1
" Ravensbrück was built for 3000 prisoners. At its height it held 35,000, 30,000 of whom were killed here. From the beginning, the SS did not want women with children in the camp; but as more and more territory was overrun, the camp swelled. After the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, there were hundreds of pregnant women deported here. Some are forced to abort; as numbers grow, women give birth and the babies are taken to a ‘hospital’ where they are slowly starved to death. The crematorium worked nonstop. Ash piles were dumped into the nearby lake as the Russians closed in. When the camp was overrun by the Red Army, 2000 women and 2000 men, mostly too infirm to be death-marched out of the camp, are found. Here "
― Matthew A. Rozell , A Train Near Magdeburg: A Teacher's Journey into the Holocaust, and the Reuniting of the Survivors and Liberators, 70 years on
3
" And this all brings to mind another incident that took place as the deportations from Berlin were being orchestrated, little known but highly illuminating and important. Between February 27 and March 6, 1943, a large group non-Jewish German women publicly protested in the cold for the release of nearly 2,000 Jews—their husbands and the male children of these ‘mixed marriages’. These couples had held special ‘exemptions’ from the ongoing racial laws, tabled even at the Wannsee Conference, but with the defeat at Stalingrad, these male Jews were ordered to be rounded up. Outside of the site of their incarceration at Rosenstrasse 2–4 in Berlin, despite being threatened with lethal force, the women and children gathered here chanted and yelled in the belief that their loved ones were to be deported to suffer the same fate as those other Jews shipped to the East. News of the protest spread, and the regime did not carry out its threat and the men were eventually released (though most were picked up again to work in labor camps).[21] It was the only German public protest against deportation of Jews, and not one of the protesters was shot. No government likes bad ‘PR’, even the Nazis at home, especially as the tables begin to turn on the war front. I "
― Matthew A. Rozell , A Train Near Magdeburg: A Teacher's Journey into the Holocaust, and the Reuniting of the Survivors and Liberators, 70 years on
5
" In the 15th and 16th centuries, Poland was the center of European Jewish life. In fact, at the end of the 18th century, 75% of the world’s Jews lived in the former Galicia, where we are, once part of Poland, Ukraine and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Still, in most places in Poland there is nothing left of this heritage; out of what was once millions, today only between 12,000 and 14,000 Jews call Poland home. "
― Matthew A. Rozell , A Train Near Magdeburg: A Teacher's Journey into the Holocaust, and the Reuniting of the Survivors and Liberators, 70 years on
8
" In the beginning, stores sold food smuggled into the ghetto, where one could buy anything—even eggs and milk. And outside lurk the snatchers, girls and boys in rags with feverish eyes, lying in wait for people leaving the store, grabbing their food and at once plunging their teeth into it, right through the wrapping paper. People crowd around, kicking and shouting, but the child does not care as long as there is food, no matter what it is. The coffee houses are full of smartly dressed women, wearing elegant pre-war hats. There are also rich smugglers, the new ghetto aristocracy, and all kinds of people getting rich at others’ expense; in front of the houses on the sidewalks lay human skeletons covered by newspapers. Winter, "
― Matthew A. Rozell , A Train Near Magdeburg: A Teacher's Journey into the Holocaust, and the Reuniting of the Survivors and Liberators, 70 years on
11
" People did these unspeakable acts to other people. But the ‘monster’ myth is just that. I suppose it is one way of coping with the unthinkable. Let the perpetrators off the hook, in a sense, labeling them ‘monsters,’ not humans capable of deeply evil deeds, and move on. But to me, it kind of absolves them of something. They are not ‘human,’ after all, so what does one expect of them? "
― Matthew A. Rozell , A Train Near Magdeburg: A Teacher's Journey into the Holocaust, and the Reuniting of the Survivors and Liberators, 70 years on
14
" The United States, Canada, and Australia had formidable immigration barriers in place, and while the British had admitted 80,000 Jewish refugees, all of that essentially ended after the declaration of war.[33] British-controlled Palestine also began to turn back ships of Jewish immigrants, a policy they would continue all throughout the war and beyond, sticking to strict Jewish immigration quotas to appease the non-Jewish residents there. "
― Matthew A. Rozell , A Train Near Magdeburg: A Teacher's Journey into the Holocaust, and the Reuniting of the Survivors and Liberators, 70 years on
16
" Farewell Warsaw, the city of joy and anguish, we shall never return! You stood uncaring when we cried to you for help in our despair. I hate you, you let a third of your inhabitants die before your eyes, without a word of protest against that terrible injustice! The ghetto was lit from above by the bright summer sun, but darkness, the smell of burning, and stench of corpses reigned inside. [*] "
― Matthew A. Rozell , A Train Near Magdeburg: A Teacher's Journey into the Holocaust, and the Reuniting of the Survivors and Liberators, 70 years on
