"More than once I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being
transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. I
remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the
platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big
for him, and he stepped on the train. I was a child observing a child."
"We saw young men put against the wall and shot, and they'd close the street and then open it, and you could pass by again... Don't discount anything awful you hear or read about the Nazis. It's worse than you could ever imagine."
- Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) on living in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation.
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I know most of us have heard this, but it is certainly on topic:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” —Martin Niemöller
Troubling thoughts, come from reading this, there is entirely too much agitation in the population, and when the agitation rises like this, I sense that people start looking for the scapegoat. I thought the anti-Israeli demonstrations that went unchecked in the Biden era were a warning, and I had a conversation like that with my friend who happens to be. and he seem to agree with me when I suggested to him that you know where this can go. It is in coming upon all of us to tamp down the invective and the hatred, and let us not give our voice to it. Do not let the politicians of either side cause you to become something you are not. I am trouble that sometimes. I think I am going in that direction, and I pull myself up short. Pray for calm
This is what Mr Orange Face Disease Carrier is going to do in America .
Yes, today there is danger again in supposedly enlightened places in the world, even in the USA; and I think that was the point you were trying to make, along the lines of this has happened before and can happen again. But, I always bristle when people hold up the Nazis as some representation of the ultimate evil of human history as if they were the result of some mutant virus that overcame the German people in the 1930s and 40's but has now been eradicated by the grace of some great vaccine that rolled out in 1945 and was distributed by the American Army. Antisemitism has been in the hearts of Europeans for almost 2,000 years (first Jews documented in what is today called Germany was in the 321 AD.) The horrible pogroms throughout eastern Europe for centuries, the expulsion of the Jews from England, the persecution/execution and expulsion of the Jews from Portugal and Spain, the expulsions and persecutions of the Jews in the Russian Empire, with only a slight respite during Alexander II's rein. We have been on the receiving end of hatred from Europeans for a long time.
The persecution of Jews did not start and end with the Nazis, and the wrong lessons are generally taught about the Holocaust. "Oh look how terrible, the hapless and frail Jews were rounded up and slaughtered like sheep by terrible evil people who the free world then defeated and eliminated." Never a mention of how they aimed to kill all the Jews in Europe but one-third survived and went on to thrive, and not just that, but today there is no Nazi Germany but there are still Jews, and after 2,000 years we have our homeland back. To me, that means the Jews won the Holocaust. Obviously at great cost, but we did win. Many people might not know this, but the Jews in Israel who fought the war of independence used large quantities of German army Mauser K-98 rifles and ammo, most of which had IDF insignia right next to the Nazi insignia. So, we used the Nazi's own rifles to win our homeland's independence. Again, I say, we won, not lost, the Holocaust. And, never a mention from anyone of the Bielski brothers who saved thousands of Jews in eastern Europe and hid them in the vast forests of Belarus and Poland, and they fought the Germans and their collaborators. And, never do we get a mention of the Ritchie Boys, American intelligence agents within the U.S. Army who interrogated German POWs amongst other intelligence gathering: "Approximately 2,000, or ten percent, of the soldiers who trained at Camp Ritchie were German Jewish refugees. Their fluency in the German language and knowledge of German customs enhanced their intelligence work...After graduating from Camp Ritchie, the soldiers were assigned to different military units in North Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States. They uncovered important information that saved the lives of thousands of other American soldiers during World War II.." etc. Jews for hundreds and in fact nearly 2,000 years have been all too familiar with the persecution and hatred that Europeans are capable of. All of that gets whitewashed when we distill all evil against the Jews down to discreet history of Nazi Germany.
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