May 7, 2012
To the Editor,
Hershel Fox – ex Winnipeger
– led services at Talmud Torah
– Camp Massad alumnus (I remember him leading services there, when my counselor was David Weisstub)
Father Patrick Desbois
My cousin (Z"L) in New York, a Shoah survivor was in contact with him.
Her father was among 2,000 shot 1st day of Pesach, 1942 in Sokal, part of what Father Desbois describes as "The Holocaust by Bullet".
The motto was "one bullet, one Jew" – buried whether dead or wounded.
She wanted to buy the field covering the mass grave from the Ukranian farmer who owns it (grows potatoes) to put up a memorial.
She and her older sister escaped the train to Belzec as it approached the camp.
Her mother and two younger sisters, too weak to make the escape, were murdered at Belzec October 28, 1942.
Belzec, one of the Rheinhard camps, did not have barracks for prisoners.
It was a simple death factory. Train, gas chambers, bural pits.
It "processed" around 600,000 souls.
You can find a description of its sister camp, Treblinka on YouTube.
Several clips from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah make up his interview with Fritz Suchomel (a guard at Treblinka) in which Suchomel descriibes the "process" in detail, including the "camp song" that jews who were used to remove the bodies (and later killed) had to learn. Lanzmann actually got Suchomel to sing it.
Source of the dates – my cousin’s subimssions to the Yad Vashem names database.
As to Belzec, once its job was done, the SS demolished everything and handed it over to a Ukranian farmer to grow crops.
Small snippet of information.
My uncle Willie (as well as my mother and his two brothers) was (per the information in my talk on Yom Hazikaron) born in
what was then Proskurov, Russia.
After the war, it became part of the Ukraine.
The city was renamed in 1954 after a great Ukranian hero, whose name I only heard with "Yemach Shemo" added.
The hero was Bogdan Chmielniki (Yemach Shemo), who in the 1600’s was the author, through his pogroms, of the death of betwenn 100,000 and 500,000 Jews…
Wilf Mandel