in 2019, compared with 218 the previous year.

Source : Al Jazeera, News Agencies

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Israeli forces demolish homes of Palestinian prisoners

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The houses belonged to two Palestinian prisoners accused of carrying out an attack in the occupied West Bank last year. Israeli forces have demolished homes of two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Walid Hanatsheh and Yazan Mughamis are currently in custody and facing trial over allegations of carrying out an attack in the West Bank last year which killed an Israeli citizen and injured another.

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Everything leans, like tottering, hunched old women.

Every eye shines with fixed waiting

and for the word “when?”

Here there are few soldiers.

Only the shot-down birds tell of war.

You believe every bit of news you hear.

The buildings now are fuller,

Body smelling close to body,

And the garrets scream with light for long, long hours.

This evening I walked along the street of death.

On one wagon, they were taking the dead away.

Why so many marches have been drummed here?

Why so many soldiers?

Then

A week after the end,

Everything will be empty here.

A hungry dove will peck for bread.

In the middle of the street will stand

An empty, dirty

Hearse.

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by Pavel Friedmann

The last, the very last,

So richly, brightly, dazzling yellow.

Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing

against a white stone…

Such, such a yellow

Is carried lightly ‘way up high.

It went away I’m sure because it wished to

kiss the world good-bye.

For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,

Penned up inside this ghetto.

But I have found what I love here.

The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut branches in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.

Butterflies don’t live here,

in the ghetto.