#The Shoah

[gay-jewish-bucky]

80th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: "The World Has to Know That We Did Not Go Like Lambs to the Slaughter."

April 19th, 1943 - May 16th, 1943 Warsaw, Poland

“The question is not why all the Jews did not fight, but how so many of them did. Tormented, beaten, starved, where did they find the strength, spiritual and physical, to resist?” – Elie Wiesel

In the morning of April 19th, 1943, on what would be the first night of Passover, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. German troops and SS entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants to the death camps.

In the summer of 1942, as Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto were deported to Treblinka, reports that made their way back quickly made it clear that "resettlement" meant mass-murder. In response to this, Jews citizens in the ghetto began forming organized resistance forces; the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW).

Following the January 1943 success of a smaller-scale resistance preventing a deportation attempt, an act that led to the suspension of such deportation efforts by the Nazis, the residents began to secretly build subterranean tunnels and shelters in preparation for a full-scale uprising.

Throughout April rumours swirled of a final deportation of the ghetto's remaining Jews. On the 18th it became clear that German forces, reinforced with artillery and tanks, were moving in to carry out their final action. The alarm was raised, and residents retreated to their underground shelters. They would remain here for the duration of the uprising, refusing to surrender themselves to deportation.

A group of around 700 Jewish resistance fighters, made up of the ŻOB and ŻZW and led by 24-year-old Mordechai Anilevitch, joined together to stage what would be their final stand against the Nazis. These brave young people were malnourished and lacked proper military training, they were equipped with nothing but poor-quality or even homemade weapons and their bare hands.

By contrast German forces numbered 2000, they were well-equipped and well-trained and had advanced knowledge of the existence of these resistance groups.

Despite this stark imbalance, on the first day of the uprising the ragtag Jewish fighters met the invaders head on and successfully forced the Nazis to retreat outside the city walls.

Amongst all of the chaos and destruction all around them, the Jews hiding in the tunnels and bunkers gathered together to celebrate Passover with what little they had, breaking homecooked matzah and drinking illicitly obtained wine.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising held strong for a full 27 days, coming to an end on May 16th, 1943. Unable to gain a full advantage, the Germans had resorted to burning the Warsaw Ghetto to the ground in an attempt flush out those in hiding so they could be rounded up.

In the months following the official end of the uprising some Jews remained hiding out in the rubble, periodically attacking German police on patrol.

This was the largest uprising by Jews during World War II and the first significant urban revolt against German occupation in Europe. It inspired many more uprisings, especially amongst Jews in camps and Ghettos.

May Their Memories Be a Revolution

Learn More: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising | Holocaust Encyclopedia Holocaust Survivors Describe the Last Passover in the Warsaw Ghetto Tuesday, Nissan 27, 5783 / April 18, 2023 - Jewish Calendar - On This Day

[rotzaprachim]

learn!

https://yivo.org/Research

Here’s a list of resources - some about the Shoah directly, some about Jewish civilization, language, food, and culture, many about both in the way that Jewish life is so often about both. I think it’s important for allies to learn about both and that accessing the song and poetry archives can be one of the best ways to engage with the experiences of victims and survivors themselves. Remember that they were people with hopes and dreams and a culture and they were murdered for being Jews and they survived as Jews. Their Judaism was not a sidenote to their humanity. Remember that their grandchildren and great grandchildren still live and they can hear you when you talk about them. Engage with our culture, engage respectfully- read our books, cook our food, listen to our songs. מיר זײַנען דאָ!

[todaysjewishholiday]

24 Tammuz 5784 (29-30 July 2024)

There is a midrashic saying that “whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world” and the 24th of Tammuz is the yahrzeit of a gentile who saved the world many times over.

Chiune Sugihara was a minor functionary in the Japanese foreign service, posted in 1939 to a consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. As the possibility of a German invasion became clearer, Ashkenazi Jews flocked to the consulate seeking exit visas to escape Lithuania. While the Japanese government insisted on issuing visas only to those with sufficient funds for self support, Sugihara was well aware of the Nazi regime’s aim to eradicate the Jewish people. When his petitions to his superiors for exceptions to the visa policy were denied, Sugihara decided that the humanitarian needs of the Jewish population overrode the importance of abiding by policy. From the 12th of Tammuz to Rosh Chodesh Elul 5700, Sugihara spent 18-20 hours a day writing transit visas for Jewish refugees by hand, saving thousands of Jewish families from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania. Sugihara’s one man campaign to provide documents for as many Jews as possible to escape the Nazis was stopped only by his own reassignment to Königsberg. He continued to write visas in his apartment and while traveling to the train station to depart, throwing them out the window to Jewish refugees gathered on the platform. Refugees report that Sugihara left his official stamp for use in forging additional visas after his departure, though his family denies that his violations of official policy went that far.

Sugihara lost his position in the Japanese foreign service after the war, possibly on account of the numerous unauthorized visas he distributed in Kaunas. It was several decades before any of the beneficiaries of his decision were able to find the man who had saved their lives by signing a single piece of paper. Sugihara lived the majority of his life in humble quiet. In 5745, he was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations who had saved Jewish lives during the Shoah. He died on the 24th of Tammuz the following year.

[vox-anglosphere]

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day may we all vow to never forget.

[jellybeanium124]

you do not ever, in any circumstance, need to "hand it to the nazis" but I'm (in case this escapes containment, I am jewish) almost kind of offended at the fact that people doubt german bookkeeping? you dare say aloud "they faked the numbers, 6 million jews didn't die" when the germans take pride in their detailed note taking?? you think the nazis didn't record ever minute detail about every jew they slaughtered? you think they didn't know, on average, how many jews were dying a day, and also the average for every camp? you think the germans weren't keeping track of the numbers? the stats? you think they weren't constantly working on maximizing their german efficiency??? they took that shit seriously. they had jew killing down to a science. and you dare tell me that the numbers aren't there. don't you fucking tell me the nazis weren't proud and diligent motherfuckers about it because they absolutely were.

[gay-jewish-bucky]

International Holocaust Remembrance Day takes place on the anniversary liberation of Auschwitz, this poses the non-Jews who knew full well the scale of the genocide and did nothing as the heroes who saved the Jews.

Yom HaShoah, which commemorates the atrocities committed against the Jewish people during the Holocaust, takes place on the anniversary of The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on the Hebrew calendar, this honors the Jewish heroes who rose up and fought for the survival of themselves and their people when the world would not fight for them.

[todaysjewishholiday]

20 Tammuz 5784 (25-26 July 2024)

It was in Tammuz 5801 that the mass murder of the Jews of Lithuania began. The Nazis had invaded only weeks before, and began a killing frenzy, bringing Jews to the fortresses surrounding the city of Kovno to protect it from invaders such as themselves, and shooting them by the thousands and dumping the bodies into open pit graves. Then after a few weeks, the massacre slowed, as the perpetrators of evil moved on to the next front in their war on the whole world. The surviving Jews were forced into a ghetto in Kovno and left to die slowly or be shipped off in the occasional transport to one of the horrific camps.

Until the 20th of Tammuz 5804, when the Nazi guards, recognizing that their machine of terror was collapsing across Europe, panicked that the Red Army would find evidence of their crimes or liberate the surviving Jews. On the morning of the 20th of Tammuz, with the Soviets mere weeks away from capturing the city, they surrounded the ghetto with machine guns and then set it on fire, burning its remaining inhabitants alive and shooting any who attempted to escape the flames.

One dormitory somehow was untouched by the conflagration and was ignored by the Nazis as they fled this scene of their crimes. Its inhabitants were the sole survivors of the ghetto, able to bear witness to the horrors that had happened there. Over 90 percent of the Jewish population of Lithuania had been murdered in the Shoah. What had for centuries been a thriving center of yeshivish culture was now a graveyard.

[vox-anglosphere]

For over a decade, Britain was the safest country in Europe for Jews.

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Rather proud of the post I made for JVP Boston for Holocaust Remembrance Day!

Antizionist Jewish Shoah survivors have always been some of my heroes.

And every one of them has been attacked and discredited by Zionists.

[gay-jewish-bucky]

Yom HaShoah (27th of Nisan): Remembering Szmul Zygielbojm

Szmul Zygielbojm (February 21st, 1895-May 12th, 1943) was a Jewish-Polish socialist leader of the Jewish Labor Movement, the Bund, and a member of the National Council of the Polish government in exile during WWII.

May, 1942, a horrifying report reached Zygielbojm from the Warsaw Bund. The report detailed the Nazi Final Solution efforts. It specifically provided details of Atkionen, extermination camps, the nature and detail of the slaughter of Jews. The report stated bluntly that some 700,000 Jews had been murdered. Zygielbojm worked to bring the human disaster to Allied and public attention.

A few months later definitive proof of the Holocaust was brought to the Polish government in Exile, the U.S., the British government and Allies about the Holocaust by Jan Karski. Zygielbojm redoubled his efforts to try and rouse public lethargy to respond to the murder of European Jewry.

He was only successful in rousing words of shock, sympathy and threats of later justice to the Nazi perpetrators but no tangible actions.

With the fall off the Warsaw Ghetto to attacking German infantry and the death of his wife and son in the Ghetto, Zygielbojm did the only thing he could do to shock public awareness.

He committed suicide.

An excerpt from his final note reads:

The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions tortured children, women and men they have become partners to the responsibility. (x)

His death made international headlines for a short time, but along with his efforts to garner public attention and tangible action from the allies, it was quickly forgotten.

Bio retrieved from Find A Grave and Written by Jerry Klinger (President of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.)

[notaplaceofhonour]

It’s maddening to find out that the scholar who first developed the idea that “Zionism is Settler Colonialism”, Fayez Sayegh, was a member of the Syrian Nazi Party during and immediately after the Holocaust, was an active participant in the Red Scare, using it to demonize Israel as a manifestation of a Global Communist Threat™️ through the height of the Cold War (true to his Nazi roots, accusing Israel of Judeo-Bolshevism) before switching to a Colonialism narrative when Post-Colonialism came in vogue in the 60s. And yet, the people I hear parroting the talking points of this anti-Communist, Ultranationalist Fascist-turned-scholar are the people who are constantly talking about how Liberal Progressives aren’t Communist enough and actually enemies because “Liberals will always side with Fascists”. Maddening.

If you’ve ever noticed how the “Zionism = Settler Colonialism” narrative eerily shares the core components of the far right’s Replacement Theory (that there are 1. Jews 2. conspiring to invade a given place and 3. replace the population with Jews), this is why; it’s because the idea that Zionism is Settler Colonialism came from a literal Nazi.

It is very literally Nazi propaganda.

[indecisiveavocado]

why are jews skeptical of antizionism? a guide for gentiles

I'd be ok with the notion Israel wasn't needed if y'all could be trusted not to fuck it up when Jews needed somewhere to flee. But last time (to put it politely) you fucked it up real bad, and six million Jews died.

Fundamentally, antizionism is asking Jews to put our lives in the hands of the same people who saw us screaming for help, who knew that death awaited us, and did all of nothing. Nada. Nil.

(As demonstrated by the recent Amsterdam pogrom, Israel is totally ok and often proactive in flying Jews out. Around the same time as Palestinians were being exiled, Jews from all over the Arab world were being driven out in similar numbers. The reason you don't hear about that refugee crisis? Israel accepted them, without complaint or delay or objection, just urgency.)

Pardon us for being a bit skeptical of your assertions that it won't happen again when a constant theme throughout our history has been it happening again.

This is a slightly modified form of an older, longer, post's tags/tldr.

[cavalierzee]

Zionists Morphing Into Nazis

During the Holocaust, Nazis would paint the Star of David on the homes of Jewish people – marking them for forced eviction.

Zionists do the same to Palestinians. The Star of David marks a Palestinian home for eviction, and then destruction.

Ousman Noor

[determinate-negation]

i really hate the revisionist holocaust history that is dominant in america and i really recommend ken burns documentary the u.s. and the holocaust. a lot of people know about hitler taking inspiration from the us but not the true degree of apathy and antisemitism from the american public, and us political and financial entanglement with the nazis. also, the holocaust and especially its jewish victims were not publicly discussed until years after the war and holocaust survivors in displaced persons camps across europe were kept in horrible conditions by their american “liberators.” the way that american history is constructed to explain its role in ww2 and reasons for supporting israel is false

ill just add this quote from the guardian review

“There are fascinating details about the complicity of most Hollywood studios, for whom Germany was a big market. About 80 million Americans went to the movies once a week in the 30s, but when they were there they would hear nothing against the Nazis. In 1938, a poll asked Americans if they felt Jews were to blame, partly or entirely, for what was happening to them in Germany. Two-thirds of respondents said they were.”

[gay-jewish-bucky]

I'm so privileged to have been able to hear Estelle Laughlin speak about her childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto. She, like many remaining survivors, is in her 90s. Soon the survivors will be gone, and it will fall to us to keep their memories and stories alive, and it will fall to us to pass their memories and stories on to the generations who come after. Those of us alive right now are the final generations who will ever get to hear these stories first-hand, listen while you still can.

[valcaira]

It is Holocaust remembrance day. Let us all remember those who survived the Shoah and those who did not. Let us also remember the many survivors who are no longer with us today.

May their memory be a blessing.

Never again is now.