Remembering Auschwitz

Sadly Tweedle24 to our shame you are right, Jews were driven out en masse by Edward 1st who issued an edict expelling all Jews from England, lasting for the rest of the middle ages. It was over 350 years before this was formally overthrown in 1656. Those who couldn't leave were persecuted and massacred.

Every person on this Earth is an individual so, it is unfair and, indeed, dangerous to generalise about any group of people. By the way, this country is not in any way immune from persecuting the Jews. William the Conqueror used them to finance the Battle of Hastings and the follow-up but, when in 1234 people realised they could not or, did not want, to repay borrowed money, they were cruelly hounded out of the country.

POGS - yes, your'e absolutely right to say the same nonsense accusations of owning all the wealth etc made in the 1930's, especially by the Nazi's, is being repeated today. Those of us who challenge this are often accused of preferring to support the Israeli government over Palestine. As if it was so simple.

POGS so true. It scares me rigid.

'The same lies and propaganda that the Nazis used so effectively in the 1930s – “Jews have too much power, Jews control the economy and the media, Jews control governments, Jews control everything” – are being repeated online, in the media and even from democratic governments.'
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Sadly that is true and some Politicians, Activists, Social Media, Forums et al are being given the oxygen to do exactly that.

Personally, I think that when brainwashed people will commit the most horrendous atrocities.

My Mother believed this country could do no wrong. She and my Grandmother were smuggled out of The Sudetenland when the Nazis occupied it. My Grandmother was Jewish married to a German, they were denounced by neighbours and the Gestapo imprisoned them in the town. A family member bravely went and successfully pleaded for their release, they were then smuggled onto a train to Holland. From there Quakers helped them get to the UK.
About 10 members of my Grandmothers family perished in the Holocaust.

When my mother found out about British atrocities in India and the fact that during the Boer war, ground glass was put into into the porridge in concentration camps. She was heartbroken.

Ronald S. Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress speaking at Auschwitz Camp Memorial.

Extracts, difficult to find full speech so this is rather clumsy :-

' Seventy-five years ago, when the world learned of the horrors of Auschwitz, nobody in their right mind wanted to be associated with Nazis But today, I see something I never thought I would see in my lifetime – the open and brazen spread of anti-Jewish hatred throughout the world once again.”

Lauder said that while antisemitism cannot be eradicated, “We cannot look the other way and pretend this isn’t happening. That’s what people did throughout the 1930s, and that is what led to Auschwitz.”

The same lies and propaganda that the Nazis used so effectively in the 1930s – “Jews have too much power, Jews control the economy and the media, Jews control governments, Jews control everything” – are being repeated online, in the media and even from democratic governments.

Auschwitz is surrounded by numbers, Lauder said: “Seventy-five years, 1933, 1938, six million.” But the loss of one and a half million Jewish children in the Holocaust is especially heartbreaking, he said. Had they survived, they would have grown to adulthood and raised a new generation.
“But something else was lost as well,” he said. “What could these one and a half million have created for us all? What symphonies? What great literature? What technology? What medical breakthroughs did we lose from these lost souls?”

Lauder recounted a story from the Eichmann trial in 1961, when witnesses recounted their experiences in Auschwitz. He told the story of a man who was separated from his wife and daughter at the platform in the camp.

“‘There were so many people, I didn’t know how I could keep my eye on them,’ he said. But he was able to see his daughter, who was wearing a bright red coat, until the coat became smaller and smaller in the distance, and she finally disappeared.

The Israeli prosecutor, Gabriel Bach, was unable to continue after hearing the man’s testimony.

“Years later, Bach explained that, as fate would have it, he and his wife had just bought their three-year-old daughter a little red coat. And Gabriel Bach said that to this day, if he goes into a sports stadium or a restaurant, or he’s just walking down a street in Jerusalem, and he sees a little girl in a red coat, his throat will tense up and he cannot speak,”

Lauder said.
“This is the legacy of Auschwitz, and it will never go away,” he said. “When we hear something that is antisemitic, when we hear someone talk about Israel unjustly, when Jews are attacked on your streets, do not be silent. Do not be indifferent. And do not just do this for the Jewish people around the world.”

“Do this for your children, do this for your grandchildren, but also, do this for the little girl in the red coat,” Lauder said."
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My memory if it does not fail me, Lauder reminded the gathering that the ashes of the little girl in the Red Coat were lying yards from where they were sitting.

I agree lemon grove, the concentration camps in the Boer war were awful places. However, the final solution, aim to kill the Jewish race, t wipe it out, along with Roma, gays, people with disabilities etc just beyond anything before or since.

Exactly Jabberwock concentration camps before the Nazis were not set up as death camps.Unpleasant places to be incarcerated in, but not to be compared.

As possibly your post upthread is too ananimous about 7 GNers.

lemons Don't start arguments please it's against GN guidelines

ananimous........sadly you haven’t chosen harmony and rarely do.

another race

The worst type of human seeks to exclude

Concentration camps, (dreadful of course) but not gas ovens!

Message deleted by Gransnet. Here's a link to our Talk Guidelines.

I have always been appalled by the Holocaust and have never understood that sort of hatred but Churchill himself thought the first concentration camps built to incarcerate the Boers were a good idea, and also participated enthusiastically in devastating attacks on local populations in Pakistan, Sudan and South Africa. As Home Secretary he unleashed the Black and Tans in Ireland, and several other horrific policies. So we as a nation also did despicable things, and there was no great outcry by the general population. So I believe that any of us are capable of becoming monsters and committing monstrous acts. I like to think I wouldn’t but if my children/ grandchildren were threatened if I didn’t comply maybe I would. I hope and pray that I never have to find out.

Ananimous, the Milgram experiment demonstrates how each ordinary nice woman or man is capable of atrocities, It's good you mentioned it.

Would you not agree being compliant with authority is the human fault that allows people to commit atrocities?

It remains to identify "authorities". And also to identify steps towards civil rights for all.

All it took to collaborate was a group of like-minded people...

Italy was an ally of Germany from 1936-1943 . After they surrendered to the allies they declared war on Germany in March 1943. The Italians were made to pay dearly in atrocities by Germany for this defection, which could have been the reason for this Italian womans reaction!

Thank you Greymar

Perhaps it would be a little more respectful not to use the Holocaust as an opportunity for pointscoring on a forum.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOUEC5YXV8U

This is why the holocaust happened.

Here's the full video experiment it is what we are all capable of...

Using 450 volts of electricity on humans but blaming someone else.

evianers I am surprised the Italians walked away; as allies of the Germans in WW2 their leader, the fascist Mussolini persecuted Jews.
They were not to blame for the sins of their ancestors but neither was the German woman.
She could have been a German Jew.

You are missing the teaching opportunity here so, so completely with your self-assured belief that "I would never!"

"What would it take for an ordinary person to torture someone else – perhaps electrocute them, even to the point of (apparent) death? In possibly the most famous experiments in social psychology, the late Stanley Milgram of Yale University investigated the conditions under which ordinary people would be willing to obey instructions from an authority figure to electrocute another person. The story of these experiments has often been told, but it is worth describing them again because they continue, more than 40 years on and many successful replications later, to retain their capacity to shock the conscience and illustrate how humans will bend to the demands of authority."

aeon.co/essays/an-ordinary-person-becomes-a-torturer-with-surprising-ease