Ohio mission faces sobering issues on trip through Israel
JERUSALEM — From the Holocaust to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, death has played a critical role in the identity and history of Israel.
Continue readingOhio mission faces sobering issues on trip through Israel
JERUSALEM — From the Holocaust to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, death has played a critical role in the identity and history of Israel.
Continue readingPlaying for your life in Auschwitz
Learning to Not Repeat a History of Hate
Continue readingA Holocaust Memoir in Doubt
Until Binjamin Wilkomirski’s truth came into conflict with his own legal identity, the slim memoir of his Jewish childhood in the concentration camps of Poland was hailed as a “small masterpiece,” a searing sketch of death and horror — rats rummaging among corpses, starving babies sucking fingers to the bone, a dying mother’s last glimpse of her son.
Continue reading‘Pre-empting the Holocaust’
Recently I watched the testimony of a survior of the Kovno ghetto, in Lithuania. He spoke of the so-called Kinderaktion, in which the Germans rounded up all the children (and many of the elderly) and took them to the nearby Ninth Fort — a killing site outside Kovno — for execution. The witness was present in the room when an SS man entered and demanded from a mother the one-year-old infant she was holding in her arms. She refused to surrender it, so he seized the baby by its ankles and tore the body in two before the mother’s eyes.
Continue readingOpinion: The Holocaust Meets Popular Culture
They [young people] are bombarded by as much disinformation as information. Holocaust deniers would have them believe that there were no concentration camps, no death camps; that Hitler’s Nazis didn’t have a Final Solution; that it is all just a Jewish conspiracy.
Continue readingHans Vischjager (below), says Anne Frank‘s message has lessons for us today. Shown with his mother and baby brother Harvie in about 1951 (right), he says his mother Hilda survived the gas chamber by thinking of him.
Continue readingAn imposing presence: the deniers have three times more sites than their detractors in the world
Continue readingFictional ‘survivor’ testimony
Continue readingToday [Tue, 18 Aug 1998] my wife and I went to the Ohlsdorfer Friedhof (Cemetary) here in Hamburg, for a walk in the nice green parks (Spaziergang) and also to visit and pay our deepest respect to the thousands of German soldiers buried there (the youngest soldiers we saw buried there were 16 and 17 years young ). We sat for awhile with the 36,000 citizens of Hamburg who were killed in the fire bombing in 1943. People have planted small crosses and plaques along the sides of the mass graves — some listing the names of whole families, from Grandpop (Oma and Opa) through to the little blonde kids.
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