Holocaust Memorial Day was commemorated last week. The day occasioned a number of remarkable stories.
Orin Kerr wrote about his late father:
The death march brought Aronek and his group to a death camp called Rieben in West Prussia. On the way there, they slept on church floors and were barely fed by their Ukrainian guards. Soon, people began to die of starvation and cold. One day when there was virtually no food left, a full supply train overturned after running off tracks that had been blown up by partisans. Aronek was selected to help clean up. Knowing he would be shot for stealing any provisions, Aronek tucked his pant leg into his boot and poured sugar into his pant leg. He allowed him himself two spoonfuls of sugar each day, which lasted until liberation.
Robert Avrech told the story of his friend, Sol Teichman:
Later, I discovered that, carrying Steve on my back, I had marched for four days and covered approximately seventy miles. But at the time, not knowing how long or how far I traveled, time seemed to vanish and distances seemed endless as I pushed onward, day after day under the oppressive heat, my back bent like a bow. My throat was parched from thirst; the sun beat down and my skin was burned raw. I was dizzy from exhaustion, hunger and fear. Every bone in my body was throbbing. I felt like a marching skeleton. Thousands were murdered along that road. My fellow Jewish prisoners were beaten to death with wooden clubs and iron bars. Some Jews welcomed death for life had become endless torture, unendurable.
The IDF spokesperson’s blog tells of Esther Friedman who was rescued by Malka Weiss de Gantz, the mother of current IDF chief of staff, Benny Gantz.
As a part of this project, IDF soldiers and officers meet with survivors each year on Holocaust Remembrance Day to hear their stories. This meeting, however, was unique. Malka Weiss de Gantz, the mother of the IDF Chief of Staff, was also a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen camp and was the one who saved Esther. “I had typhus, and then they threw me on a mountain of bodies. Your mother, I have no idea where she got the strength, was the one who pulled me from the bodies and brought me to the British ambulance,” said Esther. “Thanks to Malka, I’m here today.”
These stories are not just about the extreme suffering endured by these individuals, but about their survival too. In the face of such devastation, survival was a huge victory.
Instapundit linked to a remarkable photo essay, 20 Photos That Change The Holocaust Narrative. These pictures show defiance. Some are pictures of Jews fighting Nazi Germany. Some show Jews clinging to their faith in the face of destruction. And some simply show survival. (There was one especially poignant comment that I noticed.) When six million were killed the losses were enormous and these victories were small, but that makes the victories that much more precious.
Unfortunately, now there are those who would have us forget those small victories. In this day and age when Jews (specifically the Jews of Israel) are lectured that they need to learn the lessons of the Holocaust it’s important to keep these stories and pictures in mind. What happened to the Jews seventy years ago wasn’t the first time someone tried to wipe us out.
Chas Newkey-Burden (h/t Meryl Yourish) has a response to such judgments:
Let us strip the “they-of-all-people” argument down to its very basics: gentiles telling Jews that we killed six million of your people and that as a result it is you, not us, who have lessons to learn; that it is you, not us, who need to clean up your act. It is an argument of atrocious, spiteful insanity. Do not accept it; turn it back on those who offer it. For it is us, not you, who should know better.
In a similar vein, FresnoZionism writes:
The Jewish lesson of the Holocaust is this: Jew hatred is real, it is dangerous, and it is not possible for Jews to depend on others, no matter how well-intentioned they may seem, to protect them. For almost two thousand years, the Jewish people depended on others, and the result was periods of tolerance interspersed with persecutions, expulsions and murder.
Twenty years ago Israel made peace with a terrorist who claimed to have reformed. When it turned out that he hadn’t totally given up terrorism, Israel fought back. Instead of being praised for taking risks for peace, Israel was warned against striking back too hard lest it hurt the chance for peace.
Nowadays another regime verbally threatens Israel with destruction. The world lectures Israel that the words are metaphorical not literal and that it ought not to overreact.
The lesson of the Holocaust is that the world can’t be trusted with Jews.
When international organizations devote a disproportionate amount of time condemning Israel… When human rights organizations eagerly turn mistakes by Israel into international incidents… When counties who expelled nearly all their Jews accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing… When Israel is the only country other than Nazi Germany cited for violating the Fourth Geneva Convention…
The world shows that it still cannot be trusted with Jews.
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Comments
God bless them, one and all. I would not have had the strength to survive such barbarism.
One really doesn’t need history to remind us of man’s cruelty to man. We see it daily even now.
Human nature is as it ever was, and examples like Kermit Gosnell’s “House of Horrors” or Ahmadinejad’s (or I like to call him – “Ach-I’m-in-a-jihad’s”) denial of the holocaust and call for the extermination of the Jewish people, remind us constantly of the need to be vigilant.
The scary part of all these examples, is the willful ignorance on the part of many to deny such evil exists.
why i own a fireamr and plan to buy more:
A high school English teacher in New York state who had students pretend to be Jew-hating Nazis in a writing assignment has been placed on leave.
The teacher at Albany high school caused a storm of criticism after having students practice the art of persuasive writing by penning a letter to a fictitious Nazi government official arguing that “Jews are evil”.
ANY QUESTIONS?
firearm
Probably preaching to the choir here, but I think the answer to the question (sorrowfully) is no. Too many Christians forget that Christ was a Jew, and while we may think they are mistaken, we owe a huge debit to our (religious) older brothers.
Thank you for these links, the holocaust pictures brought tears to my eyes.
“Can the world be trusted with Jews?”
God thought so.
The lesson of the Holocaust is that Satan is a busy adversary who will go to any lengths to ensure that the work of God is not accomplished. The enemy of the Jews is Satan because God called Israel His chosen through whom the redemption of a fallen creation is to be accomplished.
How to prevent that redemption? Slaughter the Jews in the hope that the Redeemer Himself is killed and man remains at enmity with God. Therefore, the various slaughters down through history. One of the most noteworthy is the slaughter of the children in Bethlehem, the voice heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they were not.
The Holocaust is the same event on a larger scale. It is the most recent recurrence of the cycle of slaughter of the Jews.
It seems that the question is not can the world be trusted with Jews, but this: should Jews put their trust in nations, in men? The answer is no, trust only in God and be prepared for the worst. That is the Biblical answer. As for man, man is a vessel either to God’s honor or to Satan’s evil will.
To me, the lesson of the Holocaust is that injustice destroys civilization. Germany was a civilized country until it elected a party that believed that it is ok to kill people for trivial reasons. Once it becomes ok to kill people for trivial reasons such as membership in a class, there is no limiting the damage to the original class. There is no limit to the murders or the cruelty.
We saw with the Nazis that a civilized country can be dragged into barbarism, and with the oil-rich “Muslim” nations that extreme amounts of money will not bring prosperity or peace to people who are hell-bent on killing their neighbors.
Countries that violate God’s second commandment (“Love your neighbor as yourself”) do not prosper.
Looking around at the political landscape in “liberal” America, my question is, “Can Jews be trusted with Jews?”
I’d like to add the story of my old friend, Herman Feder.
When he worked for my dad, many a day as a boy I helped him in the store. My mother made me swear I would never broach the topic of the Holocaust with him and what happened to his wife and only child. She also warned me not to ask him about the number tattooed on his arm.
I always imagined his story would be one of simply wasting away in a single camp … tragic, but otherwise unremarkable in Holocaust terms. It wasn’t until recently I found his story was an amazing one of survival. I can barely fathom his unbelievable determination.
After all he suffered … you’d never have guessed it by his disposition. Always cheerful and full of life. We had some fun and funny times together.
God bless him and may his soul forever rest in peace.
And God bless the Czech couple who saved him and nursed him back to health. They were friends to the end.
http://www.humboldt.edu/rescuers/book/Chlup/federstory1.html
Luke,
Thank you for adding Mr. Feder’s story. I was tempted but chose to stick to the stories that were posted this week. I’m glad that you took the initiative.
David
David,
Every gentile boy should be so lucky to grow up knowing a Mr. Feder.
Whenever I see a young leftist hipster like those BDS dancers or the twentysomething “anarchist” who works in my office and who once told me after some tiny, insignificant, long forgotten skirmish between the Israelis and Hamas a few years ago, “This time Israel has really gone too far!” … I think of Mr. Feder and wish I could magically transplant what I know and experienced knowing him into their brains.
Short of that, I usually end up muttering something like, “Oh please … cut the crap.”
I wish I could share with Mr. Feder a day like yesterday. I can imagine him getting a good laugh out of it.
My son attended his best friend’s Bar Mitzvah yesterday. The boy’s father is the grandson of Bugsy Siegel’s brother. As I told a friend, despite the boy’s mob pedigree, you’d have a hard time finding a sweeter kid.
I got home from work after midnight and our son was still in bed awake. My wife told me his friend had told him he’d have to stand next to him during the service. That night my son got to thinking about what his friend had said and started to worry he’d have to make a speech or something. It didn’t help matters that my wife told him, “Maybe you’re like the best man at a wedding.”
He was tired in the morning and after he’d dressed and I’d tied his tie he said, looking in the mirror all dressed up, “I guess I should’ve brushed my teeth first.” His ride had arrived and was waiting. Umm, yeah, toothpaste on a tie is not a good thing.
He came home after the service and said three other boys and he had had to speak in Hebrew. Of course, the other three boys could speak Hebrew, but our Max just mouthed it.
Late in the afternoon they all boarded a bus to go downtown for the party. My wife and I were both quite tipsy from the wine we’d had with dinner when my wife got a kind of emergency call from Max’s other good friend, Asher, the grandson of Steve Wynn.
My Japanese wife couldn’t completely understand what Asher was saying but understood that something had happened to Max and handed me the phone. Asher explained to me that a glow stick had broken and the liquid had sprayed into Max’s eye. The boys were with him in the bathroom washing out his eye.
Asher said to me, “This happened to me when I was little and I was okay after going to the emergency room. Do you want us to call the poison control center?”
After talking to one of the mothers on the phone we felt better, and then Max said he was fine and wanted to stay.
I ended the night on Facebook asking, “What are these Las Vegas Jews doing to my son?”
Mr. Feder lost his only child, his son, Alfred, in the Holocaust. When I was a boy spending time with him, he loved to ask me about school and about my exploits with my friends. I think he’d get a real kick out of Max.
On the other hand the USA identified Klaus Barbie as the Butcher of Lyon very early on & set him up in a nice house in Germany. Things got a little hot & they provided him with passports & safe conduit via Italy to South America in the early 50s.
They & the South American dictators ( their friends ) protected him till a French Jew & his German wife’s long hunt finally captured him .
There were many others.
The crimes are not all Nazi . The long exodus from the Baltic countries contained many war criminals who quite likely became your neighbours. I could never trust any Lithuanian Estonian Latvian Or Ukrainian or Pole of a certain age. They would say hey had to because the bigger evil were the USSR.
Exactly what America did.
Interesting .
Just as for millenniums Jewish have blamed for jesus’s death ( officially in the case of Catholics until the 1960’s ) the 20 th century saw them blamed for Socialism & Communism .
If you read Mein Kampf again it is both Adolf’s hatred for the Slavs & socialists that is there . Today it is very risky to read this tract & likely to get you on some sort of terrorist list so I can’t quote. I do have a secondary source that has looked at this recently amongst a whole new look at ww2.
I am painting my bookcase so it is somewhere not at hand .
Even today I think this is a factor. The Left both loves Jewish because of their revolutionary credentials & despises them because they prominent in history of thought & deed.
I have not gotten a feel fo the Right. I think they are more annoyed at the Money angle. Not much has changed since The Merchant of Venice for them. I have had to defend Israel’s right to exist amongst tables of businessmen also.
Juden are caught in a pincer movement still .
My above posts are primarily about the past.
Like Luke’s story there is a present. Jewish people are extremely successful & influential also .
They can not claim victim staus today because we are all victims now . Seriously it is a new day & there are new challenges – one being a vastly increased non religious population . The claim that one was God’s Chosen People created religious hostility then but now many are likely to say WTF .
If one does not believe in God – it appears a lunatic claim . Traditional Atheists have been rather diplomatically puzzled buy the claim but these are not your uncles’ atheists – they are something else.
There are 19 million Jewish in the world – 6 in Israel. That is only up 3 million from 1938 . Food for thought.
Thank you for this post.
You’re welcome Zoomaster!