Eva Mozes Kor on Jews & Nazis

[Bluebell]

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?s...ry_index=0

I know many people will criticize me for this photo, but so be it. It was two human beings seventy years after it happened. For the life of me I will never understand why anger is preferable to a goodwill gesture. Nothing good ever comes from anger. Any goodwill gesture in my book will win over anger any time. The energy that anger creates is a violent energy.


I feel sorry for Oskar Groening for one reason: He lived a miserable life. I think if I were the judge, I would ask him one question: "Did you live a happy life?" When he looks back, he probably cannot be proud of anything, and will see he was wrong. So he would judge himself.

The purpose of this trial from my perspective is not to give him a piece of my mind but to teach the young neo-Nazis that Auschwitz existed. They can pretend and say it didn’t, and if I testify and say it was there, they dismiss me because I am a Jew and I have an interest in telling that story. But a former Nazi has no interest in saying Auschwitz existed - in fact he has an interest in denying it.

99.9% of the perpetrators will die without bearing witness. I would prefer that every Nazi, every perpetrator within a reasonable time - not seventy years but much, much faster - should come out of hiding and own up to what they have done. For that very simple reason I have to acknowledge that Groening at least made an effort. I do not think he is a hero for that, but at least he was willing to admit it in a public court.

[Splash]

Bluebell, thank you so much for this link.

As I've mentioned elsewhere on Bring4th, my Grandfather fought in WW1 and my father in WW2. My father (93yrs old in a few months) was an eye witness when Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was 'liberated'.

"Inside the camp the horrified soldiers found piles of dead and rotting corpses and thousands of sick and starving prisoners kept in severely overcrowded and dirty compounds.
Belsen, near Hanover in Germany, was the first concentration camp to be liberated by the British.
The first British soldiers who entered Bergen-Belsen have described seeing a huge pile of dead, naked women's bodies within full view of several hundred children held at the camp.
The gutters, too, were filled with dead bodies.
One of the reasons the Germans agreed to surrender Belsen was because so many of the inmates were diseased. There was no running water in the camp and there were epidemics of typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis.
There were thousands of sick women, who should have been in hospital, lying on hard, bare bug-ridden boards. Of the 1,704 acute typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis cases, only 474 women had bunks to sleep on.
There were fewer male prisoners, but they were also kept in severely overcrowded and dirty conditions.
He said their first priority was to remove the dead bodies from the camp. He was told some 30,000 people had died in the past few months.
Medical supplies were severely limited - there were no vaccines, or drugs and no treatments for lice.
The camp commandant, who was described as "unashamed" at the camp conditions, was placed under arrest.
Bergen-Belsen was the only concentration camp taken by the British and the soldiers were unprepared for what they found there. In fact most of the details did not appear in the media until a couple of days after the liberation when the first medical team arrived.
Mass graves were dug to hold up to 5,000 corpses at a time. The former army guards from the SS were deliberately made to use their bare hands to bury the prisoners, many of whom had died of contagious diseases.
The mass evacuation of the camp began on 21 April. Prisoners with any hope of survival were moved to an emergency hospital.
British medical students responded to an appeal from the Ministry of Health to go to Germany and help in the treatment of prisoners.
Photographs and a film taken at the camp and published in the media brought home the full horror of life in Belsen. German civilians living near to the camp were taken to see what had gone on inside.
The last hut in the camp was burned to the ground on 21 May 1945. Today the camp is a landscaped park.
Brigadier Llewellyn Glyn-Hughes, who was put in charge of cleaning up the camp, said it took a staff of 68 a fortnight to stamp out typhus in the camp. But prisoners too sick to respond to treatment continued to die. Historians say as many as 28,000 of the 38,500 prisoners in the camp when it was liberated, subsequently died."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates...557341.stm

So, as my own father had direct experience/proof - I find  'Holocaust denial' unspeakably awful.


As you quote above: " The energy that anger creates is a violent energy."

I see it in (some) threads elsewhere on Bring4th

I'm not engaging with that energy anymore.

Again, thank you for this link.

[Stranger]

Let's also not forget, just four decades earlier, concentration camps established by the British:

http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/women-...-1900-1902

18 June, Emily Hobhouse's report on concentration camps appear under the title, "To the S.A. Distress Fund, Report of a visit to the camps of women and children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies". Summarising the reasons for the high fatality rate, she writes, "Numbers crowded into small tents: some sick, some dying, occasionally a dead one among them; scanty rations dealt out raw; lack of fuel to cook them; lack of water for drinking, for cooking, for washing; lack of soap, brushes and other instruments of personal cleanliness; lack of bedding or of beds to keep the body off the bare earth; lack of clothing for warmth and in many cases for decency ..." Her conclusion is that the whole system is cruel and should be abolished.

[Splash]

I'm no supporter of British Imperialism...

Patriarchy is intensely dysfunctional.