Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Belzec - From Tank Ditch to Mass Grave
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Old Frog's Almanac, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Belzec

File: holocaust/poland/reinhard/belzec belzec.01
Last-modified: 1993/03/05

"In 1939, when Germany and Russia, temporarily in a treat of
non-aggression, divided Poland, buffer areas were set up so that the two
totalitarian giants could protect themselves from each other. Belzec,
appropriated by Germany, was originally intended as part of this
territorial shield. Thousands of conscripted Jews from the Lublin area were
uprooted to construct a wall and extend ditches to cordon off the separate
areas. As it happened, the wall and the dirches proved unnecessary. When
the two allies went to war with each other, the wall was torn down and,
together with the ditches, became the site for mass graves when Belzec, in
1942, was converted into an extermination camp.

Six hundred thousand lives were snuffed out there, nearly all of them
Jewish. Not everyone went submissively to slaughter. During the process of
deportation from the ghettos of Poland they put up fantastic resistance,
fighting with fists and teeth against machine guns, breaking through the
sides of trucks and trains that raced at speeds of forty-nine kilometers.
The Ukrainian guards on top of the cars machine-gunned those who made the
break. A few survived by feigning death; others, more or less seriously
wounded, were able to join the Partisans in the woods. Those who were
recaptured were almost invariably lined up for mass execution.

Once the deportees arrived in Belzec, there could be little further
resistance. Starvation, illness, physical abuse, degredation numbed them
into torpor. One survivor imagined that she had been moving through a
canvas of fearsome monsters by Hieronymous Bosch.<14> It took little more
than a year, from March 1942 to the spring of 1943, for the Germans to kill
off their Belzec victims."

<14> Greet von Amstel, cited in Presser, Destruction of the Dutch Jews,
     page 494.

Extracted from--------------------------------------------------- 
"THE REDEMPTION OF THE UNWANTED", Abram L.  Sachar (New York: St.
Martin's/Marek, 1983.
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