Gorillas at Auschwitz

When the guards were feeling particularly fiendish, they would unleash three gorillas into a pen and make one of us fight them. I was selected for these duties dozens of times and was almost killed on every occasion. Once, when the biggest, blondest, and most Aryan of the gorillas swatted off my hand, I was able to stab him in the neck with the jagged length of bone exposed at the end of my arm where my wrist had been a moment before. I knew when I beat the gorillas that day that the Third Reich's days of exterminating the Chosen people were numbered.

Fiendish Lemon Juice Experiments at Auschwitz

Dr. Mengele, in his unending zeal to torture us to the extent of endurance, liked to have me tied to a chair once a week in the main laboratory, where I was pricked with various sharp objects - forks, knives, twigs, pens, letter openers, and coat hangers - and then had my wounds spritzed with lemon juice by his assistant, Herr Unterdumpelschuffling. Dr. Mengele, however, not content to sting us with regular lemon juice, was perpetually at work on a new formula which, when completed, he dubbed the Thulean Master Acid. No Jew who has felt its sting can ever forget the appalling agony of a first administration of Dr. Mengele's Thulean Master Acid. I, as it turned out, was the first guinea pig to be given a dose of the finished formula, which, after a corkscrew had been twisted up each of my nostrils in turn, was piped into my sinuses with an iron straw. I screamed, I can assure you, and soiled myself as well, when the final citric solution was pumped up my nostrils and into my skull! In more than one way, friends, my brain has been scarred!

Slime Rations

When gruel supplies became scarce during the waning days of the war, we were sometimes fed with tiny rations of what the cooks called "British spines", or wheat chaff mixed in gelatinous goo the color of a lime or an unripe mango. Fortuitously, I found that this concoction came closer to agreeing with my digestion than the previous variety of mush.

Bare Knuckle Fights at Auschwitz

Irving Trasch was the greatest of the Auschwitz pit fighters. Commandant Hoess made big wads of marks betting on him - although, to be honest, this was a much easier proposition in view of the fact that all of Trasch's opponents were fiendishly starved to skin and bone. These were battles of Davids against Goliaths, and there was no boxing commission or protective regulatory apparatus in the inferno of the pugilistic death machine of Auschwitz. Then Irma Grese got tired of constantly losing her wagers and proposed to Hoess that he pit his man against one of her Nazi hell hounds, which, as any student of Holocaust lore knows, had been trained to rape, ravage, maul, and urinate on any Jew at first sight. Hoess agreed to hold such a bout, but only because he had an inside angle. One of Grese's dog trainers was bribed by Hoess to poison Pootschi, the bone-gnawing bruiser who was to challenge Trasch. Alas, when Pootschi met Trasch in the pit, its stomach had been so corroded by acid that it was unable even to wag its tail, let alone bite off Trasch's throat. And so the muscleman had his way with the mutt and kicked its head into the crowd of onlookers, who promptly pounced upon it and devoured it, fur, skull, and all in their terrible hunger.

Anti-Semites Slur Claude Lanzmann!

http://icareviews.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/one-third-of-the-shoah/

The Ghost Executioner's Birthday Show

The commandant's birthday was 25 February, and to curry a shameless favor with him the guards were wont to assemble and organize minstrel troupes from the capos and prisoners to put on annual vaudeville revues, comic operas, and tragedies. Naturally, we were whipped generously so as to furnish us with sense memories and motivations as thespians in our various roles. That year [1944] we, that is Schlomo, Irving, Oskar, Jan, Ennio, Karlheinz, and I, staged Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats and though few have believed me whenever I tell this story and come to this next frightening portion, I would eat my own mother's hair if I lie! When we came to my signature number of "Memory", which I, in the part of Grizabella, crept to the edge of the stage and poured out with a sensitive, piercing gusto especially for that monster the Ghost, who sat by himself in the empty theater, I declare that a solitary tear wet the back of his clicking electric monocle.

Invention of Pizza at Auschwitz

A singular circumstance that has received pitiably little publicity in the annals of culinary history, invention, and achievement is the invention at Auschwitz of pizza by a family of Italian Jews. Contrary to popular belief, the modern concept of the pizza pie is not an Americanization of an Italian tradition, but an improvisation of one Ennio G. L. C. Castanza, who, with the assistance of his wife Giulia and his son Stelvio, can alone be credited with the heartbreaking feat of the first creation of what might be termed, broadly, a pizza. What happened is that one day the commandant's wife decided to have Giulia hacked apart so as to have the poor wretch's pelvis bone fitted with wheels for use as a carriage by her obese cat, Herr Antonio. Ennio, catching wind of the cockeyed belching harpy's intentions, got hold of a pan from the scullery and ran back and forth along the vented wall of the torture shack within which the camp commandant's private carpenters, Horst and Jurgen, were quartering Giulia just like African cannibals, flinging pieces of her hither and thither to get at exactly the materials they needed. Fortunately, Ennio was able to catch on his pan several scraps of Giulia's flesh that landed on his side of the wall.

Well, Ennio and Stelvio naturally knew that without proper curing or refrigeration, these precious remains of their beloved Giulia would not last very long, and so they determined to eat them in order to keep something of her within themselves. Having the portion of flesh by itself hardly seemed sufficiently ceremonious, so a capital thing to do, they decided, would be to create a proper meal of the stuff by adding some cheese and sauce. Stelvio gladly allowed his father to slit his arm and squeeze a spritzing of blood onto the pie, while a few score of popped pustules on Stelvio's back furnished enough of a cheesy pique. The SS men, who gathered to watch and marveled at Ennio's inventiveness, even allowed him the use of one of the crematoria for the momentous baking of the pizza. It is one of my great satisfactions in life to remember that I, Benji Flakenfeld, was not only present at this major culinary event and triumph of perseverance and love, but was actually permitted to sample a slice of the world's very first cheese pustule pie. The name of the dish may have been altered to make it more palatable to American tastes, but the main thrust of the thing, I am happy to say, remains tastily unchanged.