The Holocaust: Understand in Your Bones

Congressman Tom Lantos
survivor of the Holocaust

"The veneer of civilization is paper thin.  We are its guardians, and we can never rest," said President Joe Biden in his statement issued today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

He was quoting his friend, Congressman Tom Lantos (1928-2008) of San Mateo CA, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the US Congress.

President Biden described the sources of his deep commitment to "never again":

I first learned about the horrors of the Holocaust listening to my father at the dinner table. The passion he felt that we should have done more to prevent the Nazi campaign of systematic mass murder has stayed with me my entire life. It’s why I took my children to visit Dachau in Germany, and why I hope to do the same for each of my grandchildren — so they too would see for themselves the millions of futures stolen away by unchecked hatred and understand in their bones what can happen when people turn their heads and fail to act.

He continued:

The horrors we saw and heard in Charlottesville in 2017, with white nationalists and neo-Nazis spewing the same anti-Semitic bile we heard in the 1930s in Europe, are the reason I ran for president. ...The Holocaust was no accident of history. It occurred because too many governments cold-bloodedly adopted and implemented hate-fueled laws, policies, and practices to vilify and dehumanize entire groups of people, and too many individuals stood by silently. Silence is complicity.

Antony J. Blinken also spoke out today, his first day as Secretary of State, remembering his step-father, a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family and spent almost four years in labor and death camps.  In fact, Samuel Pisar, "was one of 900 children in his school in Bialystok, Poland, but the only one to survive the Holocaust after four years in concentration camps."

"He taught me that evil on a grand scale can and does happen in our world, and that we have a responsibility to do everything we can to stop it," said Secretary Blinken.  

Listen to his 2-minute video on YouTube:

It's no accident that people who seek to create instability and undermine democracy often try to cast doubt on the Holocaust.... They want to blur the line between truth and lies.  They want to use disinformation and conspiracy theories to gain power, and they want to provoke hate... Every day that I serve as Secretary of State... I will remember that atrocities like the Holocaust don't just happen.  They're allowed to happen.  It's up to us to stop it.  Never again.

Secretary Blinken gave a fuller description of his family's stories last November when he was introduced as Biden's choice for Secretary of State.

Thank you to Lawrence O'Donnell who quoted both President Biden and Secretary Blinken on The Last Word today.  He noted that when the first American soldier entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found 7,000 prisoners still alive--but they also found 44,000 pairs of shoes.  Over 1 million people were executed there.

In the 1950s we didn't have International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

We had Anne Frank's Diary, which appeared in English in 1952 after first appearing in 1947 in Dutch.

I was in elementary school during the fifties, and the Holocaust was not part of the curriculum, nor did it come up in My Weekly Reader, the little newspaper we read aloud in class from second grade on.  It was actually one sheet, folded in half and then opened like a book or tabloid.  

We certainly did not cover World War II in our history lessons. In fact, we didn't go much beyond Columbus, the Pilgrims, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln.

But we had the first-person testimony of Anne Frank.  By 1959 a film appeared basednon her diary--the first Holocaust film made in the US.

The next time I remember hearing about the Holocaust was when Adolf Eichmann was on trial for being one of the major organizers of transporting and executing 6 million Jews and about 5 million others.  Every night in 1961, from April through December, my watched news reports of the trial in Jerusalem on our black-and-white television.  It was eerie to watch as he sat in a protective plastic box.  He was hung in Israel in 1962, the only execution ever allowed by that nation.  

By 2005 the UN decided that a remembrance day was needed, and they chose January 27, the day the Auschwitz extermination camp was liberated in 1945.

Today, on January 27, 2021, we need Holocaust Remembrance Day more than ever.  During the armed attack on the US Capitol by white supremacists and anti-Semites, there were some with abhorrent t-shirts saying "Camp Auschwitz" or "6MWNE" (six million was not enough).

Is it possible to give these people some kind of access to the reality of Auschwitz, enough to change their minds?  A tour?  A night spent naked alone in one of the gas chambers?

Or are these people's brains so polluted that they have become human waste, not fit for anything but a jail cell?

Lock them up.  Lock up as many of these armed attackers as possible and for as long as possible.

Allow them no reading material or video time--except for the stories of those who died in the Shoah and those who survived it.

~~~~~~~~~

Thank you to Vanessa Gera of the Associated Press for  reporting from Warsaw on this day, 76 years after US troops liberated Auschwitz.

  

Thank Goodness

Thank goodness the third presidential debate is over.

Thank goodness there are only 19 days left before election day.

Thank goodness Hillary Rodham Clinton has a strong lead in the polls.

Goodness is an issue in this campaign.

dt talked about "her very sleazy campaign."  Excuse me?  He brought unprecedented sleaze into it.

Hillary stood there in white, answering a question, as dt muttered "such a nasty woman."

"The operative word there is woman," Lawrence O'Donnell noted during post-debate commentary.

Gender is an issue in this campaign, one dt uses constantly.

The whole thing is unbearable, except that it's a thriller.

"It's like a train wreck--you can't not watch it," said Bob Goldman in my writing class on Wednesday afternoon.

dt claimed "She shouldn't be allowed to run."

To everyone but him, this was a reminder that 100 years ago she wouldn't have been allowed to run.  Women weren't even allowed to vote--but now a woman is ahead of him in the race for the presidency.

She's running and he's falling behind, so he wishes she were not "allowed" to run.  Put her in jail, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, but get her out of this marathon to become president of the US.

Speaking to Chris Wallace, the polite and courageous moderator of the debate, dt said, "The media is so dishonest and so corrupt...."  He didn't add "except you" or anything--he just blasted the poison in the moderator's face.

Hillary defended women's rights, gay rights, Roe v. Wade, immigration reform, background checks on people buying guns.  He criticized her "30 years" of being a politician.

"I'm happy to compare my 30 years of experience with his," she answered, cataloging her achievements and the trifling activities he was involved in simultaneously at each point: discriminating in real estate, borrowing $14 million from his dad, starring in a tv show.

Question 5 from Chris Wallace was about the nine women who have confirmed the groping and assault dt boasted of.

"I didn't know any of these women," the candidate claimed, yet he made business contracts with Jill Harth and her husband.  Natasha Stoynoff interviewed him for People magazine.

He claimed that HRC's campaign "got them to step forward" or that they did it for fame--unaware that women have been trying to avoid this kind of infamy for centuries.  

The audience at the University of Nevada laughed when he once again claimed, "No one respects women more than I do."

Thank goodness--thank God--the national ordeal is almost over.

I'm not one who believes God governs the outcome of elections, but I do believe with James Russell Lowell that God stands "behind the dim unknown":

"within the shadow, keeping watch over H[er] own."

http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/o/n/c/oncetoev.htm

May She protect Hillary Rodham Clinton and not allow her to be shot by some maniac.

May election day proceed without violence.

May we get through the next four years without violence and without the sleaze and gender bashing of this election.

Bizarre but at least behind us

I can sleep well tonight knowing that Hillary Rodham Clinton blasted dt out of the water in tonight's spectacle.  (It does not deserve to be called a debate.)

"This was a shut-out tonight," said Chris Matthews of MSNBC. "It was a disaster.  He looked out of it.  He couldn't control himself."  http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/matthews-first-debate-embarrassing-for-trump-773680707560

To be brief, I will list the top seven mistakes by Trump tonight--ones that I noticed, that drew hundreds of Tweets, and that commentators are marveling over.  Then I will list the top points made by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Most of my observations are from his many interruptions of her two-minute segments because I muted the television during his debate time.

1)  When Hillary pointed out that "He rooted for the [2008] housing crisis to happen" because he would make money, Trump interrupted her by yelling: "That's called business, by the way!"  He's proud of wanting the economy to fail so he could rake in the dough?

 
2)  Trump claim: "You've been fighting ISIS your entire adult life."  Huh?

3)  Hillary: "I have a feeling I'm going to be blamed for everything that's ever happened--"
     Trump interrupting her time: "Why not?"
     Hillary, laughing, incredulous: "Yeah, why not?!"

4) Trump claim: "I have a winning temperament.  I have a much better temperament than she does." (laughter from the audience, which had been sworn to silence).

5) Trump claim: "She doesn't have a presidential look.  She doesn't have the stamina."

    Hillary: "When he has visited 112 countries and made a peace deal and negotiated a ceasefire and negotiated the release of prisoners and spent 11 hours testifying before a senate committee, he can talk to me about stamina!" (big audience laughter).

6) When Hillary accused him of not releasing his tax returns because he may have avoided paying any taxes, he interrupted her to say "That makes me smart!"

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/09/26/donald-trump-on-not-paying-taxes-that-makes-me-smart/

7)  Somehow he brought up his own name-calling against Rosie O'Donnell and said "Everyone agrees that she deserves it."  Lawrence O'Donnell said no human being deserves the kind of language he used against her.

David Axelrod on the evening: "She drove the conversation for much of this debate.  He was on the defensive.  She would say something--like dangling a piece of meat in front of him--and he would go for it every single time."

"I was just astounded at how unprepared he was... at how thin-skinned he was," said Michael Beschloss, NBC News presidential historian.

Touche comments by Hillary Rodham Clinton:

1) "I know you live in your own reality, but..."

2) Re his refusal to reveal tax returns: "Is it that he's not as rich as he claims?  Or not as charitable?  Or that he owes $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks?  Or maybe he has paid zero taxes for troops, vets, schools, health care... There must be something really important or terrible that he's trying to hide."

3) Re his charge that she spent all her time preparing for this debate: "I did prepare, and I prepared to be president, and I think that's a good thing."  (applause by audience)

4) RE Trump's history of racism: "He started his whole public career on this birther thing.  He persisted year after year.  In 1973 he was sued for racial discrimination in his housing projects by the Justice Department.  He was sued twice by the Justice Department... His bitter lie about President Obama's birth place was a very hurtful one.  But President Obama is a man of great dignity.  As Michelle Obama said, 'When they go low, we go high.'"

5) "Words matter when you run for president, and they really matter when you are president."

6)  "He hasn't told us how he would fight ISIS because he says it's a secret plan, but the only secret is that he has no plan."

Then there was the inevitable comparison on the drinking of water.  Commentators had to mention that she didn't take a drink of water the whole evening, but he kept sniffling and drinking water and grunting...  As I said, this was not a true debate but a competition for image and impression.