Community Chat

[Porcelain]

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.

[golding76]

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.

[I am still oxox]

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

[golding76]

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.

[nana59]

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.....

[mspatmac]

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.  

[grandma r]

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.

[PamfromCT]

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.

[twinsister]

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.

[Mz iMac]

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@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

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@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.