Holocaust Victim Quotes

Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

The Rape of Nanking did not penetrate the world consciousness in the same manner as the Holocaust or Hiroshima because the victims themselves had remained silent.

No white person could possibly understand what it is like to be black in America, even someone like me, a descendant of Holocaust victims and survivors.

I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal? So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest

Do not be a perpetrator. Do not be a bystander. Do not be a victim.

Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation.

Israel’s settler colonialism differed from its predecessors’ in another way. Where European powers colonized from a position of strength and a claim to God-given superiority, the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the reverse: on Jewish victimization and vulnerability. The tacit argument many Zionists were making at the time was that Jews had earned the right to an exception from the decolonial consensus—an exception born of their very recent near extermination. The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers: If you could establish your empires and your settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its Indigenous inhabitants, or did so in your colonies, then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot. It was as if the quest for equality were being reframed not as the right to be free from discrimination, but as the right to discriminate. Colonialism framed as reparations for genocide.

I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants. Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?

The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn't. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.

Stalin's mental journey, by 1943, proceeded in the opposite direction to that of Hitler. One moved toward reality; the other moved away from it. They crossed paths at Stalingrad. And as the war turned on the hinge of that battle (and on the new psychological opposition), Stalin might have concerned himself with a "counterfactual": if, instead of decapitating his army, he had intelligently prepared it for war, Russia might have defeated Germany in a matter of weeks. Such a course of action, while no doubt entailing grave consequences of its own, would have saved about 40 million lives, including the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust.

Luz Castro "And then i explain that the world did know and remained silent. and that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. NEUTRALITY HELPS THE OPPRESSOR, NEVER THE VICTIM. SILENCE ENCOURAGES THE TORMENTOR, NEVER THE TORMENTED. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must- at that moment- become the center of the universe." Elie Wiesel (from his speech when given the Nobel Peace Prize.)

Where are the young who must dedicate their roseate hours, their illusions and enthusiasm to the good of the country? Where are they who must generously spill their blood to wash away so much shame, so many crimes, so much abomination? Pure and spotless must be the victim for the holocaust to be acceptable. Where are you, you children who must embody the vigor of life that has fled from your veins, the purity of ideas that has become in our minds and the fire of enthusiasm that has gone out in our hearts? We await you, Oh youth! Come, we await you!

Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them.

Too often the survivor is seen by [himself or] herself and others as "nuts," "crazy," or "weird." Unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma. A traumatic stress reaction consists of *natural* emotions and behaviors in response to a catastrophe, its immediate aftermath, or memories of it. These reactions can occur anytime after the trauma, even decades later. The coping strategies that victims use can be understood only within the context of the abuse of a child. The importance of context was made very clear many years ago when I was visiting the home of a Holocaust survivor. The woman's home was within the city limits of a large metropolitan area. Every time a police or ambulance siren sounded, she became terrified and ran and hid in a closet or under the bed. To put yourself in a closet at the sound of a far-off siren is strange behavior indeed—outside of the context of possibly being sent to a death camp. Within that context, it makes perfect sense. Unless we as therapists have a good grasp of the context of trauma, we run the risk of misunderstanding the symptoms our clients present and, hence, responding inappropriately or in damaging ways.

At this juncture, the entire planet is locked, figuratively, in a room with the sociocultural equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. An individual of consummate taste and refinement, imbued with indelible grace and charm, he distracts his victims with the brilliance of his intellect, even while honing his blade. He is thus able to dine alone upon their livers, his feast invariably candlelit, accompanied by lofty music and a fine wine. Over and over the ritual is repeated, always hidden, always denied in order that it may be continued. So perfect is Lecter's pathology that, from the depths of his scorn for the inferiors upon whom he feeds, he advances himself as their sage and therapist, he who is incomparably endowed with the ability to explain their innermost meanings, he professes to be their savior. His success depends upon being embraced and exalted by those upon whom he preys. Ultimately, so long as Lecter is able to retain his mask of omnipotent gentility, he can never be stopped. The spirit of Hannibal Lecter is thus at the core of an expansionist European 'civilization' which has reached out to engulf the planet.

Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind.

The flowers of Europe are long-lasting, they do not fade quickly when they are plucked from their branches. Because they grow in a such soil that still keeps the blood and bodies of the Holocaust victims in itself. -To be tried as a Jew-

Does it matter if they were from Kielce or Brno or Grodno or Brody or Lvov or Turin or Berlin? Or that the silverware or one linen tablecloth or the chipped enamel pot—the one with the red stripe, handed down by a mother to her daughter—were later used by a neighbour or someone they never knew? Or if one went first or last; or whether they were separated getting on the train or off the train; or whether they were taken from Athens or Amsterdam or Radom, from Paris or Bordeaux, Rome or Trieste, from Parczew or Bialystok or Salonika. Whether they were ripped from their dining-room tables or hospital beds or from the forest? Whether wedding rings were pried off their fingers or fillings from their mouths? None of that obsessed me; but—were they silent or did they speak? Were their eyes open or closed? I couldn't turn my anguish from the precise moment of death. I was focused on that historical split second: the tableau of the haunting trinity—perpetrator, victim, witness. But at what moment does wood become stone, peat become coal, limestone become marble? The gradual instant.

And not only our own particular past. For if we go on forgetting half of Europe’s history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century’s mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others. Every one of these events had different historical, philosophical, and cultural origins, every one arose in particular local circumstances which will never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been—and will be—repeated again and again: our transformation of our neighbors into “enemies,” our reduction of our opponents to lice or vermin or poisonous weeds, our re-invention of our victims as lower, lesser, or evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or explusion or death. The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. This book was not written “so that it will not happen again,” as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the “objective enemy,” as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why—and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

The shakedown of Switzerland and Germany has been only a prelude to the grand finale: the shakedown of Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, alluring prospects opened up in the former heartland of European Jewry. Cloaking itself in the sanctimonious mantle of “needy Holocaust victims,” the Holocaust industry has sought to extort billions of dollars from these already impoverished countries. Pursuing this end with reckless and ruthless abandon, it has become the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe.

Could it possible for humans to breath under water? A fetus in its mother's womb is certainly alive in an aquatic environment. During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labor for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air. Are Drexians water-breathing, aquatically-mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Have they been spared by god to teach us or terrorize us? Their stories took one of the most gruesome details of the Atlantic slave trade and reframed it. The murder of enslaved women was reimagined as an escape from murderous oppression and the founding of a utopia civilization.

Fracturing of the psyche is said to be conducive to creating the phenomenon that has been termed sleeper assassins. According to such theories, the first psychiatrists employed to master mind control studied mental patients who had been diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, which medical science has since renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder. Many of those psychiatrists are said to have been Paperclip Nazi doctors who were brought to the US after conducting radical psychiatric experiments on patients during the Holocaust – the same doctors whose victims not only included Jews, Gyspies, political agitators and homosexuals, but also the mentally ill.

If you are a denier, get on the right side of history and stop being so gullible. Remember, it has been historically and scientifically proven, in a court of law no less, that more than 1.2 million Jews, along with 20,000 gypsies and tens of thousands of Polish and Russian political prisoners, were killed at Auschwitz alone. Beyond that, Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names has collected 4.5 million Jewish victims’ names (and counting) from various archival sources. How much more evidence could you possibly want?

What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?

They often unfavorably compared Holocaust victims to the new, powerful Jews of the Yishuv who dislodged the British and fought off the Arabs with strength and military might. Tellingly, “[t]hose killed in the Holocaust were said to have ‘perished,’ while Jews who died fighting in Palestine had ‘fallen.’”27 Tommy

One victim was sixteen-year-old John Steinbeck. The future author of The Grapes of Wrath returned home from his Californian school one day looking ‘pale and dizzy

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum qtd. in Halter)

when we judge racism we must take the perspective of the victim.

We are at once put to work sorting. My friend Leybl stands next to me. We inspect every garment as carefully as possible. On the other side of me stands a worker who has already been here for several days. I want to find out from him what happened here, since, despite the fact that I can see the clothes left behind by the victims, I still cannot grasp what is going on.

Yesterday on public radio, I heard the sirens in Israel and the description of automobile drivers stopping on the sides of the roads for two minutes, honoring those who died in the Holocaust. I just about lost it emotionally. It tore me up so bad to finally feel the connection to those victims. I cannot deny it anymore. I am a second-generation Holocaust victim. I too am a Mengele victim.

But passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it. Empires are founded by travelers, and the claim of some exclusive knowledge of the native is their mark. I always imagined reparations as a rejection of plunder at large. And who in modern memory had been plundered more than the victims of the Holocaust? But my prototype was not reparations from a genocidal empire to its Jewish victims, but from that empire to a Jewish state. And what my young eyes now saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy. I was seeking a world beyond plunder—but my proof of concept was just more plunder.

Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered.

I often used to turn off the television whenever there was yet another documentary on National Socialism. Yeah, yeah, it was dreadful, I said to myself, but we know it was dreadful.... The equation ' National Socialism equals Holocaust' had always led me to the point where I thought, oh yes, horror. Horror ticked off like a piece of prep; horror as ritualised as a victim's story on television or at the cinema.

We share Hitler's planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. if we think that we are the victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler. If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler's world.

For roughly thirty years, young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated ‘modules’, not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast. They have been encouraged to feel empathy with imagined Roman centurions or Holocaust victims, not to write essays about why and how their predicaments arose.

Most people have no understanding of the psychological changes of captivity. Social judgment of chronically traumatized people therefore tends to be extremely harsh. The chronically abused person's apparent helplessness and passivity, her entrapment in the past, her intractable depression and somatic complaints, and her smoldering anger often frustrate the people closest to her. Moreover, if she has been coerced into betrayal of relationships, community loyalties, or moral values, she is frequently subjected to furious condemnation. Observers who have never experienced prolonged terror and who have no understanding of coercive methods of control presume that they would show greater courage and resistance than the victim in similar circumstances. Hence the common tendency to account for the victim's behavior by seeking flaws in her personality or moral character. ... The propensity to fault the character of the victim can be seen even in the case of politically organized mass murder. The aftermath of the Holocaust witnessed a protracted debate regarding the 'passivity' of the Jews and their 'complicity' in their fate. But the historian Lucy Dawidowicz points out that 'complicity' and 'cooperation' are terms that apply to situations of free choice. They do not have the same meaning in situations of captivity.

My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies. There is a personal motive as well. I do care about the memory of my family’s persecution. The current campaign of the Holocaust industry to extort money from Europe in the name of “needy Holocaust victims” has shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom to that of a Monte Carlo casino. Even

Today over breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence: fear of every ring at the door, of ill-treatment, insults, fear for one’s life, of hunger (real hunger), ever new bans, ever more cruel enslavement, deadly danger coming closer every day, every day new victims all around us, absolute helplessness — and yet still hours of pleasure, while reading aloud, while working, while eating our less than meagre food, and so we go on eking out a bare existence and go on hoping. [Dresden, 30 May 1942]

Life always takes the side of life, and somehow the victims are blamed. But it wasn't the BEST people who survived, nor did the best ones died. It was RANDOM... Look at how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What's the point? People haven't changed.. Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust.

Parent and Teacher Actions: 1. Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they would like to improve in their family or school. Then have them identify a real person or fictional character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation? 2. Link good behaviors to moral character. Many parents and teachers praise helpful actions, but children are more generous when they’re commended for being helpful people—it becomes part of their identity. If you see a child do something good, try saying, “You’re a good person because you ___.” Children are also more ethical when they’re asked to be moral people—they want to earn the identity. If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, “Will you share?” ask, “Will you be a sharer?” 3. Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others. When children misbehave, help them see how their actions hurt other people. “How do you think this made her feel?” As they consider the negative impact on others, children begin to feel empathy and guilt, which strengthens their motivation to right the wrong—and to avoid the action in the future. 4. Emphasize values over rules. Rules set limits that teach children to adopt a fixed view of the world. Values encourage children to internalize principles for themselves. When you talk about standards, like the parents of the Holocaust rescuers, describe why certain ideals matter to you and ask children why they’re important. 5. Create novel niches for children to pursue. Just as laterborns sought out more original niches when conventional ones were closed to them, there are ways to help children carve out niches. One of my favorite techniques is the Jigsaw Classroom: bring students together for a group project, and assign each of them a unique part. For example, when writing a book report on Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, one student worked on her childhood, another on her teenage years, and a third on her role in the women’s movement. Research shows that this reduces prejudice—children learn to value each other’s distinctive strengths. It can also give them the space to consider original ideas instead of falling victim to groupthink. To further enhance the opportunity for novel thinking, ask children to consider a different frame of reference. How would Roosevelt’s childhood have been different if she grew up in China? What battles would she have chosen to fight there?

Night of the Broken Glass dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust Dark is the night I hear your heartbeat In the room there is no light Fire in the night I hear them marching Your boots are brown Glass in my thoughts Hear the fear in this night Shrill screams shattered I do not hear your heartbeat Why is the light so bright in the room

No matter how much we longed for the destruction of the Nazi regime, we could not remain undisturbed by the bombing raids, and none of us enjoyed them, out of fear for our nearest and dearest. The attacks would fall on towns where thousands of innocent people would lose their lives, people who had as much repulsion for the war as us concentration-camp victims.

But every answer suggests a new question, and I now wondered why the victims of this crime had not screamed out for justice. Or if they had indeed cried out, why had their anguish not been recognized? It soon became clear to me that the custodian of the curtain of silence was politics. The People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China, and even the United States had all contributed to the historical neglect of this event for reasons deeply rooted in the cold war. After the 1949 Communist revolution in China, neither the People’s Republic of China nor the Republic of China demanded wartime reparations from Japan (as Israel had from Germany) because the two governments were competing for Japanese trade and political recognition.

So the history of the modern state can also be read as the history of race, bringing together the stories of two kinds of victims of European political modernity: the internal victims of state building and the external victims of imperial expansion. Hannah Arendt noted this in her monumental study on the Holocaust, which stands apart for one reason: rather than talk about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Arendt sited it in the imperial history of genocide. The history she sketched was that of European settlers killing off native populations. Arendt understood the history of imperialism through the workings of racism and bureaucracy, institutions forged in the course of European expansion into the non-European world: “Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India.” Hannah Arendt’s blind spot was the New World. Both racism and genocide had occurred in the American colonies earlier than in South Africa. The near decimation of Native Americans through a combination of slaughter, disease, and dislocation was, after all, the first recorded genocide in modern history.

[R]esearch on perceiver-induced constraint reveals that people do not always account for situational constraints on behavior, even when they themselves have constructed the situation. Thus, perpetrators could have focused on the degraded and pathetic state of their victims as justifica­tion for both their past and their future victimization, even though the per­petrators were actually responsible for their wretched state.

I looked at him. He sat in the darkness, with his brows knitted tightly together, as though trying to grasp something, to understand the inconceivable, to pinpoint the moment when everything suddenly got out of control and the point of no return was officially passed by both sides – the future murderers and their victims. The new Reich sorted us into two kinds and now he suddenly found himself among those who held an ax above our miserable heads.

Ahron Cohen, who, despite attending Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust Denial conference, in fact does not only not deny that it happened, but actually blames Jewry for it, saying: ‘There is no question that there was a Holocaust and gas chambers. There are too many eyewitnesses. However, our approach is that when one suffers, the one who perpetrates the suffering is obviously guilty but he will never succeed if the victim did not deserve it in one way or another.

The pictures up on that wall in Cupertino illustrated that not just one person but hundreds of thousands could have their lives extinguished, die at the whim of others, and the next day their deaths would be meaningless. But even more telling was that those who had brought about these deaths (the most terror-filled, even if inevitable, tragedy of the human experience) could also degrade the victims and force them to expire in maximum pain and humiliation.

Карский и Пилецкий произвели на меня впечатление именно как личности, делавшие то, чего не делает большинство других людей. Они видели больше, чем страдания их собственного коллектива. С учетом сегодняшней тенденции идентифицировать себя с той или иной группой жертв, их поведение особенно интересно в моральном плане. Карский и Пилецкий видели страдания других. Для них не стоял вопрос о "конкуренции" жертв, который сегодня, пожалуй, решается еще труднее, чем тогда [160].

There are now little brass plaques on the ground outside this address. These are Stolpersteine. Tributes to the victims of the Holocaust. There are many of them in Berlin, especially in Charlottenburg. They are not easy to spot. You must walk with your head down, seeking memories between the cobblestones. In front of 15 Wielandstrasse, three names can be read. Paula, Albert, and Charlotte. But on the wall, there is only one commemorative plaque. The one for Charlotte Salomon.

almost all Americans would properly applaud President Walesa’s long-overdue acknowledgment of and apology for the horrors that were perpetrated against Jewish and other European “worthy” victims in Poland’s Nazi extermination centers during forty ghastly months in the 1940s, they by and large continue to turn their backs on the even more massive genocide that for four grisly centuries was perpetrated against what their apathy implicitly defines as the “unworthy” natives of the Americas.

In Sunday school, they always make hell out to be a place for people like Hitler, not a place for his victims. But [...] if only born-again Christians go to heaven, then the piles of suitcases and bags of human hair displayed at the Holocaust Museum represent thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children suffering eternal agony at the hands of an angry God. If salvation is available only to Christians, then the gospel isn't good news at all. For most of the human race, it is terrible news.

The web of secrecy that made the Holocaust possible is the same web of secrecy that allowed innocent children in the United States to become victims of their government’s fear of Communism. If we allow that web of secrecy to continue because it is too painful and horrifying to read about and believe, nothing will prevent it from happening again. Too many children, including myself were systematically brainwashed. Our minds became our concentration camp. Only now by healing and speaking out, have we become liberated.

From the destruction of the Second Temple to the expulsion from Spain to the Holocaust, Jews have told new stories to answer the horrors we endured. We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world. Its central element should be this: We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense.

Bearing witness takes the courage to realize the potential of the human spirit. Witnessing requires us to call forth the highest qualities of our species, qualities such as conviction, integrity, empathy, and compassion. It is easier by far to retain the attributes of carnistic culture: apathy, complacency, self-interest, and "blissful" ignorance. I wrote this book––itself an act of witnessing––because I believe that, as humans, we have a fundamental desire to strive to become our best selves. I believe that each and every one of us has the capacity to act as powerful witnesses in a world very much in need. I have had the opportunity to interact with thousands of individuals through my work as a teacher, author, and speaker, and through my personal life. I have witnessed, again and again, the courage and compassion of the so-called average American: previously apathetic students who become impassioned activists; lifelong carnists who weep openly when exposed to images of animal cruelty, never again to eat meat; butchers who suddenly connect meat to its living source and become unable to continue killing animals; and a community of carnists who aid a runaway cow in her flight from slaughter. Ultimately, bearing witness requires the courage to take sides. In the face of mass violence, we will inevitably fall into a role: victim or perpetrator. Judith Herman argues that all bystanders are forced to take a side, by their action or inaction, and that their is no such thing as moral neutrality. Indeed, as Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel points out, "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." Witnessing enables us to choose our role rather than having one assigned to us. And although those of us who choose to stand with the victim may suffer, as Herman says, "There can be no greater honor.

An eternity politician defines foes rather than formulating policies. Trump did so by denying that the Holocaust concerned Jews, by using the expression “son of a bitch” in reference to black athletes, by calling a political opponent “Pocahontas,” by overseeing a denunciation program that targeted Mexicans, by publishing a list of crimes committed by immigrants, by transforming an office on terrorism into an office on Islamic terrorism, by helping hurricane victims in Texas and Florida but not in Puerto Rico, by speaking of “shithole countries,” by referring to reporters as enemies of the American people, by claiming that protestors were paid, and so on.

Past is Prologue This book was written observing the premise that the seeds of Holocaust denial take root and prosper with misinformation. Clarity and transparency are imperative, as they leave no room for denial theories that would deprive the victims justice, or rob the living of a future. Generations of historians have enthusiastically gone about their craft knowing full well that 'he who owns the past, owns the future'. Improperly documented history, or more precisely, fraudulent versions of history not only deprive the victims of pasts injustices due recognition of their suffering, but also rob the living of a fair chance at a future free from the dangers of repeating past injustices.

It took me another few hours to realize that I had just spent an entire day at a Jewish museum that made no mention of the Holocaust. It was as if the Jews of the shtetlach from that first display case had just vanished, disappeared into history for no apparent reason. It was as though there had been no reason for the new influx of Jews after the war. It was as though history, and Birobidzhan itself, had just happened. That view of history is the post-Soviet condition. What happened to people - to families that still carry the memory, whose physical and psychic scars are plainly visible - was so enormous and so inexplicable, and, worst of all, the victims and their executioners were so intimately entangled, so indistinguishable at times, that, following a brief and torturous period of examination, the country's population has conspired to treat it as a force of nature.

WHO WAS J.F. LEHMANN? This book postulates that Adolf Hitler made a subtle, but all-important shift from proselytizing the myth of Germans as the oppressed victims of an “international Jewish conspiracy” to that of the superior race and oppressor because of J.F. Lehmann. It is not until after J.F. Lehmann brought Hitler the infamous Baur-Fischer-Lenz book on eugenics that Hitler’s speeches shifted from the stab-in-the-back myth, or the “Dolchstoßlegende,” with Germans as the oppressed victims of betrayal, to the eugenic propaganda of Germans as the pinnacle of white-supremacy. Weakness and superiority are incompatible attributes, and J.F. Lehmann is responsible for the shift away from the weakness inherent in victimhood to a racial superiority. Thus, it begs to question, who was this pivotal figure in Adolf Hitler's life, and why is his name and history not part of the commonly accepted history of The Holocaust? Nothing of The Holocaust or World War II can be understood without documenting who was Julius Friedrich Lehmann. Yet, J.F. Lehmann barely makes it onto the radar of even the most thorough books on the subject, and then only to name him as the person who delivered the Baur-Fischer-Lenz book to Adolf Hitler at Landsberg prison.

It is of more than historical interest to reflect that Henry Ford modeled his assembly line car production after visiting a Chicago slaughterhouse in the early 1900s. He watched the suspended animals, legs shackled and heads downward, on a moving conveyor as they traveled from worker to worker, each of whom performed a step in the slaughtering process. Ford immediately saw that it was a perfect model for the automobile industry, creating an assembly method of building cars. More than efficient, the slaughtering assembly line offered workers a newly found detachment in the whole messy business of killing animals. Animals were reduced to factory products and the emotionally deadened workers could see themselves as line workers rather than animal killers. Later, the Nazis used the same slaughterhouse model for their mass murders in the concentration camps. The factory-style assembly line became a way for Nazi soldiers to detach from the killing--seeing the victims as "animals," and themselves as workers. Henry Ford, a rampant anti-Semite, not only developed the assembly line method later used in the Holocaust, he openly admired the Nazis' efficiency. Hitler returned the admiration. The German leader considered "Heinrich Ford" a comrade-in-arms and kept a life-sized portrait of the automobile mogul in his office at the Nazi Party headquarters.

Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals” that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior” persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths” on scarce resources. The “T-4” program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities. Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition. The second “dress rehearsal” was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order” to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections. The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941. A third “dress rehearsal” was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941. Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death. The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder” consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths” began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available. Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions.” One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution” was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions” helped open the way for a “final solution”: extermination.

Demonstrating for peace to promote war was nothing new. Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy. To the ancient Greeks, a holocaust was simply a burnt sacrifice. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who exported communism to the American continent. In 1959 he was able to install the Castro brothers in Havana and soon my foreign intelligence service became involved in helping Cuba's new communist rulers to export revolution throughout South America. At that point it did not work. In the 1950s and 1960s most Latin Americans were poor, religious peasants who had accepted the status quo. A black version of liberation theology began growing in a few radical-leftist black churches in the US where Marxist thought is predicated on a system pf oppressor class ( white ) versus victim class ( black ) and it sees just one solution: the destruction of the enemy. In the 1950s UNESCO was perceived by many as a platform for communists to attack the West and the KGB used it to place agents around the world. Che Guevara's diaries, with an introduction by Fidel Castro, were produced by the Kremlin's dezinformatsiya machine. Changing minds is what Soviet communism was all about. Khrushchev's political necrophagy ( = blaming and condemning one's predecessor in office. It is a dangerous game. It hurts the country's national pride and it usually turns against its own user ) evolved from the Soviet tradition of sanctifying the supreme ruler. Although the communists publicly proclaimed the decisive role of the people in history, the Kremlin and its KGB believed that only the leader counted. Change the public image of the leader and you change history, I heard over and over from Khrushchev's lips. Khrushchev was certainly the most controversial Soviet to reign in the Kremlin. He unmasked Stalin's crimes, but he made political assassination a main instrument of his own foreign policy; he authored a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West but he pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war; he repaired Moscow's relationships with Yugoslavia's Tito, but he destroyed the unity of the communist world. His close association with Stalin's killings made him aware of what political crime could accomplish and gave him a taste for the simple criminal solution. His total ignorance about the civilized world, together with his irrational hatred of the "bourgeoisie" and his propensity to offend people, made him believe that disinformation and threats were the most efficient and dignified way for a Soviet leader to deal with "bourgeois" governments. As that very clever master of deception Yuri Andropov once told me, if a good piece of disinformation is repeated over and over, after a while it will take on a life of its own and will, all by itself, generate a horde or unwitting but passionate advocates. When I was working for Ceausescu, I always tried to find a way to help him reach a decision on his own, rather than telling him directly what I thought he should do about something. That way both of us were happy. From our KGB advisors, I had learned that the best way to ut over a deception was to let the target see something for himself, with his own eyes. By 1999, President Yeltsin's ill-conceived privatization had enabled a small clique of predatory insiders to plunder Russia's most valuable assets. The corruption generated by this widespread looting penetrated every corner of the country and it eventually created a Mafia-style economic system that threatened the stability of Russia itself. During the old Cold War, the KGB was a state within a state. In Putin's time, the KGB now rechristened FSB, is the state. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. In 2004, Putin's Russia had one FSB officer for every 297 citizens.

Bush felt fortified in his resolve when he stopped by Rice’s office one day that week while she was meeting with Elie Wiesel, the famed Holocaust survivor. Bush had just read Michael Beschloss’s book The Conquerors, about how Franklin Roosevelt and other leaders failed to act to stop the Holocaust. “I’m against silence,” Wiesel told him. “I’m against neutrality because it doesn’t ever help the victim. It helps the aggressor.

One of the most poignant of architectural metaphors is to be seen in the Holocaust Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind (Figure 107). Its form abounds in sharp points from the plan to the shape of openings. Its cladding in zinc copper titanium alloy adds menace to the razor-sharp edges and angles. The apparently arbitrary positioning of openings in the elevations originate in lines connecting the addresses of Jewish victims of the Nazis across Berlin. Vigorously clashing shapes put the finishing touch to a building which is a most eloquent memorial to the suffering of the Jews in the Second World War. It is the architectural equivalent of Picasso’s Guernica .

Of course when the history books tell of the groups murdered by the Nazis, they never list the prostitutes, because I'm sure the mention of their deaths is considered a stain on the other victims. The attitude is that the lives of prostitutes are worthless. I think it is self-hate. Our world hates anyone who would accept us and our bodies, and our secret desires without reservation. But that is what the ladies taught me... to welcome disdained things.

As Israel marks the sixtieth anniversary of its founding, Canadian Zionists have much to celebrate. Throughout the nation-building process Canadian Jews and non-Jews have been instrumental in helping to fulfill Zionism's six main achievements: • re-establishing Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland; • offering a welcoming home to Holocaust survivors, refugees from Arab lands, and other oppressed Jews; • returning the Jews to history, transforming Jews' image rom the world's victims to actors on history's stage, with rights and responsibilities; • building a Western-style capitalist democracy with a strong Jewish flavour and a dynamic Jewish culture; • reviving and modernizing Hebrew; • making Israel a central force in revitalizing Jewish secular and religious life in the Jewish homeland and abroad.

Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl The story of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust of WWII, inspired the world after the war. By 1997, when Frankl died of heart failure, his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which related his experiences in the death camps and the conclusions he drew from them, had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages. The book’s original title (translated from the German) reveals Frankl’s amazing outlook on life: Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. In 1942, Frankl and his wife and parents were sent to the Nazi Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the show camps used to deceive Red Cross inspectors as to the true purpose and conditions of the concentration camps. In October 1944, Frankl and his wife were moved to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people would meet their deaths. Later that month, he was transported to one of the Kaufering labor camps (subcamps of Dachau), and then, after contracting typhoid, to the Türkheim camp where he remained until American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Frankl and his sister, Stella, were the only ones in his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that a sense of meaning is what makes the difference in being able to survive painful and even horrific experiences. He wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.” Frankl maintained that while we cannot avoid suffering in life, we can choose the way we deal with it. We can find meaning in our suffering and proceed with our lives with our purpose renewed. As he states it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” In this beautiful elaboration, Frankl wrote, “Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” 7.2. In recent years, record numbers have visited Auschwitz. The ironic sign above the front gate means “Work sets you free.” TRAUMA IS EVERYWHERE It’s not just veterans, crime victims, abused children, and accident survivors who come face-to-face with trauma. About 75% of Americans will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives. Women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than they are to get breast cancer.

In 1982 Abbas matriculated in the doctoral program at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. The title of his dissertation was The Connection Between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement, 1933–1945. In 1984 he published his thesis as a book in Arabic under the title The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism. In both works, Abbas wrote that the Holocaust was a joint initiative of the Nazis and the Zionist movement. He alleged that the European Jews who were killed were actually the victims of the Jews from pre-state Israel who were in cahoots with the Germans.5 In his words, “A partnership was established between Hitler’s Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist movement.… [The Zionists gave] permission to every racist in the world, led by Hitler and the Nazis, to treat Jews as they wish, so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine.” Abbas wrote that the Zionists wanted as many Jews as possible to be killed. “Having more victims,” he wrote, “meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was not a fighting partner—suffering victims in a battle—it had no escape but to offer up human beings, under any name, to raise the number of victims, which they could then boast of at the moment of accounting.” Abbas denied that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. This too was a Zionist plot. “The truth is that no one can either confirm or deny

the core of a faction within the U.S. government whose conception of national security led them to deny the Holocaust, obstruct efforts to rescue Hitler’s victims, and, later, to oppose trials of Nazi Germany’s leaders. The situation in the British Foreign Office was disturbingly similar.

A crucial question for them, indeed, one challenging their humanity, is the question addressed to the spectator at the scene of evil. How continue life as normal after having seen that? How, if you are not a stone or a pile of dead wood or a cadaver? How, in other terms, without disappearing into the insentient natural cosmos? The victim and survivor of the Holocaust thus puts his question, embodied in literary form, so to say, of a prayer. To be indifferent is to stand condemned.

The meeting with Buber, unsatisfactory as it seemed, pushed Celan to revisit his own stance on the question of what it meant for a Jewish exile to address an audience of a variety of Germans—made up of former bystanders, victims, and perpetrators, of members of the first and second generations, of individuals, too, who downplayed the significance of the Cologne synagogue desecration in 1959, and of others who came to Celan’s defense against Claire Goll’s plagiarism charges.13 In a letter to Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann had expressed her concern that “having entered a room full of people one has not chosen oneself, whether one is still prepared to read for those who do want to listen, and are ashamed of the others.

Native American youths, like the children of war veterans, like the children of Holocaust survivors, like the children of Cambodian genocide survivors, and like the children of the World Trade Center attack survivors, are among the modern world’s newest victims of transgenerational trauma.

In Sunday school, they always make hell out to be a place for people like Hitler, not a place for his victims. But if my Sunday school teachers and college professors were right, then hell will be populated not only by people like Hitler and Stalin, Hussein and Milosevic but by the people that they persecuted. If only born-again Christians go to heaven, then the piles of suitcases and bags of human hair displayed at the Holocaust Museum represent thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children suffering eternal agony at the hands of an angry God. If salvation is available only to Christians, then the gospel isn’t good news at all. For most of the human race, it is terrible news.

Le terme de génocide est souvent employé pour qualifier la traite et l'esclavage pratiqués par l'Occident. Alors qu'il convient de reconnaître que dans la traite transatlantique un esclave, même déshumanisé, avait une valeur vénale pour son propriétaire. Ce dernier le voulait d'abord efficace, mais aussi rentable dans le temps, même si son espérance de vie était des plus limitées. Il est sans doute difficile d'apprécier l'importance de la saignée subie par l'Afrique noire au cours de la traite transatlantique. Du Bois l'estime à environ quinze à vingt millions d'individues. P. Curtin, quant à lui, en faisant une synthèse des travaux esistants, aboutit en 1969 à un total d'environ neuf millions six cent mille escales importés, surtout dans le Nouveau Monde, plus faiblement en Europe et à São Tomé, pour l'ensemble de la période 1451-1870. Mais quelle que fût l'ampleur de cette traite, il suffit d'observer la dynamique de la diaspora noire qui s'est formée au Brésil, aux Antilles et aux États-Unis, pour reconnaître qu'une entreprise de destruction froidement et méthodiquement programmée des peuples noirs, au sens d'un génocide — comme celui des Juifs, des Arméniens, des Cambodgiens ou autres Rwandais —, n'y est pas prouvée. Dans le Nouveau Monde la plupart des déportés ont assuré une descendance. De nos jours, plus de soixante-dix millions de descendants ou de métis d'Africains y vivent. Voilà pourquoi nous avons choisi d'employer le terme d'«holocauste» pour la traite transatlantique. Car ce mot signifie bien sacrifice d'hommes pour le bien-être des autres hommes, même si cela a pu entraîner un nombre incalculable de victimes. En outre, la plupart des nations occidentales impliquées dans le commerce triangulaire ont aujourd'hui reconnu leur responsabilité et prononcé leur aggiornamento. La France, entre autres, l'a fait une loi — qualifiant la traite négrière et l'esclavage de «crime contre l'humanité» — votée au Parlement le 10 mai 2001. Ce qui a marqué clairement un changement d'attitude chez les Français face à une page de leur histoire jusqu'alors mal assumée. D'autres voix se sont élevées pour présenter les excuses d'un pays, telle celle du président Clinton, ou demander «pardon pour les péchés commis par l'Europe chrétienne contre l'Afrique» (Jean-Paul II, en 1991, à Gorée). [...] Seul le génocide des peuples noirs par les nations arabo-musulmanes n'a toujours pas fait l'objet de reconnaissance aussi nette. Alors que ce crime est historiquement, juridiquement et moralement imprescriptible. Car bien qu'il n'y ait pas de victimes ni de coupables hérédiatires, les descendants des peuples impliqués ne peuvent refuser d'assumer une certaine responsabilité. On pouvait cependant espérer que les résolutions adoptées par la conférence de l'ONU à Durban (2-9 septembre 2001) iraeient dans ce sense. Mais dans l'esprit, l'acte, si solennel fût-il, n'était qu'une entreprise fallacieusement orientée, doublée d'une dénonciation sélective. Durban n'a pas donné une vision d'ensemble honnête et objective de la terrible «tragédie noire» passée. Puisque, de nos jours encore, beaucoup associent par réflexe traite négrière au seul traffic transatlantique organisé à partie de l'Europe et des Amériquees, qui a conduit à la mort ou à la déportation de millions d'Africains dans le Nouveau Monde. La confusion vient du fait que la colonisation européenne de l'Afrique noire avec son système de travail forcé a suivi la fin de la traite transatlantique, ce qui incite à assimiler les deux évènements. Alors que la traite et le travail forcé des peuples noirs n'ont pas été une invention des nations européennes.

The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess.

The Nazi genocide is conventionally thought to exceed all “normal” conceptions of justice and to estrange familiar categories such as “guilt”, “punishment”, and even “the human.” Yet, invocations of the genocide in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict tend to reference the Holocaust as the bearer of shared norms of human rights and clear-cut moral distinctions. In scenarios of equation, not only is the past anachronistically rewritten from the vantage point of a very different present (a rewriting that characterizes many acts of memory), but as a result, the present loses its potential as a locus of novelty [.…] Regardless of the complexities of the Nazi genocide as a historical phenomenon, the images of the genocide that circulate in the present reduce it – as well as the contemporary cases to which it is analogized – to a stereotypical scenario of good and evil, innocence and absolute power. A discourse based on clear-cut visions of victims and perpetrators or of innocence and guilt, evacuates the political sphere of complexity and reduces it to a morality tale. Even in the case of Genocide, a seemingly exceptional situation of polarized innocence and guilt, the most thoughtful responses have been forced to reflect on uncomfortable questions of complicity and ambivalence in “the gray zone” first described by Primo Levy. P139 [….] Ultimately, the goal of a radical democratic politics of multidirectional memory today is not only to move beyond discourses of equation or hierarchy, but also to displace the reductive, absolutist understanding of the Holocaust as a code for “good and evil” from the center of global memory politics. This task is time- and place specific and demands a vision of reflective justice.

And statisticians used their little known but powerful discipline to identify the victims, project and rationalize the benefits of their destruction,

Six million trees had been planted below, near the Bnei Brit Memorial Cave, a tree for every Holocaust victim, each one representing a person of ambition, hopes and dreams.

In this sense, the claim for the Holocaust as indicating or demanding a moral transformation applies more clearly to world-history; that the Jews were the principal victims of the Holocaust only intensifies the irony here. But this does not mean that post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers have not claimed that the Holocaust requires a transformative moral and religious response in Judaism itself; many such claims have been made, and with emphasis. These turn out, however, to represent a minority view that overstates its implications even in its own terms. It does not follow, of course, that formulations that place the Holocaust on a continuum with prior events of Jewish history are by that fact adequate, but even the possibility that the enormity of the Holocaust might nonetheless leave the status of evil in Jewish thought unaltered is significant.9 Admittedly, the question would then arise of how far the meta-historical claim of continuity extends. But also a limited claim of continuity would bear directly on post-Holocaust Jewish thought – among other things, also providing a baseline for assessing accounts that emphasize discontinuity

I myself would like to see more explicit attention paid to the losses experienced due to the Japanese occupation in the Pacific during World War II, and for this history to be as much in dialog with Western culture as the war in Europe and the Holocaust has been, both in film and art, as well as in classrooms and in literature. Not only do I think it's important for the Western survivors of the internment camps like my father to be acknowledged and their trauma addressed, but the vast majority of Japanese forces' victims in World War II were millions of Asians, and with the singular focus on the Nazi occupation, I think there's a great deal of Eurocentrism in our Western understanding of the Second World War. It's important that we address this, because an attitude in the West of regions we deem as less important can lead to events such as the Rwandan genocide in 1994, during which the Western world turned a blind eye and the United Nations refused to send aid as an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered. As long as we continue to divide the world according to our "us and them" mentality, I believe these tragedies will continue. This is not just about politics, because when we talk about politics we are talking about people.

The Mishkan, where the [Tablets] were housed, alludes to a Torah scholar. If a Torah scholar publicizes himself as the day is public, [G-d] will bring a cloud of obscurity over him. However, if a Torah scholar conceals himself like an object concealed at night, [God] will spread his fame as a fire is seen from a distance.

Bottled water and paper cups were distributed to flood victims along with hay cots for sleeping.

On the other hand, the government had just passed a law making it illegal to blame Poland for any crimes committed in the Holocaust, and that doing so could result in incarceration. After decades of Soviet repression and Nazi conquest before that, the Poles were in a new nationalist phase. Their own victim status in WWII was important. The Polish underground was hugely popular; its anchor symbol graffitied across Warsaw buildings. People wore T-shirts with sleeve decorations that mimicked the Resistance armbands.

In the face of the sufferings of African-Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians, my mother’s credo always was: We are all holocaust victims.

The Holocaust could emerge in American life only after June 1967 because “the extermination of European Jewry attained [an] – if not happy, at least viable – ending.” Yet in standard Jewish accounts, not the June war but Israel’s founding marked redemption. Why did The Holocaust have to await a second redemption? Novick maintains that the “image of Jews as military heroes” in the June war “worked to efface the stereotype of weak and passive victims which . . . previously inhibited Jewish discussion of the Holocaust.

To his credit, Kosinski did undergo a kind of deathbed conversion. In the few years between his exposure and his suicide, Kosinski deplored the Holocaust industry’s exclusion of non-Jewish victims. “Many North American Jews tend to perceive it as Shoah, as an exclusively Jewish disaster. . . . But at least half of the world’s Romanies (unfairly called Gypsies), some 2.5 million Polish Catholics, millions of Soviet citizens and various nationalities, were also victims of this genocide. . . .” He also paid tribute to the “bravery of the Poles” who “sheltered” him “during the Holocaust” despite his so-called Semitic “looks.

And to split hairs, to claim that there is no comparison, that Treblinka was so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but death and annihilation while the meat industry is ultimately devoted to life (once its vicitms are dead, after all, it does not burn them to ash or bury them but on the contrary cuts them up and refrigerates and packs them so that they can be consumed in the comfort of our homes) is as little consoloation to those victims as it would have been - pardon the tastelesness of the following - to ask the dead of Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses with.

And to split hairs, to claim that there is no comparison, that Treblinka was so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but death and annihilation while the meat industry is ultimately devoted to life (once its vicitms are dead, after all, it does not burn them to ash or bury them but on the contrary cuts them up and refrigerates and packs them so that they can be consumed in the comfort of our homes) is as little consolation to those victims as it would have been - pardon the tastelesness of the following - to ask the dead of Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses with.

Adorno has here articulated the central contradiction—he calls it an “aporia”—inherent in all Holocaust memorials: legitimate art after Auschwitz must represent, translate, or in some way evoke the violence done to victims in a form that is legible to posterity. But to instrumentalize or aestheticize the victims’ memory is necessarily to violate it. In these terms a “true” memorial must accomplish the impossible: communicate the event while preserving its utter inscrutability, honor the victims while rejecting any and all ascriptions of meaning.

As the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has observed, even though no one wants to be a victim, the position does confer certain advantages. Groups that gain recognition as victims of past injustices obtain “a bottomless line of moral credit,” he has written. “The greater the crime in the past, the more compelling the rights in the present—which are gained merely through membership in the wronged group.” Conversely, the grandchildren of the alleged perpetrators aspire to absolve their ancestors of guilt and, by association, of a link to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.

Randy says, “You asked me earlier what is the highest and best purpose to which we could dedicate our lives. And the obvious answer is ‘to prevent future Holocausts.’ ” Avi laughs darkly. “I’m glad it’s obvious to you, my friend. I was beginning to think I was the only one.” “What!? Get over yourself, Avi. People are commemorating the Holocaust all the time.” “Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future.” “I take it you do not share this view, Avi?” “Look at Bosnia!” Avi scoffs. “Human nature doesn’t change, Randy. Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into Aztecs or Nazis just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “So what hope is there?” “Instead of trying to educate the potential perpetrators of holocausts, we try to educate the potential victims. They will at least pay some fucking attention.

If we take the capsulation of minorities within the nation-state as a given condition, the implication of the Holocaust is that the life and liberties of minorities depend primarily upon whether the dominant group includes them within its universe of obligation; these are the bonds that hold or the bonds that break.

It is often said that Anne symbolizes the six million victims of the Holocaust. I consider this statement wrong. Anne's life and death were her own individual fate, an individual fate that happened six million times over.

OdF Opfer des Faschismus – ‘Victim of Fascism’.

At the Einsatzgruppen stage, the rounded-up victims were brought in front of machine guns and killed at point-blank range. Though efforts were made to keep the weapons at the longest possible distance from the ditches into which the murdered were to fall, it was exceedingly difficult for the shooters to overlook the connection between shooting and killing. This is why the administrators of genocide found the method primitive and inefficient, as well as dangerous to the morale of the perpetrators. Other murder techniques were therefore sought — such as would optically separate the killers from their victims. The search was successful, and led to the invention of first the mobile, then the stationary gas chambers; the latter —the most perfect the Nazis had time to invent— reduced the role of the killer to that of the 'sanitation officer' asked to empty a sackful of 'disinfecting chemicals' through an aperture in the roof of a building the interior of which he was not prompted to visit.

item he showed us that particularly struck me was a thick hardbound book about the size of Webster’s Dictionary. In about a six-point font, the word “Jew” was printed six million times—once for each Jewish victim of the Holocaust.

First of all, the Holocaust is not really a Jewish cause. There’s a lesson for all of humanity there. Sure, it came mostly at the expense of the Jews, but there were many other victims – homosexuals, gypsies, the disabled, and anyone else who didn’t fit neatly into the Aryan categories defined by the Nazis.

Anne Frank was only one of the Nazi’s victims. But her fate helps us grasp the immense loss the world suffered because of the Holocaust. Anne has touched the hearts and minds of millions; she has enriched all of our lives. Let us hope she has also enlarged our horizons. It is important for all of us to realize how much Anne and the other victims, each in his or her own way, would have contributed to our society had they been allowed to live. To my great and abiding sorrow, I was not able to save Anne’s life. But I was able to help her live two years longer. In those two years she wrote the diary that gives hope to people all over the world and calls for understanding and tolerance. It confirms my conviction that any attempt at action is better than inaction. An attempt can go wrong, but inaction inevitably results in failure. I was able to save Anne’s diary and thus make her greatest wish come true. “I want to be useful or give pleasure to the people around me yet who don’t really know me,” she wrote in her diary on March 25, 1944, about one year before her death. “I want to go on living, even after my death!” And on May 11, she noted: “You’ve known for a long time that my greatest wish is to become a journalist someday and later on a famous writer.” Through her diary Anne really does live on. She stands for the triumph of the spirit over evil and death. A note by Miep Gies, Amsterdam, January 1998

Night of Broken Glass; dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust Dark is the night I hear your heartbeat In the room there is no light Fire in the night I hear them marching Your boots are brown Glass in my thoughts Hear the fear in this night Shrill screams shattered I do not hear your heartbeat Why is the light so bright in the room

History-note: Wednesday 23 July 2014. A national day of mourning in the majestic land of windmills, wooden shoes and tulips. Today the first 40 bodies came back to us from the holocaustic plane accident that caused 288 innocent victims; the nine guardians watched, eight of them sowed their respect in silence and one of them was howling like a hungry wolf to the East.