Sometimes we can’t rest until we resolve unanswered questions. That’s the challenge that faces Yoram Haimi regarding his uncles who met their demise during the Holocaust. As the excerpt from the article by Aron Heller below indicates, Mr. Haimi discovered more than even he could have imagined!
When Israeli archaeologist Yoram Haimi decided to investigate his family's unknown Holocaust history, he turned to the skill he knew best: He began to dig. After learning that two of his uncles were murdered in the infamous Sobibor death camp, he embarked on a landmark excavation project that is shining new light on the workings of one of the most notorious Nazi killing machines, including pinpointing the location of the gas chambers where hundreds of thousands were killed. Sobibor, in eastern Poland, marks perhaps the most vivid example of the "Final Solution," the Nazi plot to wipe out European Jewry. Unlike other camps that had at least a facade of being prison or labor camps, Sobibor and the neighboring camps Belzec and Treblinka were designed specifically for exterminating Jews. Victims were transported there in cattle cars and gassed to death almost immediately. Over five years of excavations, Haimi has been able to remap the camp and has unearthed thousands of items. He hasn't found anything about his family, but amid the teeth, bone shards and ashes through which he has sifted, he has recovered jewelry, keys and coins that have helped identify some of Sobibor's formerly nameless victims. Based on debris collected and patterns in the soil, he has been able to figure out where the Nazis placed poles to hold up the camp's barbed wire fences. That led him to his major breakthrough – the mapping of what the Germans called the Himmelfahrsstrasse, or the "Road to Heaven," a path upon which the inmates were marched naked into the gas chambers. He determined its route by the poles that marked the path. From that, he determined where the gas chambers would have been located.
The Holocaust is interesting to many, as is what led up to it. To learn more about this topic, read Corrie Ten Boom’s book, THE HIDING PLACE, to learn how she and her family protected as many Jews as they could. Click here to take a virtual tour of their home in Haarlem, Holland, which is now a museum. Equally important is praying for the peace of Jerusalem, as the Ten Booms did for a hundred years prior to WW II. To read Aron Heller’s entire article, go to: Israeli archaeologist digs into Nazi death camp
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