Yom HaShoah

Yesterday I went to two events for Yom HaShoah (Holocaust remembrance day). My synagogue, Temple Beth El of Ithaca, hosted a speaker, Professor Marc Dennis (who teaches art at Elmira College). The topic of his presentation was "Under the Floorboards – Hidden Art from the Holocaust." (The image at left is one that he showed; it is a drawing by Josef Szajna, “Waiting to be Called for Execution," 1944, Buchenwald, pencil on paper, 8 x 12).

To quote from the Temple website:

Inmates of concentration camps made thousands of clandestine drawings and paintings. In fact some 5,000 drawings and paintings survived the war – each one revealing a human dimension – providing us with a rare glimpse of the daily existence in the camps.... It reveals the little-known work of artists who left expressive evidence of what they witnessed. Mr. Dennis states, "We cannot understand it and appreciate it say in the same way we might a Rembrandt…. Victims of the Holocaust risked their lives to make art so that others may understand what they had to endure. There are very few situations where so much art can offer this unique perspective on history. It should always be a priority to study how others have suffered and survived, sacrificed and endured, and left their creative mark on history." Marc Dennis is an award winning professor and nationally recognized artist and Holocaust researcher. He teaches drawing, painting and digital imaging, as well as a course on the history of the Holocaust with a specific focus on the art of Europe from 1933-1945.

In the evening, I went to a staged reading of the play "Kindertransport," written by Diane Samuels. It was performed by On the Verge, a joint effort by the English and Theater Departments at Ithaca College, which puts on staged readings once or twice a year. The New York Times review of the performance in New York City in 1994 said of the play:

Yet another investigation of the Holocaust and its continuing reverberations, "Kindertransport," which opened last night, approaches the subject from the unusual perspective of a child who escaped the immediate horrors but paid a heavy price anyway. Kindertransport was the plan formed in 1938, in reaction to Kristallnacht and the rising Nazi threat, to evacuate children from Germany and Eastern Europe. Before World War II erupted, nearly 10,000 youngsters, most of them Jewish, had made it to England.

Ms. Samuels, an Englishwoman, has set her play in the attic of a suburban London house in the 1980's. Evelyn (Dana Ivey), a brusque middle-aged housewife, and her daughter, Faith (Mary Mara), are sorting through the cardboard boxes and steamer trunks. Theirs is a touchy relationship, although we're not to find out why for a while, and the air is charged with animosity.

At the same time, in a series of flashbacks, we follow the progress of Eva, a frightened 9-year-old Jewish girl (Alanna Ubach). Tagged like a piece of luggage, she leaves her mother in Hamburg and travels to England, where the well-meaning Lil (Patricia Kilgarriff) takes over her upbringing. Little by little, the distraught child grows into a reserved young woman. Her accent fades. And so, presumably, do the old traumas.

The performance was excellent, I thought - even though the actors had only rehearsed twice, they did very well, and I found it moving.

When I got home from the performance, I watched the latest staging of the life of Anne Frank, produced in Britain and broadcast on Masterpiece Theater (PBS). The show had the same effect that the story always does on me - it makes the life of Anne Frank vivid and real, and then at the end we discover what happened to her - she died in Bergen Belsen only two months before the war ended.

Tonight I'll be watching another PBS production - Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab Lands. From the website:

Did any Arabs save Jews during the Holocaust? That's the question author Robert Satloff had in mind when he set out to discover the lost, true stories of survival, courage and betrayal in Arab lands during World War II. The history of the Holocaust in Europe is well-documented, but the history of what happened to the Jewish people of North Africa has been mostly forgotten, even in the very towns and cities where it occurred. The truth is remarkable: not only did Jews in Arab lands suffer many of the same elements of persecution as Jews in Europe -- arrests, deportations, confiscations and forced labor -- but there were also hopeful stories of "righteous" Arabs reaching out to protect them.

I'm glad that this film has been made - most American Jews (or for that matter, American non-Jews) don't know anything about what happened to the Jews in North Africa during WWII. I think it's important for people to know this history, so that they don't imagine the Holocaust was simply a European story. If the Germans had succeeded in holding North Africa and then conquering Palestine, the Jews there would also have been killed like those in Europe. (The Nazi advance towards Egypt was halted at the first battle of El Alamein in July, 1942; the second battle of El Alamein in October-November 1942 was the first significant Allied victory against Axis forces and the beginning of the retaking of North Africa). We can see from how thoroughly the Nazis killed the Sephardic Jews of Greece, the Greek islands, and the Balkans, how they would also have killed the Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews.

Secret Agents and the Rule of Law

Further on Anat Kam - see Haim Watzman of South Jerusalem on Secret Agents and the Rule of Law.

Hanan Eshel has passed away

I just learned from Paleojudaica (Jim Davila's blog) that Hanan Eshel, the great Israeli scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other early Jewish literature, has just died. I saw him last summer when I was in Jerusalem and learned then that he was ill with cancer. He and his wife Esti spoke about his hopes at that point that he would recover from the disease. I first met him, I think, in 1987 or 1988 when I was a graduate student studying at the Hebrew University. I can't remember if we took a class together or not (or if he was already teaching at that point). He was always gracious, helpful, and often quite funny. May his memory be for a blessing.

An obituary on him can be found at: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/136903

Gila Swirsky on the Anat Kam story

Gila Swirsky, whom I first met in Israel in 1987 as we were both protesting against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the weekly "Women in Black" demonstrations at Paris Square in Jerusalem, has sent a letter to her mailing list about the latest big scandal to hit Israel, which you can read about in all of the Israeli newspapers today.

Friends,

This story is a testament to the Internet. And to Anat Kam, the whistleblower, who is widely regarded in Israeli security circles as a traitor and will probably soon be charged with treason.

Anat (I’ll use her first name, though I don’t know her) is a 23-year old journalist who wrote for the popular Israeli portal Walla. Some months ago, Anat did the unthinkable: she passed on information that was decidedly newsworthy, but that the Shin Bet – Israel’s security services – did not want outsiders to have. It was a”hit list” – the names of Palestinians living in the West Bank who were on the Shin Bet’s “wanted” list. And it was a copy of the Shin Bet protocol stating that if these “wanted” figures are identified during the course of a military action, permission is granted to carry out “an interception”. Nice language for execution without trial. Reports are that Anat photocopied this classified information while serving in the IDF.

Anat allegedly passed on this classified information to Uri Blau, a journalist, who published it months ago as a major scoop in Ha’aretz. Now Ha’aretz has whisked Uri away to London to protect him from the Israeli authorities, who would love to interrogate him about his informant. Meanwhile, Anat has been under house arrest and held incommunicado for at least three months.

This is a big story, but until today no Israeli newspapers could publish it because a judge issued a gag order at the Shin Bet’s request. But go ask Henry Miller about banned books. Thanks to the ban and Israel’s inability to control cyberspace, the story has taken on vastly greater proportions. Every news outlet in Israel – newspapers, radio, TV, news portals – has front-paged the story now that the gag order was lifted. It would never have received such widespread attention had the Israeli authorities not tried to hide it in the first place. And had the Internet not cloned the story through every webpage eager to expose state secrets.

This is not the first time the Israeli authorities have arrested suspects and held them incommunicado for extended periods. It happens to Palestinians all the time. The best known case of an Israeli is Mordechai Vanunu, who blew the whistle on Israel’s nuclear warfare capabilities 24 years ago and was tried behind closed doors. More recently, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Yaakov, an Israeli citizen now living in the U.S., was arrested on a visit to Israel in 2002, and a gag order placed on news of his month-long detention and interrogation. Yaakov, a key scientist in the development of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, was suspected of divulging some of Israel’s secrets, but eventually released without charge.

So Israel has managed to draw widespread international attention to a story it wanted to hush up. But why conceal the fact that the Shin Bet has a “hit list” and gives license to its commando units to carry out field executions? After all, doesn’t the U.S. do the same thing in its own so-called war against terror?

Israel, in my view, wanted to hide this information to avoid the legal and diplomatic ramifications of disclosures that its soldiers were once again breaking international law. Israel has been playing defense ever since the Gaza Campaign, trying to keep its senior politicians and officers out of European courts on charges of war crimes. Most recently (December 2009), opposition leader Zipi Livni cancelled a trip to London out of fear she would be arrested, thanks to universal jurisdiction of human rights violations. Similar arrest orders were deflected by other senior Israelis (Barak, Mofaz, and Almog). Publicity about a hit list and hit squads could only add fuel to the growing criticism of Israel and the fear among its leaders of being arrested on a visit to Europe. Not to mention the fact that Israel’s own Supreme Court outlawed such unprovoked assassinations just months ago.

But really, isn’t Israel still the “only democracy in the Middle East”? Concealing someone’s arrest and the charges against her are clearly pages from the annals of dark regimes. And the broader context is the growing McCarthyite culture inside Israel – the silencing of its critics, the squirreling away of its whistleblowers. We see this in the hate campaign against Israeli human rights organizations, which has now reached a new peak – a bill before the Knesset that would severely hamper these organizations from receiving funds from foreign states, one of their only sources of support as the Israeli government is not about to fund human rights activity.

What’s not to love about secrecy, lies, and human rights violations? Praise the whistleblowers and all those who turned on the Internet lights, making it impossible for the authorities to turn them off again.

Gila Svirsky
Jerusalem / Nahariya

___________________
Gila Svirsky

http://www.GilaSvirsky.com

New York Times on the establishment of Dachau, March, 1933.

In my Jews in the Contemporary World course we are discussing the Holocaust this week, and I took a look at some New York Times articles, first about the establishment of Dachau as a concentration camp for political prisoners in March 1933, then about how it was freed by the American Seventh Army on April 30, 1945, and then another article which seems to give one of the first estimates of the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust. I think it would be appropriate to reproduce these articles, as Yom Ha'Shoah is coming up in a week.

The first one is a report by a Times reporter about Dachau a couple of months after it had been established, when most of the prisoners were Communists who had been rounded up by the Nazis soon after their takeover of Germany. When compared with the article about the liberation of the camp in 1945, the camp seems to have become a much more harsh and dreadful place in the ensuing twelve years.

TIMES WRITER VISITS REICH PRISON CAMP

Taken through entire place at Dachau in Bavaria except possibly disciplinary cells
2,000 inmates gloomy
Incautious word has landed many there – machine guns and rifles bar escape

From a special correspondent
Wireless to the NEW YORK TIMES

DACHAU, Bavaria, July 25. The name of this idyllic little town, situated about a half-hour’s automobile ride from Munich, has become a word of dread throughout Bavaria.

All the Bavarians, noted for their racy unreservedness of speech, pray these days with a mock drollery designed to beguile genuine apprehension:
“Please, Lord, make me dumb,
So I won’t to Dachau come.”

For high on the edge of Dachau is the big Bavarian concentration camp for political prisoners. Many a man has landed there, because of an incautious word or too much confidence in supposed comrades or friends. The Nazi Secret State Police, like the Cheka of Russia, has agents everywhere, and any criticism of the new regime and even lack of proper enthusiasm for it are punished as “sabotage” of the Nazi up-building program.

Sentences Indefinite

Such “saboteurs and killjoys” are sentenced to an indefinite period of training and education in the new and only true dogma of national salvation and for this purpose are sent to what are euphemistically called “educational camps,” where in rigid discipline and hard labor they are converted from egotistical Marxists or liberals to good Nazis who place service to the State above service to themselves.

Your correspondent spent a day at the “educational camp” at Dachau, where there is a steady coming and going, but where the average number of prisoners remains around 2,000. He inspected the whole camp, except possibly the disciplinary cells, of which he got a hint; he talked with them and heard their grievances, at least in so far as they dared express them in the presence of the camp’s deputy commander, who showed the correspondent around.

It is necessary to distinguish between a system that imprisons men for their political opinions and the methods with which the imprisonment is administered. In the latter respect the prisoners might have repeated the famous saying of the man about to be hanged that he was as well off as could be expected under the circumstances.

Clashes at the outset

This, both the prisoners and the camp’s commander, Herr Eicke, agreed, was truer now than before; when the concentration camps were first opened, the political passions still aflame led to numerous clashes between the prisoners and guards in which the guards naturally had the advantage.
Now camp life has settled into the organized routine of any penal institution, the guards consist of approximately 275 men, and Chancellor Hitler’s black-uniformed elite guards and not the ordinary brown-shirted storm troops perform this duty. It is somewhat boring but not much different from regular army life.

The prisoners accept their confinement as a blow of revolutionary fate against which it is futile to rave. The older prisoners and “trusties” soon break in the new ones and the latter quickly learn that, in view of the indefiniteness of their stay, good behavior and the quickest possible conversion to Nazism are their only chance of release. The intellectually honest are out of luck.

The camp is located on the site of huge war-time munition works. The machine shops and machinery were blown up on the orders of the Allies. Scattered remnants of these are mute testimony of Germany’s defeat and additional confirmation to the Nazis that they are right.

Assails destruction of works

“The senseless destruction of such tremendous values belonging to the German people is a shame,” exclaimed Deputy Commander Michael Lippert, the correspondent’s guide. “It is an object lesson for our Communists which they quickly comprehend.”

Some of the sheds of the administration building, especially the concrete one-story barracks which formerly housed the munition workers, were left standing and they constitute the concentration camp. In this respect the Dachau prisoners are probably better off than in most camps.

Surrounding the camp is a seen-foot wall topped off with barbed wire and a short distance beyond have been placed barbed-wire entanglements. Between the wall and the entanglements there are patrols of guards clad in gray green service denim. They are armed with rifles while machine guns are strategically placed and manned by alert crews with fingers at the triggers ready to mow down the rebellious or check any flight.

Asked whether there had been many escapes the guide said: “No, only one that was staged from a workshop outside the camp.”

Labor gangs repair road

Dachau is ruled by both prison regulations and rules of military discipline. That is apparent on every hand. On approaching the camp, after satisfying the challenging patrols with a pass obtained from the secret State Police, the correspondent saw labor gangs at work repairing a road under the supervision of armed guards and under the muzzles of machine guns. It was a blazing hot day and the men were stripped to the waist. Most of them were sunburned a dark brown, but the red of some betrayed recent arrivals.

They seemed to work with a sort of fury within them, betrayed in part by the vehemence with which they dug up the earth, but most of all by the tortured looks on their faces, which ranged all the way from rage and bitterness to bewildered hopelessness.

Later your correspondent learned that most of them had been put to work under the burning sun as a disciplinary measure, for the day was so hot that most of the prisoners had been relieved of all outside work. This was evident as soon as the camp gates were passed. Stretched out over the entire campground were about 1,500 idling men. They ranged from boys of 17 to white-haired old men.
All types were represented – sturdy peasants, manual laborers and bespectacled intellectuals, and there were also faces usually attributed to a city’s underworld. All were clad only in grey trousers or just in bathing suits, having taken off as much of the grey prison uniform as possible.

Most Do Nothing

Most of them were lying in the grass and some were in the shade of the few available trees. A few were bathing in a makeshift swimming pool. The rest were visible between the rows of barracks, some playing chess, a few reading books, most simply doing nothing. It was an almost idyllic picture of a rest camp. That it was not a rest camp, however, was evident very soon.

The disillusioning thing, besides the grim, efficient-looking guards and their rifles, was in the faces of the prisoners. Under a smiling sky, there was not a smile in the 2,000. They looked sour, grim, sullen, sad or merely apathetic. Thoughts of other things than the beauty of nature and the peacefulness of scene obviously engaged their minds. And dark were the looks which greeted the Deputy Commander accompanying the correspondent.

Nevertheless, as soon as they were approached, all groups quickly sprang to attention. Caps were whipped off the many heads and heels clicked. When the correspondent and his guide entered a barracks room, corporals bawled out, just as in the army, “Attention!” Then reported “Corporalship So-and-So. Twelve men. Everything in order.”

Herr Lippert explained that the prisoners were organized in companies and corporalships, each under a leader selected among the prisoners themselves, who were responsible for the order of the men and the cleanliness of the barracks.

“For their own comfort, the men see that any pig among them is cleaned up and stays clean,” Herr Lippert asserted.

Barracks are clean

Indeed, the barracks were as clean as a whistle. Each room contained four tiers of three bunks each, one atop another, crude wooden affairs filled with straw, but covered by clean, blue-white bedclothes neatly folded.

The correspondent found the guards had precisely the same accommodations. In fact, their quarters were more cramped, the rooms smaller and lower, allowing only two bunks atop each other.
Both prisoners and guards eat the same kind of food. That is a principle Chancellor Hitler is enforcing for himself as well as his men, namely, that all Germans are comrades, even if political enemies, and should live more or less alike. Some of Herr Hitler’s lieutenants are less meticulous than others in carrying out the principle, but it is certainly enforced at Dachau.

All was not idleness within the camp. Some sheds had been converted into artisan shops, and here the skilled prisoners worked. Tailors sewed grey prisoners uniforms, bootmakers built boots, carpenters made doors and windows and locksmiths made the necessary fastenings. Even an arts shop was created where woodcarvers and sculptors were busy and a studio with a proper skylight housed an artist making crayon sketches. But all the art work had reference to the Nazi movement – there were Hitler and Goering medallions, swastika cross emblems and Hitler and Goering pictures, sold at fifty pfennings apiece. Other art work apparently is prohibited as contrary to Nazi pedagogics. Yet the artist was among the most satisfied-looking in the entire camp.

The Order of the Day

Following is the order of the day: 5 A.M. arising time, 5:30 coffee, 7 to 10:30 work, including a twenty-minute pause; then the midday meal and a rest; 2 P.M. to 5 work, including a twenty-minute pause; 6 supper, 8 counting assembly when every prisoner must be accounted for, and 9 lights out and bed.

The prisoners may write two letters a month, although there is no limit on letters addressed to the prisoners and they may receive two parcels a month, but only clothes and laundry. Food shipments, except sweets, are prohibited because of the danger of smuggling arms. The prisoners may also receive money from home, but only up to 5 marks a week, with which they may buy additional food from the canteen. This sells everything, including near beer, but no alcohol. Finally, good work is rewarded by an additional allotment of bread.

April 30, 1945 - liberation of Dachau (New York Times)

This second New York Times article is about the liberation of Dachau.

Dachau captured by Americans who kill guards, liberate 32,000

DACHAU, Germany, April 30 - Dachau, Germany's most dreaded extermination camp, has been captured and its surviving 32,000 tortured inmates have been freed by outraged American troops who killed or captured its brutal garrison in a furious battle....

Prisoners with access to records said that 9,000 captives had died of hunger and disease or been shot in the past three months, and 14,000 more had perished during the winter. Typhus was prevalent in the camp and the city's water supply was reported to have been contaminated by drainage from 6,000 graves near the prison.

39 Cars Full of Bodies

A short time after the battle there was a train of thirty-nine coal cars on a siding. The cars were loaded with hundreds of bodies and from them was removed at least one pitiful human wreck that still clung to life. These victims were mostly Poles and most of them had starved to death as the train stood there idle for several days. Lying alongside a busy road near by were the murdered bodies of those who had tried to escape.

Bavarian peasants - who traveled this road daily - ignored both the bodies and the horrors inside the camp to turn the American seizure of their city into an orgy of looting. Even German children rode by the bodies without a glance, carrying stolen clothing....

The camp held 32,000 emaciated, unshaven men and 350 women, jammed in the wooden barracks. Prisoners said that 7,000 others had been marched away on foot during the past few days. The survivors went wild with joy as the Americans broke open their pens, smothering their liberators with embraces.

Bodies were found in many places. Here also were the gas chambers - camouflaged as "showers" into which prisoners were herded under the pretext of bathing - and the cremation ovens. Huge stacks of clothing bore mute testimony to the fate of their owners.

A French general was slain last week as he walked toward a truck, believing that he was to be evacuated, prisoners reported. They said that Elite Guards [SS] had shot him in the back.

The Americans stormed through the camp with tornadic fury. Not a stone's throw from a trainload of corpses lay the bleeding bodies of sixteen guards shot down as they fled....

When Lieut. Col. Will Cowling of Leavenworth, Kan., slipped the lock in the main gate, there was still no sign of life inside this area. He looked around for a few seconds and then a tremendous human cry roared forth. A flood of humanity poured across the flat yard - which would hold a half dozen baseball diamonds - a Colonel Cowling was all but mobbed.

Rescued by soldiers

He was hoisted to the shoulders of the seething, swaying crowd of Russians, Poles, Frenchmen, Czechs, and Austrians, cheering the Americans in their native tongues. The American colonel was rescued by soldiers, but the din kept up.

Flags appeared and waved from the barracks. There was even an American flag, although only one American was held there. He is a major from Chicago captured behind the German lines when he was on special assignment for the Office of Strategic Services [predecessor of the CIA during WWII - RL].

New York Times, June 10, 1945 - Estimate of number of Jews murdered

The New York Times reported on June 10, 1945, about the number of Jews killed by the Nazis. Since this is such an early report, some of the information in this article was later known to be inaccurate, but this is the first version of what happened to the Jews of Europe under the Nazis.

80% OF REICH JEWS MURDERED BY NAZIS
All Those Left in Europe were Marked for Death by 1946, AMG [Allied Military Government] Investigation Shows
Only 150,000 Survied
Extermination Plan Revealed - Russians Estimate Several Million Died in East

FRANKFURT ON MAIN, Germany, June 8 (Delayed) (U.P.) - The Nazis exterminated at least 80 percent of Germany's Jews, and every remaining Jew in occupied Europe was marked for murder before the summer of 1946, it was revealed today.

It now is possible to give the full story of the Nazis' plan to wipe out all of Europe's 12,000,000 Jews. Allied Military Government authorities, after a painstaking study, reported that a majority of the Jews in Germany met death between 1939 and 1942. Russian officials estimate several million Jews were exterminated at concentration camps in Poland and White Russia during the German occupation.

On the basis of this information, it is believed that less than 20 percent, or about 150,000 of the original group in the Reich, survived the reign of terror. These survivors are being returned to their homes as soon as possible. Germans who dispossessed them are being ousted. In most cases, this is done without serious friction, despite the years of intensive anti-Semitic propaganda.

Synagogues Reopened

In several cities, including Aachen, Cologne, and Frankfort on Main, synagogues have been reopened and Jewish services conducted for the first time since November, 1938.

Some homeless Jews are cared for by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Included are 500 Jewish children, mostly between the ages of 15 and 17, but some as young as 10. They were rescued from the Buchenwald camp and now are at Thionville in Lorraine, in the French zone.

The Nazis' master plan was engineered by Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, reportedly an Allied prisoner. He was aided by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler. The plan originally called for a "Jew-free Reich" by April 1, 1942, as a birthday present to Adolf Hitler, but it was slowed down by transportation difficulties.

Its first stage began after Poland fell in 1939. Jews were to be used as slave laborers in war factories built in that country. They were to die gradually of starvation,  disease and cold. The first contingent of Jews from Germany was rounded up in Stettin, Cologne and Frankfort on Main - about 50,000 in all. They were shipped to Lublin in October and November, 1939. Transportation trouble set in and only a few thousand were deported eastward during the next two years.

Few left unmolested

The drive began in earnest in September, 1941. It continued full blast until scarcely a Jew was left unmolested in Germany or any occupied country. In Berlin the Nazis began in 1941 to deport bout 20,000 persons eastward each month. They were stripped, searched, robed and then packed in trucks and rail cars. Some worked in airplane and textile plants. Others were thrown into ghettos. Thousands went straight to extermination camps.

Relatives and friends in the Reich seldom if ever heard of them again. More than once the trains were stopped and all Jews were ordered out and massacred.

The third stage of the program was launched early in 1943, well after the original deadline for the whole plan. The Nazis rounded up and deported Jews from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Some were sent to Poland and others to concentration camps in Germany. Tens of thousands were killed monthly in these camps. The Nazis in 1943 began emptying the ghettos of Warsaw, Riga, Lublin and other large cities, and started systematic extermination by gas.

UNRRA officials expressed the belief that if the war had lasted another year, the Nazis might have come very close to their objective of wiping out all Jews in Europe.

Starvation Still Reported

The Vaad Hatzala Emergency Committee, with headquarters at 32 Nassau Street, disclosed yesterday that Jewish survivors of Nazi horror camps, freed but temporarily residing there until they can be repatriated or emigrated, "are living under conditions bordering upon starvation." The committee said that it had received word of the plight of the Jewish survivors from Isaac Sternbuch, its representative in Switzerland, who made a cabled plea for relief funds.

Mr. Sternbuch said all available food stocks purchased abroad with Vaad Hatzala funds already had been dispatched on International Red Cross trucks to concentration camps at Landsberg, Dachau, Mauthausen and Theresienstadt.