Contest Winners, October 31, 2009
Holocaust Historiography Project is proud to announce the winners of the 6th Annual David McCalden Most Macabre Halloween Holocaust Tale Challenge, which ended October 30, 2009.
Congratulations to each of our winners, and thanks to everyone who participated in our contest. Here are excerpts from our winning entries.
First Place — $200.00
Our winner Question Mark comes from abroad. He found this delightful survivor account in a Swedish newspaper:
After some time, Abraham [Frischer] was transferred to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany. He ended up in a pile of corpses where he lay for several days. German soldiers were shooting randomly into the pile of dead bodies. One shot almost hit him in the knee.
Abraham could not move, and was covered in blood and excrement. The only thing he could do is to moisten his lips with the blood from other dead Jews.
Second Place — $50.00
Eric Hunt sent in a couple of great entries, but our favorite was this one from Irene Weisberg Zisblatt’s 2008 autobiography, The Fifth Diamond.
In the next room lay scores of sick, emaciated Jews. Connected to each skeletal body were three bottles. Those barely alive people were being drained of their blood! The Nazi doctors had inserted one tube into each person’s neck, one into the crook of the arm, and the other at the back of the knee. Three pints of blood were simultaneously drawn from each prisoner.
[…]
The next day when the woman woke, she was lucid and explained to me that her eighteen-year-old daughter had died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She told me that her daughter and another group of young girls had been taken to block seven. They had literally been drained of their own blood for plasma for the German army and allies. […]