By Donal O’Kelly
Oct 30, 2025
“History did not begin on October 7th” said Ireland’s new President Catherine Connolly on her way to achieving the highest-ever vote share (63.4%) of an Irish Presidential election. She was referring to the date in 2023 lodged into the memory of a large majority of the world’s population. The Irish people, many of whom have taken part in hugely-attended protests in Dublin and throughout the country opposing Israeli genocide in Gaza, have given the independent parliamentarian a landslide victory.
Like 9/11, October 7th doesn’t need the year appended. 2001. 2023. Almost the same gap as between the Treaty of Versailles and the start of World War II. October 7th and 9/11 are dates driven deeply into our collective human psyche. They are part of the calendrical furniture in there, like our individual birthdays, Christmas Day for Christians among us, and 4th July for Americans.
On 20th September 2023 the last event of Ireland’s decade of centenary commemoration of the struggle for independence took place. The commemorative decade 1913 to 1923 was centred around the Easter 1916 armed uprising in Dublin against British rule. The last event marked a century since Ireland’s accession to the League of Nations – “when Ireland takes her place among the nations of the world, then, and only then, let my epitaph be written” – Robert Emmet, Irish patriot who led an armed uprising against British rule, hanged and beheaded in Dublin on 20th September 1803, exactly 120 years earlier. A couple of weeks later, on October 7th armed and trained óglaigh of Gaza broke out through the fence restricting 2.4 million Palestinians in the most densely concentrated stretch of land in the world.
In Ireland, the deeply reflective educational process nourished by the decade of centenary commemoration was followed by two years of watching in horror as the state of Israel, the last settler-colonial invention of imperialism, pummelled the people of Gaza mercilessly with everything the world’s military-industrial complex could supply it with. It did so while having its government’s perverse statements that it was engaged in war on behalf of civilisation against barbarism amplified by the rich world elites and their media machinery.
Mention of the date October 7th has been used as an excuse for the grossest evil perpetrated on the civil population of Gaza. A galaxy of powerful figures, led by US President Joe Biden and EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, repeated the debunked charges of mass rape, beheaded babies (Biden lied when he said he saw photos of this) and babies baked alive. It is now accepted that nothing of this sort was done by Palestinian rebels on October 7th. It is also accepted that no Palestinian rebel from Gaza was equipped with explosive weapons capable of destroying houses or incinerating cars. The high command of the Israeli armed forces at midday on October 7th imposed the Hannibal Directive that ordered soldiers to kill anyone in danger of being taken hostage as well as those taking them hostage. Israeli Apache attack helicopters were used for this purpose. It’s not known how many of the 1154 Israeli people killed that day were killed by Israeli forces or by Hamas rebels. The armed breakout from the Gaza concentration camp on October 7th 2023 was presented by a worldwide propaganda exercise directed by Israeli psy-ops as a genocidal attack on Jews for being Jews in the only Jewish state. The curated media blitz generated enough false pr justification for actual genocide to be perpetrated against the people of Gaza for two years, livestreamed on everybody’s phones, including actually burning babies alive and decapitating babies, inflicting mass murder with the full and profiteering backing of the governments of the rich world.
As President-elect of Ireland Catherine Connolly said, history didn’t begin on October 7th. Even in the relatively short-term, there was a context in which the armed breakout from Gaza occurred. There were the series of vicious weeks-long Israeli bombardments inflicted in 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021 causing thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of casualties, under the cynical but revealing Israeli vernacular ‘mowing the lawn’. There was The Great March of Return mass demonstrations close to the fence in 2018, an insistence on publicly laying claim to the land from which the parents and grandparents of many of them were violently expelled by Israel in 1948 and 1967, and denied right of return. That act of collective peaceful resistance mounted by hundreds of thousands of people was answered by Israeli snipers shooting dead almost 200 unarmed protestors including doctors and journalists, and maiming more than 6000 people using explosive bullets. Peaceful protest by the people concentrated in Gaza is verboten by the Israeli apparatus of siege and oppression. That is just a small sample from the recent past of the historical context that preceded October 7th 2023 to which the new president of Ireland alluded.
*** *** *** ***
There was another armed breakout through a seemingly impregnable fence perpetrated on October 7th. It was on October 7th 1944. It happened in the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Silesia, southern Poland. The rebellious outbreak for freedom against the most horrific manifestation of the Nazi “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in Europe” was carried out by a few hundred Sonderkommandos in the sprawling, throbbing enterprise of organised vicious terror and cruelty presented as civilised progress, honour and efficiency.
These Sonderkommando prisoners worked under SS supervision in shifts round the clock to move the thousands of bodies of recently-arrived mainly Jewish transportees from the gas chambers into the crematorium ovens. For carrying out orders precisely in this vital part of the stopwatch efficiency of the Nazi genocidal process, they received better food and accommodation. Not to carry out orders was of course a suicidal act, which some did, notably a group of one hundred mainly Jewish deportees from Corfu in September 1944.
The Sonderkommando in Auschwitz on October 7th 1944 knew they were doomed whatever they did. In Auschwitz’s four-year duration, twelve times the entire Sonderkommando population was exterminated and a fresh complement selected from the constantly replenished supply of prisoners barely staying alive in dire conditions and working slave labour in nearby giant war industry factories such as Buna and IG Farben. On October 7th 1944, the Auschwitz Sonderkommando knew they had nothing to lose. The only weapons they had against German military might were the long metal hooks that they were equipped with to move thousands of bodies per day from the gas chambers to the ovens, and to rearrange them there the quicker to turn them to ash spread as fertiliser on the nearby SS farm.
On October 7th 1944 they employed those long hooks to good effect, with axes and hammers against machineguns. Using explosives smuggled in by four Jewish women factory-workers, they blew up one of the crematoria. They killed an unknown number of SS officers and guards before they themselves were almost completely eliminated. Those who managed to get out through the fence were captured in the succeeding days, and were hanged slowly in a roll-call ceremony. A band was forced to play before speeches by the camp commandants threatening dire punishments for escape attempts.
The rebellion of October 7th 1944 in Auschwitz is not well known, and has never been, in contrast to the October 7th 2023 rebellion in Gaza. The few hundred participants, ignoring a last-minute countermanding order from the underground leadership, and armed mainly with the knowledge they had nothing to lose, are forgotten.
In the summer weeks between May and September 1944, the death-machine of Auschwitz-Birkenau turned almost one million Jews to ash, the largest group being 430,000 Jews of Hungary when the daily rate of human destruction climbed to 12,000. This is the period for which Commander Rudolf Hoess directed the construction of a more efficient mass killing process as presented in Jonathan Glazer’s superb 2024 Oscar-winning film Zone of Interest. One of the main works undertaken was the construction from February to April 1944 of a new railway platform inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, eliminating the time-consuming need for lorry transports of newly-arrived deportees to the gas chambers.
*** *** *** ***
Why was this October 7th breakout necessary? Would the Allies not have bombed Auschwitz if they knew what was happening there? Why was the Auschwitz death camp still operating on October 7th 1944? Why, through the summer months of 1944, were trains arriving from Hungary packed with people prepared for a stay in a resettlement city called Kenyermezo (meaning ‘bread field’ in Hungarian)? How was the secret of the mass killing apparatus kept for so long, inducing almost half a million Jewish people to arrive laden with possessions, only to be directed naked to the showers?
The first two questions taken together can be answered by one unusual word:- extrusion. In his book Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist explains that the word exterminate is rooted in the Latin termino, meaning boundary. To be exterminated is to be cast beyond the boundary of life. Extrusion is a word I only came across once and it was in counter-reference to extermination. It was in a high-level British Foreign Office wire to the US State Department on March 23rd 1943, more than a year and a half before the October 7th Sonderkommando rebellion.
“There is a possibility that the Germans or their satellites may change over from the policy of extermination to one of extrusion, and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries by flooding them with alien immigrants.”
Doesn’t extrusion stink of Eton? At that point, the Allies knew full well from numerous intelligence reports that the implementation of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in Europe” was ongoing. Stopping it or even hindering it never rose high on the military priorities of the Allies. Widespread organised murder of people because of their ethnicity was written off as a civilian matter that in wartime couldn’t be permitted to interfere with military objectives. This policy was deeply entrenched in Allied strategy right up to and after October 7th 1944.
The third question concerning the compliant arrival at Auschwitz of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the summer of 1944 raises issues about how the secret of Auschwitz’s function was kept from so many people for so long. They expected to see the bounteous city of Kenyermezo with which they’d been tantalised. How?
*** *** *** ***
It was during the completion of the in-camp railway platform in Spring 1944 that a successful escape was accomplished by two Slovakian Jews from the small town of Trnava, Rudolf Vrba, aged 20, and Fred Wetzler, aged 26. They had survived in Auschwitz for more than two years. They disappeared from the roll-call on April 7th, a full five months before the Sonderkommando rebellion of October 7th, and escaped on April 10th. They knew that Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz were about to start. Vrba had overheard SS guards joking about looking forward to lots of Hungarian salami. Their reason for escaping when they did, in opposition to the international underground resistance leadership in the camp, was to warn the Jews of Hungary not to board the deportation trains. They set off south towards the Slovakian border ‘without documents, without a compass, without maps and without a weapon’ as Vrba put it.
After several close encounters with patrols, and with the vital help of (luckily) supportive Polish civilians, they made their way through mountains and woodlands for eighty miles until they reached Slovakia. They made contact with a Jewish doctor who brought them to meet Zionist leaders of the Slovakian Jewish community in Zilina on 25th April 1944.
For three days Vrba and Wetzler gave separate testimonies to spokesman for Slovakia’s Jews Dr. Oskar Neumann and Jewish Council member Oskar Krasnyansky who came from Bratislava. Vrba drew an accurate map of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, indicating the gas chambers and the crematoria, so that Allied bombing missions could be sent. Both had acted as registrars of their blocks, so they had accurate figures memorised of the numbers of arrivals. They gave an estimate that between June 1942 and April 1944 1.75 million Jews had been killed in Auschwitz. Vrba felt at first their interviewers didn’t believe a word they were saying. It was only when he named a list of people who had been on the train that originally took him to Majdanek concentration camp in April 1942 that they changed their tone. They themselves had drawn up the deportation lists under pressure of the Nazis and their Slovak puppet government. As far as they were concerned the people they listed for deportation were sent to resettlement camps from which they would return after the war. These two young Slovak escapees now confronted them with the reality that, by their official compliance with Nazi diktats, they had sent tens of thousands to their deaths.
Now realising the seriousness of the moment, they spliced together Vrba’s and Wetzler’s testimonies, taken separately, into one report. Both escapees emphasised the urgency of informing the Hungarian Jewish leadership of imminent mass deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The SS Hungarian salami jokes led them to surmise this was the reason for the construction of the new platform inside the complex, nullifying the need for lorry transport from arrival to gas chamber.
Vrba knew the transports would start any day. Everything was ready in Auschwitz. He told the Zilina men to get the report into the right hands in Hungary immediately. They knew exactly who to contact: Rudolf ‘Retzo’ Kasztner in Budapest. He was a brilliant lawyer and journalist, the Zionist president of the Hungarian Jewish Council.
Vrba and Wetzler were fixed up with forged papers. Days passed. Vrba asked if there was any word back from Kasztner in Budapest. No, not yet. Then early on the morning of May 2nd Vrba asked the maid why she was crying. “They’re deporting the Hungarians. Thousands of them. They’re passing through Zilina in cattle trucks.” He was told the Zilina leaders were gone to Bratislava, but they had sent sandwiches and milk for the people in the trains passing through.
Sandwiches. Milk.
More than four months and 430,000 genocide victims before October 7th, knowing what they knew from Vrba and Wetzler, they still propagated the Kenyermezo myth.
*** *** *** ***
By then Kasztner read the Vrba-Wetzler report (named The Auschwitz Protocol). At that time, the end of April 1944, he was in talks with Adolf Eichmann, Nazi military commander in Hungary since mid-March. Hungary’s Jews had already been rounded up into ghettoes. Vrba recounts in his book “I Escaped from Auschwitz”, how Kasztner, having read the Auschwitz Protocol, told Eichmann he knew his secret. At that, Eichmann knew he would have to bargain, because under his command he had only 150 SS men to supervise the deportation of one million Jews to Auschwitz.
Kasztner presented as a proposal to Eichmann his encouragement of resettlement in the fictional Kenyermezo in return for a train-load of prominent Jews of his choice to be sent to neutral Switzerland instead of Auschwitz. Eichmann agreed. Like Auschwitz Commandant Hoess, he and Kasztner both knew that secrecy and obscurance of truth was paramount for successful genocide.
While Kasztner consorted with Eichmann in the Majestyk, Vrba and Wetzler were sent to sow their wild oats in the Slovakian mountain resort of Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas for six weeks. They were sidelined while their report was suppressed in the personal interests of the Zionist leader in league with Eichmann to send Hungary’s Jews to their deaths with maximum efficiency – except a select number of his choice. It was, in fact, by now a habitual Zionist political strategy to make common cause with the German Nazis rather than working class, ‘assimilated’ or left-wing Jews; they had done it since opposing the 1933 international boycott of Germany led by Jewish US veterans, in return for the Ha’avara transfer agreement that allowed special terms for prominent Jews of their choosing to migrate to Palestine with a favourable proportion of their wealth. Kasztner and his Zionist accomplices in the Hungarian Judenrate maintained a strict public silence about genocide in Auschwitz, and spread the comforting mirage of stepping on a train to a new life in Kenyermezo, thereby generating by outright treachery the myth weaponised by Zionism to this day ‘they went like lambs to the slaughter’. The holocaust genocide was based on a massive deceit. Elie Wiesel summarised it as:- “We were taken just two weeks before D-Day (June 6th 1944), and we did not know that Auschwitz existed.”
In Auschwitz, the summer months went by, with several trains arriving daily from Hungary, disgorging their passengers onto the platform while their luggage was brought to their quarters; but first a shower.
Eventually, the Vrba-Wetzler report was surreptitiously circulated by enough outraged people with enough outraged urgency to circumvent the Kasztner suppression. Its content was reported on BBC, it reached the Vatican forcing the Pope to condemn the deportation trains, and once a copy was read by Hungarian Prime Minister Horthy he was forced to stop the trains on July 10th 1944, by which time more than 400,000 had been exterminated. Horthy was deposed by the fascists of the Arrow Cross movement shortly thereafter. They reimposed the deportations of Jews, but this time on foot to Vienna for forced labour on defence infrastructure. Through the worsening weather, many thousands died by the wayside. By then, Rudolf Vrba had joined the Slovakian resistance to fight for the defeat of Nazi totalitarianism forever.
*** *** *** ***
In the immediate aftermath of October 7th 1944, four Jewish women were hanged for smuggling into Auschwitz the dynamite used to blow up a crematorium, and all Sonderkommando rebels were slaughtered as a deterrent once their breakout was foiled. Primo Levi, in ‘If This Is a Man’, his memoir of his ordeal in Auschwitz, recounts being forced to stand with the entire camp watching the ceremonial slow hanging of one of the recaptured Oct 7th escapees, with band accompaniment. Meanwhile Kastner was continuing talks with Eichmann’s successor as Nazi negotiator, Kurt Becher, in Budapest. He departed in an SS car to join his wealthy friends in Switzerland on October 27th 1944, where they waited in comfort until they could travel to Palestine. The chosen ones.
In 1946 Kasztner would write a defence affidavit for Becher at the Nuremberg Trials. As a result, Becher avoided not only the gallows but even a jail sentence, and went on to become a multi-millionaire businessman in West Germany and die of old age in 1995. Eichmann spoke highly of Kasztner, giving an interview from Argentina to a Dutch Nazi journalist in 1955 in which he spoke of negotiating with Jewish political officials in Budapest:-
“One man stood out among them, Dr. Rudolf Kastner, authorized representative of the Zionist movement. This Dr. Kastner was a young man about my age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist. He agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation and even keep order in the collection camps if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine.”
Along with many of the select 1,684 Special Train passengers, Kasztner settled in Israel on its establishment by the violent Nakba that forced 750,000 Palestinians to flee their homes in 1948, and he became a junior minister for Ben-Gurion’s Labour Party and a government spokesman. As Holocaust survivors streamed into Palestine turned into the Jewish state of Israel, many Hungarian Jewish refugees had developed an extremely dim view of Kasztner. This all played out, it must be remembered, in the context of a brutally violent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population, a context often omitted from otherwise meticulously researched historical accounts. Kasztner was accused of Nazi collaboration in a political pamphlet, and the government pressurised him to sue for libel. The trial turned into a damning public indictment of Kasztner. The pamphleteer was found not guilty, which meant by default Kasztner was found guilty of collaboration in the Holocaust. He appealed to the Supreme Court, but before it could deliver its verdict (a carefully curated not guilty majority) he was shot in Tel Aviv on March 4th 1957, less than a year before I was born. It’s not that long ago.
The Holocaust has left deep psycho-political scars on human society we don’t perceive fully or heed. And ‘it’, the recurring human societal habit of imposing genocide, even allowing for the accompanying profound dread of it, didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s historically based, in Namibia with the almost total annihilation of the Herero and Nama people by the Germans in 1904, in Congo by the Belgians, in Tasmania by the British, in Peru by the Spanish, in Molucca by the Dutch, in Niger by the French, in Ireland by the British, in Armenia by the Turks, in East Timor by Indonesia, tumbling, tumbling out of my mind into ovens, into troughs in the earth, in Argentina, in Algeria, in Guatemala, in Rwanda, in The Canaries, in Massachusetts and Maine, in Sudan, in Hispaniola, in Bosnia, more, lots more, relentless, but also, the steadfast resistors to genocide, unheralded, unnamed, uncredited, the risk-taking helpers of genocide’s escapees, the urgently outraged who take action, in those times past against genocide and slavery, and here, right now, for Palestine, for the people of Gaza, sailing on laden flotillas, attacking compliance with genocide, unsettling collaboration with genocide, smashing the Kenyermezo myths of Gaza Riviera, collapsing the revered false idols dressed in civilisation garb, boycotting the commercial interests supporting the military onslaught on defenceless civilians, derailing the business-as-usual profiting from infliction of misery, cutting the wire, plugging the works, staunching the flow, changing the course of history set at present on repeat.
Rudolf Vrba opposed and derided the Zionist state of Israel. For his exposure of Kasztner and his cronies, he was studiously airbrushed out of Holocaust history, including and especially by Yad Vashem, and by the revered high priests of Israeli historians, even though he and his accomplice Fred Wetzler escaped to create the Auschwitz report that saved half a million Hungarian Jews from extermination by a grand deceit eased, amplified and facilitated by the Hungarian Zionist leadership.
The book ‘Escaping Auschwitz’ by Haifa University Emeritus Professor Ruth Linn, published by Cornell in 2004, is highly instructive in how tradition and collective memory is invented, shaped and weaponised in the service of the Israeli state and nation. One of the strategies used is the obstruction of translation into Hebrew of any work that counters the prevailing Israeli orthodoxy, which itself has swung spectacularly from time to time especially with respect to Holocaust commemoration. Vrba’s book ‘I Escaped from Auschwitz’, published in 1963 in English, and translated into many languages, was only translated into Hebrew by Ruth Linn herself in 1998. The classic textual account of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jews, published in 1961, has never been translated into Hebrew, because it’s perceived by the keepers of the Israeli historical canon as hostile, in that it gives what they perceive as undue emphasis to Zionist and Jewish Council collaborative activity with the Nazi Final Solution, which is, nevertheless, historically factual and supported incontestably by available archives. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are brash propaganda exercises widely disseminated such as Anna Porter’s Kasztner’s Train (2007), with the embarrassing subtitle ‘The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust’.
A vast gallery of Israeli prime ministers and cabinet ministers have used biblical story narrative and Holocaust commemorative iconography as political artillery in support of the Greater Israel project, which has been the grand deceit half-hidden by the flimsiest of rhetorical and political veils since the utterly and horrifically honest real-politik genocidal Zionist writings of Jabotinski and Weizmann in the early 20th century. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are just the latest say-it-as-it-is (just in Hebrew if possible) demagogues in the front row of a massive choir of fanatical Zionists (as Eichmann admiringly described Kasztner) joined in recent weeks by the corporate evangelical equivalents of the mid-19th century Holy Land gospel-clutchers Palmerston and Shaftesbury, the AI tech-heads of Palantir, Gloo, Stripe, Intel and too many others to mention, ranged behind Witkoff and Kushner, all slavering to continue feasting even more intensively on the genocidal horror they’ve made of the city given teeming life by the Palestinian refugees forced to shelter from the foundational violence of the state of Israel.
Gaza.
History did not begin on October 7th.
/
We remind our readers that publication of articles on our site does not mean that we agree with what is written. Our policy is to publish anything which we consider of interest, so as to assist our readers in forming their opinions. Sometimes we even publish articles with which we totally disagree, since we believe it is important for our readers to be informed on as wide a spectrum of views as possible.
