Auschwitz - By Train To Birch Tree Meadow

Part I of the book has been compiled from 'published' historical records and survivors accounts. It is presented in chronological order and serves to provide the reader with an overall understanding of the establishment and expansion of Auschwitz. The prisoners in these camps were forced to work as slave-labourers, and when the war started they were pressed into slave labour directly for the Nazi war effort. They received no pay, a food ration at starvation level and no medical necessities to survive. Gradually over three years, the Nazi's constructed extermination centres for the sole design and purpose to enable the mass murder of ethnic groups from almost every country in the world. Part II of the book enables the reader to assimilate the grievous torture that innocent men, women and children had to endure even before they were murdered and the author has over-laid proven facts upon the lives of a Jewish family forced to live in a Ghetto. Their names are fictitious, but in relating them to the dreadful but truthful events which were cast upon the Jewish citizens of Europe, the account serves to heighten the understanding and appreciation of the reader. Thousands were rounded-up and transported to a centralized extermination unit, others were marched to the edge of deep burial pits and shot in the back of the head. Many were harshly confined in a Ghetto under terrible and oppressive conditions, where through starvation and intimidation they were brought to a very low physical and mental state. Periodically these people were evicted from the Ghettos and like the family featured in this account were transported to a death camp and gassed like 'unwanted-dogs.' The account describes how the Nazi's 'cleared' a Ghetto in Warsaw and follows a mother and her three children on their long journey in a railway 'goods-wagon' to Auschwitz-II-Birkenau, where they were murdered in a gas chamber together with 2,600 other men, women and children who travelled with them.