#yizkor

[divinum-pacis]

People gather for Yizkor, a Jewish prayer service for the dead, to demand a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, on Yom Kippur in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Saturday, Oct. 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

[queenwille]

יִזְכֹּר עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶת בָּנָיו וּבְנוֹתָיו הַנֶּאֱמָנִים וְהָאַמִּיצִים,

חַיָּלֵי צְבָא הַהֲגָנָה לְיִשְׂרָאֵל,

וְכָל לוֹחֲמֵי הַמַּחְתָּרוֹת וַחֲטִיבוֹת הַלּוֹחֲמִים בְּמַעַרְכוֹת הָעָם,

וְאַנְשֵי קְהִלּוֹת הַמּוֹדִיעִין, הַבִּטָּחוֹן, הַמִּשְׁטָרָה וְשֵׁרוּת בָּתֵּי הַסֹּהַר,

אֲשֶׁר חֵרְפוּ נַפְשָׁם בַּמִּלְחָמָה עַל תְּקוּמַת יִשְׂרָאֵל,

וְכָל מִי שֶׁנִּרְצְחוּ בָּאָרֶץ וּמִחוּצָה לָהּ בִּידֵי מְרַצְּחִים מֵאִרְגּוּנֵי הַטֵּרוֹר.

יִזְכֹּר יִשְׂרָאֵל וְיִתְבָּרַךְ בְּזַרְעוֹ וְיֶאֱבַל עַל זִיו הָעֲלוּמִים

וְחֶמְדַּת הַגְּבוּרָה וּקְדֻשַּׁת הָרָצוֹן וּמְסִירוּת הַנֶּפֶשׁ

שֶׁל הַנִּסְפִּים בַּמַּעֲרָכָה הַכְּבֵדָה.

יִהְיוּ חַלְלֵי מַעַרְכוֹת יִשְׂרָאֵל עֲטוּרֵי הַנִּצָּחוֹן

חֲתוּמִים בְּלֵב יִשְֹרָאֵל לְדֹר דֹּר.

[angryjewishcockroach]

My synagogue has a Torah that survived the Holocaust; while the Torah survived, the community it belonged to didn't, so we put them in our Yizkor book and remember them every year on Yom Kippur 💙

[psychologeek]

Bleeding Memories

Today is Yom Ha'Shoah (Holocaust Day).

And I wrote something (tw: holocaust. Mention of dead ppl *including kids* , and their memory.)

You're five years old, and your Ballet-class dance to a voice singing: "wait until you grow up, you were often told/A tall man and a short woman/ If you won't eat, you'll never grow up/Good boy leave an empty dish" (It would take years before you fully understand that). You are seven, and your mom won't let you read That Book. (You take it when she isn't home, read about death and darkness and hope). You read a lot during the next years. (It's written in your DNA). There's a siren and you think about People turn to numbers Numbers turn to bodies Bodies turn to ashes (to ashes). (You never really cry). It doesn't matter that your family already been here when it happened (In the book of people in your family, keeping records of ten generations, there are chapters thin as paper, summarised: "Fruma, 1940-1943, Auschwitz" ; "David, 1915-?, Trablinka" ; "unknown, 3 daughters of-" (Do you know their names? Do you remember?)

My great-grandmother To her dieing day, Never believed her sister is dead "She was an award-winning swimmer!", She claimed. (Or so they said) What difference can that make With two children? It's a familiar story: overcrowded ship meets a direct bomb. Old, laconic papers filled with names, ages, a description, maybe- (Don't forget) "Victiom's first name (also nickname): Adele. ||Approx. age at death: 5|| Relationship to the victim (family/other): Other (you fill the papers for your family and friends. You fill it for the people you know knew. You fill it for the woman who laid next to you in the cold cabin, who cried as she told you about her daughter. You fill one for the daughter, too, even if all you can put is "Girl, daughter of Esther, approx. age at death: 4, Dachao". "I had a cousin, she had 5 children. I can't remember the names" "Name: Her Father's name was David? Or Dov?" "There was a family. I don't remember their names. But they lived in the apartment next to mine when-" (Remember) In 2017 my parents spent a vication in Slovakia. The Airbnb owner was excited to hear they are jews, and had planty of helpful advices: "Oh, you're Jewish? So, you're probably going to visit Auschwitz?" When I was in 11th grade, I didn't go to the Poland Journey. My mother did go. There are prime locations you must see- The children's forest, in Tarnow. (700 Jews returned, after- Or tried. They were harassed away. No one left now. It's 100 less then the amount of kids' skeletons, laying in the woods). 2023, a Tumblr post says "I support Jews, this is a safe place" get the following replies: "Heil Hitler" "Seig Heil" "No thank I no like jews" "The first holocaust happened in Africa. What happened to Jews was just why white on white violence. Who cares" ... They are right. Who cares?

It's about the need to feel safe - but can you? It's about a blood stained history, where we can't even count or name all the times our people were butchered and slaughtered. (And we've just been through Passover) It's about a long list of names and dates and deaths. (Not even mention my personal list of names and faces. Just to name a few: Shalhevet, Hadas, Efrat, Eyal, Gilad, Naftali-) It's about generational trauma, written in our DNA (Hide. Run. Live). It's about 1943 Jewish in (not yet) Israel making plans what to do if (when) Rommel will arrive [where will you run?], It's the 1950-60s and european being called weak, and "why didn't you fight?" ( Why did you go like lamb to the slaughter?). It's the 60-70s, and North-African being told "you're lying" when talking about concentration camps and forced workers in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria ("But my MOTHER was there!") It's about everyone we forgot - because everyone who ever knew them is gone. (It's about the remains: One-from-town, two-from-family, a cinder saved from the fire). It's about remembering, Remember and never forget. Who cares? (I do)

[palmtreepalmtree]

Some random thoughts on this fast day:

Services were very bleak today, even though the subject of the sermon was 'love.' Things have been pretty traumatic in the Jewish community the last year.

I'm desperate to break fast, but I don't feel like seeing my cousin's in-laws right now (the hosts). Happy to see the rest of my family though.

I am watching Bad Sisters and I have never felt as strongly like I want to reach through the screen and murder this brother-in-law myself. That's some good writing.

I have such a bad headache from fasting. Not sure why I still fast, but I guess it just feels weird not to.

Thanks everyone who responded to that weird sparkling water thing. It made me laugh.

Better get ready for break fast.

[linnaealyn]

[childofeberron]

very brave of me to extend a hand and something that's ""mine"" to someone who has historically not respected me or the things i care about. very demure very mindful

[herrlichersonnigertag]

I love waking up on Yom Kippur morning with an agonizing migraine that doesn’t respond to medication and lying in the dark for twelve hours and missing yizkor and neilah. It’s great 👍

[yiddish-shmues]

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[pomegranateandhoney]

Just added Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur service information to my shared Google calendar w/my partner -- and realize this year I will be bringing my son 😭🥰 with me to services.

I couldn't help but remember some years back, going to shabbat services with my then-girlfriend, watching one of the parents with his son leading kiddush. Back then I still had a deep-seated belief that I would never get to have children, which is a completely different story -- but it would always make me just a little teary with longing to see tiny hands and hear little voices saying our prayers.

Here I am now, years later, typing this as my son sleeps in the bassinet across from me. He is still so small, he still doesn't really perceive my prayers for him, still doesn't really even comprehend that he's a separate entity from me -- but in October, I'll bring him to the synagogue to begin the new year, a part of my own little family and our larger Jewish family. We'll say Yizkor for his grandfathers. So many firsts, so many new things.

So many blessings.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה, יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ, מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה.

[girlactionfigure]

The holiday of Sukkot is followed by an independent holiday called Shemini Atzeret.

In Israel, this is a one-day holiday; in the Diaspora it is a two-day holiday, and the second day is known as Simchat Torah.

This holiday is characterized by utterly unbridled joy, which surpasses even the joy of Sukkot. The joy reaches its climax on Simchat Torah, when we celebrate the conclusion—and restart—of the annual Torah-reading cycle.

The special joy of this holiday celebrates the conclusion—and restart—of the annual Torah-reading cycle.

These two days constitute a major holiday, when most forms of work are prohibited. On the preceding nights, women and girls light candles, reciting the appropriate blessings, and we enjoy nightly and daily festive meals, accompanied by kiddush. We don’t go to work, drive, write, or switch on or off electric devices. We are permitted to cook and to carry outdoors (unless it is also Shabbat).

The first day, Shemini Atzeret, features the prayer for rain, officially commemorating the start of the Mediterranean (i.e., Israeli) rainy season, and the Yizkor (prayer supplicating G‑d to remember the souls of the departed).

We no longer take the Four Kinds, and we no longer mention Sukkot in the day’s prayers; in the Diaspora, however, we do still eat in the sukkah (but without reciting the blessing on it).

The highlight of the second day, Simchat Torah (“The Joy of the Torah”), is the hakafot, held on both the eve and the morning of Simchat Torah, in which we march and dance with the Torah scrolls around the reading table in the synagogue. (In many synagogues, hakafot are conducted also on the eve of Shemini Atzeret.)

On this joyous day when we conclude the Torah, it is customary for every man to take part in the celebration by receiving an aliyah. The children, too, receive an aliyah!

After the final aliyah of the Torah, we immediately begin a new cycle from the beginning of Genesis (from a second Torah scroll); this is because as soon as we conclude studying the Torah, G‑d’s infinite wisdom, on one level, we immediately start again, this time to discover new and loftier interpretations.

(In the Land of Israel, the celebration and customs of these two days are compressed into one day.)

[shalom-iamcominghome]

Service Leaders: It's customary for people whose parents are still alive to leave for Yizkor, so-

Me:

[casavanse]

I read a book a Holocaust survivor wrote, about his experience in the concentration camps. I read about his suffering. I read about the apathy of the others around.

And I read, and I wonder, why?

I stand during the minute of silence. My nose itches, and I think about the people that were too hungry to move. Someone coughs.

And I think, and I wonder, why?

I sit in the sports hall near my school. There's a ceremony. A teacher reads the Yizkor. The students read their texts. Their words are hollow, there's no feeling to it. I drift off.

And I hear, and I wonder, why?

The ceremony is over. Students walk back to their classes, and so am I. They talk around me. I hear them laugh.

I don't talk. I don't laugh. I sit in the corner, staring at my phone. I think of the things I have to do later. I want to sleep.

I don't feel. And I wonder,

why?

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Yizkor, 1943 by Rachel Auerbach

I saw a flood once in the mountains. Wooden huts, torn from their foundations, were carried above the raging waters. One could still see lighted lamps in them; and men, women and children were tied to the ceiling beams. Other huts were empty inside, but one could see a tangle of arms waving from the roof, like branches blowing in the wind waving desperately toward heaven, toward the river banks for help. At a distance, one could see mouths gaping, but one could not hear the cries because the roar of the waters drowned out everything. And that’s how the Jewish masses flowed to their destruction at the time of the deportations. Sinking as helplessly into the deluge of destruction.

And if, for even one of the days of my life, I should forget how I saw you then, my people, desperate and confused, de­livered over to extinction, may all knowledge of me be forgot­ten and my name be cursed like that of those traitors who are unworthy to share your pain.

Every instinct in the mass is revealed, entangled, exposed. All feelings churning, feverish to the core. Lashed by hundreds of whips of unreasoning activity. Hundreds of deceptive or ridiculous schemes of rescue. And at the other pole, a yielding to the inevitable, a gravitation toward mass death that is no less substantial than the gravitation toward life. Sometimes the two antipodes followed each other in the same being.

Who can render the stages of the dying of a people? Only the shudder of pity for one’s self and for others. And again il­lusion: waiting for the chance miracle. The insane smile of hope in the eyes of the incurable patient. Ghastly reflections of color on the yellowed face of one who is condemned to death.

Condemned to death. Who could—who wished to understand such a thing? And who could have expected such a decree against the mass? Against such low branches, such simple Jews. The lowly plants of the world. The sorts of people who would have lived out their lives without ever picking a quarrel with the righteous—or even the unrighteous—of this world.

How could such people have been prepared to die in a gas chamber? The sorts of people who were terrified of a dentist’s chair, who turned pale at the pulling of a tooth.

And what of them ... the little children?

The little ones, and those smaller still who not long ago were to be seen in the arms of their mothers, smiling at a bird or at a sunbeam. Prattling at strangers in the streetcar. Who still played “patty-cake” or cried “giddyup” waving their tiny hands in the air. Or called, “Papa.” O, unrecognizable world in which these children and their mothers are gone. “Giddyup.”

Even the sweetest ones: the two- and three-year-olds who seemed like newly hatched chicks tottering about on their weak legs. And even the slightly larger ones who could already talk. Who endlessly asked about the meanings of words. For whom whatever they learned was always brand new. Five-year-olds. And six-year-olds. And those who were older still—their eyes wide with curiosity about the whole world. And those older still whose eyes were already veiled by the mists of their ap­proaching ripeness. Boys who, in their games, were readying themselves for achievements yet to come.

Girls who still nursed their dolls off in corners. Who wore ribbons in their hair; girls, like sparrows, leaping about in courtyards and on garden paths. And those who looked like buds more than half opened. The kind to whose cheeks the very first wind of summer seems to have given its first glowing caress. Girls of eleven, twelve, thirteen with the faces of angels. Playful as kittens. Smiling May blossoms. And those who have nearly bloomed: the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. The Sarahs, the Rebeccahs, the Leahs of the Bible, their names recast into Polish. Their eyes blue and gray and green under brows such as one sees on the frescoes unearthed in Babylon and Egypt. Slender young frauleins from the wells of Hebron. Jungfraus from Evangelia. Foreign concubines of Jewish patriarchs; desert maidens with flaring nostrils, their hair in ringlets, dark com­plected but turned pale by passion. Spanish daughters, friends of Hebrew poets of the Middle Ages. Dreamy flowers bent over mirroring pools. And opposite them? Delicate blondes in whom Hebrew passion is interwoven with Slavic cheerfulness. And the even-brighter flaxen-haired peasants, broad-hipped women, as simple as black bread, or as a shirt on the body of the folk.

It was an uncanny abundance of beauty of that generation growing up under the gray flag of ghetto poverty and mass hunger. Why was it that we were not struck by this as a portent of evil? Why was it that we did not understand that this blos­soming implied its own end?

It was these, and such as these, who went into the abyss— our beautiful daughters. These were the ones who were plucked and torn to bits.

And where are the Jewish young men? Earnest and serious; passionate as high-bred horses, chomping at the bit, eager to race. The young workers, the halutsim, Jewish students avid for study, for sports, for politics. World improvers and flag bearers of every revolution. Youths whose passion made them ready to fill the prison cells of all the world. And many were tortured in camps even before the mass murder began. And where are the other youths, simpler than they—the earthen roots of a scat­tered people, the very essence of sobriety countering the decay of idealism at the trunk. Young men with ebullient spirits, their heads lowered like those of bulls against the decree spoken against our people.

And pious Jews in black gabardines, looking like priests in their medieval garb. Jews who were rabbis, teachers who wanted to transform our earthly life into a long study of Torah and prayer to God. They were the first to feel the scorn of the butcher. Their constant talk of martyrdom turned out not to be mere empty words.

And still other Jews. Broad shouldered, deep voiced, with powerful hands and hearts. Artisans, workers. Wagon drivers, porters. Jews who, with a blow of their fists, could floor any hooligan who dared enter into their neighborhoods.

Where were you when your wives and children, when your old fathers and mothers were taken away? What happened to make you run off like cattle stampeded by fire? Was there no one to give you some purpose in the confusion? You were swept away in the flood, together with those who were weak.

And you sly and cunning merchants, philanthropists in your short fur coats and caps. How was it that you didn’t catch on to the murderous swindle? Fathers and mothers of families; you, in Warsaw. Stout women merchants with proud faces ra­diating intelligence above your three chins, standing in your shops behind counters heaped with mountains of goods.

And you other mothers. Overworked peddler women and market stall keepers. Disheveled and as anxious about your children as irritable setting hens when they flap their wings. And other fathers, already unhorsed, as it were. Selling sweets from their wobbling tables in the days of the ghetto.

What madness is it that drives one to list the various kinds of Jews who were destroyed?

Grandfathers and grandmothers with an abundance of grandchildren. With hands like withered leaves, their heads white. Who already trembled at the latter end of their days. They were not destined simply to decline wearily into their graves like rest-­seeking souls, like the sun sinking wearily into the ocean’s waves. No. It was decreed that before they died they would get to see the destruction of all that they had begotten, of all that they had built.

The decree against the children and the aged was more complete and more terrible than any.

Those who counted and those who counted for less. Those with aptitudes developed carefully over countless generations. Incom­parable talents, richly endowed with wisdom and professional skill: doctors, professors, musicians, painters, architects. And Jewish craftsmen, tailors—famous and sought after; Jewish watchmakers in whom gentiles had confidence. Jewish cabinet­makers, printers, bakers. The great proletariat of Warsaw. Or shall I console myself with the fact that, for the most part, you man­aged to die of hunger and need in the ghetto before the expulsion?

Ah, the ways of Warsaw—the black soil of Jewish Warsaw.

My heart weeps even for the pettiest thief on Krochmalna Street, even for the worst of the knife wielders of narrow Mila, because even they were killed for being Jewish. Anointed and purified in the brotherhood of death.

Ah, where are you, petty thieves of Warsaw, you illegal street vendors and sellers of rotten apples? And you, the more harmful folk—members of great gangs who held their own courts, who supported their own synagogues in the Days of Awe, who conducted festive funerals, and who gave alms like the most prosperous burghers.

Ah, the mad folk of the Jewish street! Disordered sooth­sayers in a time of war.

Ah, bagel sellers on winter evenings.

Ah, poverty-stricken children of the ghetto. Ghetto peddlers, ghetto smugglers supporting their families, loyal and courageous to the end. Ah, the poor barefoot boys moving through the autumn mire with their boxes of cigarettes: “Ciga­rettes! Cigarettes! Matches! Matches!” The voice of the tiny cigarette seller crying his wares on the corner of Leszno and Karmelicka Streets still rings in my ears.

Where are you, my boy? What have they done to you? Reels from the unfinished and still-unplayed preexpulsion film The Singing Ghetto wind and rewind in my memory. Even the dead sang in that film. They drummed with their swollen feet as they begged: “Money, ah money, Money is the best thing there is.”

There was no power on earth, no calamity that could inter­fere with their quarrelsome presence in that Jewish street. Until there came that Day of Curses—a day that was entirely night.

Hitler finally achieved his greatest ambition of the war. And finally, his dreadful enemy was defeated and fell: that little boy on the comer of Leszno and Karmelicka Streets, of Smocza and Nowolipie, of Dzika Street. The weapons of the women peddlers reached to every market square.

What luxury! They stopped tearing at their own throats from morning until night. They stopped snatching the morsels of clay-colored, clay-adulterated bread from each other.

The first to be rounded up were the beggars. All the unemployed and the homeless were gathered up off the streets. They were loaded into wagons on the first morning of the Deportation and driven through the town. They cried bitterly and stretched their hands out or wrung them in despair or covered their faces. The youngest of them cried, “Mother, mother.” And in­deed, there were women to be seen running along both sides of the wagons, their head shawls slipping from their heads as they stretched their hands out toward their children, those young smugglers who had been rounded up along the walls. In other of the wagons, the captives looked like people condemned to death who, in the old copperplate engravings, are shown being driven to the scaffold in tumbrils.

The outcries died down in the town, and there was silence. Later on, there were no cries heard. Except when women were caught and loaded onto the wagons and one could hear an oc­casional indrawn hiss, such as fowl make as they are carried to the slaughter.

Men, for the most part, were silent. Even the children were so petrified that they seldom cried.

The beggars were rounded up, and there was no further singing in the ghetto. I heard singing only once more after the deporta­tions began. A monotonous melody from the steppes sung by a thirteen-year-old beggar girl. Over a period of two weeks she used to creep out of her hiding place in the evening, when the day’s roundups were over. Each day, looking thinner and paler and with an increasingly brighter aureole of grief about her head, she took her place at her usual spot behind a house on Leszno Street and began the warbling by whose means she earned her bit of bread....

Enough, enough ... I have to stop writing.

No. No. I can’t stop. I remember another girl of fourteen. My own brother’s orphan daughter in Lemberg whom I carried about in my arms as if she were my own child. Lussye! And another Lussye, older than she, one of my cousins who was studying in Lemberg and who was like a sister to me. And Lonye, my brother’s widow, the mother of the first Lussye, and Mundek, an older child of hers whom I thought of as my own son from the time that he was orphaned. And another girl in the family, a pianist of thirteen, my talented little cousin Yossima.

And all of my mother’s relatives in their distant village in Podolia: Auntie Beyle, Auntie Tsirl, Uncle Yassye, Auntie Dortsye, my childhood’s ideal of beauty.

I have so many names to recall, how can I leave any of them out, since nearly all of them went off to Belzec and Tre­blinka or were killed on the spot in Lanowce and Ozieran in Czortkow and in Mielnica. In Krzywicze and elsewhere.

Absurd! I will utter no more names. They are all mine, all related. All who were killed. Who are no more. Those whom I knew and loved press on my memory, which I compare now to a cemetery. The only cemetery in which there are still indica­tions that they once lived in this world.

I feel—and I know—that they want it that way. Each day I recall another one of those who are gone.

And when I come to the end of the list, segment by seg­ment added to the segments of my present life in the town, start over again from the beginning, and always in pain. Each of them hurts me individually, the way one feels pain when parts of the body have been surgically removed. When the nerves surviving in the nervous system signal the presence of every finger on amputated hands or feet.

Not long ago, I saw a woman in the streetcar, her head thrown back, talking to herself. I thought that she was either drunk or out of her mind. It turned out that she was a mother who had just received the news that her son, who had been rounded up in the street, had been shot.

“My child,” she stammered, paying no attention to the other people in the streetcar, “my son. My beautiful, beloved son.”

I too would like to talk to myself like one mad or drunk, the way that woman did in the book of Judges who poured out her heart unto the Lord and whom Eli drove from the Temple.

I may neither groan nor weep. I may not draw attention to myself in the street. And I need to groan; I need to weep. Not four times a year. I feel the need to say Yizkor four times a day.

Yizkor elohim es nishmas avi mori ve’imi morasi... Remember, Oh Lord, the souls of those who passed from this world hor­ribly, dying strange deaths before their time.

“May God remember the soul of my father-and-teacher and of my mother-and-teacher...”

And now, suddenly I seem to see myself as a child stand­ing on a bench behind my mother who, along with my grand­mother and my aunts, is praying before the east wall of the woman’s section of the synagogue in Lanowce. I stand on tiptoe peering down through panes of glass at the congregation in the synagogue that my grandfather built. And just then the Torah reader, Hersh’s son, Meyer-Itsik, strikes the podium three times and cries out with a mighty voice so that he will be heard by men and women on both sides of the partition and by the com­munity’s orphans, boys and girls, who are already standing, waiting for just this announcement: “We recite Yizkor.”

The solemn moment has arrived when we remember those who are no longer with us. Even those who have finished their prayers come in at this time to be with everyone else as they wait for the words, “We recite Yizkor.”

And he who has survived and lives and who approaches this place, let him bow his head and, with anguished heart, let him hear those words and remember his names as I have re­membered mine—the names of those who were destroyed.

At the end of the prayer in which everyone inserts the names of members of his family there is a passage recited for those who have no one to remember them and who, at various times, have died violent deaths because they were Jews. And it is people like those who are now in the majority.

[psychologeek]

Holocaust (and culture appropriation)

(TW: holocaust, death camps, sexual assaults, rape, industrial murder. I will put the graphic shit undercut. Include children death and human experiments).

Sometimes I think about how fucked up it is that for most non-jews (and some jews) "The Holocaust" is Anne Frank and Auschwitz "where they killed people".

I think about the fucking, the goddamn AUDACITY some people have to take our trauma and use it as a tool. As a lesson.

People that for them the holocaust is nothing but a story, a bunch of facts, probably as aware of it as they're aware of the crusaders.

(Once upon a time, in a far away land, there were Troubles)

People who didn't hear about it as children, who didn't grew up with six million and one-and-a-half million and yellow stars and quiet ceremony and Yizkor (remember).

That.

Would look at a pile of hats and bones and wigs and hair and make it about them.

But also

Sometimes I think about how wild it is, that this looks so horrific to them.

(And they never heard about half of it.)

Like.

Dear.

Deary.

We are used to death. We are so used to being murdered, and loosing loved ones by hate, that half of our culture is basically based on it.

I think about how non-jews keep talking about the holocaust, like it's a clean cut, like it's a thing that was, like it's that's all that was - there were people hiding, and there were gas chambers, and that's it.

And I remember being a kid (maybe 10 yo?) reading a kid/ya book that was an autobiography, and I remember the writer (who was a young teen at the time, and pretended to be a Christian German) wrote about someone came into the shower and touched him. (Writer) Panicked, and turned around - and then the other man asked him "wait- are you jewish?"

As a kid, I remember that this is all that was in it.

As an adult, I remember that scene, sometimes. And I can have a pretty clear idea on why the older man didn't tell about the kid.

I remember, several years ago, reading about a therapy group for holocaust survivors that were sexually assaulted.

I remember reading about an old lady, that (70 years later) told about what happened to her when she hide away with her sister, (I think they were two, or three girls?) she was sixteen, or maybe fourteen. I remember

"I did it so they'll share their food with us".

~

I think about people talking about the "death camp" Auschwitz, and how someone said (those who went there, were the lucky ones. When the newbies asked what happened, where are their families? We just pointed at the burning chimneys of Birkenau ,and the smoke.)

~

I remember the HUNDREDS who died once the camps were "freed", because they didn't know the dangers of eating two pieces of bread after a long period of starving.

I remember the massive Jewish community of Poland that was just. Erased. 99% of 3 million population pre-war. Whole communities we only remember and mention as the community's name (and even that is a very long list.)

I remember how people remember it as "German jews" (and some Poland) - but it's not. My grandma had cousins in Debretsen, Hungary. And it's Ukraine and France and Morocco and Greece and Lybia and Lithuania and Latvia and almost everywhere in Europe and North Africa

(except for Denmark. we love Denmark. My grandad's step-grandma survived there. She immigrated to her family in Israel after that.)

~

Idk if Goyim ever heard about Mangele. I wonder, how many of them heard during their childhood about:

The eye experiments, where he injected serums in people's (living) eyes, to see what would happen?

His obsession about twins. The toddlers that got their back skinned, then stitched together in "to see what will happen".

(They died after four days of misery.)

[linnaealyn]

Wish we could've gotten some character interaction and resolution between these two. Dominia deserved more. So many characters deserved more, but I think the only thing she got was mostly Ramsus focused.