"Zis is da vey I
svallowed ze diamonds..."
Hungarian Jew Irene Zisblatt is a Holyhoax superstar and has a story for the ages.
Irene has a "memoir" called "The Fifth Diamond" which "documents" her tale.
As a prisoner in the concentration camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Irene says she witnessed and experienced unspeakable cruelty and brutality.
She lost her entire family of 40 members in the gas chambers.
She was a "guinea pig" for Dr. Josef Mengele, who performed inhumane experiments on her.
Irene claims she had chemicals injected in her eyeballs by Dr. Mengele, and miraculously gave birth to two children despite attempted sterilization by the Nazis.
Mengele also removed the tatto on her arm.
She was almost skinned and turned into a lamp shade for the infamous Ilse Koch.
Irene's mother gave her four diamonds before they were taken to the concentration camps to be used to buy bread should she ever find herself hungry during the war.
Irene kept the diamonds from being confiscated by the Nazis by repeatedly swallowing them and retrieving them from her feces.
One time she says she had to swallow them right after retrieving them from her excrement without washing them off.
Miraculously, Irene says she escaped not only the "death" camp of Auschwitz, but also a "death march" of "3 months trudging through the snow in the dead of winter", and "weighed only 40 pounds" at 14 years old when "rescued."
Irene didn't say a word about her "experiences" for 50 years, then finally decided to tell her tale.
Steven Spielberg liked her story so much he even put her in his Oscar-winning Holocaust "documentary" called "The Last Days."
Article #1:
source: http://www.irontontribune.com/news/2009/feb/26/survivors-story/
photo by Jessica St. James
Irene Zisblatt points to the area of her arm where a tattooed number used to be when she was a little girl during the Holocaust. Zisblatt addressed students from Fairland High School Wednesday afternoon about her experiences in Nazi concentration camps and her life afterwards during a special presentation.
A Survivor’s Story
Woman shares experiences of Holocaust
By Benita Heath
The Ironton Tribune
Published Thursday, February 26, 2009
PROCTORVILLE — It was more than a challenge. It was a plea from one of the few Holocaust survivors still alive today to the students of Fairland High School.
Never again allow humanity to be consumed by evil against itself.
That was the message of Irene Zisblatt when she spoke to a high school assembly Wednesday afternoon. Zisblatt, an Hungarian Jew, was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust.
She endured Auschwitz, the barbaric experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele and a Death March from the concentration camp to Loslau in during a brutal January winter.
As she watched the gas chambers churn out its victims into ash and the cattle trains bring in more, she made a vow.
“Through the shouting, the barking dogs, the cries of despair in different languages, I knew I must fight the darkness. I must live and tell,” Zisblatt, now 78, told the students.
She survived the factories of death, but kept silent for decades, not even her own children knew her story. But that changed when Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” hit the screen.
Then Zisblatt joined the March of the Living that annually takes teenagers through the death camps to teach them what happened during World War II.
In an interview before the assembly, Zisblatt became momentarily speechless when asked her reaction the first time she re-entered Auschwitz.
“I saw my whole family in the gas chamber and I heard my mother saying to me, ‘Stop crying. Do what you must do and that is when I started this,’ ” she said.
“This” being a constant schedule of speaking engagements, especially at schools, talking about the brutality of the Nazis.
“There is a pressing need to educate about the evil that took place,” she said. “Genocide is possible anytime, anywhere.”
Her story begins when she was 13 when her family was herded onto cattle cars, first to a ghetto, then to Auschwitz.
She had heard friends of her parents talk about the atrocities going on, but so many found the tales beyond belief.
“No one believed the most civilized people were doing the most barbaric things,” she said.
Ripped away from her parents and five siblings, Zisblatt was alone.
One night crying for her mother, she tried to leave the barracks where she was housed. A guard stopped her, then pointed to a chimney.
“You mother is just about now coming out of those chimneys,” she was told.
Zisblatt was too young to understand she was being told of mother’s murder.
Soon she became a human guinea pig for the experiments of Mengele. She had chemicals injected into her eyeballs to see if the color of the iris could be changed. She was given other chemicals in a test to destroy her reproductive organs.
“I called to God, but God wasn’t there,” she said. “But I couldn’t blame God. He didn’t create the Holocaust. I was not losing faith.”
She escaped the gas chamber, only to be sent to a labor camp. There she was forced with 5,000 other women on a Death March through the snows. For three months, she endured brutal cold and starvation, until she and a companion escaped.
Hiding out in a forest, they were found by American soldiers. Weighing no more than 40 pounds, Zisblatt still remembers the look of astonishment the soldiers, ignorant of the Nazi horrors, gave her.
“God knows I didn’t look human,” she recalled. “Who is going to believe a child for such a nightmare.”
But she was free — and alone, at the age of 14.
However, in two years after a stay in a displaced persons camp, she was on her way to America.
After seeing Spielberg’s film, Zisblatt found a mission.
“I knew it was duty to be a witness,” she said.
And it is now the duty of a new generation, she believes.
“It is going to be up to you,” Zisblatt said. “If we promote tolerance, it will change lives. It has to start with you. You are the last generation to know the survivors. Your children will not know a survivor. Those lives of hell can become lives of hope.
“Accept my legacy … work for understanding and tolerance. … No matter how small you think you are, you can make a difference.”
Article #2:
source: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/broward/cooper-davie-southwest/story/819285.html
Holocaust survivor escaped with gems
A Pembroke Pines woman who hid her mother's diamonds while she was in Auschwitz tells her tale in a memoir.
Friday, 12.19.08
BY JENNIFER COHEN
Special to The Miami Herald
Her mother gave her four diamonds to be used to buy bread should she ever find herself hungry during World War II, but those diamonds gave Irene Weisberg Zisblatt the fortitude to survive the Holocaust.
''I can not buy bread with your diamonds, mother, but as long as I am alive they will stay with me,'' she wrote in her memoir, The Fifth Diamond: The Story of Irene Weisberg Zisblatt.
A resident of Pembroke Pines since 1990, Zisblatt recently discussed her book and appearance in Steven Spielberg's documentary, The Last Days, at Nova Southeastern University.
Born Chana Seigelstein, Zisblatt lived in Hungary with her parents and five siblings. In 1942, when she was 11, her mother, Rachel, sewed the diamonds into the hem of her skirt before she was taken by the Nazis to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.
Zisblatt's entire family was killed in the gas chambers, and those four diamonds were the last mementoes of them. The only way Irene could keep the diamonds hidden was to swallow and retrieve them over and over again. She did this for 15 months.
Zisblatt told the audience how, as a young prisoner in the camps, she was a favorite of Dr. Josef Mengele, who performed experiments and surgeries on her and other prisoners without anesthesia. A girl named Sabka was another of Mengele's regular victims. Though they weren't allowed to speak, they formed a friendship and Zisblatt drew strength from their bond.
''The diamonds survived because, to me, they were the strength, the hope, the courage, and my mother, so they had to survive,'' Zisblatt said. In having a valuable secret from the Nazis, she felt that she was defeating her torturers. ``For every time that I was hungry, beaten or was tortured with experiments, I was hitting back by keeping my mother's diamonds.''
Mengele injected chemicals into her eyes in an attempt to change their color and forced her to remain in a cold room for days. He injected viruses under Zisblatt's fingernail and surgically experimented on her to find a way to remove the numbers tattooed on her arm. Afterward, he ordered the nurse to administer a lethal injection to both girls, but the nurse worked for the underground and was able to free them, one of many miracles Zisblatt experienced.
''Mengele was the most good-looking man,'' she said. ``He could have been the one scientist in the world who could have developed extraordinary things for humanity, but he became a murderer. He would look at me and smile and at times I could not believe this man could ever hurt me, he could be so charming. But the next minute, he was cutting me up into little pieces.''
In 1945, Irene and Sabka were part of a group of 5,000 prisoners forced to march in the cold. Every day, weakened prisoners dropped dead around her. After two months, they escaped. Exhausted and covered in lice, they walked through the forest and managed to stay alive by digging up food.
The pair were finally liberated by Gen. George Patton's Third Army, but Sabka died the very next day. Once again, Zisblatt lost her only family. After her recovery, she was taken in by relatives in America and began a new life with a new name. She married in 1956, and although she had been given watery soup filled with chemicals to destroy her reproductive organs, she gave birth to a son and a daughter in the 1960s.
Not wanting to remember her past, Zisblatt kept her mother's diamonds in a vault. Years later, at her husband's suggestion, she had the diamonds set into a pendant in the shape of a tear drop. She does not wear them regularly -- only when she speaks to future generations.
Zisblatt had vowed that if she survived, she would be a voice for her fellow prisoners. But it was not until her son asked her about the Holocaust that she was ready to share her story.
''For 50 years, I didn't say a word. I didn't want my children to live with my pain,'' she said.
After taking part in the March of the Living, a walk through the camps culminating in Israel, she began to share her story to educate children in order to rid the world of prejudice and indifference, and to teach future generations about the past and what hatred can do.
''I am a survivor of man's hatred,'' Zisblatt said. 'We were dragged from our homes, robbed of our childhood, yanked from our mothers' arms. I was living in a factory of death.''
Some more Zisblatt tales deconstructed:
In case video is down, see: alternative video link
This is one of the last holy Survivors™ alive on the planet left to tell Holocaust tales. Please take just a few minutes to listen. You may never be able to hear a survivor speak again.
Holocaust Survivor | CitrusTV News, 10 March, 2010.
CitrusTV's Ivory Hecker talks to one of the last survivors of the Holocaust.
Irene Zisblatt's website
