topic Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day in Community Chat

Holocaust Remembrance Day

grandma r — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 21:44:19 GMT

Regardless of religion, ethnicity, or whatever....we should never forget the victims. May their souls rest in peace.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

NicksmomESQ — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 21:52:33 GMT

This day was always observed in my house growing up. My father, a victim of the Holocaust lost many family members . I grew up hearing all the stories.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

nyc1 — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 21:56:05 GMT

@NicksmomESQ My Grandfather lost his Mom and 2 Siblings in one of the camps.

Such a sad, tragic and unimaginable event/time in the history of the world.

NEVER AGAIN!!!!!

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

NicksmomESQ — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 22:01:34 GMT

@nyc1 wrote:
@NicksmomESQ My Grandfather lost his Mom and 2 Siblings in one of the camps.
Such a sad, tragic and unimaginable event/time in the history of the world.
NEVER AGAIN!!!!!

@nyc1 Yes, NEVER AGAIN!!!

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

Mersha — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 22:04:37 GMT

@NicksmomESQ wrote:
This day was always observed in my house growing up. My father, a victim of the Holocaust lost many family members . I grew up hearing all the stories.

@NicksmomESQ It would be wonderful if you could write the stories that you heard and share them with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC.

These stories should be available for future generations so they know what an incredibly vile and horrific experience so many had to endure.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

Nataliesgramma — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 22:17:16 GMT

I was a Leasing Agent for an Apartment Complex about 30 years ago.

I struck up a conversation with an elderly woman who stopped by the Office to get her mail.

She had an accent, so I asked her where she was from....

Anyway, that conversation still sticks with me today, especially when she rolled up her sleeve to show me her "number"...

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

Greeneyedlady21 — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 22:17:20 GMT

Never again 🙏

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

suzyQ3 — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 22:17:37 GMT

It's also a reminder that demonizing groups of people can lead to such horrors.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

NicksmomESQ — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 22:26:53 GMT

@Mersha wrote:
@NicksmomESQ wrote:
This day was always observed in my house growing up. My father, a victim of the Holocaust lost many family members . I grew up hearing all the stories.

@NicksmomESQ It would be wonderful if you could write the stories that you heard and share them with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC.

These stories should be available for future generations so they know what an incredibly vile and horrific experience so many had to endure.

@Mersha Actually, I have .My cousin worked in Washington for the C.I.A. for many years.His wife wrote her dissertation for her doctorate on the Holocaust about 25 years ago. I sat down with her & played her cassette tapes of my father's stories in his own words that he asked me to record.

Copies of the cassettes along with her published dissertation were shared with the Holocaust Museum in D.C. & Yad Vashem in Israel.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

Mersha — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 22:40:26 GMT

@NicksmomESQ That is so wonderful and you must be so happy to know that those important stories will live on for future generations.

Just to think of all of the people who can read the stories as they visit the museum is amazing.

Job well done.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

Porcelain — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 22:41:49 GMT

Never forget, lest it happen again. It could happen here because it could happen anywhere.

We need to remain aware of the amazing human capacity for great heroism and love, as well as the worst depravity beyond a reasonable person's comprehension.

From the United States Holocaust Museum website

"As with other efforts to deceive the German population and the wider world, the Nazi regime benefited from the unwillingness of the average human being to grasp the dimensions of these crimes. Leaders of Jewish resistance organizations, for example, tried to warn ghetto residents of the German intentions, but even those who heard about the killing centers did not necessary believe what they had heard. “Common sense could not understand that it was possible to exterminate tens and hundreds of thousands of Jews,” Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of the Jewish resistance in Warsaw, observed."

And from the 2018 Time Magazine article, What Americans in the 1930s Really Knew About What Was Happening in Germany

"To wit, one item that’s part of the USHMM exhibition shows public opinion polls demonstrating that while half of U.S. respondents in 1943 thought the fact that 2 million Jewish Europeans had been murdered was just a rumor, by 1944 about three-quarters believed concentration camps were really part of the Nazi plan — and yet they still couldn’t fathom the number of victims involved.

(A Gallup poll that year shows that most people who dared to guess thought the number killed would be in the hundreds of thousands, or less.) Today, the fact that 6 million Jews were killed has been “seared in our collective understanding of the Holocaust,” Greene says, but at the time, that number was hard to process."

Humanity's basic decency (and I think our propensity to shut down as a reaction to incomprehensible horror) was used against us to make us unable to completely comprehend the evil we were dealing with. We must remain on guard against that.

If anyone dehumanizes another human being to you, calls them an animal or subhuman, they are already down that path -- and trying to take you with them.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

golding76 — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 23:15:58 GMT

Nataliesgramma,

I anticipated what you were going to write next; nevertheless, I broke into tears upon reading what you saw.

There is a very sensitive and moving album called Ballad of Mauthausen by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis. Here is some background from an online site:

"The poet Iacovos Kambanellis was a prisoner in Mauthausen during World War II. At the beginning of the sixties, he wrote his memories of this time under the title of "Mauthausen". In 1965, he also wrote four poems on the subject and he gave Mikis the opportunity to set them to music. Mikis did this with much pleasure, firstly because he liked the poetry of the texts, and secondly because he was locked up during the Nazi occupation in Italian and German prisons, but mainly because this composition gives us the chance to remind the younger generation of history, that history that must never be forgotten."

It is estimated that more than 14,000 Jews perished at Mauthausen.

The album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvNm0F8L96Q&t=1528s

We must never forget.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

I am still oxox — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 22:48:38 GMT

My brother did research on 23 and me and it turns out the my Great Grandfather had family that did not leave Russian and presumably passed in the Holocaust

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

golding76 — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 23:16:55 GMT

The Liberation of Mauthausen

Jewish Prisoners

Before May 1944, the SS incarcerated relatively few Jews at Mauthausen. The total number of Jewish prisoners at Mauthausen between 1938 and the end of February 1944 was around 2,760. Most of them were reported dead by the end of 1943. From March through December 1944, at least 13,826 Jews arrived in Mauthausen, most of them Hungarian and Polish Jews and approximately 500 of them women. The SS had deported virtually all of them from Auschwitz-Birkenau and Plaszow camps to Mauthausen. In all, the SS registered 25,271 Jews in the Mauthausen camp complex, though the actual number of Jews, including arrivals during the last week of the war when the prisoner registration process broke down, may have pushed the number as high as 29,500.

It is estimated that more than 14,000 Jews perished at Mauthausen.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

nana59 — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 22:57:45 GMT

i'm armenian....i remember my uncle telling me stories about his family members who perished during the armenian genocide......whether holocaust or genocide...such a sad memory for many.....

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

mspatmac — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 23:15:03 GMT

It is incumbent on us as parents and grandparents to ensure our kids/grands understand the full horror of what happened. Especially those of us who did not grow up in a Jewish household.

History must never be forgotten.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

grandma r — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 23:26:46 GMT

Thank you to all who shared. My prayers to all. It should never have happened, yet, it did. Words matter; the lies and hatred of one man led to this horrendous tragedy.

The world should never forget.

I had the privilege of meeting 2 survivors many years ago. They each shared their experiences and how they wound up at Auschwitz. Their survival was by the grace of God.

The stories of the survivors should be part of history. Students everywhere need to know what really happened so that it can never happen again anywhere.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

PamfromCT — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 23:39:52 GMT

Even though I know it happened, it’s hard for me to comprehend the level of hatred that made this happen.

Absolutely, Never again. And may I add, Always Alert.

Hatred directed to any group of people is always a danger.

May the souls of all martyred Rest In Peace forever.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

twinsister — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 23:44:11 GMT

I did not grow up in a Jewish household, but I remember my mom telling me a story that I never forgot. She worked with two women who survived the concentration camps. These two women were sisters, but pretended not to know each other so they would not be separated. They ate grass to survive, and luckily they did, eventually emigrating to New York City. As a child, I just couldn't imagine what that was like.

Also growing up, there was a small candy store in my neighborhood owned by an elderly man. One summer day, he had his shirt sleeves rolled up and I noticed numbers on his arm. When my mom and I walked out, I asked her why there were numbers on his arm and she explained to me. I can still picture that kind old man and those numbers.

It shouldl never be forgotten.

Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day

Mz iMac — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 23:49:04 GMT

@I am still oxox wrote:
My brother did research on 23 and me and it turns out the my Great Grandfather had family that did not leave Russian and presumably passed in the Holocaust

@I am still oxox I did not know Russia had Jewish concentration camps. I've always heard they were the first soldiers who arrived & saved the Jews that the Germans left behind in a few camps.