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Well, I related what I was told by a family of French Jewish survivors. There was the Vichy government, but there was also La Resistance. About 3/4 of French Jewish population (ie, about 200,000 people) survived the WW2, more than in most other European countries. My late boyfriend's parents even survived Auschwitz (possibly because they were there for only about a year or so), and his uncle (mom's brother) also survived while fighting in the Resistance, later moved to Israel.
People, myself included, often use their own personal experiences as their basis for broader generalizations. It’s normal…we are human. Take a few moments and read what I shared thru the previous link. If you are so inclined, do a bit of online research yourself…you will find a significant body of research that is consistent with what I wrote earlier. I’m sorry if my statements are not consistent with what you have been told or read or otherwise experienced, but they are not reflective of the realities of 1933 to 1945.
As a kid I didn't think much about the Holocaust, not even when my grandparents took my parents, sister and I back to Germany to visit their hometowns, ancestral gravesites and even several living -but very old- extended relations... that only spoke German. I remember a few years later we had a -real live- Jewish Holocaust survivor -with the tattoo- come talk to our middle school and after his heartbreaking account we all stood in line to see his tattoo. I wanted so badly to say, "Hey, my grandparents are survivors too!". But my grandparents didn't have the tattoos. Instead they had a big beautiful house and they were very happy. My grandma didn't even have an accent when she spoke. And besides I wasn't Jewish. I wasn't anything. Certainly not a Holocaust survivor and I felt like an impostor saying I was the granddaughter of a couple of them. So I kept my mouth shut!
As I've gotten older though, the Holocaust and what it was for my family and all the ways that it still lingers in the dysfunction in my paternal relatives and between paternal relatives has carried an ever-increasing weight in my heart and mind. There was a book written by Georgia Hunter, another Holocaust granddaughter that wrote a book called "We were the Lucky Ones" that made waves in various book clubs and literary circles a few years ago. I was once listening to an interview and I was thinking to myself that I could -and ought to- write a book called, "We weren't Quite as Lucky"... Ha!
My grandfather's (nuclear) family fled Germany first. It was right after the Reichstag Fire, which Hitler used in order to suspend Jewish civil liberties. They stayed in Europe for quite a number of years hoping to wait out the Nazi, but they eventually abandoned Europe altogether, realizing that the entire continent was about to go under war times (again).
My grandmother's (nuclear) family stayed much longer. They experienced Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, a massive pogrom on Nov 9-10, 1938. My great-grandfather was arrested and held for two weeks in Dachau Concentration Camp. He was able to get out and return to his family. Meanwhile my great-grandmother contacted a few relatives in the United States and, with their advocacy, was able to secure passage to the US the following April for the three of them. Unfortunately many of my great-grandfather's close relatives, including his parents, were arrested, scattered among various concentration camps (often times repeatedly) and eventually died. All of them.
I got to visit Dachau nearly 80 years exactly since my great-grandfather's imprisonment. I asked the tour guide, "how many actually got released?" And I was told, "About 5%". I said, "What happened to the rest?". He said, "They starved.. they worked themselves to death.. they were sent to other camps mostly... worse camps...." "Well..." I said, "Looks great-grandpa really beat the odds!".
I have a lot to say about what happened when my grandparents got here, how they met, how they raised their kids, what happened to the kids, etc, etc.. too much for a post!
The conversation of the Holocaust only started to come up after my grandfather died. For whatever reason I don't think it was a subject that my grandfather could tolerate much, although nobody ever said this out loud, I've only pieced it together retrospectively. My grandmother talked more and more frequently of her feelings about it as she was dying of cancer. The reality is she felt a tremendous sense of guilt for having been able to leave and NOT DIE with most of her extended relatives. She also felt guilty for having had such an easy-going life of nice things (at some point she had inherited a small fortune). She said she was told as a young woman to "never forget" but the reality, she said through deep sobs one evening, was that she was tired of "never forgetting". So very tired.
I don't know. In a way, some sort of metaphysical way, I feel like she transferred that "burden" on to me in that very moment because it haunts me over and over again. I had never seen her cry out like that. I had never seen anyone cry out like that....
And since then rarely a day goes by that I'm not discovering or contemplating connections between many of my contemporary personal miseries to the miseries of a different people, of a different time and a different place. It's like that terrible energy went adrift, but it's still here...
Those of us that are Catholics -I'm a catechumen- understand that the Church is more than an institution, that it's considered to be a living direct connection with Jesus even though he died nearly 2000 years ago. It's because of this idea, this fact, this transcendence, that I know the traumas of the Holocaust are, in a slightly similar way, still with my relatives and I. It's in what we were taught - or not taught- it's in how we were loved - or not loved - it's in how we've come to see the world or family, the expectations that we have about ourselves or each other or the world around us. It maybe even more subtler than that...
As we Catholics-in-training get ready for the Sacraments of Initiation (Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist) we are asked to pick out a patron saint for ourselves. I'll be honest... I'm still struggling with this concept a little (which is normal and expected)... but most of my weird feelings have gone away with the discovery of Edith Stein [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein[/url]
I got her biography yesterday to learn more about her and I can't believe the connections I'm finding between her, her life, my life, my family's life. Turns out... my trip to Germany with my grandparents was exactly one month after Edith Stein's Beatification...in Germany. And as I was reading about this magnificent event I remembered... my grandparents took me to a German Convent on that trip. There is even a picture of all of us with two nuns, one of them with her hands on both my shoulders and my face is in utter confusion... Grandma and grandpa are Jewish so why does this non-English speaking nun I've never met have her hands on me?
I'd love to ask about that memory, but unfortunately, all the adults in the photo are now dead so I'll never know. What I do know, without a doubt, is that those nuns would have known about Edith Stein and Edith Stein would have been very present in their minds when I came to visit them.
And that was my grandmother's name by the way... Edith.
My Holocaust-surviving Grandma Edith took me back to Germany and we visited nuns and I never forgot.
I'm not sure of the question. Connection via family? I don't think so. Via a close family friend? Yes. Know the history? Yes, extensively, because of my area in Intelligence.
My mom and her two sisters fled Serbia in 1941 when Serbian communists executed their father. He was a civil service forestry engineer and refused to stop working during the German occupation of Serbia. He was one of 15 civil servants, including bus drivers and teachers, in his town, who kept working during the occupation and were rounded up and executed by Serbian Communists. Their mother and oldest sister stayed in Serbia, but there was no food or money for the three younger sisters so after their father's death death, when the Germans recaptured their town, they fled to Germany. My mother, the youngest, was only 15.
My mother often remarked on the bravery of Nazi officers who they saw executed by the Serbian communists. She said they stood at attention, gave the Nazi salute and bravely died.
The only good part of that last sentence is that they died. Bravery? Praising the Nazi soldiers? I would have pulled the trigger and shot them myself. And the collaborators.
I guess you are proud that your grandfather supported the Nazi regime and continued to work for them. So be it.
As a kid I didn't think much about the Holocaust, not even when my grandparents took my parents, sister and I back to Germany to visit their hometowns, ancestral gravesites and even several living -but very old- extended relations... that only spoke German. I remember a few years later we had a -real live- Jewish Holocaust survivor -with the tattoo- come talk to our middle school and after his heartbreaking account we all stood in line to see his tattoo. I wanted so badly to say, "Hey, my grandparents are survivors too!". But my grandparents didn't have the tattoos. Instead they had a big beautiful house and they were very happy. My grandma didn't even have an accent when she spoke. And besides I wasn't Jewish. I wasn't anything. Certainly not a Holocaust survivor and I felt like an impostor saying I was the granddaughter of a couple of them. So I kept my mouth shut!
As I've gotten older though, the Holocaust and what it was for my family and all the ways that it still lingers in the dysfunction in my paternal relatives and between paternal relatives has carried an ever-increasing weight in my heart and mind. There was a book written by Georgia Hunter, another Holocaust granddaughter that wrote a book called "We were the Lucky Ones" that made waves in various book clubs and literary circles a few years ago. I was once listening to an interview and I was thinking to myself that I could -and ought to- write a book called, "We weren't Quite as Lucky"... Ha!
My grandfather's (nuclear) family fled Germany first. It was right after the Reichstag Fire, which Hitler used in order to suspend Jewish civil liberties. They stayed in Europe for quite a number of years hoping to wait out the Nazi, but they eventually abandoned Europe altogether, realizing that the entire continent was about to go under war times (again).
My grandmother's (nuclear) family stayed much longer. They experienced Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, a massive pogrom on Nov 9-10, 1938. My great-grandfather was arrested and held for two weeks in Dachau Concentration Camp. He was able to get out and return to his family. Meanwhile my great-grandmother contacted a few relatives in the United States and, with their advocacy, was able to secure passage to the US the following April for the three of them. Unfortunately many of my great-grandfather's close relatives, including his parents, were arrested, scattered among various concentration camps (often times repeatedly) and eventually died. All of them.
I got to visit Dachau nearly 80 years exactly since my great-grandfather's imprisonment. I asked the tour guide, "how many actually got released?" And I was told, "About 5%". I said, "What happened to the rest?". He said, "They starved.. they worked themselves to death.. they were sent to other camps mostly... worse camps...." "Well..." I said, "Looks great-grandpa really beat the odds!".
I have a lot to say about what happened when my grandparents got here, how they met, how they raised their kids, what happened to the kids, etc, etc.. too much for a post!
The conversation of the Holocaust only started to come up after my grandfather died. For whatever reason I don't think it was a subject that my grandfather could tolerate much, although nobody ever said this out loud, I've only pieced it together retrospectively. My grandmother talked more and more frequently of her feelings about it as she was dying of cancer. The reality is she felt a tremendous sense of guilt for having been able to leave and NOT DIE with most of her extended relatives. She also felt guilty for having had such an easy-going life of nice things (at some point she had inherited a small fortune). She said she was told as a young woman to "never forget" but the reality, she said through deep sobs one evening, was that she was tired of "never forgetting". So very tired.
I don't know. In a way, some sort of metaphysical way, I feel like she transferred that "burden" on to me in that very moment because it haunts me over and over again. I had never seen her cry out like that. I had never seen anyone cry out like that....
And since then rarely a day goes by that I'm not discovering or contemplating connections between many of my contemporary personal miseries to the miseries of a different people, of a different time and a different place. It's like that terrible energy went adrift, but it's still here...
Those of us that are Catholics -I'm a catechumen- understand that the Church is more than an institution, that it's considered to be a living direct connection with Jesus even though he died nearly 2000 years ago. It's because of this idea, this fact, this transcendence, that I know the traumas of the Holocaust are, in a slightly similar way, still with my relatives and I. It's in what we were taught - or not taught- it's in how we were loved - or not loved - it's in how we've come to see the world or family, the expectations that we have about ourselves or each other or the world around us. It maybe even more subtler than that...
As we Catholics-in-training get ready for the Sacraments of Initiation (Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist) we are asked to pick out a patron saint for ourselves. I'll be honest... I'm still struggling with this concept a little (which is normal and expected)... but most of my weird feelings have gone away with the discovery of Edith Stein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein
I got her biography yesterday to learn more about her and I can't believe the connections I'm finding between her, her life, my life, my family's life. Turns out... my trip to Germany with my grandparents was exactly one month after Edith Stein's Beatification...in Germany. And as I was reading about this magnificent event I remembered... my grandparents took me to a German Convent on that trip. There is even a picture of all of us with two nuns, one of them with her hands on both my shoulders and my face is in utter confusion... Grandma and grandpa are Jewish so why does this non-English speaking nun I've never met have her hands on me?
I'd love to ask about that memory, but unfortunately, all the adults in the photo are now dead so I'll never know. What I do know, without a doubt, is that those nuns would have known about Edith Stein and Edith Stein would have been very present in their minds when I came to visit them.
And that was my grandmother's name by the way... Edith.
My Holocaust-surviving Grandma Edith took me back to Germany and we visited nuns and I never forgot.
Thank you for bringing up this issue.
Most people don't realize that the damage done to the survivors, whether they escaped by the skin of their teeth or were tortured in one of the camps, is often passed on to their children and grandchildren who were born after WWII. I agree that sometimes, there is dysfunction in the family. Public figures, such as Thane Rosenbaum and Henry Winkler have spoken about it openly. Henry Winkler has commented that he had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't understand the reason until he was an adult. There's also the problem of children feeling "different" because they don't have extended family to visit during holidays or for celebrations during other special events.
The only good part of that last sentence is that they died. Bravery? Praising the Nazi soldiers? I would have pulled the trigger and shot them myself. And the collaborators.
I guess you are proud that your grandfather supported the Nazi regime and continued to work for them. So be it.
Like most of the people in the world you would have done nothing, saving your own skin. That's a perfectly natural thing to do. You seem to forget in war everyone thinks God is on their side.
As anti-communists, even the Popes and the Catholic clergy were on the side of the Nazi's and assisted in their relocation to South America after the war even though they were hunted men. Hitler was financed in part by the Harriman and Bush families which brought him into power. After WWII the OSS and then the CIA hired ex-Nazi intelligence officers to fight against the Communists intelligence services. Werner Von Braun and his whole crew who worked on the V1 rockets were brought to the US to work for the government and were an instrumental part of the program to land on the moon. A good portion of the WWII military industrial complex of Germany and Japan are the present day industrial giants of those two countries. Good guys and bad guys are not black and white.
There were six Nazi extermination camps, all located in Poland, manned by no more than five thousand soldiers each. But there were 11 million German soldiers in WWII, the majority of whom were fighting the Americans, the British and the Russians in Europe, North Africa and Russia.
I noticed that some of the posters relate stories about how their associates felt the need to cooperate because of fear of Nazi repercussions. They didn't want to "salute" and only joined Hitler youth under duress. It's just like the gentile neighbors who did business and were friends with their Jewish neighbors until they felt threatened. No one will admit that they were friends with the Jews while it served their purpose and when it no longer served their purpose, the business relationships and friendships were dropped suddenly. It was only discontinued because of fear of Nazi reprisals. What if everyone in the general population, who claims to not be bigoted, took a stand and refused to comply.
The Danes refused to comply with the Nazi orders and almost every Jewish Dane survived.
Like most of the people in the world you would have done nothing, saving your own skin. That's a perfectly natural thing to do. You seem to forget in war everyone thinks God is on their side.
As anti-communists, even the Popes and the Catholic clergy were on the side of the Nazi's and assisted in their relocation to South America after the war even though they were hunted men. Hitler was financed in part by the Harriman and Bush families which brought him into power. After WWII the OSS and then the CIA hired ex-Nazi intelligence officers to fight against the Communists intelligence services. Werner Von Braun and his whole crew who worked on the V1 rockets were brought to the US to work for the government and were an instrumental part of the program to land on the moon. A good portion of the WWII military industrial complex of Germany and Japan are the present day industrial giants of those two countries. Good guys and bad guys are not black and white.
There were six Nazi extermination camps, all located in Poland, manned by no more than five thousand soldiers each. But there were 11 million German soldiers in WWII, the majority of whom were fighting the Americans, the British and the Russians in Europe, North Africa and Russia.
If this is your narrative, so be it. While we may understand the reasons why people collaborate with evil and perform heinous acts, that doesn't mean we can absolve them individually of responsibility. This is especially true as the scope of their evil becomes evident after the fact.
Mgkeith - I respect your experiences which are mostly second and third hand. I expect you to respect mine which are similar but I lived with and met on a regular basis with the people. Please do not let history eat you. Out!
What? You "lived with and met" Nazis during the Holocaust, or you were personally living with Jews in Europe during that time?
If this is your narrative, so be it. While we may understand the reasons why people collaborate with evil and perform heinous acts, that doesn't mean we can absolve them individually of responsibility. This is especially true as the scope of their evil becomes evident after the fact.
People should acknowledge mea culpa.
It's a pretty fine line. Is paying income taxes collaborating with evil when it financed the death of 2 million Vietnamese in the Vietnam war and half a million Afghans, Iraqis and Pakistanis in the post 911 gulf wars? In war, the majority of casualties are non combatant civilians. Are all tax payers collaborators? If not, why not?
Personally, I know that we are all collaborators, but there's not much we can do about it. I don't feel like going to prison for not paying my taxes, like Wesley Snipes, no matter what evil use they are put to. And my protest wouldn't change anything anyway, except my freedom and livelihood and the livelihood of my dependents. My first priority is the safety and welfare of my family. Just like my "collaborator" grandfather.
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