A French Holocaust survivor whose name was found in a bottled message on the grounds of Auschwitz this week said on Tuesday the discovery was a “mystery” to him.
Museum officials said on Monday that workers demolishing a wall that was once part of the Nazi death camp in Poland had found a handwritten message apparently signed by seven prisoners, only two of whom survived.
“I am a little shaken up by this bottle business — it’s a mystery,” Albert Veissid, now a healthy 84-year-old, said at his home in Allauch in southeastern France.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“It’s incredible. I remember everything from the camp, from A to Z. As I speak to you now, I can see the images before my eyes,” he said.
“But this bottle business is an enigma. The biggest surprise of my life,” said the former fairground worker, who was arrested by collaborationist French authorities in 1943 and deported to Poland.
Dated Sept. 20, 1944, the message listed the names and camp ID numbers of seven Auschwitz prisoners aged 18 to 20, all Polish nationals except for Veissid, who worked together on the construction of an air shelter.
Workers found it packed inside the mortar of a wall of a building in the town of Oswiecim that served as a warehouse for the camp’s Nazi guards during World War II, now part of a high school.
Veissid said he recalled meeting the six Poles in question while working as a builder at the camp.
“It’s true I did them some favors. There was food supplied upstairs and they used to steal tubs of marmalade, which I would hide downstairs,” he said. “Maybe they wrote my name in the bottle as a way of thanking me.”
Further details about the message are expected to be made public in the coming days.
Veissid managed to survive Auschwitz until it was evacuated in January 1945, when he walked across Germany to France, arriving in a state so emaciated that his family struggled to recognize him.
“I was a walking skeleton. One more week and I wouldn’t have made it back,” Veissid said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS