Early in the morning of this day, in 1942, the first convoy of Jewish men, women, and children arrived at the Germans’ newly established killing center of Bełżec.
Out of the more than 400,000 Jews who were murdered there, fewer than 10 are known to have escaped.
Whereas only two of them lived to see the war’s end, Austro-Hungarian-born, Rudolf Reder, was the only one who survived to tell his tale…
Raised in the now-Polish town of Dębica, Rudolf was living in the Ukrainian city of Lvov when Hitler’s Germany invaded in the summer of 1941.
Although Rudolf bravely saved his beloved wife, Feige, and their three cherished children from being slaughtered during the ensuing pogroms; regrettably, his heroic efforts to later spirit them away from Ukraine were thwarted when the Germans intercepted them…
(The aftermath of the Lvov pogroms. Spearheaded by Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Bandera instigated the pogroms when he issued a “kill order”, urging Ukrainian gentiles to “take Jews to the gallows!” When the massacres began on June 30th, 1941, Jews were dragged from their homes into the streets of Lvov, where, after being forced to clean them on their hands and knees, they were ordered to scrub them again to remove the blood of their savagely beaten brethren. Women, in particular, suffered greatly at the hands of Ukrainian men, who, to the shock even of a lone German Wehrmacht “Propagandakompanie”, stripped, raped, and abused countless numbers while the propaganda troops were filming. By the time the abuse, rapes, and killings ended, on July 2nd, 1941, nearly 12,000 Jews lay dead at the hands of their Ukrainian neighbors. In the weeks thereafter, the horrifying film that was captured by the Wehrmacht was edited for an “exclusive newsreel” that, in turn, was broadcast across all four corners of Hitler’s Germany. Today, all that remains of the footage is that of which was found by an American unit in an SS barracks in Augsburg at the war’s end: Lvov Pogroms)
Then confined to the horrors of Lvov’s Jewish ghetto, it was there, in August 1942, Rudolf was violently separated from his family, and deported to the living hell of Bełżec.
Publishing with a specific focus on Holocaust and military history, William is an accomplished citizen writer, prided on keeping people from forgetting.
