Silberschein, Abraham

Abraham Silberschein was a member of the Polish parliament, a delegate of the World Jewish Congress and a member of the Committee for Assistance to the Suffering Jews in the Occupied Countries. As such, he collected witness testimonies about the alleged extermination of Jews in occupied Poland, which he published in Geneva in 1944 in a multi-volume series under the German title Die Judenausrottung in Polen (The Extermination of the Jews in Poland). The series contains statements by Jerzy Tabeau on Auschwitz as well as various texts on Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka without mentioning any author. Silberschein also possessed a version of the report by Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba, which forms the core of the so-called War Refugee Board Report. This version is now stored at the Yad Vashem Archives.

Here are some peculiar claims in Silberschein’s texts about Belzec:

• Victims were killed by electrocution with an electric oven. However, the orthodoxy insists that murder occurred at Belzec with engine-exhaust gases.
• The victims’ body fat was drained, and special camp factories turned it into soap and shoe polish.
• Hospitals were built to drain the blood of Jewish children. Even the most fanatical orthodox historians consider that claim to be untrue.

Here are some more peculiar claims in Silberschein’s texts about Treblinka:

• The extermination building consisted of an undressing room, a shower room, a dressing room, plus an experimental gas chamber that was connected to a furnace room, from which a railway led to the cemetery. However, the orthodox narrative has it that the gassing facility had neither an undressing nor a dressing room, that there was no furnace or furnace room anywhere at Treblinka, and that no rail connected the gas-chamber building with the mass graves.
• Arriving inmates first took a bath, then waited in holding cells. But eventually, they were brought from there to the gas and furnace chambers, where they were steamed to death with water vapor. The orthodoxy insists, however, that there was no shower and no waiting time for arriving inmates, but that they were gassed right on arrival with Diesel-exhaust gases — which are unsuitable for mass murder. What would have been the purpose of going to great length in giving thousands of deportees a warm shower, if they were to be killed soon anyway?
• An orchestra had to play music during executions, with the musicians being killed after every gassing batch, to be replaced with new musicians. This is ludicrous.

Silberschein’s books reflect one of the earliest impressions of the claimed mass murder in these four camps, allegedly originating from survivors who had just escaped these hellish places and whose memories were still fresh and not yet contaminated with stories later spread through media and survivor associations. Yet still, the stories were all dead wrong, even compared to today’s orthodox narrative.