Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

So many bastards, so little time.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

In my day, never was longer.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

The gop couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickel?”

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Fuck that bum, let’s go Joe!

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

Everybody saw this coming.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Another missed opportunity for Jamie Dimon to just shut the fuck up.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

You are here: Home / Politics / America / International Holocaust Remembrance Day & the 77th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

International Holocaust Remembrance Day & the 77th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

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As Anne Laurie highlighted for everyone this morning, today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is separate from Holocaust Remembrance/Memorial Day, which is known as Yom HaShoah (day of the Holocaust) in Hebrew and will be observed from sundown 27 April through sundown 28 April this year. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is also on the same day that the series of camps and complexes collectively referred to as Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army.

The Auschwitz Museum and Memorial, which spends each day of the year tweeting out those killed on that day at one of the Auschwitz camps or complexes, whether they were Jews or Poles or Romani or LGBTQ people or anyone else the NAZIs had determined were undesirable and not deserving of life, also has a special  program for the 77th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army. This is in addition to the normal real life, online, and interactive exhibits they offer, including a virtual tour of the museum. Which is being updated:

The special program for today, which can be found at this link, is described as:

The reflection on our own indifference. The 77th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

The beginning of extermination at Auschwitz constituted the main theme of the 77th anniversary of liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp.

Here’s the video of the special program with English translation:

The Auschwitz Museum has also just announced the launch of an educational program designed specifically for high school students in the US. More details can be found in the thread at the tweet below and on the other side of the read more divider.

As we learned last night, this educational initiative is needed now more than ever. As almost anyone with any amount of sense predicted, the moral panic created by Chris Rufo – because he failed to get elected when he ran for a local political office and was essentially unemployed and decided that he could create a lucrative grift out of thin air, which he has now been handsomely rewarded for – around education in the US involving issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation would never stay confined to a white Christian panic about issues of race, gender, sexual orientation as taught in history, English, and social studies curriculum. It would, as we’ve now seen happen, move into anti-Semitism as well. It is unfortunate, but the simple reality is these things either start as anti-Semitism and then pull in other religious minorities, then racial and ethnic minorities, and then LGBTQ people or they start with racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, and/or religious minorities that aren’t Jewish and then progress to anti-Semitism. There are, of course, some Jews who fail to recognize this unfortunate reality and decide to take their bigotry out for a walk on a regular basis. They are a shonda.

As are the Jews who then cover for them:

I’ve actually read the full transcripts of the minutes from the McMinn County Board of Education meeting about Maus and they are worse than the excerpts printed in the reporting. These are the thoughts and deliberations of the men and women we are constantly told are the real, authentic Americans living in real, authentic America. What they actually are are the thoughts of the marginally educated, incurious, parochial, small minded and bigoted. And when I say bigoted here I mean the casually bigoted. The bigots that don’t even know enough to be properly bigoted. That aren’t self aware enough to even understand what it is they are doing and that they are bigots even if they don’t intend to be. One of the principle objections to the book was the depiction of violence done by the NAZIs to, primarily, Jewish children. 1.5 million of the 6 million Jews slaughtered by the NAZIs during the Holocaust were children. Every day the Auschwitz Museum twitter feed tweets out the details of several of these children’s fate. A fate that was always death. Whether they were teens or toddlers.

If they could die brutal, needless deaths at the hands of the NAZIs, American 8th graders can handle reading about it. Especially as the trauma experienced at the hands of the NAZIs produced genetic changes in the survivors’s children.

As I write this, there are other genocides ongoing. Such as what the PRC is doing to the Uighurs. The Russian psychological operations campaign currently aimed at Ukraine, as well as useful idiots in the US and elsewhere, is itself a type of informational genocide designed to rhetorically erase Ukraine and Ukrainians. Specifically that Ukraine was never Ukraine, that Ukrainians never were Ukrainians, rather Ukraine has always been Russia and, therefore, Ukrainians have always been Russians. This is, of course, a lie. What the McMinn County School Board has done, which is right in line with Rufo’s intentions when he brewed up this bullshit moral panic around education for his own personal and professional gain, is to make it so that no one learns about any of this in school. Or at least not anything substantive, accurate, and useful. Not the Holocaust, not the Holdomor, not the Armenian genocide, not the Killing Fields, not the Trail of Tears, not the Long Walk, not the Atlantic slave trade, not the slave revolts in the US and the Caribbean, not the Banana Wars, nor the Indian schools, etc. Which makes it all the more likely that sooner or later all of them will happen again. Either here or elsewhere. And when they do we won’t know enough to do anything about it because far too few of us will have the necessary context to understand what is going on and what needs to be done to stop it.

Update at 6:55 PM EST:

And the McMinn County School Board decides to continue digging:

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

145Comments

  1. 1.

    Adam L Silverman

    I’ve got to go feed the dogs and then get them out. I’ll pop back in later. Please get all pedanticism out of the way in your initial comments.

  5. 5.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Thank you for this passionate and thoughtful post, Adam. Many of us have missed your presence around here for the past month. Glad to see you back amongst the jackals.

    On a somewhat related topic: Several years ago you related a story which I recall only in fuzzy outline, about a wedding where the bride’s grandfather and groom’s grandmother, or vice versa, compared the faded tattoos on their forearms and discovered that they were long-ago sweethearts in one of the camps before they were liberated and separated. I think of that so often, and would like to read your original, more detailed version again. Possible for you to point me to that story? TIA.

  6. 6.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    Grateful to have you back, Adam. They may try, but we will not be silenced.

  7. 7.

    MisterDancer

    @Adam L Silverman: Please get all pedanticism out of the way in your initial comments.

    Here’s my pedantic thank you. I don’t have the right context for understanding much of this, and I am trying to listen and pay attention.

  8. 8.

    Dan B

    I was struck by someone’s 9 year old who read about the campaigns against teaching “uncomfortable” history.  “It sounds like people who want to do it again.”

  9. 9.

    Mary G

    Don’t forget the disabled. Killing me off would save Social Security a fortune and real ?? could buy more gunz.

  10. 10.

    Adam L Silverman

    @SiubhanDuinne: How about I just relate it again?

    In 2011 I was dating a school teacher from Bucks County. Brilliant, beautiful woman. I can’t quite remember how we got on the topic, but one night she recounted to me that sh had attended a wedding for a friend. At the rehearsal dinner before everyone had been fully introduced to each other the groom’s grandfather kept staring at the bride’s grandmother. As more and more people noticed and started to wonder what was up, he walked over to the woman and asked “What is your #?” As in the number the NAZIs had tattooed on her arm. It turned out it was his (first) wife. They had been separated by the NAZIs and unable to locate or even find news of each other after they were liberated from their respective concentration camps, made their ways separately to the US to start new lives. They met new partners, married them, had children. And found each other decades later at their respective grandchildren’s wedding.

  14. 14.

    Adam L Silverman

    I will have a Ukraine update post, or, rather, a post about what Russia is doing vis a vis Ukraine most likely tomorrow. I don’t think I’ll get to it tonight. But Gin & Tonic did a great rundown for you all, so just refer to that in the meantime.

  15. 15.

    Mike in NC

    My favorite episode of “Band of Brothers” is the one where GIs liberate a death camp. The title of the episode is “Why We Fight”.

  16. 16.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Thank you so much! I don’t know why* but that story really haunts me. You’d be amazed at how often I think of those two lovers.

    *Yes, I do, in fact. It’s because the story itself is haunting.

  19. 19.

    Cephalus Max

    Welcome back, Adam!

    And thanks for this post, as well as retelling the story to @SiubhanDuinne above.

    I don’t think I have any pedanticism queued up.

  20. 20.

    Fair Economist

    @Adam L Silverman: What a story.

    I’m very grateful people put in the hard work to record the horrors of the Holocaust. It seems we’re going to need those records to resist repeats.

  22. 22.

    CarolPW

    Thanks Adam.
    On a day when everyone is talking about Maus why on earth would Schorr call Stern a mouse? I know the taunt “are you a man or a mouse,” but mouse is not a frequently used put-down these days.

  23. 23.

    Tony Jay

    @Adam L Silverman: 

    Good to see you back. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that you went dark right about the time somebody who knows what they’re doing with information warfare began consciously decoupling Prime Minister Johnson from the job of his dreams?

    Such a special relationship.

  25. 25.

    Spanky

    I am not young, and maybe somewhere along the line I heard about what the Russians’ reaction to Auschwitz was, but I don’t remember it.

    Is there any record of first-hand accounts from the Russian troops?

  26. 26.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    the tweets about individual victims are a shot to the gut, very effective use of social media

    @CarolPW: I had the same thought

  28. 28.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Which makes it all the more likely that sooner or later all of them will happen again. Either here or elsewhere. And when they do we won’t know enough to do anything about it because far too few of us will have the necessary context to understand what is going on and what needs to be done to stop it.

    It doesn’t have to be that way. I mean, people know enough now, despite all the roadblocks that were employed in the past.

    Not saying everything would necessarily work out, but there’s hope

  31. 31.

    Bill Arnold

    These are the thoughts and deliberations of the men and women we are constantly told are the real, authentic Americans living in real, authentic America.

    Yep, definitely worth a read (or at least a skim), especially for those of us who don’t mix much in those circles.
    (I called it “raw Americana” elsewhere.)

  33. 33.

    RSA

    @Adam L Silverman: Thanks for your informative post, Adam.

    Please get all pedanticism out of the way in your initial comments.

    Will do: I notice you write NAZI, all caps. Why is that?

  34. 34.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @NotMax:

    One time, I encountered one of those types on the intertubes, and I asked them if they thought the blacklisting of Colin Kapernick (sp?) was “cancel culture”. Guess what their response was? “People at football games just want to watch football; that’s not the place for protesting. Oh, and watch this 20 minute video where a black person agrees with me about cancel culture.”

    It was different from the what the “woke left” does because reasons, I guess

  37. 37.

    NYCMT

    My sister just let me know that a long time ago before she met her husband, she attended a Christmas party at a u of c classmate’s apartment where Ilya Shapiro was present, and Ilya proceeded to spend the length and breadth of the Christmas party telling my cornered sister how much he liked Russian women with big breasts and how it was okay for smart people to date bimbos. This would have been before he was doing the above the law blog or maybe right when he was doing it.

    With regards to the 77th anniversary of liberation of Auschwitz, and the synchronicity of that benighted school board’s decision to ban art spiegelman’s book, I have a book on my shelf that was put together by the city government of the small City from which my great-grandfather and great-grandmother were removed – from the house in which they had lived since it had been built in 1905 – put in cattle cars and shipped 26 days across Central Europe to a siding in a forest in central eastern Poland where my namesake great grandfather and my great-grandmother were stripped shoved into a bunker and fed exhaust fumes from a Russian tank diesel engine for 20 minutes until they were dead, and then their bodies were put into a pit, from which they were exhumed the next year and burned into cremains on pyres built by Jewish slave laborers, and the book that was on my shelf had pictures and the description of a stumbling Stone installation by Gunter Demnig in front of their house with the inset facsimile of the letter I wrote for the occasion, and pictures of my great-grandparents, and the students at the Heinrich Böll Schule sang Dona Dona.

  38. 38.

    CarolPW

    @Bill Arnold: Not rhetorical. I understand he is an idiot, but I was unwilling to go far enough down his twitter feed to determine whether or not he is a holocaust denier. If he used it to indicate Stern is Jewish, that means he is a mouse too so that doesn’t make sense.

  41. 41.

    debbie

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Just wow. A high school friend’s mother survived Dachau and ended up marrying one of the soldiers who liberated the camp. She never shied away from showing her tattoo.

    I started following Auschwitz Memorial, I think, after the first time you mentioned it and I always check the dates in the tweets. Apart from the many who were murdered in the selections and the few who managed to survive, it’s been saddening to realize how many died in the first couple of months, as if their spirits were lost the instant they passed through that gate.

  42. 42.

    Alison Rose

    @Mike in NC: That episode in particular gutted me. Was watching with my then-boyfriend and we had to stop it for a while because I was sobbing too hard to keep watching. Seeing such a raw depiction of what happened to my own relatives hit me even harder than I’d anticipated. And the response of the soldiers I thought was perfect, the way they were almost baffled and couldn’t even explain it to the superiors. The whole thing was gut-wrenching.

    And thank you for this post, Adam. I’m glad to hear about the program for US schools, because there are too many kids (and adults, TBH) who either buy the denialism or just don’t even seem to understand the depths of the horror.

  46. 46.

    currawong

    Can I recommend a Twiiter thread by Hugo Rifkind, a British Journalist. Very moving. One story among millions.

    “It’s Holocaust Memorial Day. This year, I’m thinking of a woman called Sulamita Szapiro. Here she is as a student. We weren’t related and I don’t even know much about her, but I’m pretty sure that remembering her still falls to me. This is a thread about why.”

    https://twitter.com/hugorifkind/status/1486737299366944768?s=20&t=9aVwoWDjJBcUa-MgVPLWjQ

  50. 50.

    HeleninEire

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: One of my first jobs out of college was with the city of NY. I worked at the Dept. for the Aging. They had a program where they paid the elderly to do admin and relatively easy jobs to supplement their SS. There was a woman in that program named Jennie. She was the loveliest, kindest, friendliest woman I had ever met. And she had a number tattooed on her arm. The first time I saw it, I was stunned. Not because she had it but because she was the loveliest, kindest, friendliest woman I had ever met. Imagine being able to recover from the horrors she endured. That was 35 years ago and I think of her often.

  53. 53.

    John Revolta

    @Adam L Silverman: That’s an amazing story Adam. It puts me in mind of a line from Maus, when Vladek comes home from WWI; “And I don’t need to tell you how great was the joy in our house”.

    (Good to see you around the place BTW)

  54. 54.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @zhena gogolia:

    You know their stated reasons are total BS when they won’t even let high schoolers read it. Juniors and seniors can handle that material. They’re only a year or two from university

  55. 55.

    tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat)

    Adam, it’s nice to see you back.

    The WaPo has an article on a book coming out on an elite top secret group of British Jewish Commandos. They focus on one particular commando in the article. This man died in 2010 in the US (New Jersey, I think). How many people saw an elderly Jewish gentleman, never realizing the courage and daring he showed? Amongst all the horrors, it’s important to find threads of hope.

    Here’s a link to the article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/01/27/jewish-commando-x-troop/

  59. 59.

    Starboard Tack

    @Mary G: The Nazis started the killing with physically and mentally disabled Germans because they were the most helpless and accessible.

  61. 61.

    Mike in NC

    There’s an excellent documentary series on Netflix called “Five Came Back”, about five famous Hollywood movie directors who worked for the government during WW2. One of them was George Stevens, who was known for musicals and comedies. He filmed the liberation of one of the camps and was deeply traumatized by the experience. When he returned home he told people “I can’t make fluff anymore”. He turned to serious drama, including the first film adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank”.

  62. 62.

    delk

    My husband’s dad survived Auschwitz. He grew up in the Warsaw Ghetto. I never had the opportunity to meet him. He had a fatal heart attack when he was 58.

  64. 64.

    Cermet

    I once talked to a person that was in the Polish army and captured by the Germans in WW II with their invasion; he was placed in one of those concentration camps – he escaped. He was captured by the Russians and fought with them against the Germans and was captured again; put in another such camp and escaped again.

    Many years ago I talked with him for over an hour and learned things I will not share nor darken this day with what he had to do to survive and what was common in those camps by anyone who did survive – and make no mistake, to survive in one of those camps is not something you want to know – I will certainly not judge because it was absolutely necessary and not displayed in those films.

    The darkness of WWII and what the Germans did and caused can never be forgotten even if Amerikan  winers … I mean right wingers, still admire those Nazi’s.

  65. 65.

    CliosFanBoy

    The mother of one of my wife’s best friends was a child at Auschwitz. She’s in a photo of young girls you often see in stories about the liberation. It gives me goosebumps when I see it as I know her.

     

    The friend’s father survived another camp as a child. The couple met after the war in Canada.

  67. 67.

    Adam L Silverman

    @tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat): We had our own equivalents:

    http://www.espn.com/classic/biography/s/Berg_Moe.html

    After two years as a Red Sox coach, Berg left baseball on Jan. 14, 1942, the same day his father died. Bernard Berg always regarded his son’s choice of a career as a waste of a fine intellect. Moe’s love of the game – and of the travel and social hobnobbing it afforded him — was a matter of contention between them to the end.

    It is at this point, just after the start of the United States’ entry into World War II, that Berg’s life became the subject of much speculation. Nelson Rockefeller gave him a job with the Office of Inter-American Affairs that allowed him to travel through South and Central America studying the health and fitness of the population.

    He parlayed that post into becoming an officer in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, in 1943.

    Berg, according to one biography, was prone to blunders: getting caught trying to infiltrate an aircraft factory during his training, dropping his gun into a fellow passenger’s lap, and being recognized by wearing his O.S.S.-issue watch.

    Despite these mistakes, Berg was well-regarded enough to have been chosen to carry out one of the O.S.S.’ more ambitious endeavors – a plot to possibly assassinate Werner Heisenberg, the head of Nazi Germany’s atom-bomb project. Berg, who spoke German fluently, was sent in December 1944 to Zurich to attend a lecture by Heisenberg. Berg’s assessment of the situation was that Germany was not close to having a nuclear bomb, and there was never an attempt to kill Heisenberg.

    Another story involving Berg’s spying career came at the end of the war, when, while traveling through Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia with some other agents, he produced a letter with a big red star on it when asked for credentials. The Americans lacked any authorization, and supposedly what Berg showed the Soviet soldiers was a copy of the Texaco Oil Co. letterhead.

  68. 68.

    MomSense

    @Dan B:

    I saw that making the rounds on Twitter and Instagram.

    Today is always a somber day for me. I remember for people who are no longer here.  My stepfather lost his entire family in Hungary. I still remember when my ballet teacher told me about how she lost her sister, mother and nanny. She and her father searched and searched after the war for her sister.  She was likely a victim of the death marches.

  69. 69.

    Gretchen

    My dad was one of the US soldiers in Patton’s army who was one of the first to reach the camps.  I’m not sure which one – Bergen-Belsen?  He was one of 6 men travelling ahead of the lines, and got to this camp.  The Nazis had fled, leaving the captives behind.  They hadn’t known about the camps, and were horrified at what they found – hundreds of starving people. He said they had rations for 6 men, and tried helplessly to try to figure out how to distribute them to all the starving people.  They realized that the prisoners were trying to get to some people, and surmised that these were the collaborators, and proceeded to arrest those people. The extent of my dad’s German seemed to be “Hands up! You’re under arrest!”. It’s said that when Patton arrived and saw the conditions, he went outside and threw up.

    Dad was a social worker, the most empathetic of people.  The detail of only having enough food for 6 when people were starving haunted him.  As I got older, I realized he knew things that should be on the historical record, and asked him to tell me more, but he wouldn’t.  He had stopped drinking by then, and, while he really wanted to talk about it when he’d been drinking,he refused to talk about it when he hadn’t.

  70. 70.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Another story involving Berg’s spying career came at the end of the war, when, while traveling through Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia with some other agents, he produced a letter with a big red star on it when asked for credentials. The Americans lacked any authorization, and supposedly what Berg showed the Soviet soldiers was a copy of the Texaco Oil Co. letterhead.

    LOL, wouldn’t the Soviet soldiers have been able to tell the difference between the Texaco logo and the Soviet Army red star? Very ballsy of him, assuming the story is true

  72. 72.

    hueyplong

    @Mike in NC: I have the book Five Came Back.  Interested to see the doc.

    Stevens’ son did a documentary about his father’s experience in Europe that I saw at a theater in Atlanta long ago (late 80s maybe). Had color footage. At the time I had never seen color footage from Europe, as opposed to the Pacific.

  73. 73.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Cermet: My father was a medic in the Polish army and was captured and imprisoned by the Germans. He never spoke a word about it. We knew never to ask.

  74. 74.

    Adam L Silverman

    @tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat): After the part about how he found his parents alive and was reunited with them, this is the best part of that article. Emphasis mine.

    As more and more of Europe was liberated and the end of the war seemed near, Gans was assigned to noncombat work in the Netherlands, which he found frustrating. In March 1945, a few days after his hometown in Germany, which just over the Dutch border, fell, he visited, spotting German civilians he had known his whole life who had turned against his family. His childhood home had been used as a torture facility by the Gestapo.

    His parents were long gone. The last he had heard, they had been moved from Bergen-Belsen to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic.

    By early May, he couldn’t wait another minute. Though it was clear the war would end soon — rumor was Adolf Hitler was already dead — there was still intense fighting in some places, and the Nazis were massacring Jews as fast as they could before they were forced to surrender. If his parents were still alive, they might not be for much longer.

    That’s how Gans ended up in a British military jeep, speeding through the heart of the Reich as it crumbled, on a 400-mile quest to save his parents. He had food rations, a few extra tanks of gas, a machine gun, a handgun, a bag of grenades and — to drive — a young private named Bob.

    Also, the brakes on the jeep did not work.

  77. 77.

    Gretchen

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): the Virginia woman who objected to Toni Morrison’s Beloved didn’t want her precious baby to see the awful sexual violence stuff, even though he was a senior in a college-level advanced placement class, and the AP English test usually has questions about the book.  I wonder when she thought her little snowflake would be ready.

  78. 78.

    Dan B

    @Adam L Silverman: A Texas pol has introduced legislation that would make teaching about sex acts and homosexuality illegal in schools.  They want LGBT people disappeared.  How Nazi of them.

  80. 80.

    Roger Moore

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    the tweets about individual victims are a shot to the gut, very effective use of social media

    That’s exactly what the denialists want to avoid.  They want to make everything about the numbers: so many killed, so many liberated.  It goes with the saying attributed to Stalin that one death is a tragedy but a million are a statistic.  As long as the denialists can keep it in the realm of statistics, they can feel safe.  It’s only when they’re forced to deal with the victims as human beings that the real weight of the crime comes through.

  82. 82.

    Gretchen

    @Starboard Tack: Now people are saying that covid “just” kills people who already had something wrong with them, as if in that case it’s fine.  Nasty historical echoes there.

  84. 84.

    tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat)

    @Adam L Silverman: Yes, and I wondered about that private named Bob. What made him join Gans in what must have been a crazy dangerous mission that was probably not sanctioned?

    Thank you for the info on Berg.

    My great-grandmother was Jewish, born in Austria. When her first husband died she remarried to a Catholic and converted. At some point she came to America, but I think it was between the Wars. She had a son from her first marriage who grew up Jewish and stayed in the faith and my grandmother from her second marriage who was raised Catholic. I imagine if I were to try to dig into my heritage, I might discover relations who never got the chance to emigrate.

  85. 85.

    Seanly

    Everyone should visit Auschwitz. It changed my life. There are piles of the shorn hair, the eyeglasses, and other items taken from the victims of the Nazis. I had my camera with me, but it’s not a place to take pictures in my mind. I shot 27 rolls of film in a couple of weeks of travel in Paris, Warsaw (where my mom was a Fulbright scholar at the time), Prague, and Krakow. I didn’t take a single shot that day.
    The thing that most affected me however, was the full sized architectural drawings for the ovens. I was a young engineer and knew that someone in some architect’s office in Germany had spent time inking the linework for the building and smokestack, showing the individual bricks in the drawing, making sure that things were at the right scale. Some young engineer had sized the timbers of the roof, some other engineer made sure that the thickness of the oven walls was just right for roasting human remains, that the corridors were wide enough for wheeling in the dead in an expedious manner.
    And the epiphany I had? That all those people took pride in their work. They weren’t forced to do it. They willingly designed and detailed the means to dispose of the murdered victims of hatred and bigotry. If I was a young engineer in similar circumstances, would I have the conviction to not participate? Would I have that conviction even now? I hope I would…
    I was at Auschwitz with my brother. We both broke down crying numerous times that day.

  88. 88.

    raven

    I have a buddy whose dad served with the Second Armored Division in Europe and his tank broke down. His fellow soldiers considered surrendering and he said “fuck you, I’m a Jew and I’m not surrendering shit”! They fought their way our and her received the Distinguished Service Cross.

  90. 90.

    trollhattan

    @eachother:

    I want some “urban” school district to ban all of Donny’s “books” so we can watch what happens. Mind, it would result in zero books being removed.

  91. 91.

    mrmoshpotato

    Hi stranger!

    Thanks for your, as always, insightful and thoughtful post. And double thanks for tying the atrocities of the past to events we need to keep an eye on and fight back against today.

  92. 92.

    Dan B

    The book burning in Berlin took the books from the Institute for Sexual Science of Magnus Hirschfeld a proponent of gay rights.  That was some of the first piles burned.  He researched transvestism and gay sexuality.

  96. 96.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Dan B:

    I remember reading about that a few months ago. There’s speculation that those book burnings put trans studies decades behind

  97. 97.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Seanly:

    The thing that most affected me however, was the full sized architectural drawings for the ovens. I was a young engineer and knew that someone in some architect’s office in Germany had spent time inking the linework for the building and smokestack, showing the individual bricks in the drawing, making sure that things were at the right scale. Some young engineer had sized the timbers of the roof, some other engineer made sure that the thickness of the oven walls was just right for roasting human remains, that the corridors were wide enough for wheeling in the dead in an expedious manner.

    And the epiphany I had? That all those people took pride in their work. They weren’t forced to do it. They willingly designed and detailed the means to dispose of the murdered victims of hatred and bigotry. If I was a young engineer in similar circumstances, would I have the conviction to not participate? Would I have that conviction even now? I hope I would…
    I was at Auschwitz with my brother. We both broke down crying numerous times that day.

    That’s the thing that’s always haunted me whenever I think about what life must’ve been like in Nazi Germany. It would definitely have taken a lot of conviction to refuse to be complicit. And to refuse to be apart of those atrocities could’ve gotten people on the Gestapo’s shit list, I’m sure

  99. 99.

    Adam L Silverman

    @eachother: The people that do that tend to quickly move to burning them. From their they tend, unless they’re stopped, to first banning and then burning people.

  101. 101.

    Ohio Mom

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): That is the banality of evil. What is more everyday, ordinary, unnoteworthy — that is, banal — than an engineer carefully drawing his plans? A sloppy engineer is a contradiction in terms.

  106. 106.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Adam L Silverman: Because it is an acronym and acronyms are capitalized.

    Oh, come off it, Adam. Were you taught by wolves? It is no such thing.

    ac·ro·nym, noun: an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word (e.g. ASCII, NASA ).

    Nazi is an abbreviation or contraction of the official party name in German, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (aka NSDAP – which BTW is an actual acronym), and as such is not capitalized.

    (Pedantry – excuse me, “comma fucking” – follows:)

    Germans have historically used such contractions instead of and in preference to acronyms, e.g.,  Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police), Orpo (Ordnungspolizei, Order Police), Grepo (Grenzpolizei, Border Police), Vopo (Volkspolizei, People’s Police), Stasi (Staatssicherheitsdienst, State Security Service).

    Have you – has anyone – ever seen any of those abbreviations capitalized??

    (NB Germans have also used acronyms when it suited them – SA, SS, RSHA, SEP, OKW, OHL, etc. The Soviets used a mix as well – e.g., Gosplan [Gosudarstvennyy Planovyy Komitet, State Planning Committee], Komsomol [Коммунистический Союз Молодёжи, Young Communist League] but KGB [ Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, Committee for State Security]. From what I can tell, most Indo-European languages prefer acronyms, but there’s some leakage [e.g., SecDef for Secretary of Defense]).

    (Pedantry ends.)

  109. 109.

    Lyrebird

    @Seanly: Thanks for writing that out here.

    I can’t find it anymore on the Facing History and Ourselves website, but they used to have this letter up, either from a founder or from someone who inspired a founder of the organization.  IIRC the letter was from a German survivor of the Holocaust, saying he knew that education per se was no guarantee a person would not do evil… he had seen doctors, nurses, kill babies, etc etc etc.

    I am not planning to visit a death camp, given how affected I was spending maybe an hour in the archive room at the Holocaust Museum in DC.  But I am glad they are telling the stories.

  110. 110.

    TonyG

    @Adam L Silverman: The complaints about nudity, language and violence (in a cartoon!) are just absolute nonsense.  As a former middle-school kid (and a father of two sons who once were middle-school kids) I can attest that middle school kids are among that most profane people on the face of the earth.  These are thirteen-year-olds, not five-year-olds, that we’re talking about.  The school board just doesn’t want to make holocaust-deniers uncomfortable.  It’s that simple.

  111. 111.

    brendancalling

    The contact information for the McMinn School Board is online and easy to find. I sent them several constructive emails. For instance I suggested they teach “Triumph of the Will” instead since it aligns better with their values. Or “Birth of a Nation” since Tennessee Republicans make a fetish of Bedford Forest, founder of the KKK. “You could have a cross burning activity for the students on the lawn of a local Jewish family. It would be a good look for you.”

    Juvenile? Yeah. Unlikely to win any converts? Yup. Well-deserved? Ab-so-fucking-lutely. I’m sending more tomorrow.

  115. 115.

    TonyG

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): My brother-in-law’s father barely survived Auschwitz, and went on to live another 51 years afterwards, because he was young and strong enough to be used as a slave laborer.  I think that what made Auschwitz so successful as a killing facility was the fact that the killing was made to be as impersonal as possible.  Everybody just did their job.

  118. 118.

    debbie

    @Seanly:

    My youngest brother came back from Auschwitz and was at a loss as to how people could know what was going on, but do nothing. Twenty years later, he voted for Trump. Go figure.

  119. 119.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @debbie:

    Everybody’s the hero of their own story, I guess

    @TonyG:

    I think that what made Auschwitz so successful as a killing facility was the fact that the killing was made to be as impersonal as possible.  Everybody just did their job.

    I just can’t imagine willingly going along with it. It’s horrific

  120. 120.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Ohio Mom:

    Yes, it is banal, isn’t it? I’m sure many of those engineers never thought of themselves as evil. People typically don’t. Just doing their jobs

  121. 121.

    Eunicecycle

    @debbie: my father was at the liberation of Dachau. He rarely talked about it, but would become very angry at Holocaust denial.

  122. 122.

    mvr

    FWIW, this was stuff I knew about from the time I was 5 or 6. It didn’t kill me. My folks were Dutch and it was part of their lives when they were in their late teens and early 20s.  I did not need to be protected from knowing about it.  I was taught to worry that it could happen again and now I think that was wise.

  123. 123.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The engineers weren’t told to design a furnace that could be used to incinerate dead bodies.  The were given design parameters.  Certain sizes, certain tolerances, etc.  It’s easier to say no to a direct invitation to commit horrific acts than it is to just design something without asking yourself “Why the hell would they want a furnace this big?”  And even if you did ask yourself tha,t most people would say to themselves, “Well, obviously they aren’t planning on disposing of bodies on an industrial scale. I mean, who does that?”  Then once the rumors are floating around, you say to yourself, “I just designed a piece of machinery.  I didn’t use it to incinerate anyone.”  What is that engineer’s level of guilt?

  127. 127.

    Gretchen

    I was born in 1953.  All the dads in my childhood had fought in the war.  My best friend’s parents met in a displaced person’s camp after her mom was in a Nazi slave labor camp and dad in a Nazi POW camp.  When adults were disabled or emotionally damaged, the Nazis did it. When my kids were little, one of the dads had a limp.  My first thought was that the Nazis did it.  That was a reflex of my experience.  Nazis hurting people wasn’t a theoretical, historical anomaly.  It happened to real people whom I knew.  Turned out that this dad was injured in a motorcycle accident.  It seemed like a better, more innocent world that this was the worst that could happen.

  129. 129.

    Roger Moore

    @Uncle Cosmo:

    I think there’s some flexibility in English depending on circumstances.  When something is going to be pronounced as a word, it’s often easier to use either a straight contraction or a mix where some words are just their initial letters and others are contracted.  For acronyms, English can cheat a bit by either using or not the first letters of articles and short prepositions to make things work out as pronounceable.  Acronyms are most common when they’re short enough to be pronounced as letters or deliberately constructed to be pronounced.

    With German, I assume some of the reluctance to use straight acronyms is because they have a tendency to make very long compound words rather than a collection of short words.  When the term is just one or two long words, especially ones that start with common letters, an abbreviation isn’t very revealing.  Nobody wants to call the Staatssicherheitsdienst “S”, since it would get confused with all the other things that could get abbreviated that way, so they contract it to “Stasi” instead.

  134. 134.

    Suzanne

    @SiubhanDuinne: Your very uplifting story reminds me of this much less uplifting one.

    SuzMom was working at an office when she was pregnant with me, near where we lived on Long Island. For reference, I was born in 1980. Anyway, she had a coworker who she really liked, who became her friend, gave me a handmade baby blanket, etc. One day shortly before I was born, her friend disappeared. SuzMom and her coworkers were really concerned, tried calling, went to her house…. Nothing. She was gone. Turned out she disappeared because her dad was this guy, and got caught.

  138. 138.

    Suzanne

    @Seanly: I visited Dachau. The thing that affected me the most — and it was an absolutely incredible experience — was seeing how close other houses, structures, etc. we’re to the camp. Dachau was the first, so it not a giant complex like Auschwitz at its inception. And I visited in 2009, so obviously things have changed somewhat since the war. But they were carrying out the Holocaust in plain view of people. Literally in neighborhoods. Like, right over the back fence.

  139. 139.

    Eric NNY

    So, I’ve been here forever.  I was recently bashed for being gay pretty bad.  Physically, not here.  I saw the picture of the six month old put to death.  It broke my heart and now I have to do what is right and stand up so this doesn’t happen to others but I’d rather just crawl under a rug.

  140. 140.

    mvr

    @Eric NNY: Not sure quite what to say but saying something seems better than saying nothing. “hard” comes to mind as the thing to say, but  . . .

  141. 141.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Eric NNY: I am very saddened to read someone went after you in real life for being LGBTQ. I think I speak for everyone here that we all have your back, even if it is only virtually. It takes a lot of courage to open up about something like this in a comment, even at a site like Balloon Juice where we try hard to do right on this type of thing. You are always welcome here and we’re keeping good thoughts for your safety and your ability to heal and move on.

  142. 142.

    Laura Too

    @Eric NNY: Second what Adam said. You are in our thoughts. Please take whatever time you need and get help. That is too traumatizing to go through on your own.

  143. 143.

    debbie

    @Eric NNY:

    I’m sorry you’re going through that. I’m sorry we’re all going through this timeline. It’s sickening that as a species, we haven’t really progressed all that much further since the Holocaust. It’s like we can’t learn the fucking lessons that are placed right in front of us.

  145. 145.

    Miss Bianca

    @Adam L Silverman: That’s a movie, right there.

    Yay, you’re back! We have missed you. Thanks for this post. I am worried about our current Board of Education in our county, to be honest – I would not be surprised to see them pull this kind of stunt. Hoping not. We’ve already had our “CRT panic” motion. : (

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