I met a man who lost nine family members at Auschwitz

[undeterred]

I was teaching a class and I found out that one of my adult students was the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Normally her parents were very closed mouthed about their childhood experiences, but this same year they had been filmed by Steven Spielberg's crew for "Shoah" so their stories are documented.
So her parents came to my class one evening and talked about this time in their lives.

This man was a young teenager in Poland when his mother sent him away to live with relatives. Then the whole family was taken to Auschwitz and died there. Two parents, seven brothers and sisters. The teenager spent the whole war in hiding with other teens, running from one town to the next, pretending to be a Nazi. After the war he could find none of his family alive. He went back to the home he grew up in and there were other people living in it. He showed the people that he had engraved the family name on his mother's sewing cabinet to prove that this was where he lived. They told him to get out and never come back.

So, with a couple of other teenagers who survived and the clothes on his back he came to America. Her father said he was ashamed that he came to America with no shoes. He met his wife in America.

There were a half dozen college age students in my class who did not know that 6 million Jews were exterminated during World War II, including entire families. When you hear a story like this in the first person you realize what a crime it is to deny it.

[MadBadger]

1. Sounds like my grandfather.

He was documented by Spielberg and lost all of his family in the holocaust, except he survived Auschwitz

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. For the record Iran has not gone on any agressive

war since the seventeeth century.

For the record, mad in the head is nuts, but he has far less power than Bush, in fact, he wishes he had half the power that any western head of state has.

[Selatius]

Ahmadinejad is a dick, but I don't want to get pigeonholed into the pro-war camp.

The disadvantage with operating in an extremely polarized environment is that people want to put you into a black or white, us vs. them, good vs. evil context, when reality is rarely so absolute. Authoritarians deal in absolutes. For the record, I don't support military aggression against Iran.

[nadinbrzezinski]

13. Neither do I

and I have made this clear

that said, I can separate between a lousy RIGHT WING leader, and the country.

That said, I may not support war, but it is comng

;-(

[cali]

6. Dump on Ahmadinejad if you must but

it really, really infuriates me to see someone calling Iran a "piece of shit country". It's an old and wonderful culture. It's a country of approx. 70 million people. It is NOT Ahmadinejad or the Khatemi and the Assembly.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

7. "And the piece of shit Country he represents."

See, it's nationalistic sentiment like this which makes me hard to believe certain people are really concerned about holocaust denial.

[bullwinkle428]

31. Scares me to think how many worldwide think of the U.S. as a

"piece of shit country" just because the "president" fits that description...

[bemildred]

12. Yep, hate is a terrible thing. nt

[H2O Man]

15. And bitterness

contaminates the vessel which contains it.

[Chemical Bill]

24. Which POS?

Prescott Bush, who funded Hitler?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540,00.html

Watson from IBM, who provided the technology to take a census of the Jews?

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

Henry Ford, who's picture hung above Hitler's desk, because Ford funded Hitler's anti-semitic publications, possibly as far back as the 1920s?

http://www.amazon.com/American-Axis-Henry-Charles-Lindbergh/dp/0312290225

You don't like their country?

Oh, you mean the Iranian guy. Never mind.

Bill

[eridani]

25. Iran is not a piece of shit country

Women are an order of magnitude freer than they are in Saudi Arabia, which we are not threatening to bomb. There is no Saudi equivalent to Shirin Ebadi, the feminist human rights lawyer who won the Nobel Peace Prize a couple of years ago. There are a lot of more secular oriented Iranians--in fact they had a secular democracy until we overthrew it in 1954. Given that more than half of all university students are women, it might move that way again if we quit fucking with them.

It's people like you with all the aggressive saber rattling that got that piece of shit elected in the first place. If we bomb them, all the seculars and liberals with line up right behind him, just like everybody (90% anyway) lined up behind Bush after the 9/11 attacks.

[William769]

34. They still stone women to Death in Iran, they still kill Homosexuals.

As Mickey Mouse said back in the 80's, FUCK YOU IRAN!

[eridani]

38. The religious crackpots do

The majority of the population is no more successful in stopping them then we are in stopping Bush from waging war on the entire world in his quest for permanent military dominance. As a citizen of the country that destroyed their secular democracy in the first place, you have no moral standing to say anything about Iran's shortcomings.

[LeftishBrit]

57. I think you mean, fuck the Iranian GOVERNMENT?

I wouldn't appreciate someone saying my whole country is no good because of Thatcher and Blair, and I wouldn't think you'd appreciate someone saying 'fuck that piece of shit country America' because of Bush and Cheney.

Ahmadejinad is an evil man (so are many other leaders); and Iran has a bad government and laws (so do many other countries); it doesn't mean that all of Iran is evil.

[Name removed]

33. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

35. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[MLFerrell]

40. "And good luck, your gonna need it."

What the hell is that supposed to mean? I SHOULDN'T get offended when someone insults an entire nation of people, one of whom I love very deeply?

:eyes:

[Name removed]

43. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[William769]

44. Why thank you!

Then I guess I won't have to hear any more of your tripe.

[Bonobo]

45. Can you believe it? He used the word "tripe"? What a tool.

[uppityperson]

37. Showing your colors tonight, are you? Please, tell us more.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. Why mad in the head is maddening

My family, my father lost 50 relatives at Treblinka... my grandmother died September 1st, 1939 with two aunts, when a bomb fell through the kitchen, from a stuka.

[undeterred]

10. and so many children were lost there too...

:cry:

[Bonobo]

11. All of my grandmother's cousins (and there were lots!) were murdered.

[blondeatlast]

5. The first time I saw a tatto I just about fell apart.

I was selling a very nice lady some beautiful china and it hit me after she left what I'd just seen.

[cali]

8. That story and your conclusion, along with

the fact that many of your students had no knowledge of the Holocaust, sums things up neatly. Thank you.

[undeterred]

18. I was going to show the film Schindler's list,

which I had used in another class- and this student came to me and said no, I can't watch that. Then she told me why. And I realized that if her parents were willing to come to class it would mean so much more. She said they were really nervous- but the Shoah experience helped because they had talked for 8 hours of film. They didn't think they had that much to say.

The detail about the sewing cabinet hit me hard. He said he and his brother had learned woodworking and made it for their mother. Not only did they lose their lives and their family, but they were totally divorced from their beginnings in the country they were born in. Complete strangers took over their homes and told these teens to go away... leave your home country. Americans cannot imagine this aspect of war- being forced to leave your home.

[MLFerrell]

39. If you want to show a Holocaust film, I have some excellent recommendations.

I'm a grad student, studying History. Last year, I sat in on an undergrad Holocaust history class, and watched several outstanding films (though some were quite gruesome, and all were quite depressing) pertaining to the Holocaust.

Instead of Schindler's List, I recommend "The Pianist".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pianist_(2002_film)

Also outstanding is "The Wannsee Conference". It's a German film that essentially recreates the events of the infamous summit, line by line as recorded in the minutes of the meeting, that discussed the logistics of genocide. The runtime is 86 minutes, the precise length of the conference itself. It's utterly chilling to watch people (even actors) calmly, even jovially plan the destruction of an entire people.

Most of the other things that were shown were straight-up historical documentaries. "America and the Holocaust" was very well-done, though I found its point of view somewhat biased.

"Nazi Concentration Camps" should be required viewing for anyone who denies the Holocaust. It's also the most disgusting, gory, inhuman thing that I have ever seen. As another poster on another thread mentioned today, "Eisenhower made sure as shit to document the hell out of what we found so that the entire world would know what the Nazis did."

If you'd like more info, feel free to PM me.

:hi:

[achtung_circus]

9. I used to spend a great deal of time on the Shoah boards

before deciding that it was all one big circle jerk and no one was going to convince the other of the truth. The willful blindness of the deniers is something to behold. I learned a great deal, however, including the stunning images of the Auschwitz Album from the Yad Vashem site detailing the arrival and disposition of trains of people during the Hungarian deportation of 1944.

I believe it is incumbent on all humans to look at these photos at least once in their lives. Nothing too graphic, except the graphic humanity and the knowledge that these people were, for the most part, doomed to die by the end of the day.




http://www1.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/10-13a.html

[nadinbrzezinski]

16. One of the things I brought from my parents home

is precisely one of the first denial books... mostly to see how that was done in the begining, and it is astonishingly "well done" of course, by a Franquist but that is besides the point

Been thinking of taking book to the college and donating it to the rare book collection. It is trash, but part of the record

[achtung_circus]

17. One of Faurrison's works? or Rassinier? nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

21. World defeat by Salvador Borrego

the actual title is in Spanish

Derrota Mundial

[Redstone]

14. I met a Holocaust survivor last hear. He owns a Ford dealer in a town near mine,

and I was damn near in tears when I was finished talking with him. This is a guy who owns a car dealership, and he said to me: "You have a perfectly good car. Why would you want to trade it on a new one?"

I was seriously impressed, indeed oved emotionally.

There, as the old saying says, goes a Man.

Redstone

[TheDebbieDee]

19. I'm 45 and I'm appalled at the lack of WW2 history knowledge

of people in my age group. I think this lack of historical knowledge has helped the * admin in that their supporters can't see the similarities between the * admin and the nazi third reich. (BTW, isn't * a history major?)

They don't know about Japanese American internment camps, they don't know which countries were Axis countries and which countries were Allied countries, they have no idea that there wasn't a corner of Europe that was left untouched by that war, there wasn't a family left unscarred.

9/11 was horrible! And I only watched these events unfold on television. But a 9/11-type Event was a daily occurrence in Europe during WW2. And I can't even BEGIN to imagine what things were like in Japan after the A-bombs were dropped.

Lots of times I wonder what the hell is being taught in our schools!

[undeterred]

22. I didn't know about the Japanese camps

until I was a freshman in college and had a Japanese-American roommate who wrote a paper on it, which I read. I was glad she wrote about it because I learned a lot that my parents and my classes never mentioned.

[leftofthedial]

20. Dear friends of mine maintain family pictures, memorabilia and written history

showing their extended family before WWII, who survived, who died in which camps, who died in the war...

It's been a life work for my friend and her sister.

[Recursion]

23. Seriously? How do you grow up and not hear about that?

I mean, really? Schindler's List and all they didn't know about it?

[yellowdogintexas]

27. not to mention "Exodus", the miniseries "Holocaust"

and countless other works of fiction which touch on the tragedy of what was done to 6 million people in the name of Aryan Purity.

For a world leader to deny it ever happened just makes him look like a total idiot, not to mention the fact that there are no homosexuals in Iran..yeah RIGHT!!!!


the fact that he is such a marroon makes him scary


and yes, this nation is being crept up on by its leaders and our rights and values are being chipped away by same leaders.

[Recursion]

29. Well, if I ever hear a world leader deny it happened, I'll be pissed at him...

I'll also add Spiegelman's Maus. We read that in high school. Damn, that was powerful...

[Lilith Velkor]

55. Both of those came out before the class of '11 was born

Schindler's List was in theaters when they were in kindergarten.

Time marches on and, as always, cluelessness prevails.

[Dukkha]

49. It was required learning in my school

I don't remember what it was called but it was a French documentary film on the holocaust that was shown in a lot of schools in the 80's. I recall quite a few students we're like "did this really happen? They just simply couldn't comprehend the concept that an atrocity of this magnitude could happen so recently in history.

I make a point now to watch Schindler's List about once a year. It's reaffirming in that I'm more grateful just to have a safe simple life with luxuries I really don't need.

[nadinbrzezinski]

52. Fog and Night

I used to show that one to college students who were incredolous

[ben_meyers]

26. L'olam lo suv n/t

[puebloknot]

51. Can you share what that means? :) nt

[kath]

28. The ignorance of US high school graduates, and many college students, is absolutely mind-boggling.

It prompted Ken Burns to do his "The War" series:
"The thing that really got me mad," Ken Burns says in explaining why he felt called to begin "The War," his forthcoming documentary series, "was finding out that a huge number of our high-school graduates think that we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the second world war. It's so unbelievable." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20789381/site/newsweek/

And then there's this, posted on DU a week or two back:
College students struggle on history test http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-09-17-history-test_N.htm (includes link to the full quiz)

[madeline_con]

30. College students unaware of the Holocaust?

What are they teaching in schools these days? :wtf:

[rockymountaindem]

32. I know a man in my Synagogue who lost forty members of his family

that he knows about. He was in various concentration and forced-labor camps for three years. Now, in his eighties, he goes around to schools in my town lecturing about his experiences. I've talked to him a couple of times and there's just no way I could relate the kind of things he talks about.

I can't imagine even having 40 people in my family, much less losing them all at once at the age of 12.

[MedleyMisty]

36. When I was 9 my mother and I read all the Holocaust books in the local library

And I've kept researching it and how the Nazis came to power throughout my life, trying to understand how humans can do that to each other.

I think that reading stuff like the story of a man who survived Treblinka and was in the Sonderkommando and broke the necks of the kids who survived the gassing because that was a better death than suffocating in the mass grave before I reached double digits helped make me who I am today.

I posted this in another Holocaust thread, but it sums up my feelings about it pretty well so here it is again.

If there's one thing I know about it - the Nazis were human. They weren't inhuman monsters. They weren't a special circumstance that can never happen again. A look around the world today shows you that. We must always watch ourselves and stay aware of prejudice and hate and fear and obedience and conformity. We have to look it in the face and know it and rise above it. In all my reading, there was one constant theme.

Witness.

And so today I look at the pictures of the victims of humanity. I witness their suffering. I look at their torturers and killers and I witness their fear and their hate. I look in the mirror and witness those oh so human qualities in myself. I will not let them take me over.

If we really truly mean it when we say "Never again", we all have to do that. We have to look at the worst parts of human nature and know them intimately and recognize them and own them as part of ourselves so we can overcome them.

[Warren Stupidity]

41. The crime was the holocaust.

Denying it happened is idiocy and stupidity and an exercise in free speech. The crime was the murder of those nine at Auschwitz, along with millions of others by the German regime. Iran, oddly enough, had no involvement at all in that crime.

[struggle4progress]

46. To mutilate memory is a moral crime: denying the real past is a technique of oppression

because it denies to real people a critical tool for understanding how our world came into its present form and leaves them instead only fantasies

[Warren Stupidity]

48. Saying "there was no holocaust" is just stupidity.

Acting to commit another genocide is a crime. What is so sad and ironic here is that this all is being used to build support for our attack on Iran, an attack that will likely result in another crime against humanity on the order of our ongoing slaughter of Iraqis.

[struggle4progress]

54. Concur in part, dissent in part

Of course, you are completely correct that press attention to such denials is intended as propaganda supporting the drive to yet another imperial war. And it seems to me that you are properly motivated to react against that drive.

I think, however, that you incorrectly analyze what is required by way of response.

Every systematic abuse of human rights requires a mythology. The Nazis made substantial efforts to "educate" the German population to support Nazi terror. Similarly, the Administration expends significant resources to establish justifications for its abuses such as the slaughterhouse in Iraq and the indefinite lawless detentions at Guantanamo. Similarly, when a major official in a large state engages in holocaust denial, it is quite certain that the oficial is engaged in a form of propagand and that political agendas and ideological motives are involved: it is an especially poor sign when there is a long history of human rights problems in that country. Forestalling, stopping, or rolling back abuses in all such cases typically involves some attack on the supporting mythology.

There are key considerations, in fighting back against the current war party in the United States.

For example, the message must be clear. The war party chooses its ideological turf carefully, and it is a mistake to engage an an ideological adversary at sites the adversary has carefully prepared for defense. Arguing logically about Ahmadinejad will have no net effect in turning the country from another war; curiously, it is more likely to have the opposite effect of reinforcing the war propaganda, because it is not a clear message.

Since the ideological struggle is a struggle for popular opinion, the message must also be believable, which means that it must be factually accurate and on point. One may do better by leaving the war party in the swamp they have chosen and conducting operations from higher ground. There are a number of probing questions that can be asked in various contexts, with supporting facts, which will have great effect than arguing for minor psychological and moral points about an Iranian politician. One may ask whether the next war is really necessary and just in some moral sense; one may ask whether it could possibly be cost effective or whether there are more expeditious ways to proceed; one may ask whether it could be competently-enough prosecuted to obtain the officially-stated objectives; one may ask whether the global blowback would be so grievous as to render even a completely decisive military victory Pyrrhic. And probably more importantly, one may inquire into the motives of the war party: from what issues do they seek to distract us? who will actually reap the material benefits of the war? &c&c

[Warren Stupidity]

59. I actually don't have any disagreement with you.

I agree that we should not even enter into the Ahmadinejad debate. That is pretty much all I have been saying here: stay out of it. We indeed need to attack the war party from other directions.

[lynne]

42. I knew a woman who had been in one of the camps -

- It was about 30 years ago. This sweet lady with a Jewish surname came into my office and sat down next to my desk. I noticed what I first thought was a tattoo on her forearm. It took me a while but I finally made out that it was numbers. I never asked her about it but the numbers on her arm pretty much told the story.

[pitohui]

47. went to high school w. a daughter of survivors

yeah, hard to understand the deniers, you always think, hey dude you need to get out more

[puebloknot]

50. "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" I just recently...

...finished reading this book, and highly recommend it. It's written by Daniel Mendelsohn.

As the title suggests, Daniel seeks out the fate of six members of his family who remained in Poland and perished under the Nazis.

I'm not Jewish, but this subject matter is important to me. This story is a very emotional one, with a bittersweet ending (is there any other kind in this genre, other than bitter without the sweet?) that made me want to seek out Daniel Mendelsohn and give him an embrace.


My closest fried is an Israeli woman with the same story as your OP: Eight brothers and sisters, and parents, perished on her father's side; same story on her mother's side. A cousin of each parent also made it to Palestine and survived.

Another friend I met at a Democrats.org meeting, right after Selection 2000, has the same story. His whole family perished in Poland.

Stories like these are legion, but each one has its individual touch.

I'm watching "The War" this week. My father fought in it, and came home "intact." No one was ever the same after that time in history.

Thanks for this post.

[KharmaTrain]

53. Ever Seen "The Tattoo"???

In the mid 70's, I went out for coffee with a group of friends from CB radio...an "eyeball". One of the men who was there I had never met before but soon we were discussing a lot of things. He had a slight accent and I asked him what his nationality was. He said he was a Polish Jew...and that he had been a concentration camp survivor. Then, matter of factly, he rolled up his sleeve, and I got to see his tattoo...the number that was his identity. The man spoke about his experiences almost in a third person...and the image of that tattoo still stays fresh in my mind to this day.

I grew up with the Holocoust...my father entered a concentration camp in 1945...it wasn't until his last years that he disclosed what he saw. His words and the far away look in his eye all but showed how he could never really get a grip on all he saw and I'm certain it tormented him far more than he ever let on. Another incident was in 1967...my our family had taken a trip to Europe and my mother brought a list of family member names to look up in Paris...in hopes there were some who had escaped from her mother's little town outside Warsaw. We came up empty. Several years later, she traveled to the town her mother and father had come from...one that at one time had a Jewish community of nearly 20,000...there were only 3 Jews left in the town. Deny these realities...I sure can't.

[Sequoia]

60. I have.

I worked with a woman who was in the Dachau concentration camp along with her sister who were both spared being blonde and blue-eyed and sung in the choir. She pulled up her sleeve and showed me hers, I was shocked.

[1monster]

56. I was fortunate enough to sub in an eighth grade history class the day

a Polish Jew who spent most of World War II hiding out in Russia (not a place known for friendliness to Jews).

He escaped Poland after all the Jewish men in his village had been rounded up and taken into a wooded area and shot. Just as the Nazis opened fire on the men, his father shoved him down, thus saving his life.

He lay under the dead bodies of his father and fellow villagers until it got dark enough for him to slip away into the forest and escape to the Soviet Union.

His life there was difficult and he had many more close calls before the war ended and he escaped to the west.

He told the story of a farmer who always greeted his neighbor with "Good morning, Herr *" (can't remember the name). The farmer ended up in a concentration camp and found that the neighbor was an officer directing the incoming traffic either to the gas chambers or to the slave labor forces. He greeted him, "Good morning, Herr *." And Herr * indicated that he should go to the right... to the slave labor pool. And that he never knew for sure just why he had been spared.

He talked of how as a young man, he hated and reviled God for allowing the horrors that were visited on the Jewish peoples and others, but that as he got older, he had reconciled with God.

The slience in that classroom stuffed full with three classes of eighth graders was thick enough to feel its pressure. And his story, though really bad, was not as harrowing as others I have heard of.

It is so important for those survivors that are left to get out to the schools and other venues to tell their stories.

It is important to the young people; they need to hear it.

And it may help those who tell the story to know that by sharing their memories they may help young people recognize the early warning signs and thus avoid a future human created disaster of a similar, larger, or smaller nature.

[undeterred]

58. I think the stories are so important...

I only heard one in person but I will always remember it.

[in_cog_ni_to]

61. I met David Faber, Holocaust survivor and author of "Because of Romek" and

hearing his story from his own mouth was one of the most intense, heartbreaking things I've ever heard. He was at my son's school a couple of years ago to speak to the kids and then gave a speech at out local Barnes and Noble and that is where I met him. From his book:

Polish-born Holocaust survivor; Nazi victim from 1939-1945; survivor of eight concentration camps; witness to the Nazi murders of his parents, brother Romek, and 5 of his 6 sisters; partisan resistance fighter at age 14; liberated from Bergen-Belsen 1945, age 18, weight 72 pounds; author and award winning lecturer and educator.

His book is one I couldn't put down until I finished it. What a sad, sad story and one that must never be allowed to be repeated.

[dave29]

62. My great grandfather had a tattoo "brand" from Auschwitz.

He never talked about it

[Chovexani]

63. The Romani branch of my family tree was nearly exterminated

My great grand aunt and her son escaped France and snuck into England. They were the only ones in their clan who made it out alive.