#death camps

[my-midlife-crisis]

[mentalmeles]

This is horrifying in every sense of the word.

[secular-jew]

Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day

In memory of the six million Jewish men, women, the elderly and children who were starved, tortured and mass murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

Also remembering the millions of non-Jewish victims, Russian, Polish, Serbian, Roma etc. that were exterminated based upon Germany’s virulent genocidal racial policies.

Let's also remember that Islam also attempted to kill as many Jews as possible and partnered with Nazi Germany. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem went to Berlin and trained Islamic troops with the Nazis in order to kill Jews wherever they could find them in the indigenous Jewish homeland.

[reality-detective]

Think about it 🤔

[cavalierzee]

The Gaza Concentration Camp

If There Were Only Warning Signs.

Put Gazans In Concentration Camps, and Then Exterminate All Resistance.

Employing Hitleresque Methods and Terminology.

Zachary Foster

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dave Maass and Patrick Lay’s “Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis”

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

"The Emperor of Atlantis," is an opera written by two Nazi concentration camp inmates, the librettist Peter Kien and the composer Viktor Ullmann, while they were interned in Terezin, a show-camp in Czechoslovakia that housed numerous Jewish artists, who were encouraged to make and display their work as a way of proving to the rest of the world that Nazi camps were humane places.

Of course, it was all a sham. Like nearly all of Terezin's inmates, Kein and Ullmann were eventually shipped to Auschwitz to be murdered. "The Emperor" was never performed during their life, but the manuscript, written on scrounged paper (including the backs of other inmates Auschwitz transfer papers) survived.

In the decades since, "The Emperor" has been mounted a few times, with varying degrees of faithfulness. But those live performances were limited to the people who could attend them during their limited run. Now, a new graphic novel called Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis, brings the work to us all:

https://www.darkhorse.com/Blog/3726/berger-books-and-dark-horse-comics-present-death-s

Death Strikes was adapted by my EFF colleague Dave Maass, an investigator and muckraker and brilliant writer, who teamed up with illustrator Patrick Lay and character designer Ezra Rose (who worked from the Kein and Ullmann's original designs, which survived along with the score and libretto).

The tale is set in the mythical kingdom of Atlantis, where the reclusive emperor has been holed up in an armored tower for decades, directing a forever war, greeting each battlefield report with fresh orders, all the while carefully scheming to maintain his grip on power by prolonging the war footing among his people.

But the Emperor has a problem: he's won the war. Every enemy has fallen. Without endless war, his system of social control will shrivel and he will be vulnerable to his people. So the Emperor declares a new war of all against all, announcing that it is every citizen's duty to make war on their neighbors. Problem solved!

But the Emperor goes too far. In announcing his new war, he directs his messengers – drum-beating automata who march through the streets of Atlantic rapping out his edicts – to claim that Death himself has blessed this new war, and "when the final drum sounds, our old friend DEATH, our flag-bearer, will raise his sword in salute to our great future!"

For Death – a swordbearing skeleton in a soldier's greatcoat and shako – this is too much. The Emperor's endless wars have already tried Death's patience. Death brings mercy, not vengeance, and the endless killing has dismayed him. The Emperor's co-option drives him past the brink, and Death declares a strike, breaking his sword and announcing that henceforth, no one will die.

Needless to say, this puts a crimp in the Emperor's all-out war plan. People get shot and stabbed and drowned and poisoned, but they don't die. They just hang around, embarrassingly alive (there's a great comic subplot of the inability of the Emperor's executioners to kill a captured assassin).

The Emperor will not be denied. He embarks upon a war of wills with Death, to see who will give in first. The surreal tale plays out among the people of Atlantis, the living and the undead, as they struggle to fight a war where no one can die. The tale cuts between these people, the Emperor, and Death, who is in company with Life, a sad harlequin who is even more demoralized than Death by the Emperor's long war.

What follows is a tale of revolution and love and hope snatched from despair.

Maass discovered "The Emperor" through a bargain bin CD of "degenerate music" he found in a suburban Best Buy in the 1990s, which was accompanied by illustrations by Art Spiegelman:

https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-music-survives%21-degenerate-music-music-suppressed-by-the-third-reich-mw0000711660

Maass found a six-panel cartoon Kein drew "expressing his frustration with the evolution of his libretto." Over the years, Maass turned this little strip over and over in his head, until he found himself travelling to Prague with Lay, where they were able to handle the surviving manuscript pages. After consulting with experts all over the world, Maass and Lay and their collaborators created this extraordinary graphic novel, updating it, queering it, and lavishly illustrating it.

While this is clearly an adaptation, Kein and Ullmann's spirit of creativity, courage, and bittersweet creative foment shines through. It's a beautiful book, snatched from death itself.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/23/peter-kien-viktor-ullmann/#terezín

[lets-make-light-now]

Boycott is forever!

There is

no redemption from Genocide!

Germany has proven it, after 80 years of abstinence they are back with a vengeance. Arming Israel backing it's genocide financial and starving Palestinans to Death. Like back then in Auschwitz, only there is no help Coming this time

[aitiuilghrain]

Ay, Tone

[todaysjewishholiday]

25 Menachem Av 5784 (28-29 August 2024)

Due to Anne Frank’s diary, the Frank family and their associates are among the best known victims of the Nazi regime. But the focus is almost always on the two years of their life that were spent in hiding in the upper chambers of Otto Frank’s workplace. That closed off existence was an anomaly that has little to do with the broader European Jewish experience of the Shoah. Examining the trajectory of the Frank’s life before and after their time in the Annex reveals more about how vulnerable even the most wealthy European Jews were in the face of Nazi targeting and the widespread antisemitism and apathy of other nations that could have provided refuge.

Otto and Edith Frank were prosperous German Jews from culturally integrated but still religiously practicing families in the Liberal (aka Reform) Movement. Otto had served in the German Imperial Army in the so-called “War to End All Wars” and then served as a bank manager and businessman. Edith was the heiress to a moderate industrial fortune. They were members of a well-established German Jewish middle class that was the envy of Jews across all the rest of Europe.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Otto Frank immediately recognized the danger, and moved his family to the Netherlands. Through family connections, he was able to open a Dutch branch of Opekta, a company that specialized in pectin and spices for canning.

The Franks were far from the only German emigres in Amsterdam’s Jewish community during those years. So many had seen the danger, but thought that across one border would be secure enough.

As the years passed, the Franks continued to hear from relatives in Germany as the situation became more and more dire. As it became clear that the Nazis wouldn’t be contained by Germany’s border, Otto began applying for visas elsewhere. The Franks were financially self-supporting, well educated, and in good health. The only thing standing in their way as potential immigrants was their Jewishness. Several years of applications proved fruitless.

The Nazis invaded the Netherlands and occupied the nation. Otto was forced to sell his businesses, the girls were kicked out of school. Rumors of the concentration camps spread. Otto continued to seek some route of escape. None was available. His former employees were eager to find some way to help— they saw the injustice of the situation keenly and were close personal friends of the Franks. But there were obvious and massive dangers to attempting to remain hidden in the Netherlands under Nazi rule. Otto continued to grasp for an alternative until the day the family received a summons to send their elder daughter, Margot, for forced labor in Germany. It is then that they sprung the plan Otto had come up with along with a small circle of Opekta employees to hide the family in the upper floors of the company’s offices. Everybody involved knew that to participate was too risk murder at the hands of the Nazi occupiers and betrayal by Dutch collaborators. But they had no other available options. The Franks had to travel on foot for several miles across the city— Jews had already been banned from traveling on Dutch public transportation by the Nazis. They left their apartment in disarray with notes suggesting a last minute dash for the Swiss border in the hopes of throwing the authorities off their scent.

Just over two years after their disappearance behind the walls of Otto’s office, the Franks found their refuge breached by the SS on the 25th of Av 5704 and they were placed first in a Nazi jail and then transported to Auschwitz. There they experienced every horror of life in the camps. Edith, Margot, and Anne all died within the next year, and Otto was the family’s sole survivor.

[naipan]

On January 27, 1945, the extermination camp #Auschwitz was liberated. The Nazis clearly had to be defeated militarily and their regime had to be eliminated. The Holocaust Remembrance Day teaches: •Never again• can only mean •Never again defenseless•, which is also why Israel must exist, the 7.10.23 warns. @SchmalleBlogger

[immaculatasknight]

Unresolved atrocities

[ukdamo]

The Survivor

Primo Levi

Once more he sees his companions' faces

Livid in the first faint light,

Gray with cement dust,

Nebulous in the mist,

Tinged with death in their uneasy sleep.

At night, under the heavy burden

Of their dreams, their jaws move,

Chewing a non-existant turnip.

'Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people,

Go away. I haven't dispossessed anyone,

Haven't usurped anyone's bread.

No one died in my place. No one.

Go back into your mist.

It's not my fault if I live and breathe,

Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.'

[secular-jew]

This is Ottla Kafka, originally from Prague Czechoslovakia. She was the youngest and most favorite sister of iconic author Franz Kafka. The 2 were close confidants.

Ottla was first sent to the Terezin Ghetto in Czechoslovakia and then to Auschwitz, where she was murdered upon arrival on 7 Oct 1943.

[cylonalyna]

Detention facility. So... It's concentration camps.

Where have I seen it before? Hmmm....

Concentration camp.

They built a concentration camp.

I don't think words can describe what this other than genocide.

[cavalierzee]

What We Did To Gazans At Sde Teiman