Questions For My Mother

[Balsamo]

Funny how, when you start to do your own research on WW2, you suddenly start to find out about events you never learn about in school.

I was just looking up 'Anders Army' and came across The 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland which I had never....bloomin'......heard about before....ever. It happened only 17 days after the German invasion of Poland from the West.

Quote from Wiki:

"The Red Army achieved its targets, vastly outnumbering Polish resistance and capturing some 230,000 Polish prisoners of war.[4][17] The Soviet government annexed the territory under its control and in November 1939 made the 13.5 million formerly Polish citizens now under its control citizens of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union immediately started a campaign of sovietizing the newly acquired areas. This included staged elections, the results of which the Soviet Union used to legitimize its annexation of eastern Poland. The Soviets quelled opposition through summary executions and thousands of arrests.[18][19] The Soviet Union sent hundreds of thousands of people from this region to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union in four major waves of deportation between 1939 and 1941"

Well, as you mum said :

Don’t you know your history son?

Anyway, thanks a lot for those minutes from you mum...though i might say it does not help to clear the fog
I was not aware that the "Anders Army" was active so far in the USSR...but as promised, i leave it there...

[Armor105]

Now I know why my mums family moved/were relocated to Magnetogorsk.

The Red Army had made early plans to move a workforce and equipment to the region in the event of a German victory on the eastern front.

Totally weird coincidence here. Just started watching a documentary series by Adam Curtis (love all his stuff) called 'Pandoras Box'. Didn't really know what it was about.

First episode, first topic. Magnitogorsk!

Apparently it sprung up in the 30's as part of a Bolshevik utopian technocratic masterplan to industrialize USSR. Stalin threw a wobbly in about 1938 and murdered a bunch of the engineers. Possibly why so many replacements were deported there from Poland.

The video series is on youtube if anyones interested.

Pandora's Box

I also highly recommend Curtis' 'Century of Self' and 'Power of Nightmares'.

[Occam's Razor]

This is all highly interesting.

In Minsk the twins parents died of typhoid epidemic in 1943

Is your mother aware of the difference between typhoid (also known as typhoid fever) and typhus? Both diseases are often confused because of the similar name, and sometimes people use one word for both diseases because they don't know that there's a difference. And this confusion crosses the language barrier. The same problem of confusion exists in several European languages, because both diseases have these similar names in several languages.

Could you ask your mother if she knows the difference between typhus and typhoid and if she is certain that it was typhoid and not typhus?

Typhus is the disease that is transmitted by lice, typhoid (fever) is transmitted via contaminated water and food (fecal-oral route).
Both diseases were a big problem during WWII and reached epidemic dimensions, so it is just as likely that they died from typhus as from typhoid. One of the main symptoms of typhoid is diarrhea, it's similar to dysentery, whereas for typhus diarrhea is not typical.

Could you explain that to your mother (in case she doesn't know the difference) and ask her if she can tell with certainty whether it was typhoid or typhus?

That's also the reason why I asked whether she knows anything about epidemics and delousing measures in Magnitogorsk at that time. That might enable us to tell whether typhoid, dysentery, typhus or any other disease was the main problem, or all of them.

Does she know at what time of the year (summer, winter, month) they contracted the disease, and in what month they died?

Does she know how big this epidemic was, how many people died in that area from this particular epidemic?

Thanks again for your efforts.

[Armor105]

OR,

I sent my mum more questions after her latest reply and included all of the questions you asked for in your previous post in this thread.

When she writes me back I will include the questions in your post above.

Do we have any topics here regarding typhoid epidemics in Minsk during the war?

[Armor105]

Anyway, thanks a lot for those minutes from you mum...though i might say it does not help to clear the fog.

Oh I dunno, I'm learning some very important things from my mums testimony such as...

- Jews died on their journey from Poland to USSR and there were epidemics as early as 1941 not just in concentration camps but in ghettos/transit cities outside of the German influence.
- Other Jews were simply lost on the way, Like the little boy Fischel.
- The soviets implemented summary executions, arrests and deportation of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people from soviet controlled Poland and their own territories.
- People believe their relatives died in gas chambers when they actually have ZERO information/documentation for this. It's an assumption based on propaganda. Tragic. They could be alive and well.

...among other things.

[Occam's Razor]

Do we have any topics here regarding typhoid epidemics in Minsk during the war?

I don't think so. I don't think we have anything specific either about typhoid epidemics or about epidemics in Minsk here. Typhoid epidemics were usually smaller in scale than typhus epidemics. You may get a few dozen or hundred cases when the water supply of a specific building or part of a city is contaminated. Once that is cleared up the epidemic is usually under control. But if you have a few thousand people living under crowded conditions, and they're all full of lice, than one infected louse is enough, and a few weeks later everybody is ill. Typhoid epidemics were rather low level, here a small epidemic, there a small epidemic etc. But since optimal hygienic conditions could not be sustained in many places during the war, typhoid and dysentery were also serious problems.

[Armor105]

Quick google for - Minsk typhoid 1941.

All I can find is a typhoid fever outbreak in a German POW camp Stalag II-B Lager-Ost which is near present day Gdansk - Google map

Quote:

"Stalag II-B: The construction of the second camp, Lager-Ost, started in June 1941 to accommodate the large numbers of Soviet prisoners taken in Operation Barbarossa. In November 1941 a typhoid fever epidemic broke out in the Lager-Ost; it lasted until March 1942 and an estimated 45,000 prisoners died and were buried in mass graves. The camp administration did not start any preventive measures until some German soldiers became infected."

SOURCE: Wiki

About 700km away from Minsk though.

Still looking.

[Armor105]

Googling for Typhus Minsk 1941 throws up many more results including this:



Quote:

Typhus Fever Raging inCentral Europe

LONDON, Sunday.

Tile Stockholm correspon- dent of the "Daily Tele- graph" states that a violent epidemic of spotted typhus is reported to be raging in German Ostland (Latvia, Lithuania and White Russia). Thousands are already dead.

The epidemic is worst inside the area bounded by Vuna, Bialystok, Brestlitovsk and Minsk along the main line of retreat of the German central armies.

Residents of Ostland have 'been ' forbidden to enter Germany.

- The Canberra Times, Tues, December 16th, 1941

SOURCE: Trove Digitized Newspapers

[Armor105]

Oh shoot...I've been looking up 1941 rather than 1943.

Back to the drawing board.

[Armor105]

Something about a typhus epidemic around 1943 in Minsk:



- 'The Holocaust in the Soviet Union' By Yitsḥaḳ Arad, Page 436

SOURCE: Google Books

[Armor105]

1943 is also the year the Minsk ghetto was 'liquidated'. October 1943 according to Wiki.

[Armor105]

On the Lodz ghetto, Arthur Butz quotes a newspaper article on page 105 of Hoax:

April 12, 1943, p. 5: “NAZIS ERASE GHETTOS IN TWO POLISH CITIES

London, April 11 (AP) – The Polish Telegraph Agency said tonight that the Germans had erased the ghetto at Krakow in a three-day massacre that started March 13, and also had eliminated the ghetto in Lodz. The fate of the Jews in the latter city was unknown, but the agency said it was believed they also were killed.”

Does anyone know where he got this quote from?

[Balsamo]

Those are press releases, there are rarely accurate especially during war time...Could also be a misunderstanding, as a load of ghettos were being "liquidated" at that time.
The Lodz Ghetto lasted untill 1944...that does not mean that some transfer among its population did not happen of course...

[Armor105]

Those are press releases, there are rarely accurate especially during war time...Could also be a misunderstanding, as a load of ghettos were being "liquidated" at that time.
The Lodz Ghetto lasted untill 1944...that does not mean that some transfer among its population did not happen of course...

The part that interests me in that quote is in bold.

"The fate of the Jews in the latter city was unknown, but the agency said it was believed they also were killed."

[Occam's Razor]

The wikipedia article you quoted contains more references to typhoid fever:

In November 1941 a typhoid fever epidemic broke out in the Lager-Ost; it lasted until March 1942 and an estimated 45,000 prisoners died and were buried in mass graves. The camp administration did not start any preventive measures until some German soldiers became infected.

Stalag IV-H: Of the 10,677 inmates in the camp before the typhoid fever epidemic in December 1941, only 3,729 were still alive when it ended in April 1942.

Stalag VIII-E: The first Soviets arrived in July 1941; by June 1942 more than 100,000 prisoners were crowded into this camp. As a result of starvation and disease, mainly typhoid fever and tuberculosis, close to half of them died before the end of the war.

Stalag XI-B: In July 1941, over 10,000 Soviet army officers were imprisoned here. Thousands of them died in the winter of 1941/2 as the result of a typhoid fever epidemic.

And then one reference for typhus:

Stalag IV-B: In July about 11,000 Soviet soldiers, and some officers, arrived. By April 1942 only 3,279 remained; the rest had died from malnutrition and a typhus epidemic caused by the deplorable sanitary conditions. Their bodies were buried in mass graves. After April 1942 more Soviet prisoners arrived and died just as rapidly.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_Soviet_POWs

The problem is: That is complete bullshit! These wikipedia clowns have no idea what they're talking about. A few of these cases might have been typhoid fever, but most of them died with high probability from typhus.
I told you about the confusion with typhus and typhoid. If you look up "Typhus" in a German medical dictionary, you get the entry for typhoid fever. The German word "Typhus" refers to the disease that is known in English as typhoid fever. And the same problem exists in several languages.

Typhoid epidemics with tens of thousands of victims, and then several of such outbreaks in succession, are basically impossible. These outbreaks can only have been typhus.

According to this wikipedia article tens of thousands of soviet POWs died form several typhoid fever outbreaks, but only a few thousand from one typhus outbreak. That's completely ridiculous.

And that's the reason why I suspect that the parents of the twins you referred to died from typhus and not from typhoid.

But you can never be sure. It could have been typhoid, it's not impossible.

Btw., you wrote:

And now to my mothers side of the family. Her oldest brother Izzi Wasserman(Woziwoda) left Poland around the first World War 1914 or so for America via Germany. Her elder sister Rivka her husband and twin daughters – Hanna and Ita, also went to Russia along with my mother and Ciocia (Auntie) Bella – second older sister. In Minsk the twins parents died of typhoid epidemic in 1943 and the twins were taken to an orphanage.

The "twins parents" means your mother's sister Rivka and her husband? We're talking about your aunt, right?