Holocaust History

[Ringo]

What does it have to do with the Holocaust ?

Genocide, based on race and nationality of the victims. And many jews, who managed to escape by 1943, were killed along with poles during the Volyn massacre

 

[Sixties Fan]

Genocide, based on race and nationality of the victims. And many jews, who managed to escape by 1943, were killed along with poles during the Volyn massacre

Where is the part about the Jews being killed during that massacre?

 

[surada]

Genocide, based on race and nationality of the victims. And many jews, who managed to escape by 1943, were killed along with poles during the Volyn massacre

Gypsies, homosexuals, clerics and others also suffered.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Are you afraid of contemporaneous writings about Palestine?

We have discussed this article written by a person who did not like Jews.

BUT, as you insist in calling in your heroes, here is some information about McKays unbiased thinking:

An echo of Mackay’s antagonism to Jewish nationalism could be found in Albert T. Clay’s February 1921 report titled “Political Zionism.” Clay wrote with bracing hostility about the Zionist movement, and he failed to hide his suspicions about Jews generally. The founders of modern Zionism, Clay wrote,

have claimed that the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth would become an active force, by bringing diplomatic pressure to bear upon the nations, to secure protection for Jews in all lands. A clannish sense of pride in the Jewish race, however, seems to be uppermost in their minds. They apparently think that their status in society will be enhanced everywhere if a Jewish nation exists in Palestine.

While I would distance myself, for reasons of taste and accuracy, from Clay’s diagnosis of Jewish clannishness, I would also say that what he feared did indeed come to pass: the success of Israel as a national Jewish project enhanced the status of Jews even in places like the Soviet Union, to say nothing of the United States.

Clay’s brand of hostility to Zionism found no echo in a 1927 article by Henry Nevinson, who admitted to a certain narrow-mindedness about Jews before becoming a witness to their national project in Palestine.

Like most Englishmen, I certainly had no prejudice in favor of the Jews. Rather the reverse, though I have always admired their exceptional intelligence, their patriotic mutual aid, and their marvelous persistence in the face of the cruelest persecution. But as I surveyed the work of the Zionist cause in tangible or visible form I was filled with a sympathetic exhilaration at the sight of so many young men and young women released from the perpetual fear under which their fathers had suffered for so many centuries.

The dominant theme in The Atlantic’s early writings on Zionism was unfriendliness.

Prophesying Palestine

Jeffrey Goldberg looks back at a mixed bag of Atlantic predictions from the 1920s and '30s about prospects for a Jewish homeland.

www.theatlantic.com

 

[surada]

We have discussed this article written by a person who did not like Jews.

BUT, as you insist in calling in your heroes, here is some information about McKays unbiased thinking:

An echo of Mackay’s antagonism to Jewish nationalism could be found in Albert T. Clay’s February 1921 report titled “Political Zionism.” Clay wrote with bracing hostility about the Zionist movement, and he failed to hide his suspicions about Jews generally. The founders of modern Zionism, Clay wrote,


While I would distance myself, for reasons of taste and accuracy, from Clay’s diagnosis of Jewish clannishness, I would also say that what he feared did indeed come to pass: the success of Israel as a national Jewish project enhanced the status of Jews even in places like the Soviet Union, to say nothing of the United States.

Clay’s brand of hostility to Zionism found no echo in a 1927 article by Henry Nevinson, who admitted to a certain narrow-mindedness about Jews before becoming a witness to their national project in Palestine.


The dominant theme in The Atlantic’s early writings on Zionism was unfriendliness.

Prophesying Palestine

Jeffrey Goldberg looks back at a mixed bag of Atlantic predictions from the 1920s and '30s about prospects for a Jewish homeland.

www.theatlantic.com

Jewish nationalism is obviously not healthy for the people who lived in Palestine for over 2000 years.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Jewish nationalism is obviously not healthy for the people who lived in Palestine for over 2000 years.

The Jews have been in Canaan much longer than that. We have the history to prove it.

 

[surada]

The Jews have been in Canaan much longer than that. We have the history to prove it.

Of course Abraham was Canaanite from Urfa near Haran. The Akkadian empire was just earlier.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Of course Abraham was Canaanite from Urfa near Haran. The Akkadian empire was just earlier.

So.....of course after taking your time to respond to my post......and after I denounce your hero as a
Taught from Birth Christian Jew Hater, you .....who have had basically the same upbringing........

Return to your favorite memes, words, unimportant nonsense .

This thread is about the Holocaust.

Now.....GET LOST from this thread if you do not have anything to discuss about the HOLOCAUST.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Last week, Poland demanded compensation from Germany for its estimates for World War II losses it estimated at $1.32 trillion.

Jan Grabowski, an expert on the Holocaust in Poland, discovered that some of these demands were to pay Poland for killing its own Jews.

On the 83rd anniversary of the outbreak of World War II last week, a three-volume report was published entitled “Report on Losses Suffered by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation during World War II 1939–1945.” The report was written by a parliamentary investigative committee established in 2017 to assess damages from Germany for Polish losses during the war....

However, the report ascribes to Germans the murder of Jews carried out by their Polish neighbors without the involvement of Germans. Canadian-Jewish historian of Polish origin, Prof. Jan Grabowski, discovered this when reading the third volume of the report, which includes a list of 9,292 places where Germans committed atrocities against Poles in occupied Poland between 1939 and 1945. According to the report, the list is intended to “commemorate the Polish citizens who were killed by Nazi Germany in World War II.”

Grabowski, who called the report “shameful," and a “rewriting of the history of the Holocaust,” discovered that one of the sites listed in the report is the town of Jedwabne, where it states that 1,650 Jews were murdered. The pogrom there, carried out in July of 1941, is well documented through historical research based on archival material and eyewitness accounts.

According to the research, the pogrom was carried out by Poles exclusively, without German involvement. The precise number of Jews murdered in this event is not known but is believed to be a few hundred. Beaten and threatened, they were led by Poles to a local barn, where they were burned alive.

Prof. Grabowski was surprised to find the victims of Jedwabne in a report meant to deal with German crimes against the Poles in World War II. Writing on Facebook, Grabowski said he was "dismayed" that the "Polish authorities would actually ask the Germans for compensation" for the Jews murdered by Poles in 1941. "To say that the whole situation is grotesque is to say nothing at all," he wrote.

Along with requesting reparations for Poles' murder of the Jews of Jebwabne, the new report includes other sites where Jews were also killed by Poles exclusively. The list includes the murder of Jews in the towns of Radzilow, Bzura and Szczuczyn, all in the summer of 1941.

Grabowski calls the inclusion of these towns in the report “grotesque,” but his claims against the writers of the report are more significant. He bases his arguments on the fact that in the calculation of Poles murdered and killed during World War II, the Poles also include 3 million Polish Jews, among whom he says about 200,000 were murdered with the help of or directly by Poles. What kind of restitution does Poland want from the Germans for 200,000 Jews murdered by the Poles or with Polish participation?" he asked in Polish on Twitter.

The tweet drew angry responses, with comments calling him “Jewish bastard” and “Jewish swine,” among other things.

Poland has been engaged in historical revisionism about the Holocaust in recent years, denying Polish complicity with the Holocaust and allowing historians who documented it to be sued.

Poland demands compensation from Germany for the Jews burned alive - by Poles

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Trevor Chadwick with a child. Source: YouTube.

A bronze statue was unveiled in England in tribute to a British schoolteacher who helped 669 children in Prague escape Nazi persecution.

Trevor Chadwick from Swanage, England, assisted Sir Nicholas Winton in arranging for the children to travel safely to Britain in 1939 before and after the capital of the Czech Republic was occupied by Nazi German forces, according to the Trevor Chadwick Memorial Trust. He was later nicknamed the “Purbeck Schindler” for his efforts. He died in 1979 at the age of 72.

Winton, who has also since died, previously called Chadwick “the real hero,” saying “he did the more difficult and dangerous work after the Nazis invaded … he deserves all praise. He managed things at the Prague end, organizing the children and the trains, and dealing with the SS and Gestapo.”

Nick said that his father “would have been delighted to know that at long last there was something to commemorate the bravery and sacrifice of Trevor Chadwick,” reported Metro.

He added that “it is a fitting tribute, and I think it is essential that people have a record of the extraordinary contribution made by ordinary people like Trevor Chadwick to help others in need.”

(full article online)

Teacher posthumously honored in UK for saving children from Nazis in Prague

The unveiling ceremony of a statue in honor of Trevor Chadwick was attended by hundreds of guests, including Chadwick’s grandchildren and Winton’s son, Nick Winton.

www.jns.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

In early 1944, the girls were selected as workers at the Birkenau camp and separated from their mother, who they never saw again, according to a biography of the women. They last saw their father at the camp, and their brother died at a camp in Germany.

“The girls worked carrying bricks from one end of the compound to the other for hours at a time. Ilse sewed gun covers and uniforms as well. Working close to the crematory ovens, they saw the mountains of shoes. For the first time, they realized that their fellow prisoners were being killed and cremated,” the biography said.

Both women married fellow Holocaust survivors in 1949. Ruth and Walter Siegler moved to Birmingham in 1960 to be with Ilse and Walter Nathan, who already lived in the area.

The women, who taught lessons about the Holocaust, were both widows and remained best friends until the end, living within walking distance of each other for years.

(full article online)

Inseparable to the last: Sisters who survived Holocaust, moved to US, die days apart

Ruth Scheuer Siegler and Ilse Scheuer Nathan, who said they helped each other survive Nazi camp, are remembered for remaining inseparable throughout their lives

www.timesofisrael.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Even American Jews ignored the Holocaust

By Nora Berman

In the opening minutes of “The U.S. and the Holocaust” — a new three-part Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein documentary, we hear the blunt truth that still haunts our nation today: “The exclusion of people and shutting them out has been as American as apple pie.”
The documentary lets no one — including American Jews — off the hook.

Of the film’s many characters, two Jewish leaders fighting back this impulse to save the Jews of Europe stood out to me: Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Peter Bergson. Both men believed that they represented the “true” opinion of the Jewish people. And both of them were labeled as “radical,” despite having very different beliefs.
Rabbi Wise, a quintessential American Jew, ultimately held greater faith in his American identity and government than were deserved. The tactics of Bergson, a foreign militant Zionist, were ultimately more effective at persuading the U.S. government to save Jewish lives.
A charismatic rabbi vs. the State Department
Born in Hungary, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise immigrated to the United States as a child and was an early leader in the American Reform movement. A founding member of both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Jewish Congress, he differed from his Reform colleagues in his zealous support for civil rights and Zionism.
Wise tirelessly pushed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to loosen immigration quotas and urged boycotts of German goods, with little success. He was ultimately the one who broke the news to the American public during a press conference on Nov. 24, 1942, of the comprehensive German plan to murder all of the Jews of Europe.


Yet despite Wise’s great faith in FDR, he was unable to convince the American president to intervene more directly to save the Jews. Even after the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps had finally become front page news in 1945, Americans still did not want to admit refugees, with only a meager 5% agreeing that the U.S. should accept more.

In the most tragic of ironies, the U.S. State Department during WWII boasted the most antisemites, racists and isolationists of any other governmental office at the time. The department was led by Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who notably loathed Rabbi Wise and believed, without evidence, that Jews were especially dangerous to the U.S. Long called the hundreds of thousands of desperate German Jews already on the waitlist for a visa “a perfect opportunity for Germany to load the United States with Nazi agents.”

Long’s explicit goal was to bring immigration, particularly Jewish immigration, to a full stop, and the State Department under his direction intentionally made it as difficult as possible. Under his direction, refugees were not permitted to come to the U.S. if they had a job, as that took a job away from an American, but they could also not receive a visa without a job, as that meant they would need government assistance.

A divided people

But Wise wasn’t just fighting antisemites in office: He was fighting resistance from his fellow Jews. From the beginning of the Nazi regime, American Jews were divided on how to respond to Hitler’s persecution of German Jews. “I think a lot of American Jews were torn between wanting to ring the alarm, and not seem too alarmist,” writer Daniel Mendelsohn says in the documentary. “They had just precariously established their identities as Americans.” Renowned Holocaust historian and current U.S. Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt goes one step further: “There was a legitimate fear that if we talk too much about this, Americans are going to say ‘Well, it’s right! Jews are like that! Jews are conniving.’”

Rabbi Wise abhorred these attitudes and excoriated those who held them. Recent immigres who had successfully navigated Long’s bureaucratic maze received anxious letters from family members trapped in Europe, begging for the $5,000 fee to obtain a visa — a sum that for the time represented a year’s salary for the average working American. Still, American Jews, particularly those in positions of power and wealth (like the leadership of the American Jewish Committee), were more comfortable quietly exhorting FDR to do something for German Jews than publicly demonstrating.
Shortly after Hitler gave a speech on Jan. 30, 1939, that called for “the annihilation of the Jewish race,” a bill that would permit 10,000 Jewish children per year to come to the

U.S. died in committee without being brought to a vote — there were, again, fears its passage would negatively affect the well-being of American Jews. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, possibly the highest ranking Jewish American in government, privately told FDR that there was no possible way this vote would ever reach consensus among Congress, let alone among Jewish Americans.

Nearly a quarter of American Jews had opposed the proposed legislation, even as German Jews were losing their businesses, forced to wear yellow stars and desperately applying for visas to get out of Nazi Germany.

The man who likely did convince FDR to devote government resources to saving Jewish refugees found the American Jewish response to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews bafflingly timid. Peter Bergson, a founding member of the Irgun (a British Mandate-era precursor to the IDF), dismissed Wise as “a timorous American of Hebrew descent and not an authentic member of the Jewish nation” and believed that American Jews were not responding to the crisis at hand with the sense of urgency it required.

Direct action

Bergson had a history, to put it mildly, of not playing by the rules. Born Hillel Kook (nephew of Israel’s first chief Ashkenazi Rabbi, Avraham Kook), Bergson changed his name in 1937 to protect his family from retribution for his political activities when he was sent to Poland to coordinate an underground network that was smuggling Jews into Palestine. Bergson’s mentor, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, sent Bergson to the U.S. in 1940 with the stated goal of raising a Jewish army to fight Hitler.

Two days before Yom Kippur in 1943, Bergson organized more than 400 Orthodox rabbis to march on Washington in protest of the Roosevelt administration’s perceived indifference to the mass murder of European Jews. This protest is believed to have influenced the creation of the War Refugee Board in early 1944, an organization that ultimately saved tens of thousands of Jews in the last years of the war. FDR did not meet with the rabbis on the advice of his Jewish advisers, who said that Bergson and his rabbis did not represent the mainstream Jewish opinion.
These advisors were not wrong: a significant portion of the American Jewish community did not want to draw attention to their Jewishness during WWII by advocating for the Jews of Europe. They feared antisemitic reprisals by their neighbors; despite their assimilation, they felt the tentative status of their relative acceptance in American society. There was also a palpable divide between wealthier, assimilated, largely German-American Jews and their poorer Eastern European brethren. A rabbi in the early 20th century said of the new Yiddish-speaking arrivals: “We are Americans and they are not. They gnaw the bones of past centuries.”

This attitude was, unfortunately, quintessentially American. Over and over, in Gallup poll after Gallup poll, Americans clearly said they did not want more Jewish immigrants. In 1938, shortly before the events of Kristalnacht, 60% of Americans believed that German Jews were responsible for their own persecution. In 1944, 76% of Americans believed that the gas chambers were real, but only 20% believed over a million Jews had been killed (at this point, the real number was 5 million dead).

Having visited the sites of concentration camps myself, I can understand the disbelief Americans experienced when confronted with the horrors of the Nazis’ extermination campaign. The breadth and scale of the Shoah confound the mind, and I was not surprised to see in the documentary the initial skepticism displayed by American journalists, politicians and citizens upon learning of the death camps.

Yet it was shocking to learn how mixed the response was within our own American Jewish communities. We are not immune from what seems to be the classic American immigrant cycle: as soon as our generation is allowed through the Golden Door, we want to shut it behind us.

 

[Sixties Fan]

The faces of the children follow you as you watch the haunting documentary "Three Minutes: A Lengthening." They keep popping up in the worn frames of the rare 1938 footage from a Jewish neighborhood in a small town in Poland, and the silent footage is played over and over and over again throughout the 70-minute film. The children look straight at you as you sit in your comfortable seat in a suburban movie theater in 2022, thinking of your own children's faces as you watch these children whose names you will never know. There's the girl in the faded red dress. The one with the braids, who pops up so often that at one point, a teenage bully shoves her from view. The boys in their newsboy caps. The girl in the faded red dress again, her hair in the neatest of bobs. Those braids. They are smiling, jockeying for position, staring in wonder at this strange new thing, a movie camera, and behind it an American visitor. They are smiling because, unlike you, they have no idea what is about to happen to them. They do not know that in a year they and their friends, their parents and their grandparents and all the 3,000 Jews in this little town, Nasielsk, will be marched from the town square and squeezed into cattle cars. They do not know that all but a handful of the scores of faces in this film will soon be erased from this Earth, slaughtered at Treblinka. They know only that there is a camera, and that they want to be seen. They are children, after all.

Glenn Kurtz was a child, too, when he first saw this footage. It was the 1970s and he was growing up in his own comfortable suburb — Roslyn, N.Y. — and remembers his parents showing it to him a couple of times. The footage was shot by his immigrant grandfather, David Kurtz, who ran a company that manufactured boys' shirts and died before Glenn was born. It was part of a 14-minute travelogue of a European adventure that included Paris, Amsterdam, Geneva and the south of France. "We just watched it like a home movie," the younger Kurtz recalled when we spoke by phone yesterday. "No one thought of it as anything other than grandma and grandpa's vacation footage." Decades later, in 2009, Kurtz was working on a novel about someone who finds an old home movie in a flea market and becomes obsessed with identifying the people in it. He went to his parents' home in Florida and dug the footage out of the back of a closet. It was all but ruined by the years, but U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington miraculously restored the film, and Kurtz posted it online as he, like his character, became obsessed with identifying the people in it. Back then, no one even knew which town in Poland was depicted. Years of meticulous research resulted in Kurtz's 2014 book, "Three Minutes in Poland," and then this remarkable documentary directed by Bianca Stigter, which debuted a year ago at the Venice Film Festival and was released in theaters on Aug. 19. It also led to the creation of the Nasielsk Society, an informal network of 300 descendants of the few survivors from this town. Last year, the group helped erect the first memorial to the thousands of Jewish residents lost in the Shoah, and Kurtz has been working with teachers in Nasielsk to bring the town's lost Jewish history into school curriculums. Over the years, a handful more artifacts have been uncovered from Nasielsk, most recently a 1937 photo from the town's yeshiva that includes Maurice Chandler, one of the boys in the newsboy caps in the Kurtz footage, and one of two survivors whose voices you hear in the documentary. A professor in Amsterdam who works with facial recognition software is hoping to match other faces from the yeshiva photo with those faces following the camera in "Three Minutes." "That's what this project has been about — just connecting these fragments that are floating around in isolation in someone's drawer or in an archive somewhere," said Kurtz, who is 59. "The hope is that the more pieces we're able to assemble, the closer we're able to come to identify someone or at least to being able to provide a context for their lives." The footage he'd viewed as just another home movie as a child looked different once he "became an adult with a historical consciousness," Kurtz explained. "I inherited this film, and the minute I saw it, I thought, 'I am responsible for the memory of these people. If I don't figure out who they are probably no one will and their memory will be lost.'" So far, only about a dozen of the 153 faces in "Three Minutes" have been identified, despite intense effort. The documentary showcases this effort, with a walk-through of the painstaking process Kurtz and others pursued to determine the name of the owner of the grocery store shown in his grandfather's footage. Not far from the synagogue — which itself was identified by the carving of a Lion of Judah on one of its doors — the film shows a doorway with a small sign over it that says "Grocery" in Polish. The letters on the sign that would indicate the proprietor were unrecognizable due to the graininess of the footage, and time. A Polish researcher took the shapes of the least washed-out letters — the first one had a loop at the top so could have been a P, B or R; another was almost certainly a W — and pored through business directories from the time to ultimately determine that the store was owned by someone named Ratowski. It is satisfying, even a little thrilling, to see this small mystery solved before your eyes. Though we would be fooling ourselves to think that knowing the name of the owner of the grocery store owner means we understand the horror of what happened to him any better. And later in the film, when Stigter pulls thumbnail portraits of everyone who appears for even a single frame in the original footage into a 17 x 9 grid, it's clear that there are many, many more names we do not know, will almost certainly never know.

"I inherited this film, and the minute I saw it, I thought, 'I am responsible for the memory of these people.' – Glenn Kurtz, author of "Three Minutes in Poland"

The camera Kurtz's grandfather carried with him on his European adventure was a Ciné-Kodak Magazine 16 mm introduced the year before, in 1937. More than 70 years later, his grandson bought five of them on eBay for between $25 and $40 each. "I learned quite a bit by having it in my hand," he told me. "The whole thing is the size of a paperback book. It's a spring-wound motor. You wind it up and that provides the power for the motor. The spring has a limited tension, so the longest shot that you can make depends on the strength of the spring." For his grandfather's camera, that was about 20 seconds. Which explains why the three minutes is mainly made up of what feels like a loop of short spurts panning a crowd of faces, the children seemingly chasing the camera as it moves along. Kurtz took his new-old cameras with him to Nasielsk in 2014, the year his book was published and the 75th anniversary of the deportation of the town's Jews. Some 50 descendants of the few survivors, or relatives of people like his grandfather who had left Nasielsk before the war, returned as well, the largest group of Jews to grace the town since that fateful day in 1939. "There's something about the nature of this history that makes people from the same town feel connected in a real way," Kurtz said. "People in the film are undoubtedly relatives of mine, though I can't say who. It feels like an extended family." Kurtz, who has a doctorate in German studies and comparative literature from Stanford, had previously written a memoir about his journey as a musician, and from 2008 to 2015 hosted "Conversations on Practice," a series of discussions of the writer's life with authors including Patti Smith, Jennifer Egan, Martin Amis and Adam Gopnik. He's visited Nasielsk eight times over the last decade, showing his grandfather's footage at schools and libraries, and last year screening "Three Minutes: A Lengthening" in the town theater for a crowd that included the mayor. Kurtz is also now president of the Nasielsk Society, which he sees as a third iteration of the "landsmanshaftn," the networks of immigrants from the old country that were active in New York City in the early 1900s and the period after World War II. During the 2014 visit with the 50 other Nasielsk descendants, he shot some footage on the Ciné-Kodak Magazine 16 mm. He said he hopes to someday use that footage in another documentary. For now, "it's in my closet," Kurtz laughed. But not to worry: "It's on my computer as well." The Forward

 

[Sixties Fan]

Queen Elizabeth’s relationship with Holocaust survivors and the State of Israel

“The Jewish community is really in mourning along with the rest of the United Kingdom. We really feel that we have lost, I think someone described her, as the grandmother of the nation,” said Olivia Marks-Woldman, chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

www.jns.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Immigrants waiting to be transferred on Ellis Island, October 30, 1912.
Photo: Courtesy of Library of Congress.
PBS LearningMedia, the educational arm of the PBS network, announced the release of free lesson plans for middle and high school teachers to help educate students about topics explored in an upcoming documentary that focuses on how the United States government and American people responded to the Holocaust as it unfolded in Europe.

The three-part film “The US and the Holocaust,” co-directed by award-winning American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, will air on PBS from Sept. 18-20. It examines America’s actions, or lack thereof, concerning the Holocaust as well as the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology in Germany within the framework of global antisemitism and racism, including in the United States.

PBS will provide eight lesson plans for educators that address clips from the film and cover various topics, including the impact of Nazism; US immigration policy from 1924-1941; US media coverage of the Holocaust; and how public opinion in the United States influenced the American government’s response to the Holocaust and the refugee crises.

Some of the free lesson plans have already been released but the full collection of educational materials will be available on Sept. 18 on the “Ken Burns in the Classroom” hub on PBS LearningMedia’s website. The lesson plans were developed with historical and archival help from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, whose exhibit, “Americans and the Holocaust,” partially inspired Burns’ documentary.

(full article online )

PBS Offers Free Lesson Plans, Teaching Course for Educators Related to Upcoming Ken Burns Holocaust Documentary

Immigrants waiting to be transferred on Ellis Island, October 30, 1912.Photo: Courtesy of Library of Congress. PBS LearningMedia, the educational …

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Arūnas Bubnys of the state-sponsored Lithuanian Genocide Center speaking at a June 23, 2020 far right meeting flanked by the photographs of wartime Nazi collaborators Jonas Noreika and Kazys Škirpa. Photo: courtesy of ‘Defending History’.


In one scene from the powerful and horrific documentary “Baltic Truth,” Riga Ghetto survivor Marger Vesterman plays the piano to the tune of a song created in the ghetto. He then recalls what the words were: “If you survive, no one has to remind you that you have responsibilities.”

The chilling documentary reminds us that it was not only Nazis who massacred Jews. In this case, Latvians and Lithuanians were all too eager to quench their thirst for Jewish blood, even if it meant shooting neighbors who they’d previously celebrated birthdays with.

The searing documentary is narrated and hosted by Israeli singer Dudu Fisher. Fisher explains that his mother, Miriam, was born in Riga in 1932, and that if much of his family hadn’t moved to Mandatory Palestine, he would have been “among the millions of unborn Jewish children.”

On July 4, 1941, Riga’s Great Choral Synagogue was burnt down. Jews at the time thought massacres against their brethren in Poland were only rumors.

Because Latvia had been occupied by Russia in 1940, when it was occupied by Germany in 1941, Jews hoped the fury would be against the Bolsheviks. In the film, George D. Schwab explains that his father gave flowers to the German Army and greeted them and asked what would happen to the Jews. His father was told not to worry, as the main goal was to fight the Bolsheviks. Days later, his father had his eyes gouged out, he was tortured and then executed.

In the town of Akniste, Jewish men had their noses and ears cut off before they were shot to death.

At different times, Fisher chants the “maleh” — a prayer to honor the dead — and it is difficult not to cry when he does so. Outrageously, a number of Latvian and Lithuanians responsible for massacres against Jews have had monuments built in their honor.

Fisher notes that Jews were told they would be relocated, but many were relocated to their graves. And in some cases, Jews had to dig their own graves.

As to why regular citizens would participate in such atrocities, three theories are advanced: they wanted to loot and improve their economic situation, they were influenced by the Nazi ideology of scapegoating Jews or supported it themselves, or they believed propaganda that the Jews were all communists who supported the Russian takeover.

Survivor Elly Lasar Gotz says that on October 29, 1941, Lithuanians, supervised by Nazis, killed 10,000 Jews. We learn that by one forest, 25,000 Jews were killed in two days. Adults were killed with one bullet to the head, but so as not to waste bullets, children were killed by having the rifle butt being smashed against their heads.

Before the war in Lithuania, there were 400,000 Jews. But after World War II, there were only hundreds.

Viewers will become more and more enraged as the film goes on, but that is the point. “Baltic Truth” is a documentary you must see, as a participant to fight against those who seek to erase historical facts. If your blood hasn’t fully boiled, it will when you see that a murderer of Jews has been romanticized in a play that receives applause. Los Angeles resident Grant Gochin also notes that there are monuments in Lithuania for Juozas Kristaponis, who murdered Jews in Belarus, including relatives of the late Israeli leader Shimon Peres.

Gochin says in the film that if Lithuania is permitted to rewrite its history — as it is trying to do — then anyone can.


(full article online)

New Documentary Examines the Murder of Jews by Latvians and Lithuanians in the Holocaust

Arūnas Bubnys of the state-sponsored Lithuanian Genocide Center speaking at a June 23, 2020 far right meeting flanked by the …

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Beautiful Blue Eyes centers on an NYPD cop (Scheider) who has spent decades haunted by the murder of his family during World War II. When he believes he has found the Nazi responsible for their deaths, he enlists his estranged son to help him exact revenge. It’s unclear how the film’s title violated Facebook’s race policy given that people of any race can have blue eyes. The stated rationale would presumably subject the promotion of a literary classic like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to a similar ban.

The British director believes that the ban significantly diminished prospects for the film, which opened in 431 theaters in the U.S. on Sept. 9. “Every decent and sane human being on this planet should be alarmed by Meta-Facebook’s ban on the advertising of a Holocaust-related film,” Newton adds. “Mark Zuckerberg has created a monster that has no oversight. It’s one thing to be flagged by an algorithm. It’s another for Meta-Facebook employees to review the flag and uphold it, knowing full well that the title is not discriminatory and that the film is Holocaust-related.”

One of the actors in the film, Alexander Newton, the son of the director who performs Beautiful Blue Eyes’ titular song, says he was informed that any advertising or promotion of his artist’s page is also permanently banned by Facebook and Instagram.

“It’s incredibly ironic [given that] both the movie and song are about a Holocaust survivor,” says the younger Newton. MovieFarm CEO Martin Myers tells Rolling Stone that the ban is “completely outrageous.”

The Facebook ban isn’t the first roadblock the elder Newton has faced with the film. In 2008, Jaws icon Scheider died after battling multiple myeloma before the film’s completion. Due to a problem with one of the cameras, some shots were lost. But the director used AI technology developed in recent years to repair the damaged frames, allowing him to edit and release the movie as he originally envisioned.

(full article online)

Facebook Bans Holocaust Film for Violating Race Policy

The filmmakers behind ‘Beautiful Blue Eyes,’ which marks Roy Scheider’s final performance, cannot advertise or promote the movie because the title breaches its policy against content that “includes…

www.rollingstone.com

 

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[Sixties Fan]

My Grandparents’ Impossible Situation

Taking a new look at my family’s history, after watching Ken Burns’ PBS documentary ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’

www.tabletmag.com

 

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The Nazis recorded everything they stole. One artist is mining their archives for something new.

Lisa Oppenheim’s solo exhibition inverts Nazi archival photos to make the absence of stolen objects and stolen lives feel tangible.

forward.com