Before, I was unable to answer those types of questions because I don't know what an answer looks like. Now,. I am happy because I know that you guys don't know what an answer to those types of questions look like either. But I do know what kind of an answer with which you have no choice but be happy.
Dogzilla is completely disingenuous.
It is hard to understand what makes him say things like "you guys don't know what an answer to those types of questions look like" when he has been given so many answers.
Perhaps the conversation about “ANY specific detail” “endorsed” by “an historian” has been marred by too many comments, asides, and reflections. And by too many examples of specific details found in witness testimony.
Perhaps Dogzilla wanted simply one detail, not many, and we gave him many. Or perhaps Dogzilla has gotten confused because of the volume of quick replies to his query. This whole discussion would then be a rare upside-down case of not being able to see the tree for the forests. So let’s simplify this and reduce it down to just one detail.
What Dogzilla asked for: “Now, all you need to do is find an historian who endorses ANY specific detail found in ANY specific holocaust survivor or perpetrator testimony so we can see what such an ‘endorsement’ looks like.”
What Dogzilla claims about the replies he’s received: “. . . nobody had been able to demonstrate a clear link between a certain fact and a historian's endorsement. . . .” Etc.
If Dogzilla had looked into or asked about the very first example I gave--
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7883859&postcount=8603
—he would have seen that I noted that Yitzhak Arad had, based on sources, given the detail that there were a “few survivors” of the shootings at the pits at Ponar in the wake of the Great Provocation. He would have seen facts tied to their sources, had he been interested.
So here is “a certain fact” or “ANY detail” from my first example: a few people survived the mass murder in Vilna the first week of September 1941, and in fact all of them were women or girls.
In his 1980 book on Vilna, for example, Arad wrote of the Great Provocation executions in Vilna that “Six Jewish women who were only slightly wounded scrambled out of the pits” that evening and “made their way to Vilna. . . .” Arad,
Ghetto in Flames, p104, citing Kruk’s diary and Dworzecki.
In his notes to the 2005 edition of Kazimeirz Sakowicz’s diary, Arad also wrote that “women and children were shot later in the day; those who were still alive were able to climb out of the pit after nightfall. . . . a few managed to reach Wilno.”
Ponary Diary, 1941-1943, p25
Arad also quoted from Trojak’s testimony to Kruk, including her account of how she and others, all female, managed to escape the pit. Arad wrote that “With help from the peasant women, Trojak and two women managed to return to the ghetto.” p26 Kruk, whose diary Arad referenced, had written that Trojak told him that “a peasant woman took” her and others who’d survived “to the city” (it isn’t clear from this entry how many were taken).
The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, p91 Kruk also explained that he had “gained access to a few of the sex who came from Ponar” including Trojak and Schloss. Kruk noted that Schloss had told him that “three of us” (survivors of the shooting) spent the night with peasants in a village, then the next morning “the Lithuanian woman took all three of them to the city and thus they came to the hospital,” where Kruk interviewed the survivors and peasant-rescuers. p92 Kruk had added, “Six wounded people . . . lie in the Jewish hospital. They all tell us: they shot us . . . In the ditch lay thousands of dead bodies. Before being shot, they took off their clothes, their shoes. The peasants who brought the people to the hospital tell the same thing. . . . A few crawl out of there, and a few drag themselves to the villages. Six of these few are now in the Jewish hospital. . . .” p92
Indeed, Sakowicz’s diary is another source for the fact that a few women and girls survived the shooting, writing of the extermination action that “That day the Heneks met 5 bleeding Jewish women, their clothes torn to shreds.” p28
As noted, there are many, many more details in these various accounts used by Arad (and other historians – to name just one, Dina Porat’s
The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner, p62) to describe the killings at Ponar the first week of September 1941. But in the interests of focusing on a single certain detail, let’s stick with historians’ writing about a few female survivors of this shooting. Dogzilla ignored this before, and will no doubt ignore it now - or wave it way on account of lack of interest, its not being what he meant, or some other excuse designed to cover up his confusion.
Lest Dogzilla plans to quibble about who the victims of these shootings were, note that Sakowicz described those shot as Jews, Kruk’s diary wrote that the victims were Jews taken from the Jewish neighborhood, and Jaeger reported that the German action on 2 September in the “City of Wilna” had killed “864 Jews, 2019 Jewesses, 817 Jewish children.”
Dogzilla has been given many examples of details used by historians – but, faced with the small problem that he has no point to make, he has tried claiming that none of these examples meets his standards. Oh well, here is a focus on a single detail out of the many details TSR, Nick Terry, and I have mentioned in reply to Dogzilla’s strange request. Bottom line: Dogzilla wants to negate, but he has no grounds to do so and thus descends into a swamp of incoherence and petulance.
