Remarkable nonsense

PETA BRINGS CONTROVERSIAL ‘HOLOCAUST ON YOUR PLATE’ EXHIBIT TO AMSTERDAM

Date: Thursday, March 8

Time: Noon

Place: Leidseplein (Leiden Square)

www.unobserver.com/layout4.php?id=1564&blz=1

Amsterdam — PETA’s controversial “Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit is coming to Amsterdam. The display, which consists of eight 6-meter-square panels, each showing photos of factory-farm and slaughterhouse scenes side by side with photos from Nazi death camps, graphically depict the point made by Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer when he wrote, “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis.”

“Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”

— Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), German Jewish philosopher forced into exile by the Nazis

Queens Fire Kills Survivor of Holocaust

An 82-year-old Holocaust survivor was killed early yesterday morning when a fire tore through his Queens home.

[…]

Rotter was forced to make the infamous “Death March” from Auschwitz into the Polish countryside, when the Nazis evacuated the camp in 1945, {grandson Boruch] Salzberg said.

By Jeremy Olshan

April 5, 2004

www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/22277.htm

From the Holocaust to Saddam

Suzanne Fields

April 5, 2004

www.townhall.com/columnists/suzannefields/sf20040405.shtml

We’re supposed to learn lessons from history, but the lessons we learn depend on who’s writing the history — and who’s reading it.

With the help of a few of our friends, we rid the world of a psychotic madman who used torture, rape and poison gas to dispatch his enemies, and critics mock us for calling him “evil.” We have yet to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — the weapons that everyone agrees were once there because he used them — and our sunshine friends in Europe can’t see the moral purpose in the enterprise. They dismiss Saddam as just another monster coughed up by nature, a monster that we should have, or could have, ignored. The more these critics learn of his heinous crimes, the less they see how much his crimes mattered.

David Gelernter calls this phenomenon the “Holocaust Shrug.” It’s the head-in-the-sand defense for doing nothing. “The world’s indifference to the Coalition’s achievement resembles its long-running, well-established lack of interest in Hitler’s crimes,” he writes in The Weekly Standard. “I don’t claim that Saddam resembles Hitler; I do claim that the world’s indifference to Saddam resembles its indifference to Hitler.”

[…]

Concentration camp survivor in Anniston has many scars

By Brett Buckner

April 5, 2004

www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040405/APN/404050531

ANNISTON, Ala.

Some remain hidden, consumed by the darkness of memory, where the delicate suffering of hope serves only as a constant reminder of a pain once endured but never forgotten. These are the scars that never completely heal. Max Steinmetz has many scars.

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In the fall of 1943, Steinmetz, along with his family and thousands of Jews, stood on the wooden ramp of a Polish railway station waiting in line for “the selection.” […]

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Born in what would become Hungary, Steinmetz and his family were sequestered with other Jews in ghettos before German soldiers forced them onto train cars. They spent three days riding in freight cars packed with people, and with only a third of a loaf of bread to eat apiece during the entire trip. When the doors opened in Poland, they were thankful to breathe fresh air again.

[…]

After looking the 16-year-old Steinmetz over, with a wave of his hand [Dr. Joseph] Mengele sent the teenager, along with his younger brother, to the right. Steinmetz’s mother, father and baby sister were sent to the left. He would never see them again.

Later that night, sick with worry, he grabbed the attention of a passing prisoner, a man who knew a great deal about the prison, including the horrible stench that hung heavy in the air, which Steinmetz describes as “smelling like burning meat:”

“I asked him what it was,” Steinmetz says.

‘You don’t know?’

“No,” I said.

‘When did you come here?’

“This morning.”

‘What about your parents, did they come with you?’

“Yes.”

‘Where did they go when you got off the train?’

“To the left.”

‘That’s what you smell. That’s the crematorium. Your parents are dead and that’s them being burned.'”

Prisoners sent to the left were urged quietly forward into “shower rooms,” where they were stripped of their clothes and told that they were about to be bathed and given fresh clothes. There were water pipes and sprays along the ceiling, but no drains on the floor. Instead of water, Zyklon B gas spewed from the showerheads, killing all inside within a matter of minutes.

[…]

After only a few weeks, Steinmetz and his brother were again packed into freight cars and taken to Dachau in Germany, the oldest concentration camp and known as “murder school” because it trained troops that went to other concentration camps. […]

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Anti-Israel sentiment shows need for Holocaust education

Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi cited current anti-Israel sentiment Friday as a reason to boost education on the Holocaust during Italy’s presidency of an international task force.

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Berlusconi said he has proposed a day be set aside in Italian schools specially for education on the Holocaust. The history of the Holocaust “has to be remembered always, and above all by young people,” Berlusconi said.

Associated Press

Apr. 2, 2004

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/
ShowFull&cid=1080885960847&p=1008596975996

Jewish Holocaust: A Forgettable, Unforgettable Era

According to historians, at least 6 million Jews were systemically annihilated by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. A total of 5 million people of other ethnic groups, such as Gypsies, Slavs and Poles, also perished in the Holocaust. By Nazi standards, these groups were considered to be undesirable and “inferior.”

Euthanasia was the Nazis’ vision of a biologically “pure” population to create an “Aryan master race”. Besides the annihilation of the above ethnic races, this vision also forced the sterilization of all persons who suffered from so-called hereditary diseases, including mental illness, learning disabilities, blindness and deafness, according to Dr. Patricia Heberer, a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Of the 11 million people who died in World War II, statistics show that about 275,000 Germans — children and adults — were murdered because of their disabilities, either by lethal injection, starvation, or in gassing installations designed to look like shower stalls.

Books written by and about Holocaust survivors and sociological studies about the Holocaust continue to educate the public about the atrocities committed, why they happened, and why this massive genocide should never happen again.

by OS2 Wendy Kahn

Journal Staff Writer

Found at: http://www.dcmilitary.com/navy/journal/9_13/features/28266-1.html

The resurgence of European anti-Semitism after the Holocaust suggests that it is integral to European culture.

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Chilling Accounts from Holocaust Survivor

For students at Frenship learning about the Holocaust has been a life changing experience. On Friday they got a rare chance to hear from the heart of Holocaust survivor, Eva Hance.

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She says she will never forget the day she and her Jewish family were taken from Hungary to a concentration camp in Germany. “The life was miserable.” The camp located in Dachau held thousands of Jewish prisoners, many of them young children like Eva.

Even decades later, the torment she experienced there is unforgettable. “You know what the Germans did when they had a baby? They would throw it up for a target shoot,” Eva says.

More than 50,000 men, women and children were tortured, gased, shot and starved of food and water for days at a time. Eva spent every moment living in fear. “I was shot on my left leg because I wanted to have some water,” Eva says.

[…]

KCBD — NewsChannel 11 / Lubbock, TX

www.kcbd.com/Global/story.asp?S=1741325

The Fog of War

PG cert, 107 min

February 4, 2004

www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/04/02/bfalso02.xml
&sSheet=/arts/2004/04/02/ixartleft.html

Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, an artfully assembled interview with former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, won Best Documentary at this year’s Oscars. It’s high time Morris won, since he’s America’s pre-eminent documentarian and wasn’t recognised for his 1988 masterpiece The Thin Blue Line. But, fascinating though it is, The Fog of War didn’t deserve the award. It should really have won Best Actor.

Straight to camera, McNamara discusses his involvement in several of the most costly military engagements of the 20th century. Under Gen Curtis LeMay, he helped orchestrate the campaign of firebombings that killed nearly a million Japanese civilians in 1945. Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he was instrumental in the escalation of the Vietnam war. Yet Morris never pierces his guard for a second.

Garrulous, engaging and still intellectually razor-sharp at 87, McNamara confesses up front that he’s made errors of judgment in his lifetime. You won’t catch him admitting what they were, though. Typically, he meets Morris half-way by decrying the needless loss of life in Japan and stating that he and LeMay (a conveniently bloody-minded foil here) would have been prosecuted as war criminals if they’d lost.

“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he goes on to ask. It’s an excellent question that illustrates Morris’s wider concerns perfectly, but its unanswerability is McNamara’s escape clause.

Morris usually knows exactly how much rope his interviewees need to hang themselves — see Mr Death, his chilling 1999 study of execution expert and Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter. McNamara is no such monster, but only with unusually tricksy editing can Morris contrive to get him on the back foot at all. And far from providing an ironic underscore, the sinister throb of Philip Glass’s music is so familiar by now as to be oddly soothing.

[…]

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.

Holocaust studies encourage students to contemplate their actions

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