For our next fake ‘Holocaust Survivor’ story we have that of Mordechai Ciechanower who died recently and was the subject of a lengthy obituary on ‘Ynet’ by either his granddaughter or great-granddaughter Yael Ciechanover.
We begin with the fairly standard ‘where they came from’ narrative which runs as follows:
‘Ciechanover was born in 1924 in the Polish town of Maków Mazowiecki. To survive two years in Auschwitz, he worked as a roofer, repairing barracks in the camp. He was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, and later that year immigrated to Israel under a false identity, posing as a British soldier. He was laid to rest Tuesday in Yarkon Cemetery. Senior officials from the Shin Bet and Mossad, who had attended his lectures — including former Police Commissioner Yaakov Shabtai — helped carry his casket. Singer Yonatan Razel performed "Shir Mispar," a song he and Ciechanower had created together.
Born to Meir Zvi Hirsch and Rachel, Ciechanower grew up in a family that made edible and industrial oils. He was educated at the Yavne religious school, where his primary language was Yiddish, though most subjects were taught in Hebrew. As a child, he studied the Talmud at night while listening to discussions among members of the Zionist youth movements Hashomer Hatzair and Betar.
When World War II broke out in September 1939, the Jews of Maków Mazowiecki were ordered to assemble in the town square. Ciechanower, along with hundreds of other young men, was sent to forced labor camps.’ (1)
This isn’t too bad as far as it goes as Ciechanover is the right sort of age for a jew to have experienced the camps – he would have been 20 in 1944 – and his description of life in Maków Mazowiecki seems genuine enough with the references to the debates between Hashomer Hatzair (Socialist Zionists) and Betar (Revisionist Zionists) members given it a touch of authenticity, but then suddenly it goes horribly wrong when Ciechanover claims:
‘When World War II broke out in September 1939, the Jews of Maków Mazowiecki were ordered to assemble in the town square. Ciechanower, along with hundreds of other young men, was sent to forced labor camps.’
Now the problem here is that while the Germans did begin to use jews as ‘forced labour’ pretty early on this was generally from 1940 onwards not from September 1939, but also what is missing here is something obvious in that military age Poles were also subject to this requirement and the town of Maków Mazowiecki had circa 7,000 inhabitants in 1939 of which 4,000 were Polish and 3,000 were jewish.
So, what happened to young Polish men in Ciechanower’s account?
They simply don’t exist, and the Germans are only using the jews for forced labour: why is that?
Now you might think I am being a little hard on Ciechanower here, but the thing is we actually have quite a lot of information about what occurred in Maków Mazowiecki and when it occurred. For example, Ciechanower doesn’t even mention the major event of 1939 in the town which is that Einsatzgruppe V turned up on 10th-11th September 1939 and immediately began the process of Germanization and confiscating food and medical supplies for the advancing Wehrmacht.
Ciechanower skips over this without a word and also claims to have been sent to forced labour camps in September 1939, but this actually occurred in 1941 not 1939 since the Germans only set up a forced labour camp called ‘Arbeitserziehungslager Maków Mazowiecki’ in the town in March 1941 and which was then in operation till 1944. (2)
We can already see that Ciechanower is completely unreliable because he is contradicting established facts and deleting over half the population of Maków Mazowiecki from the picture he is giving.
Maybe the reason is that the people of Maków Mazowiecki wanted to be free of the jews in their midst – likely for good reason – and what Ciechanower is so upset about is that the local Poles helped the Germans identify and throw all the jews in the camp?
It is a distinct possibility and actually indirectly confirmed in a more detailed autobiographical version of his account that was originally written in either modern Hebrew or Yiddish. (3)
Next, we hear from Ciechanower how:
‘By late 1940, the town’s Jewish residents were relocated to a designated Jewish quarter, and by the end of 1941, a ghetto was established. Ciechanower’s family shared a cramped room with two other families.
“The overcrowding was unbearable, and food was scarce,” he recalled in a 2018 Zikaron BaSalon testimony - a social initiative of informal gatherings in private homes where participants listen together to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. “I removed my yellow badge, approached Poles, and asked for bread – they gave it to me. I brought it home, and within 20 minutes, my family had devoured a whole kilogram of bread. For three years, from 1942 until the end of the war, I was constantly hungry. My greatest dream was simply to sit at a table full of bread and eat.”’ (4)
Now this first bit is fine as far as it goes with a designated jewish quarter being created in 1940 – which is in line with German ghettoization policies in Poland - and then a sort of ghetto – which likely was actually just the accommodation area for ‘Arbeitserziehungslager Maków Mazowiecki’ which was built several months before – but once again we then descend into weird madness with Ciechanower ‘taking off his yellow star’ – a yellow star was actually sewn onto your clothes so he cannot have done this while a white armband with a blue Star of David on it was the earlier version and was not sewn onto the jew’s clothes unlike the later yellow star – that he couldn’t have easily removed and then went up to some Poles who – in a time of significant rationing – he openly admits to having deceived into giving him ‘a whole kilogram of bread’.
So, either Ciechanower wasn’t wearing a yellow star but rather a white armband with a blue Star of David which shows he is not reliable concerning details or he deliberately conned Polish men into giving him their bread rations so his family could eat extra food while the Polish men’s families went without.
Ciechanower continues by claiming that:
‘In November 1942, the ghetto was liquidated and Ciechanower was deported to the Mława Ghetto before being sent, along with his family, to Auschwitz a month later. Upon arrival, his mother, Rachel, and sisters, Rivka and Chana-Hadasa, were murdered in the gas chambers. Ciechanower and his father were selected for forced labor, surviving for three and a half months.
“The journey to Auschwitz — the largest Jewish cemetery in the world — was horrifying,” he recounted. “A man who leaned on me throughout the trip died during the journey. I wept as I bid farewell to my mother and sister. I took one last look at them before entering the camp.”’ (5)
Again, this isn’t too bad as far as it goes since jews from the ghetto in Maków Mazowiecki were indeed deported to Auschwitz; however there is a fly in the ointment here since Ciechanower claims his sisters and mother were sent to Auschwitz, while his fellow jewish ‘Holocaust Survivor’ from Maków Mazowiecki Jakob Blankitny claims that all the ‘elderly jews and women with children’ were deported to Treblinka to be ‘gassed’ not Auschwitz. (6)
This is a direct contradiction that is not easy to resolve as Ciechanower says Auschwitz and Blankitny says Treblinka.
Both cannot be true in the orthodox version of the ‘Holocaust’!
However, Ciechanower is also incorrect as the ghetto at Maków Mazowiecki – which remember almost certainly served as the accommodation area for the concentration camp – was only liquidated in 1944 unless what Ciechanower actually means is that the old ghetto was liquidated in November 1942 and the jews moved from there to either new purpose-built sanitary accommodation at ‘Arbeitserziehungslager Maków Mazowiecki’ or moved on to the new large work camps in the east of which Auschwitz was but one, while any sick or especially vulnerable (i.e., elderly and mothers with children) were routed through Treblinka for medical evaluation and sanitation before being transported onwards to a suitable camp or ghetto.
You see this is why the revisionist narrative on the ‘Holocaust’ works so well because it allows us to understand and iron out so many otherwise apparent contradictions in the ‘Holocaust Survivor’ testimonies as well as in the German documentation!
Next, we move on to the last section of Ciechanower’s ‘Holocaust’ narrative where he read how:
‘On his first night in Auschwitz, Ciechanower recalled the barracks overseer telling them: ‘The weak will be exterminated, the strong will work until they die. Look at the smoke rising from the chimney—those are your families.’
His father’s fingers froze in the bitter cold, and he was taken to the infirmary. A month later, Ciechanower was injured. During a selection process, he was loaded onto a truck bound for the crematorium, but a delay due to the arrival of a transport from Greece saved his life.
Later, Ciechanower worked as a roofer in the camp and acted as a messenger for the Jewish underground inside Auschwitz. After the Sonderkommando uprising, he and 500 others were transferred to the Stutthof concentration camp in northern Poland. His journey of suffering continued, moving from camp to camp, and enduring brutal forced labor.
At the end of the war, he was liberated from Bergen-Belsen. In Munich, he discovered that his father had survived. “I took a train to see him. When he opened the door, we both fainted. I promised him we would never be separated again,” he said.’ (7)
Now the first paragraph is clearly atrocity propaganda and is unlikely to have been said and if it had been said it wouldn’t be any more necessarily true than say a guard in one of Stalin’s Gulags boasting to some prisoners about how they are going to ‘gas them all with Zyklon B’; it is at best an irrelevant comment and at worst anti-German hate propaganda.
Next things turn from the silly to the bizarre with Ciechanower claiming that he got injured presumably while working at the camp and ‘selected’ for ‘the crematorium’ (i.e., he was to be gassed and his body cremated) and was put on a truck to go there, but a transport from Greece turned up (presumably loaded with jews from Greece) and the Germans seem to have forgotten all about him and his having been selected for gassing and cremation for no reason whatsoever.
We then learn that Ciechanower was part of the ‘jewish resistance’ in Auschwitz and was at Auschwitz on 7th October 1944 when the ‘Sonderkommando Revolt’ occurred at crematoriums IV and V – which spread to crematoriums II and III – and was identified by the Gestapo as a member of said ‘jewish resistance’ and because he was simply a messenger the German authorities preferred to be merciful and deported him to the Stutthof labour camp in the north along with ‘500 others’ – rather than execute him as they did to many of those jews involved in the ‘Sonderkommando Revolt’ - from whence he deported to Bergen-Belsen where he was subsequently ‘liberated’ by the British in 1945.
We can thus see that Ciechanower gets an awful lot wrong as he contradicts documentation, is apparently unaware there were non-jews living in his town, completely misses a key event in September 1939 regarding his town, thinks a forced labour camp in his town was created two years before it actually was and also claims to have magically not have been gassed because ‘some Greek jews arrived at Auschwitz’.
All in all, Ciechanower isn’t really remotely believable as a credible ‘Holocaust Survivor’ although I don’t doubt he was in the camps; the details of what he claims went on are not to be taken seriously!
References
(1) https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sji3layfye
(2) https://www.bundesarchiv.de/zwangsarbeit/haftstaetten/index.php?action=2.2&tab=7&id=2600
(3) https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Makow_Mazowiecki/mak309.html
(4) https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sji3layfye
(5) Ibid.
(6) https://www.ushmm.org/remember/holocaust-reflections-testimonies/behind-every-name-a-story/jakob-blankitny
(7) https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sji3layfye