April 08, 2019 Monday
Bedtime Story
John Kemeny got out just before the Massacres Started
But in a matter of year Teleki’s mind would
change when Hungary had to cede away a large part of its territory and when the
short-lived Communism had left people disillusioned.
Somebody had to be blamed and scapegoated
for the terrible loss and it would not help to blame the powerful Western
nations such as United States, the British Empire or France.
The Communists or the Bolshevik-loving Jews
were psychologically the “right” one to be blamed.
Within a year Teleki labeled the Jews as a
“problem of life and death for the Hungarian people.”
And so it would be as history shows – life
for Hungarians and death for the Jews.
Almost just about the time John Kemeny
along with his family was taken out of Hungary by his father the first batch of
Jews were rounded up (many of them were from the reacquired territories of Czechoslovakia
and thus were unable to prove their citizenship) were rounded up and dispatched
to Ukraine and Poland.
John Kemeny’s father was unable to convince
his own father or his sisters and brothers to leave Hungary who all perished in
the Holocaust.
Of the Jews that were rounded up some were
simply abandoned in South Poland whereas most were handed over to the Germans.
In the first massacre of the Holocaust it
would be the Hungarians who would take care of the logistics to a large extent
and to the actual murder of thousands of innocent countrymen to a lesser
extent.
It was the Hungarians who loaded the Jews
in freight cars and took them to Yasinia in Ukraine which in the prewar period
was at the Hungarian-Polish border and a German-controlled territory.
Once in German hands they were first taken
to the city of Kolomiya which is now in the western part of Ukraine and from
there they were forced-marched to the city of Kamianets-Podilskyi that is also
located in Western Ukraine on the banks of river Smotrych.
It was here that the first massacres of the
Holocaust took place on the 27th and 28th August of 1941
by the team of Schutzstaffel’s paramilitary death squads, Hungarian soldiers
and Ukrainian Auxiliary force.
The orders from the top came from Heinrich
Himmler – who himself was not present at the scene of crime - who can probably
be labeled as the chief architect of “The Final Solution to the Jewish
Question”.
In just this short span of 48 hours 23,600
Jews were shot dead in cold blood under the supervision of the SS commander
Friedrich Jeckeln who had developed and perfected a method of massacring a
large number of people.
This methodical killing was very proudly
known as the “Jeckeln System” that was somewhat akin to the treatment that is
bestowed upon farm animals in abattoirs where the entire process was divided
into sub parts with specialized people carrying out specific activities of
butchery.
We shall go into this in the nights to
come.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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