Thursday, April 30, 2009

Message In A Bottle: Auschwitz

When you are lost at sea or on a desert island and have no hope that you will be found, what do you do? You put a message into a bottle and cast it into the sea, hoping it will one day be found. It's a fool's hope, a yearning for a miracle to not be forgotten.

What do you do, then, when you are one of seven prisoners confined at the Auschwitz death camp by the Nazis during WWII? You put a message into a bottle and hide it carefully in a wall, hoping it will one day be found. It's a fool's hope, a yearning for a miracle to not be forgotten in a place where that intention is the primary purpose of your evil captors.

65 years later, the bottle is found, and the names and the words of the forgotten men are read by construction workers tearing down a wall:

Bronislaw Jankowiak, Stanislaw Dubla, Jan Jasik, Waclaw Sobczak, Karol Czekalski, Waldemar Bialobrzeski and Albert Veissid.

Of the seven, Mr Veissid is alive and well, the BBC has established, having spoken to him on the phone at his home in France. Veissid has stated that at least two of the prisoners survived Auschwitz, and efforts are being made to discover if any of the other prisoners are still alive.

So you failed once again, Nazi swine. Your evil intentions are once again shown to the entire world, to be an example of depravity and barbarity for all time. A piece of paper stuck into a bottle made a miraculous landfall 65 years later, announcing to the world that seven brave individuals refused to be forgotten as so many others were.

Here's a pic of the note found in the bottle:



h/t instapundit

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