Ramones Outside CBGB, NYC, 1975.

 Ramones outside CBGB, NYC, 1975.

📷  Bob Gruen

14/4/2024 | http://antifagruppeweidenneustadt.blogspot.com/2024/04/berlin-hands-off-israel.html

Maybe the reason we’re so angry is because your response to this:

Was a whole lotta this:

And now you have the audacity to cry about Israel striking back. We’re supposed to care about what happens in Gaza. Israel can’t “collectively punish the Palestinians”. That’s just wrong - how dare they.

It’s not like you collectively punished Israelis. It’s not like you collectively punished Jews around the world. It’s not like you’re wishing death on us. No - you would never do that. You’re not antisemitic at all.

January 27th 1945: Liberation of Auschwitz

On this day in 1945, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. One of the most notorious camps of Nazi Germany, Jews and others persecuted by the Nazi regime were sent to Auschwitz from 1940 onwards. During its years in operation, over one million people died in Auschwitz, either from murder in the gas chambers or due to starvation and disease. As the war drew to a close and the Nazis steadily lost ground to the Allied forces, they began evacuating the camps and destroying evidence of the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed there. The leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, ordered the evacuation of the remaining prisoners at the camp as the Soviet Red Army closed in on the area. Nearly 60,000 prisoners from Auschwitz were forced on a march toward Wodzisław Śląski (Loslau) where they would be sent to other camps; some 20,000 ended up in the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. However, thousands died during the evacuation on the grueling marches, leading to them being called ‘death marches’. 7,500 weak and sick prisoners remained in Auschwitz, and they were liberated by the 322nd Rifle Division of the Soviet Red Army on January 27th 1945. Auschwitz remains one of the most powerful symbols of the Holocaust and the horrific crimes committed by the Nazi regime against Jews and numerous other groups.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

January 27 marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.

In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD), an annual day of commemoration to honor the victims of the Nazi era.

From 1940 to 1945, more than 1.1 million men, women and children were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp. 90% of them were Jews. All were innocent. Today, we remember

Never Again.

Source: yadvashem.org

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I’m thinking about the documentary, Shoah. What I linked below is only part one, and I think part two is also right on YouTube. It is 9.5 hours long and is essentially nothing but witness testimony.

I understand why people wouldn’t have time to watch it, but I at least want to tell you about it. Roger Ebert actually wrote a great review of it, and I’ll include some excerpts here:

“There is no proper response to this film. It is an enormous fact, a 550-minute howl of pain and anger in the face of genocide. It is one of the noblest films ever made.”

There is a part where a Czech Jewish man named Filip Muller is interviewed. He had to work the door of the gas chambers. I won’t put his descriptions of the dead bodies here, but Ebert said:

“The images evoked by his words are unutterably painful. What is remarkable, on reflection, is that Muller is describing an event that neither he nor anyone else now alive ever saw. I realized, at the end of his words, that a fundamental change had taken place in the way I personally visualized the gas chambers. Always before, in reading about them or hearing about them, my point of view was outside, looking in. Muller put me inside. That is what this whole movie does, and it is probably the most important thing it does. It changes our point of view about the Holocaust. After nine hours of ‘Shoah,’ the Holocaust is no longer a subject, a chapter of history, a phenomenon. It is an environment. It is around us. Ordinary people speak in ordinary voices of days that had become ordinary to them.”

He talks about the calm and really unsettling interviews with former Nazis:

“Some of the strangest passages in the film are the interviews with the officials who were actually responsible for running the camps and making the ‘Final Solution’ work smoothly and efficiently. None of them, at least by their testimony, seem to have witnessed the whole picture. They only participated in a small part of it, doing their little jobs in their little corners; if they are to be believed, they didn't personally kill anybody, they just did small portions of larger tasks, and somehow all of the tasks, when added up and completed, resulted in people dying…The message of this film (if we believe in the brotherhood of man) is that these crimes were committed by people like us, against people like us.”

Filip Muller, mentioned earlier, shared his moment of despair when he heard the group of Czech Jews entering the gas chamber sing the Czech national anthem and “Hatikva.” He wanted to go inside and die with them:

“Q. You were inside the gas chamber?

A. Yes. One of them said: ‘So you want to die. But that's senseless. Your death won't give us back our lives. That's no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us.’”

If you ever possibly have the time, please watch this, even just some of it. I can’t remember why I decided to watch this a few years ago, but I’m glad I did.

amyisraelchai

Happening now: a march in solidarity with Israel near The Hague. Thank you to each and every one of you for coming out in support of the hostages and their families.