How science is helping unearth an 80-year-old Holocaust mystery

[JohnSJ]

"Out of the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, remnants of resistance emerge, thanks to advanced geoscientific tools and a team determined to keep the horrors of history from fading.

"The team excavated them from the buried rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto, where German occupiers sealed hundreds of thousands of Poland's Jews into crowded, desperate squalor during World War II and over 80,000 died inside the walls of starvation, exposure and infectious diseases. Amid the twisted metal and bits of glass, the archaeologists unearthed small, unassuming remnants of daily life, suspended in hardened earth "like a time capsule," says Philip Reeder, a professor of natural and environmental science at Pittsburgh's Duquesne University and chief cartographer for the group working on the dig. "

A fork. A light-green heart-shaped keepsake. A palm-size silver memorial medallion for a man named Nachum Morgenstern who died in 1880, inscribed in Hebrew.

"It makes you think," Reeder muses of the tiny heart. "Did it belong to a child who lived in that house and most likely ended up dead when the ghetto was liquidated?"

The excavation -- organized by Poland's Warsaw Ghetto Museum and led by its research specialist Jacek Konik -- is part of a broader effort to fill gaps in Holocaust history using geoscientific tools. These include ground-penetrating radar; GPS systems; magnetometers, which study variations in Earth's geomagnetic field; and electrical resistivity tomography, a technique typically used for engineering and environmental investigations that images subsurface structures down as far as 660 feet (200 meters). Geoscience allows for what's called "non-invasive archaeology."

https://www.cnet.com/news/how-science-is-helping-to-unearth-an-80-year-old-holocaust-mystery/

What is probably most disturbing is some of the comments in this piece such as extolling the virtues of David Irving by some, Irving a so-called historian turned holocaust denier.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/david-irving

This is all symptomatic of the dangerous environment we live in today.

Holocaust deniers
Those who don't want the history of slavery to be taught in schools, or to sugar coat it by trying to deny it by saying things that it was "never about slavery, but justify it by saying it was about 'state rights", or some other lame excuse to rationalize the immorality of it.

Just look at the reactions to critical race theory. Not only do those who have issue with race not want to discuss it, they want to use it as a dog whistle to push their racist dogma.

and it doesn't stop there. Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans, Jews, Muslims, etc. etc. etc.

The real cancel culture are those who don't want to recognize the racism, bigotry, and sexism that permeates our society. It's not surprising that the carries down to the anti-vaxers, and climate change deniers. Anti-science fits perfectly into their mind set

[Beakybird]

1. I totally see how these dots are connected.

[canetoad]

2. I've been following the career

Of another woman doing the same thing. Caroline Sturdy Colls received permission to carry out a very limited excavation at Treblinka and now specializes in non-invasive archaeology. She is Professor of Conflict Archaeology and Genocide Investigation at Staffordshire University.

[JohnSJ]

3. Thanks

[Behind the Aegis]

4. Almost 80 years later and we are still learning as others deny.

This is why history is so fucking important.