Author: Webb

The River that Runs Red with the Ashes of Jews

Dated:

A town relives memories of the Holocaust

St. Petersburg Times

July 13, 1992

[…]

It was 1944 and the Red Army was approaching. On orders from the high command, the Nazis began an effort to hide the evidence of their atrocities in the Terezin ghetto, a town just 30 miles outside of Prague known as the antechamber to Auschwitz.

As the Red Army neared, the Nazis forced surviving Jews to dump truckloads of ashes into the river’s calm waters. The ashes were the remains of tens of thousands of Jewish victims who died in Terezin and were burned at a crematorium near the river.

“The river has never been clear again,” said Mark Talisman, an American scholar of Czechoslovakian Jewry, on a recent visit there. “It has always been blood red.”

Memory of Holocaust central to new world order

Dated:

  • Unchallenged, racism has the capacity to undercut civilization’s basic values and to destroy democracy

Ian J. Kagedan

Toronto Star

November 26, 1991

In the moral reconstitution of Eastern Europe, coming to the terms with the Holocaust must figure prominently.

The hatred of Jews brought thousands to collaborate with the Nazis in the extermination process; anti-Semitism is still a problem. And today we are witnessing a more generalized racism targeting one group or another. The effective denial of the Holocaust by the Communist regimes made it easy to ignore its lessons.

[…]

The Holocaust stands as Western civilization’s greatest failure. It was a natural outcome of centuries of racism and of anti-Semitism.

To deny the Holocaust is to deny racism’s capacity to undercut our civilization’s basic values and to destroy democracy. Achieving our quest of a “new world order” depends on our learning the Holocaust’s lessons.

Ian J. Kagedan is director of government relations for B’nai Brith Canada.

Never show a swastika to a Nazi

Dated:

Adolf Hitler

Copyright 1990 Gary M. Grobman

www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.hitler.html

[…]

CHAPTER CONTENT

Hitler’s Early Life

[…]

Following another family move, Adolf lived for six months across from a large Benedictine monastery. The monastery’s coat of arms’ most salient feature was a swastika. […]

[…]

No business like Shoah business

Dated:

Too many books are written on the Holocaust. There are too many films and television plays that exploit the subject …

There is a fascination with the Holocaust and with Nazism. There may, in fact, be “no business like Shoah business.” The problem is that many of these productions, if not most, are historically inaccurate, sentimental, romantic, exotic and hyperbolic, and so they ultimately distort and cheapen the Holocaust.

The popularization and commercialization of the Holocaust is not only unhistorical but it is antihistorical. Over time, it will inevitably subvert the historical sense and strip it of any moral implications it may carry.

Source:

Dr. Michael M. Dobkowski, Professor of Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Martyrdom and Resistance

International Society for Yad Vashem, New York City

Sept.-Oct. 1990, p. 4.