Recently I’ve been reading the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel in my lit class. Coincidentally, I also recently read a post by some troll on Usenet. The troll asserts many things about the historocity of “Night” (read: Holocaust denier), and the vast majority of the troll’s assertions are laughingly false and asnine. However, a few of them raised questions. The questions themselves pertain to the Holocaust itself than to the disgusting denial movement. So, here they are:
-In “Night” Wiesel mentions seeing the furnace at Auschwitz belching forth flame. How does flame belch from chimneys? Were they blast furnaces, or was this passage symbolic?
-Wiesel implies that some people were thrown into the furnaces alive. How often did this happen at Auschwitz?
-Wiesel says that babies were thrown into the furnace alive. Again, how often did this happen?
-What did they do to Auschwitz right before the Death March? Wiesel says that they were forced to clean their buildings, but I recall hearing that the Germans burned the entire camp down. Which happened, or did both actually occur?
Annnnd…that’s about as far as I personally feel like going with this evil stuff, looking at Google hits for “Auschwitz furnaces”. Feel free to borrow my search engine.
You might go the the library and get the book Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William L. Shirer. This is a well researched and documented account. There is a section (starting page 967 in my book) in it about the activities of the various extermination and other concentration camps of that period.
Does Wiesel talk about seeing the flames from a location in the barracks? Jewish prisoners were forced to attend to the disposal of the bodies. If Wiesel was ever a part of one of the work parties, he’d have seen the flames from the doors being opened. On the other hand, I worked at a place that had an incinerator (back before clean air standards were improved) and I know that with any lax standards regarding maintenance and fire levels, you can, indeed, get flaming debris rising up the stacks. (It would not be a constant flame in the manner of an oil refinery burn-off stack, but it could be considered “flaming.”)
As to throwing people (adult or infant) into the flames, alive: it certainly would not have been standard practice (as that would have slowed down the assembly-line efficiency for which the Nazis were striving), but one or two incidents of spontaneous cruelty in that manner would probably haunt a person for a very long time.
Feel free to borrow my search engine.