Community Chat

[Mz iMac]

@grandma r   "The Holocaust is the most horrendous event in world history."

Actually it wasn't.  Check out the website steemit DOT com/history & search for "Tragic, Brutal and Horrible Events in History that Changed the World"

[Porcelain]

How does it help to have a horror competition?

[Porcelain]

Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

[Tessa Mendoza]

@ grandma r - Thank you for starting tihs thread.  I am not Jewish, but had a very good Jewish friend in Junior High.  Her parents had been in a concentration camp.  I saw the tatoo numbers on their arms.  She told me her father used to wake up in the middle of the night screaming.  I loved her family and, even though we lost touch long ago, I have never forgotten the horrors of the Holocaust.  I actually don't remember learning about it in school and I I would bet it is not taught these days.  Not considered relevant anynore.  So many deniers and others who aren't even aware of what happened.  Very sad and scary.

[sunala]

Thank you everyone for posting your experiences, thoughts and feelings about the holocaust (I never capitalize the word).

I had a dear uncle who my aunt married when I was 8. He was the sweetest, kindest man in the world. Yes he had a thick accent and it was sometimes hard to understand him, and sometimes he looked very sad and had to leave the room. I loved him dearly but didn't understand what was wrong until I was about ten and asked my mother about him. She explained the holocaust to me in terms I could understand. I had many nightmares after that, and realized that several of our relatives as well as friends and neighbors in our Brooklyn neighborhood had numbers on their arms and spoke with accents. Many people called them "refugees." I have such clear memories of these precious people who endured their worst nightmares, but yet they survived. G-d bless every one of them.

And no, I don't ever remember learning about the holocaust in school. I don't know if it's part of the curriculum today. Anybody know?

[Tessa Mendoza]

@ Mz iMac - Actually, it is the most horrific extermination that a government has practiced.  Over 6 million people died.  There is no such parallel in history.

[suzyQ3]

Another thought about the Holocaust: There were several groups in addition to the six million Jews who were murdered:

Six million Jewish people were murdered during the genocide in Europe in the years leading up to 1945, and the Jews are rightly remembered as the group that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party most savagely persecuted during the Holocaust.

But the Nazis targeted many other groups: for their race, beliefs or what they did.

Historians estimate the total number of deaths to be 11 million, with the victims encompassing gay people, priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and resistance fighters.

source: HuffPost

[golding76]

The intelligentsia also suffered from their (the Nazis') misguided and perverted desire to preserve an Aryan ideal.

Mauthausen received much of the intelligentsia.  Independent thinking and people who analyze and question are anathema to those who wish to impose dictatorial propaganda.

[suzyQ3]

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@golding76 wrote:

The intelligentsia also suffered from their misguided and perverted desire to preserve an Aryan ideal.

Mauthausen received much of the intelligentsia.  Thinking people are anathema to those who wish to impose dictatorial propaganda.

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@golding76, I was surprised that the list I posted didn't specifically mention the intelligentsia. They are always held in comtempt by many groups and individuals. As far as authoritarians go, they'd rather have a gullible, easily swayed, minimally informed following.

[golding76]

suzyQ3,

I stumbled upon this overlooked segment that was removed from society when reading about Mauthausen.  

Yes, dictators abhor independent thinking.  It is easier for them to incarcerate and muzzle those who think and defy rather than use other more civilized methods.  Dictators do not want challenging views out there!

Look at Putin and Navalny now.