#tw:holocaust

[jinned]

is there anyway you can delete yuju from gfriend from your fic because gfriend is antisemitic & she sang the words “blow up like a holocaust” in a song

hey! i was unaware of the things going on surrounding gfriend (sowon in particular) and i apologize for the timing of my teaser. i will be changing that immediately and will be keeping a closer lookout for updates on the situation

[craby-bouquet]

“A camp to slowly die in.” 

The end of November 1944, less than a year before the end of world war 2, my great uncle, together with many more Dutch men, was arrested and forced to work in a camp. I’m not too sure why they were arrested but my family always told me it was because a bunch of German soldiers were killed and so, to get revenge, the Germans recruited innocent young men to work in horrible circumstances. 

My grandfather’s older brother, Anton, was forced to work in this nightmare camp, never to return home again. My grandpa used to tell me stories about him all the time, some of the few times he showed vulnerability, a tear in the corner of his eye whenever he spoke of him. My grandfather, whom rarely showed emotions, always teared up when he spoke about his eldest sibling. 

A bunch of his friends, whom were taken to the same camp and returned after the war ended, later told my great-grandmother, Anton had died from an unknown illness. 

Anton Molenaar was 19 when he died.

He was half a year older than I am today.

Why am I posting this on my Tumblr? Well, I recently found out there are people who say these events didn’t happen and I’m honestly shocked. So maybe if I give y’all ignorant people a name and a face and a story behind one of the victims, it might sink in. I think it is horrible that there are people out there who truly believe that there were no such camps. Millions of people died, either being gassed, from disease caused by the horrid circumstances, or being murder/ beaten to death by the German soldiers, and you pretend like that all didn’t happen. My grandfather was scarred for life, to have his brother taken away so suddenly, only for him to never return. He wasn’t even able to say goodbye. 

A young man, a man with a family, with friends, with a name and a face, who was perhaps younger than you are now, or only slightly older, lost his life together with so many others. And you still spread the lie that this didn’t happen. 

How dare you.

I might not have known my great-uncle, but we lost a beloved family member and we will never know what happened to him exactly. 

A young man, with a name, and a face, lost his life. Anton Molenaar, my dear great-uncle, know that even now, 80 years later, you are still so loved by your brothers and sisters still alive, and by their own children and grandchildren, too.

[laraimaustria]

Search for Meaning: Krakow day 2

As someone who studies psychology I am often required to theorize about the causes of human behavior and how we react to and deal with challenges in our lives. About a month ago the director of our school recommend we read Man's Search For Meaning by Austrian psychologist Victor Frankl who survived Auschwitz and went on to write about the psychological phases of concentration camp imprisonment and his own theory that man is driven not by primal urges but the search for a meaningful existence. It was an amazing book and a fantastic intro to what we saw today.

Today we started off with a tour of the castle hill here in Krakow, which was nice but I think I'm getting a little castled-out. Our tour guide was very nice though and gave us a lot of good information about the history of Krakow. After the tour we got some surprisingly good pizza for lunch and then got on the bus towards Auschwitz.

I didn't cry today. I thought I would, and I came close, but the experience of Auschwitz can't really be described as simply as "sad". It's a combination of sadness, horror, disgust, and vague feeling of unsettled incomprehension of the massive scale of the atrocities that were committed here. I don't want to sound like I'm trying to be poetic about this, because romanticism has no place here. It's just hard to convey such a complicated mix of emotions.

We met our guide at the entrance to the complex. The parking lot has a restaurant attached to it, which seems kind of distasteful if you think about it. But we followed our guide under the Arbeit Macht Frei sign and into Auschwitz I. This wasn't the extermination camp yet but the barracks where prisoners worked and we're forced to live, and that now make up the museum. The day was fittingly grey and gloomy, I think it would have been extremely unsettling to see it on a nice day. We walked through the museum full of pictures of prisoners arriving at the camp, pictures of prisoners in their uniforms, pictures of nearly starved children. The most hard-hitting exhibits were the rooms filled with the possessions that the prisoners brought with them to the camp. Thousands of suitcases, eyeglasses, shoes, bowls, hairbrushes. And an entire room just with hair. The closest I came to crying was in the room filled with children's shoes. We also got to see some of the rooms used for punishment where people were often forced to stand in the dark often four to a room built for one. Another unsettling moment was seeing the death wall where over 7,000 people were executed. The last thing we did before leaving the first camp was to walk through the only remaining gas chamber and crematorium. I don't think there are any words. I didn't linger for long.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the camp that people probably most often think of, which the large front entrance and railroad tracks. This was the extermination camp, and has been kept as close as possible to what it looked like the day it was liberated. Again, the sheer size is the most unsettling part, that these barracks were filled and filled again. We passed one of the train cars used for deportation, again I didn't linger long. It was beginning to be dusk and we had to hurry before the complex closed for the night, but we saw the inside of the barracks and then walked to the back of the complex to see the remains of the blown up gas chambers and crematorium. All that's left is charred rubble so it's hard to believe that these used to be buildings in which so many were murdered. The last thing we saw was the memorial, with plaques written in all the languages of the prisoners. In the fading light the place felt even more solemn.

People always ask how humans could have done this to each other, and there are plenty of explanations. But there's no justification for what happened to the 6 million people who died in the Holocaust. I'm not going to pretend like I'm having an original thought when I say that the only thing we can do now is honor the dead and prevent such tragedy from happening again. I didn't cry today, but I did learn about what happened in Auschwitz and about the human reaction to tragedy, which, as our guide told us, was the ultimate wish of those who survived that place. That was how they found meaning from the horror.

[totonafrica]

I don’t understand why

my white, christian acuaintances always want to bring up the argument that “Hitler was actually a good leader/talented politician.” I mean sure, it is true, but you are not bringing up a new, or fresh point, so you are just throwing around the name in order to seem... I don’t know, controversial?

Like everyone knows Hitler was a shit bag, and your point is not revolutionary, and I didn’t ask for this, I was having a chat about leadership in general/roadwork/fucking baby bunnies, and now I need to play edge-lorde-intellectual with you? No thanks

[ishouldhaveaspellforthis-blog]

On writing about Billy’s sexuality in the ‘80s.

Things that are important to note about LGBT+ issues in the ‘80s.

1. Differentiation of romantic and sexual orientation was not as commonly used. The term “demisexual” simply wasn’t used until relatively recently. Thus, despite the fact that my version of him might identify as homoromantic demisexual in a modern setting, he simply identifies as gay in the RP.

2. “Queer” was still generally considered a slur so I may refer to Billy (and myself) as queer, but he wouldn’t have reclaimed the term the ‘80s. “Homosexual” was also considered a less-than-positive term as well because it had pathological connotations until relatively recently, so I would imagine that Billy wouldn’t use it. RE: my Billy’s Filipino heritage, he would not identify with the term “bakla” because the term is generally associated with feminine-presenting AMAB people, even if it is used to describe gay men too. Billy is also very Americanized in the way that many first-generation Americans were during that time were so the term might not even be on his radar.

3. Billy is very lucky to have been born and raised in New York and to have the parents he does. In the ‘80s, New York had one of the most visible gay scenes in the world “A Chorus Line” debuted on Broadway in 1975 and I would imagine that Billy’s seen it. Even if the representation was relatively one-dimensional, representation was there. I based Rebecca’s story and personality on my Bubbe’s and my Bubbe’s experience as a holocaust survivor made her very very sensitive and opposed to any kind of profiling or bigotry. Even in the ‘80s, my Bubbe was very  accepting of any and all sexualities, so I’ve decided that Rebecca is too. The research I’ve done on the Manila Jewish community suggests that aside from American influence, there wasn’t particularly overt homophobia (read: what homophobia there is in the Philippines as a whole exists mostly because colonizers ruin everything) so I can’t imagine that Jeff would be too opposed. 

4. And finally, the elephant in the room here: AIDS. This was an era where if you were HIV+, you died and there was very little information about it. Some people were still calling it GRID. I play Billy as knowing that HIV is sexually and intravenously transmitted and that it’s common among gay men, but little else. That said, Billy is hopeless sweaty virgin nerd who has more of a wistful puppy-love approach to finding potential partners and he feels a personal responsibility to his parents not to do drugs (Rebecca probably had the “I didn’t survive the Nazis so that you could could waste your life with heroin!” talk with him before he even knew what heroin was) so he doesn’t consider himself to be someone who’s at risk. What few other gay people he might know probably were though, so he may have some trauma-by-association.

[deskstuff]

[the-red-church-receipts-blog]

Records of Apologetics

~To be added~

[niedobitek]

magda's relation to her roma culture post-holocaust.

Meta on: Magda + Roma culture post-1945

Immediately after liberation, it’s safe to presume that Magda would’ve been holding onto the shreds of her culture for dear life. It was all she had left of her parents, this deeply significant and personal attachment to the world in which she’d grown up. And to quantify that a little, up until 1936, her background was incredibly, textbook traditional. Which means for the first eight years of her life, that was the world she knew and obviously it was a very profound and significant facet of her core upbringing. (Her family travelled, they kept horses, she lived in a vardo, there was a huge sense of community etc.)

In a post-war environment however, that community didn’t exist. The close knit community she’d grown up with, had essentially died in the camps for being Romany. Which puts into perspective a huge sense of dichotomy really for how tied to her culture she wanted to be. From 1936 and her deportation to Marzahn, right up until 1944 and the Sonderkommando revolt, Magda had been told day in day out, that she was defective. That she and the other Roma, were vermin. That they weren’t worthy of life, respect, dignity or any of the other basic human rights they should’ve been afforded. She watched her people die, slow, painful deaths, and the SS neither batted an eyelid nor cared.  So for eight years (which is also as long as she’d been in the Roma community) she had it drilled into her, that she was bad.

Which kind of spawns this entire conflicting world view. In one breath she wants to be what she was born to be, and yet in the other, she would rather forsake her cultural identity and blend into the background. She doesn’t want to be the enemy. She doesn’t want to be the ink blot on somebody else’s otherwise pristine canvas - and ultimately being Roma, led to a lot of her own internalised self loathing, because that’s the mentality that had been ingrained into her.

Ultimately, though, her attachment to her parents was far stronger than the chokehold of the Nazi regime. Max taught her that much, when they were trying to build a new life, and slowly but surely, Magda fell back into old habits. She took on board the things that served as a comfort, the routine for preparing food, the very defined gender roles, the spirituality and birth customs etc, especially when she realised she was pregnant with Anya.

I would say the biggest test of faith, came in marrying Max. In marrying a gadjo she severed her cultural ties. She wouldn’t be accepted by the rest of her people (by traditional standards) and honestly, after a good couple of years with him as the best thing to ever happen to her, she was okay with that. If they didn’t want him, then that was their problem - SHE DID. And okay, he went through a bit of a phase of trying to adopt a new identity, to blend in with the Roma, so he could give her back this support network she was so sorely lacking, but she was happier without. She was happier with him and their little girl, and a kind of less traditional approach to what it meant to be Roma.

It’s not as if she completely eradicated her connection to it. She still observed a lot of rules, with regards to dress, and whatnot. She wore a diklo from the day they married and never looked back. She still followed the rules for what was and what wasn’t considered marimé, she still spoke Polska Roma and was sure to teach it to Anya - and I think she was happy with the sacrifice really. It didn’t make her any less tied to her culture to be cut off from the community, it just made her a lot more appreciative of the man she married and the fact he recognised the significance of what she’d done for him.

[tinkertonks]

Today marks 71 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. It’s a day regarded internationally as Holocaust Memorial Day, a day to honour and remember the men, women and children who suffered at the hands of Nazi regime. I won’t just cite the Jewish deaths here, but also those of the disabled, political dissidents, of gay and lesbians, of the Roma, of the Sinte, ethnic Poles, hell just about anyone that was deemed undesirable to the greater good.

Hate fosters hate, and while the world insists that it will never happen again, the political wheels currently in motion are already tiptoeing into dangerous water. Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims from America, Hungary’s persecution of the Roma, the worldwide treatment of displaced migrants, the growing inability to distinguish Judaism from Zionism, Russia’s homophobia, the Tory government’s move towards gentrification,  or even just the general international rhetoric of ‘You’re not like us, so we don’t want you.’

Anne Frank said it best, when she told us “What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.”

So today I implore the world to remember it’s not too distant past. To look at the path it lead us down, because once you’ve toppled down that rabbit hole, it’s a long hard climb to come back from. We’re supposed to be a civilised society. We’re supposed to have learnt from past mistakes. Yet here we are, in the 21st century dangerously close to watching history repeat.

George Santayana once said ‎"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

So remember. Remember and say it with me. ‘Never Again.’

[void-spells]

I just called a bunch of fuckers out in front of my entire history class for making jokes about the Holocaust I feel a little bit terrified but mostly really fucking proud of myself

[captaine-carter]

Holocaust

The thing about the holocaust that gets me, well one of the things, is how to some people today its a curiosity. They feel so far removed from it that they can say things like how cool it was that they had a wall of machine guns to prevent uprisings or talk about how the gallows and gas chambers were close together. My roommate has been to a concentration camp and she honestly got excited to see that place on an episode of twilight zone. So much so that she texted her grandmother about it . And to me it is so horrendous I can't stand to think about it. I have no want to know what it looked like or where things were, and yes those were my people but still. Or at least the fact that people don't understand why I get upset after talking about the holocaust, I like to hope that if I was not Jewish it would still be something that caused me to contemplate humanity and not just a tourist attraction I visited.

[coffeeandbowtiesrps]

When man will stop killing man, in the name of God, And nation will not lift weapons against nation. When it will be, I do not know, but Despite all the signs to the contrary. In the dawn of a Better World, I do believe.

The Action in the Ghetto of Rohatyn, March 1942 - Alexander Kimel

[niedobitek]

Remember that time when the fandom actually remembered who Anya Lehnsherr was?Remember that time, when they actually realised the significance of two emaciated holocaust survivors, reclaiming their lives, rebuilding what had been lost and ultimately finding ways to live again after so much death? Remember when Anya was the tangible embodiment of recovery? When her very existence was the living proof of just how far they’d come. When she was humanising, energising, the epitome of hope and everything they could achieve again. Remember when people understood how pivotal it was for two people - who were barely adults themselves, to suddenly venture down the rocky road of parenting? Not in their 30′s or 40′s. Not when they’d had a chance to live a little, or to grow into themselves. But when they were thrown headfirst into it, clueless and nervous but above all else - for her, they learnt to thrive.  Remember when Anya Lehnsherr mattered?  Fun fact: She still does. 

[magnetisedcatharsis]

Magda favours dresses and skirts due to an inherent need to be feminine. It's also one of the reasons she's so maternal, because in a traditional role, that's part of what femininity and womanhood means to her. As someone denied the ability to exercise her gender identity to it's full potential while in Auschwitz, it's become both a pathological and psychological need for her to be able to express it now.

[friedrichsteinkopf]

A cheerful, chatty, touchy-feely Nazi sympathizer

((Note: extremely inaccurate, opposite and out-of-character. Don’t take this seriously.))