Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 13

6A TIMES FRIDAY. JANUARY 27; 1995 AUSCHWITZ 1945-1995 50 YEARS THE ANATOMY OF Survivors recall the horror that Auschwitz I Fifty years ago today, Soviet soldiers arrived at Oswiecim (Auschwitz), Poland, to begin freeing survivors and exposing the horrors of the largest and most lethal of the Nazi death camps Compiled (rom Tlmejire8 Auschwitz environs Major Polish death camps Vistula Dwory River Station Birkenau (Auschwitz ll) n. r- THE CAMPS Auschwitz was a collection of three major death camps and more than 45 subcamps in southern Poland. Most of the prisoners were gassed; the others worked as slave laborers at the camps and in nearby factories, farms and mines supporting the Nazi war effort. A SSWar I Auschwitz Wf-y Station Berlin Warsaw a a Chelmno Treblinka Sobibor Industries REGIMENTED DAYS Wake: At dawn, straighten be-d'! Attend roll call: Prisoners 3 forced to stand motionless at attention for hours, sometimes in cold, rain or snow.

Whoever stumbled or fell was killed. '1 March to work Auschwitz I Sola River 7 Mile Majdanek Belzec AusChwite-Birkenau Monowltz (Auschwitz III) AUSCHWITZ Known as Auschwitz the main camp was begun in 1940. The first victims 600 Soviet POWs and 250 sick prisoners were gassed in September 1941. When the Final Solution was implemented in March 1942, trains from all over Europe began i if Workshops i Gas chamber and crematorium Work Eat: Stand in line for meal March back to camp mm Jti0ZZnia A bringing Jews to the camps. c- Block inspection rri rvvSa ted, i Evening roll call Sleep: In bunks stacked three high Admissions building Fifty years after the Allies liberated the Nazis' most notorious death camp, the fires of Auschwitz still burn in the minds of the survivors.

For the thousands who walked out of Auschwitz with little more than their lives, the death camp is with them every day. While they must bear the burden of those memories, many survivors believe they have an obligation to share them, to pass them on to their children and grandchildren. As long as they do, they say, the world will not forget Auschwitz. So they look back on those years for their children. And they tell their stories.

'I don't think God was there' In the morning, Gene Gross stood under a cloud of black smoke and watched ashes from the chimneys settle on his prison uniform. At night, when the guards marched him back to the barracks, the fires cast a dull red glow against the sky. It was his first full day at Auschwitz, and through it all, Gross thought only of his family. His parents. His sisters.

Almost everyone was sent to the camp ahead of him. Eventually, he asked a fellow prisoner about them. The man paused a moment before turning to the chimneys. "There," he said pointing to the smoke. "They are there." "Auschwitz was hell," says Gross, who lived there for six months in 1944.

"I don't think God was there at all." The memory just won't fade' BERLIN Kurt Goldstein, 80, is still haunted by the years he spent in Nazi concentration camps. "There are still these nightmares where I wake up in fright, tSfv Commandant's 'X' ffec- j.fe, 1 BIRKENAU Most of the gassings were done at Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II. Incineration area, mass graves Prisoners who were not killed were stripped, shorn, made to shower and given uniforms and ID badges Research "We heard a grenade exploding near the entrance area. We looked out and saw some Soviet reconnaissance soldiers approaching, guns in their hands," recalled Anna Chomicz, a former prisoner. "The soldiers came up and said: 'You are free at The Holocaust is always with you' Her voice shakes with age, but Frieda Katz remembers every word of the sentimental German song that Nazi guards forced her and other death camp inmates to sing 50 years ago.

Her song floats above the group therapy session for Holocaust survivors at a Jerusalem home for the elderly. "Don't cry, girl, when we talk about parting. Give me another kiss before we say goodbye," the 79-year-old widow sings. The therapist, Giselle Cycow-icz, 67, recalls a day in the fall 1944 when Auschwitz's camp doctor, Josef Mengele, marched into her barracks for one of his life-or-death selections. "There was a human chain of SS guards.

There was chaos and screaming and people stepping on each other. We had to undress, carry our clothes and pass naked in front of Mengele," Mrs. Cycowicz said. Mengele sent more than half the 1,000 women in the barracks, to their deaths in the gas chambers that day. Mrs.

Cycowicz has since married, raised three children and worked as a psychologist in New York City and in Israel all hallmarks of a normal life. But the shadow of Auschwitz remains. "The Holocaust is always-there with you. You always wonder whether the world is a safe place or a place in which these things can happen again at any time," she said. She keeps a tattered snapshot of the camp bunks in her wallet.

'I always held my head up high' Stanislav Ryniak was one of the first inmates of Auschwitz only a few weeks after SS head Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of what later became Germany's most notorious death camp. Ryniak, now 80, arrived on June 14, 1940, with the inaugural transport of Polish political prisoners to the camp. It was to be five years before he regained his freedom. "The only way out of this German concentration camp is through the chimney; this is not a sanitorium," Ryniak, then a student from Sanok in southern Poland, heard the Auschwitz commandant bark when he arrived. The nightmare vision dogged Ryniak for the duration of his ordeal at the camp, an existence characterized by the fear of death, humiliation and hunger.

"Despite this, I always held my head up high. People who gave up became victims and quickly ended up in the crematorium," said i station, meaicai i i "experiments" AUSCHWITZ DEATHS I I Block wall: zz. execution EEs site, 1 Urz Camp Jews Poles 83,000 extension 1 1 A Ju ijTlji ik i ii inn ih LIiiin MARCH, Gypsies 20,000 HOLOCAUST DEATHS vr.t,M-rtt Camps 11-milllon Railway station: Arriving prisoners Auschwitz victims: 10 In early January 11 945, as the Nazis realized they were losing World War II, they forced almost 65,000 prisoners, most of them Jews, on a death march to Wodzislaw, Poland, then on freight trains to other camps. More than 15,000 died. were split into two groups: The majority elderly, infirm, women with children, many others were gassed; those kept as slave laborers were quarantined, then sent to the "sauna." Gas chambers, crematoriums I mZ iff, m.

6 1 Mk If i It jr I uvvjjsr loin' ci ri4 i -17. 1 4 ti i Himselfemrer. -Eiio Auschwitz survivor Ryniak and 727 other political prisoners who had been rounded up by the authorities in Yaroslav was transferred to Auschwitz from the prison at Tarnov. The Nazis tattooed the number 31 on his lower arm, making him officially the first inmate of Auschwitz. my body bathed in sweat, he said.

"I can remember everything that happened with such clarity. The memory just won't fade." Goldstein, a communist who fought with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, was one of the few to survive the hell of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps, but the scars remain. Detained in France after the outbreak of World War II, he was later handed over to the Nazis by the collaborating French Vichy government along with other Jews who had fought Franco. Mis fate: Auschwitz. "For me, the awful thing was seeing children and toddlers going to their deaths in the gas chambers.

When I saw these things, I inwardly vowed that if I was ever to survive the camps, I would marry and raise a large family of my own." He achieved his wish. He married and had five sons. He chuckled when he said, "I suppose you could say Goldstein, the Jew, gained his revenge on Hitler!" 'This is the end of the world' Hellmut Szprycer, 65, was just 13 when he was taken to Auschwitz' Birkenau complex from Ghent, Belgium. But he's angry that the official celebrations call this week the 50th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation. "What liberation? For most of us it came too late as the Nazis took 50,000 of us off to kill us at other camps," he said.

"When they liberated Normandy, they were still gassing people here, and where were the Allied bombs to stop it, and where was the Vatican to stop it? They knew what was happening here. "It's not the liberation 50 years ago that brings us here," he said, "but remembrance that 50 years ago people knew about this and did nothing." Szprycer survived Birkenau, but he watched his parents and grandparents walk to the gas chambers in 1943. "I haven't talked about this for 50 years," he said before slowly walking through the front gate. "This is the end of the world here." 'You are free at last' OSWIECIM, Poland It was bitterly cold in Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945.

The death camp's German guards had gone, and some 7,000 surviving prisoners, sick and starving, were sheltering in their barracks. ana imoso! rnze winner Knight-Ridder TribuneJAMES SMALLWOOD and RON CODDINGTON- Photo: Jewish children at Auschwitz after liberation; CSA. courtesy of S.Holocaust Memorial Museum Sources: U.S. Holocaust Memonal Museum, "Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death research by PAT CARR Auschwitz from 1A rience of the Holocaust," said Rabbi Andrewj Baker, European affairs director for the; American Jewish Committee. "The anniver- sary of its liberation becomes the tangible? vehicle for remembering a historical event that spanned seven years.

And the fact thac so many extermination camps were placed irr Poland means that this strange German-Jew-I Pole connection comes together there." i Poland's prewar Jewish community 3.3-million 10 percent of the population- was virtually obliterated by the Third Reich. Today only about 7,000 Jews live ir the country. The shrill pitch of the dispute was clearl yJ upsetting to many of the survivors who have gathered here to pay homage and to remem-j ber. "It's terrible, terrible," said Blanche Ma-J jor, 70, a Hungarian Jew who survived; Auschwitz when SS physician Josef Mengele. selected her for a work detail while sending her grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts to the gas chamber.

"This should be quiet, a day very much just for us survivors." There is so much to remember but so few with direct experience left to bear witness, On Jan. 27, 1945, when advancing Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, they found o'nljf 7,000 skeletal inmates remaining. working the coal mines here. "They don't want to accept that the great majority of the victims are Jews, preferring to keep at least Auschwitz I (the oldest part of the camp) as a shrine to Polish nationalism." Walesa spoke earlier in the day in Krakow at Jagiellonian University, where 184 professors were seized by the Nazis in November 1939 and deported to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp just outside Berlin. Never once, however, did he utter the word "Jews." Some Jewish leaders ignored the university ceremony, including the president of the European Jewish Congress, Jean Kahn, and Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who headed the U.S.

delegation. Likewise, no official Polish representative attended the Jewish observance, where Kahn accused Walesa's office of organizing "a nationalist celebration" that diminished the Holocaust's Jewish dimension. But prominent Jews, including Wiesel, were determined to mend relations with Poles, and none suggested a boycott of the main ceremony today. Wiesel and Israeli Knesset Speaker Shev-ach Weiss said they met with Walesa and agreed that a peace declaration to be released at the main ceremony would acknowledge Jews were the main target of the Nazi genocide plan symbolized by Auschwitz. Nine in 10 of the 1.5-million people killed at the largest Nazi camp complex people gassed, starved, clubbed, hung, shot, worked to death in outlying armaments and chemical plants were Jews.

But half of them were Polish Jews, arid Auschwitz initially was built for Polish opponents of the Nazis, who were intent on eradicating Poland as a state and settling it with the Aryan race. Half a century has failed to assuage the anguish of Auschwitz or resolve the stewardship of its legacy. And the centuries-old friction between Jews and Poles exploited by the Nazis, who built six extermination camps in occupied Poland was on view Thursday as a scuffle broke out within a stone's throw of an Auschwitz watchtower once manned by SS troops. A group led by a militant New York rabbi, Avi Weiss, traded insults and shoves with several Poles outside a Carmelite convent, which many Jews object to as an effort to impose a Christian gloss on what is fundamentally a Jewish shrine. Pointing to a huge wooden cross erected only a few yards from the camp's barbed wire, Weiss held up a placard reading, "Where Was This Cross 50 Years Ago?" The placard was promptly torn to shreds by an angry Pole.

"For so many people, just the very word 'Auschwitz' has come to symbolize the expe tional Auschwitz Association. German President Roman Herzog, a boy during World War II, was the only head of state to attend. He barely spoke, pain etched on his face. But Thursday's ceremony was nearly overshadowed by an ugly dispute between Jewish groups and Polish officials over how to properly honor the dead. The World Jewish Congress, among others, has charged the Polish government with insensitivity and bungling in planning the two-day commemoration.

Jewish leaders, noting that 90 percent of the victims at Auschwitz were Jews, felt particularly aggrieved that the official ceremonies scheduled for today had excluded the kaddish, Judaism's traditional prayer for the dead. Consequently, Thursday's procession was planned as a defiant rebuke to Polish President Lech Walesa, and the memorial service ended with the kaddish and the haunting wail of a cantor crying out the names of the Nazi death camps. "I won't say it's anti-Semitic, but Polish state authorities haven't grasped the global significance of the 50th anniversary of Auschwitz," said Kurt Goldstein, 80, a Berlin Jew who survived more than two years of.