#tw: Shoah

[laineystein]

Spending my day watching We Were The Lucky Ones and wow. Difficult but powerful and well done. 10/10. Do recommend.

[burnbrighterthanever]

magneto + six million germans (nakam)

[voidingintotheshout]

John Oliver on the Israel-Hamas War

I love this. Here are my favorite takes so far. Finding out that Kmart Australia needed to pull a bunch of decorative ham bags (I take pride in myself as a Muslim, that I did not know that a decorative handbag was a thing) because the messaging on the bag seemed like they were supporting a terrorist organization. With a ham bag.

The absolute dog shit take from American representative Mast, creating no daylight between Hamas and actual Palestinian citizens, and going so far as to say that the average Palestinian citizen is in no way different than a Nazi. I know this is a dog shit take because I’ve heard from a fair number of Jews on this, and I’ve never even heard Jews make this comment because of obvious reasons. Some Jews lived through the Shoah and they would not be so lighthearted about making a Nazi comparison.

I also learned that Gaza elected Hamas in 2006 when they were positioning themselves as the more moderate party, and they only ended up revealing how extremist they were after the fact. Also that they have not had any elections since 2006 and many, if not most, Palestinians do not support Hamas, but they have no way to get them out of power anymore.

Also, the obvious that most Israelis don’t like Benjamin Netanyahu.

I would disagree respectfully with John Oliver, when he seems to imply that all of the lack of food and water that Palestinians in Gaza have is due to Israel. He doesn’t say it out right but he does imply it. From what I’ve gathered, Hamas has chosen to use the resources of Gaza towards terrorism, and not towards taking care of their own people, and they are one of the most responsible in terms of the poverty in Gaza.

[amaditalks]

What if the Nazis had existed but their plans never came to a violent fruition? What if the disabled children stolen from their families were saved before they were killed? What if they grew up with an enmity, and a perfectly reasonable grudge against everybody who was happy to become a Nazi because they wanted the pride of Germany to be restored? What if they grew up with a score to settle with everyone who gleefully parroted eugenicist ideology?

What if the Nazis were stopped after they started trying to persecute the LGBTQ community but before they destroyed Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute?

What if the leaders of the Reich were found in possession of all of their plans for genocide before they started building camps or ghettoizing or invading, and all of them, right down to the filth with the ugly facial hair, were put on trial for their crimes, found guilty, and they all publicly dangled from the gallows?

If you want to talk about what if scenarios around World War II and the Nazis, if you want to create a fictive conflict that would play out for decades right up to the modern day, try that one on for size. The interesting question is never “what if the ‘bad guys’ had won?” the interesting question is “what if the persecuted had the opportunity for real and meaningful justice?“

being a jew studying preholocaust european jewish history is just *mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns-*

[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.

[sayruq]

[voidingintotheshout]

Just so people know where I stand. I 100% know that the Holocaust happened and it was an evil thing done by horrible people to the Jews and there were a lot of non-Nazis in the allied governments that actively prevent the Jews from going to safety. What happened to the Jews during World War II was evil and monstrous. When I say, never again, I fucking mean it. No group should have to live through that. I can’t even conceive of the amount of collective PTSD you would have after your entire people had to go through something like that. For me, if someone denies the Holocaust, even as a joke, I’m not interested in talking to them any further. I just walk away. 

So, about 5 days back YouGov released poll results for a very comprehensive public opinion poll they did for the US, which you can see here: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_tT4jyzG.pdf The poll itself asks about a lot of different topics, but the section I wanna focus on here is the section between pages 96 to 112, which focuses on Antisemitism and Israel. Most polls with questions like these tended to only survey around 100~200 people, and had really depressing results, so I was really hoping going into this study that we'd see some more cheerful statistics. Maybe those small sample sizes caused some bias, I dunno. Maybe the numbers were off.

I kept being disappointed by how many people denied the holocaust in those studies. I didn't want to believe those numbers were real, quite frankly.

Well.

Of a poll of 1500 people, give or take, 7% say the holocaust is a myth, with another 16% saying they "don't know" whether it is or isn't, with people in the 18-29 age group having even more alarming numbers than that: 20% think the holocaust is a myth, and 30% that they don't know. Conversely, in the 65+ age group, not a single responder denies the holocaust.

If you take this poll as being representative, then out of 331.9 million people living in the US, that gives us about 23.2 million people (rounded down) in the US alone who think the holocaust did not happen.

For reference, there are only 16.2 million jews in the entire world, with 7.1~ million of them in Israel.

Turns out the numbers I saw previously were representative.

Fuck, dude.

[justasillylad]

“make auschwitz jewish again”

there are ACTUAL OUT AND PROUD NAZIS on this website. and literally nobody but the jews are talking about it.

let me repeat— there are people who think every jewish person or the majority of them deserve to DIE.

there are fucking nazis on this website

[shalom-iamcominghome]

If anyone is interested, please feel free to light a digital candle through Illuminate. I got a name a few years back, and it's a name I won't forget. May every name we have found be a blessing. May their names never be forgotten. May we never forget.

Never again means now.

[applesauce42069]

Just saw someone say that Hitler was a Zionist.

No he was not. He did not send us to have sovereignty in our ancestral homeland he sent us to die in gas chambers. What is wrong with you.

[laineystein]

If this is weird you don’t have to answer it but I was wondering what sparked your interest in WW2? Not to say that Jews can’t like WW2 I just feel like it’s not common and it’s always fascinated me a bit especially because I think you said once that you have shoah survivors in your family? again if this is weird you can ignore it and I apologize lol

Not weird!

Have I answered this before? I feel like I have. But I’m happy to share again!

I am the grandchild of two Shoah survivors. I grew up very angry at the goy world and I didn’t understand how the entire world had turned a blind eye to the atrocities of the Holocaust and everything that led up to it. It was mind boggling to me that other people (goyim) were living lives completely separate from this genocide. And I didn’t have stories about non-Jews during this time. Until I was 21 I really didn’t have much interaction with the goy world at all. So I started reading about the war and what was going on in their world at that time. I was still angry, maybe even more so, but it gave my anger even more context. And I felt kind of valid in my anger…which I can’t really explain and I feel like I’m not articulating it properly here. Being the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors entitles me to anger and a million other emotions; knowing what happened surrounding that horrible time gave my emotions confidence. Nobody could ever say I didn’t understand what was going on. People *did* turn a blind eye to the growing antisemitism in Europe. People did know about the camps and said nothing. The world was fighting a different war than my family and my tribe and my family and my tribe would forever be fighting a different war, even when this particular war ended.

More simply - in general, I love history. It fascinates me. I love knowledge and learning. I think the knowledge that makes you uncomfortable is the knowledge you really need to learn because that’s the world and some aspects of it are never going to change. And a lot of it still makes me angry but when I compartmentalize it, some of it is courageous and inspiring and I think a lot of people were backed into a corner and thought they were doing the right thing. (I’m referring to 18 year old Allied soldiers who thought they were fighting for their country but just ended up watching their friends die and living in horrible conditions for months. I’m not talking about Nazis. Fuck Nazis.)

Regarding BoB - that premiered right around 9/11. And for 24+ hours I thought my parents were dead so when they finally got home, my dad sat down to watch it (he loves Spielberg) and with everything going on, he felt bad telling me I couldn’t watch it too. It was probably not appropriate for an 11 year old (read: it was NOT appropriate for an 11 year old). But he let me watch the entire thing with him. And he, the son of Holocaust survivors who knows far more about what my grandparents went through than I do or ever will, thought the Shoah episode was…fair. He got me the box set (it was before I left for undergrad - it was 5 VHS tapes and I actually put it in my carry on). I ended up watching it anytime my life was stressful. Midterms and finals. Sleepless nights in the army - I made my entire team watch it and they actually liked it. I watched it a lot in med school because I was really fucking miserable and had no friends so I just spent a lot of time in my apartment by myself. It was just a weird comfort watch when my life was chaos - but I almost always skip episode 8 because again: compartmentalizing.

The more I talk about this the more I realize how weird this is (my hyperfixation, not your question) but whatever.

Tachles there ya go 🙃

[burnbrighterthanever]

a.x.e. judgement day, kieron gillen // full spectrum resistance part one, aric mcbay // the butcher's sher, daniel kahn and the painted bird // unknown // nice people made the best nazis, naomi shulman // the book thief, marcus zusak // the butcher's sher, daniel kahn and the painted bird // incredible tails aka. rosencrantz and guilderstern in space, bluemeany // powers of x, jonathan hickman // carpe jugulum, terry pratchett

[voidingintotheshout]

Regarding the Shoah and the name Waldsee.

I’m reading about the shoah at the moment and how dark and horrible it was and I felt like I would reblog this article because this name doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page and I don’t know if a lot of people know about this aspect of the shoah so I thought I would point it out. Whenever Jews would ask where these transports were taking them, they were always told they were going to Am Waldsee. They were forced to write postcards to family saying that they were in this place on the Swiss border, and that they were happy. There was even a fake Nazi stamps from this place to cover their tracks. There’s a lengthy quote by Miklós Nyiszli about this in the book I’m reading. It’s very grim. It’s tough reading, but I felt like in this era of antisemitism. I owed it to the Jewish people to know they’re suffering, even if it’s just reading about it in the book. 

[chanaleah]

"Seems like Jews didn't learn any lessons from the Holocaust!"

We did. We learned a very important lesson.

We learned that we are not safe without a state.

[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

[koenji]

via via_maris (on ig):

In 1945 in Berlin, legendary LIFE Magazine photographer Robert Capa documented the first Rosh Hashanah service held in the city since 1938 at Fraenkelufer, a synagogue that the U.S. Army had helped restore after the Nazis torched it. The text reads:

'This year, for the first time since 1938 when the Nazis destroyed Jewish synagogues, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, was celebrated in a Berlin synagogue. Among the 500 worshipers who gathered for the services at sundown on Sept 7. were American and Russian soldiers who prayed together with the relatively few remaining Jews of Berlin. The synagogue, once burned by Nazis, had been repaired, re-painted and refitted with the aid of the U.S. Army.

The honor of holding the Torah or Sacred Scroll (above) during the ceremony was bestowed upon Pfc Werner Nathan, of Newark, N.J. The scroll had been hidden from the Nazis in an underground safe. Their freedom to worship restored once again, the German Jews prayed for a new world. "We are still in the dark," intoned the rabbi. "We are between two doors. We have opened and passed through only one. I ask God where we shall go from here."'