Monday, January 25, 2016

January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Nadene Goldfoot                                                
Auschwitz Concentration Camp established June 1940.
Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of German Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Poison gas experiments here by September 3, 1941.
First systematic deportations here from March to April  1942
                   

The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the victims of the Nazi era and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides.  WWII ended on May 8, 1945.  The anti-Semitism did not end, nor did the physical attacks on Jews that often led to their deaths.  .  
                                                                        
Buchenwald, 1945, a Concentration Camp established in 1937.  Buchenwald concentration camp was a German Nazi concentration camp established on the Ettersberg near Weimar,

Germany, in July 1937, one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps on German soil.  
Jews wer
e deported to here in 1941 and then gassed.  One survivor, Dow Lewi, wrote to his sister in Palestine on August 4, 1945, "that you, over there, cannot imagine even a hundredth part of the suffering, fear, humiliation and every kind of bullying that we lived through.  People who live and think as normal people cannot possibly understand."  Even after liberation, the survivors were victims of riots in Cracow on August 20, 1945 and afterwards in other Polish towns.  The truth is that the native populations helped the Nazis to kill the Jews during the Holocaust and afterwards.  
                                                                   
This is a time to remember the unthinkable and of what MAN is capable of doing.  The killing of 6 million Jews by the German National Socialist  (Nazi) regime led by one of the ugliest men I've ever seen, Adolf Hitler, with a voice that ranted and raved like a lunatic.  Will someone tell me why the Germans followed him like a herd of sheep?                                                                           
Treblinka was an extermination camp, built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was located near the village of Treblinka north-east of Warsaw in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship.

Treblinka was disguised as a train station.  All Jewish property and belongings in Thrace and Macedonia were confiscated and sold.  The money raised had first to go towards the cost of the rail and boat "fare" to Treblinka.  Each morning on their journey northward, the trains would stop in the  open countryside, and the bodies of Jews who had died during the night were thrown out.  The Germans would not allow any form of burial.  Several hundred sick and old people died during the 6 day journey, which ended at Treblinka.  

His followers went along with his plans that the extermination of the Jews was an essential part of the gospel of Nazism and inherent in the core of its creed.  The Aryan decree issued on April 11, 1933, defined as non-Aryan, any person having a non-Aryan, particularly Jewish parent or grandparent.  In other words, if you had even one Jewish grandparent, you were headed for the gas chambers.  The extermination of all Jews on the planet had started.                                      

Just 2 years, 5 months and 4 days later, on September 15, 1935, the NUREMBERG LAWS were issued by Reichstag.  These were racial laws from the Nazis and reinforced by persecutory decrees including economic and soial discrimination against the Jews.  Incarceration in CONCENTRATION CAMPS without any legal proceedings were the rule and law.  There was no protection from them.

It all began with a BOYCOTT on April 1, 1933.  Violent acts occurred against Jews were common after the occupation of Austria on March 13, 1938.  The intention was to force Jews to emigrate from Germany and Austria. The catch was in finding a country that would take them in.   Then there was a pogrom on November 9th and 10th of 1938 that followed the killing of Vom Rath in Paris;  the brutal assault on Jews throughout the Reich, the demolition of their homes and businesses, the burning of synagogues and the wholesale arrests, violence and murder.

My uncle was from Germany.  His family had lived there since about the year 1000, maybe even as early as the year 321 when the emperor Constantine issued regulations about their Jewish community in Cologne.  .  His father had served in WWI as a soldier.  They were sausage makers, had their own little business.  My uncle, about 20 years old, was picked up and taken to Dachau in 1938 for walking a cow to their slaughter house.  The Nazis said he hit the cow with a stick. (Have you ever walked a cow along a cow path?)   By May 4, 1939, he was on the SS Washington headed for New York.  His parents had to sell everything they had to get his passport and official papers allowing him out of Germany.  I think he was the last Jew to leave.  His family had to remain as they could not afford the price for themselves and his 16 year old red-headed sister.  Luckily, he was helped by my great uncle who took the responsibility for him in the states, for you could not just enter and that was it.
                                                                         
Jews being moved from their homes to concentration camps.  Notice the Star of David on their clothing-identifying them as Jews.  
I was born in 1934 in the United States.  If I were in Germany like my uncle, I would have been 7 years old in 1941 at the height of the war.  Today, we find 40% of Europeans still harbor anti-Semitism, brought out today by the influx of Muslim refugees that has hit their shores who bring it with them.  We've all seen on our TVs what has been going on in France, lately, and then in Brussels.  Sweden is the 3rd highest in anti-Semitic occurrences.
                                                                       
Jews of Hungary not knowing what awaited them.  
Most school districts have had a poor program to teach about the Holocaust.  Then we have Iran who are Holocaust deniers.  If you really want to learn what it was about, read THE HOLOCAUST-A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War by Martin Gilbert.

Resource:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Holocaust_Remembrance_Day
http://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-features/special-focus/international-holocaust-remembrance-day
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia-Holocaust

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