Voices lost to genocide

[Dr. Richard Grossman]

Hi everybody,

The thread “To Izzy” reminds me that in the ten plus years of the Board, (I believe) there has never been a thread on voices lost to genocide.  If you have anyone you would like to remember, feel free to post about them here.  I’ll start (mine are all a result of the 1930’s-1940’s holocaust):

My sister in-law's parents each were the only ones who survived in their respective families.  A dear friend unbelievably survived, as did the rest of her family, hidden away in Berlin (we just went to her 70th birthday party where this was talked about).  My first boss's wife (I worked in a 5 person engineering firm in high school) survived Auschwitz.  The rest of her family did not.  My best friend in high school's father somehow escaped Germany and ended up in Australia, of all places.  He was a lovely man.  I worked on a kibbutz in Israel for a month between high school and college, and of course was surrounded by survivors.  Except for my Berlin friend, each person lost all or almost all who were dear to them.

with tears,

Richard

[JustKathy]

I have an uncle who is Polish. (Not related by blood, but married my aunt). As a little boy growing up in Poland, he belonged to a very wealthy family. The Nazis came one day and raided their home, took all of their valuables, and shot his entire family to death as he hid in a closet. Apparently his mother had feared this, and in preparation had cut up some of their more valuable paintings and hid them with friends. Years later my uncle was able to recover a small piece of a Rembrandt painting they had owned. It's only about 7"x9" in size, but he has it in an oversized frame hanging prominently in the living room. It's all that he has left of his family. Because the signature has been removed from the painting, it can never be sold as Rembrandt, but he doesn't care about the monetary value. That little piece of canvas represents all that is left of the childhood he lost to Nazi Germany.

[Hopalong]

(((((((Richard))))))))

I lived in a Jewish-majority neighborhood outside Baltimore for years. Loved my neighbors. As I got to know people around me (and my boss and company owners' families too) I tried to understand the massive grief they all carried. I saw the tattooed numbers on the arms of a few older people in the shops.

I had first seen those numbers--more of them--on some people's arms in Paris when I was 10 years old. I asked what they were and remember my parents hushing me.

I have watched many documentary films of the horrors, read nonfiction books about WWII (too many titles to recite--but how on earth could such a massive body of eyewitness testimony be dismissed?) and heard stories of people who had liberated the camps.

Some things are so crushing that the mind wants to veer away. "It's not true" is more than a defense, though. I think it's people wanting someone else to blame for their own pain. Comfort of a crowd. Specialness of having an alter-view.

I think how odd it is, the vigor that holocaust deniers put forth about what would be such an impossibly elaborate revision of reality. The link I feel to our lives, is that denial of abuse is no different than denial of genocide. The underlying thing is not allowing victims of abuse their reality. Trying to control victims' experience...(because if you DON'T, you have to face the resident capacity for that much evil within yourself--which involves a world of heartbreak.) I think that heartbreak has to happen though, for any human to understand what morality is.

What bullies do (and warmongers with their "collateral damage") is, I think: not only will I try to annihilate you--or at the least, close my eyes to what you suffer at someone else's hands--but if you survive, then I'll try to force you to say you were the culprit in harming ME (iow, a conspiracy).

Holocaust denial is a massive projection. If those handsome (in Western eyes) wholesome-looking well-organized Nazis that could do that--could I do that? The deniers' psyches contract from that horror, and they project it out.

They start with physical differences evident in some, but not all, ethnic groups. Separate themselves as human beings from that group. So then they can blame, vilify. Someone who is "other". Someone whom they perceive as "different".

We must never forget.

Hops

[ann3]

Thank you for this thread, Dr. Grossman.  Your story, JustKathy's story & Hop's story are all so moving, so sobbering, so sad & are made more so in light of someone endeavoring to void those stories, to make them into lies, as if they were fictional tales which never occurred.

I enjoy travel.  I have been to Dauchau & Auschwitz.  It is immensely sad to actually stand on the ground, in the place where human beings were burned as if they were garbage.  I felt my body just fill with a void of numbing emptiness:  Why did this happen?  How did this happen? I think I could still feel the suffering in the atmosphere, in the air of these camps all those decades later.

Visiting Ann Frank's house in Amsterdam:  You see the little bookcase that hid the families's secret living space.  Imaging what it was like to live like that & imagining how the nazi's dragged them out, with Ann (& her sister) dying from the effects of exposure in concentration camp Bergen Belsen in 1945, about 3 months before the war ended in Europe.  Again, I filled with the numbing emptiness.

Budapest:  I saw the beautiful Memorial to the 600,000 Hungarian Jews murdered:  it's a silver weeping willow tree & on each leaf is the name of a victim.   Here is a photo of it:  http://www.davidpride.com/Europe/Hungary/HU_04_169.htm

I have also been to Turkey, which is a fascinating country, but, in the beginning of the 20th century, the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians who lived within Turkish territory.  To this day, the Armenian People are still fighting for official recognition of their genocide.

[cgm1028]

Growing up I lived next door to my Aunt who owned a two-family house.  The tenant I remember most, was an older German lady who lived there from the time I was about 10 or so, until I was 17.  I remember her a lovely woman of quiet dignity and who possessed an amazing inner strength.  But even as a child I could sense a profound and deep sadness about her. She lived alone, had never married or had children (or so we thought at the time), but she had a nephew that came over weekly to check on her.  Ms. S. was an amazing gardener.  She singlehandedly transformed my Aunt's yard (who was not a gardener at all - LOL) into a showplace.  Her apartment was the first place we neighborhood kids would stop during Halloween to make sure we got the homemade candies she had waiting for us.  My family looked forward every year to the homemade cookies she would send to the neighbors during the holidays.  She was Jewish, but on Christmas Eve, she would bring us those cookies!

Mrs. S always wore long sleeves, even on the hottest summer days.  When she slipped on the ice one winter and broke her arm, I would go over once a week and help her clean her apartment until she was better. I noticed she had no pictures of any family members.  This was odd to me since in my family, my grandparents had tons of pictures all over their houses.  The only ones Mrs. S displayed were current ones of her nephew and his family

Eventually she could no longer live alone and had to go to a nursing home.  Her health was poor and her mind going.  When her nephew came by to pack up her things my Aunt told him how sorry she was to see her go.  That's when he told her story.  As you might have guessed she lost her entire and I mean entire family during the Holocaust.  Parents, husband, children, siblings.  All gone. She was the only one left.  In fact he was really not her nephew at all.  He was the son of a friend of her family and only called her Aunt as a form of respect. 

How can anyone deny the horror that these people lived.  Its reprehensible.

[sKePTiKal]

So, there was the 5th grade teacher who'd fled to the US from Romania - and helped me to cope at the most difficult time of my life and gave me hope that people can - and do - survive trauma.

There were the early exhibits of Holocaust photos I saw in the 60s - before there was a holocaust museum - and I realized that there were even worse horrors than I'd lived through; that evil was real - even if I couldn't define it in a way that always applied, in every situation. My grandfather's refusal to describe anything he saw or experienced in Germany, in WWII. As a german-american, I'm sure it was a huge conflict for him.

I have since done a bit of research into how survivors have coped with and healed from their experiences - there is much I connect with in those stories, to my experiences and much for me yet to learn. There is much kindness, humor, honor & compassion that provides the mirror-opposite of the horrors of what one group people did to others.

Most of all - it's the "us vs them" type of fear-mongering that we hear so much more of today, that frightens me about the future. The inability or unwillingness to separate the acts and attitudes of a dictatorial government from the people of the country, who are in general victims - not collaborators and supporters. The decrease in ability or willingness among groups to try to even identify common ground and common good and both work toward an intelligent compromise or win-win solution. And the too quick reflex to resort to "tarring" all people of any given group with the same stereotypical characteristics and not being willing or able to appreciate that people who are considered part of "a group" are first & foremost: individual human beings. As individuals, we all want, need, and hope for pretty much the same things. No matter who or "what" else, we are.

[JustKathy]

There was an elderly German woman who used to live on my street who was a holocaust survivor. As many others have shared, she too, always wore long sleeves. Her name was Brigetta and her story was remarkable. She was sent to the camps as a teenager, but she and her sister managed to escape while being transferred to another facility. She was a gifted pianist, and came to the states with her husband after the war. She played with the L.A. Philharmonic for years, then taught privately in her elder years. The sound of the classical piano coming from her house would take your breath away.

Two years ago, her children had her declared unfit to care for herself and had her removed from her home against her will. They didn't care about her - they just wanted to get their hands on her house, which was worth quite a bit of money. I wasn't home at the time, but the neighbors told me she had terror in her eyes when they came and "took her away." I'll never understand how someone could do that to their own mother. Well, maybe I can. After growing up with an N mother, I know that family members will gladly throw a loved one out with the garbage so they can have their "stuff." I've since moved but I know that some of the people in the neighborhood go and visit her at the nursing home.

I think of Brigetta whenever I watch the movie "The Pianist." Her story is very similar. I suppose spending the end of her life in a nursing home is a pretty good end compared to what could have been, but still, she lived in that home for nearly 60 years. It breaks my heart that she had to leave it. I feel honored to have known such an amazing woman.

[Lucky]

This thread really gives me goose bumps. I am from the country of Anne Frank, my family all survived the war but it must have been a horrible experience. My father was born in 1940 and I have been told that his mother never really overcame the war anxiety.
I know that many Jewish people never returned to their houses after the war, they did not return at all.

P.s. only after reading this thread did I read the thread "to Izzy". There is no doubt in my mind and there never has been any doubt, the holocaust did happen. Even most Germans don't deny that it happened.

[mudpuppy]

I think it's important to remember the many other holocausts as well, because many of them are forgotten or nearly so and have no one to speak for them; the voiceless holocausts you might say.
There are too many to list just in the last century but a few come to mind and it's worth remembering that you don't have to be very different at all to be massacred. It's also worth remembering that some of the criminals below still have their portraits sported on baseball caps and tee shirts by people who apparently endorse mass murder as long as it's for the right reason:
The Turks massacre of 1 million+ Armenians which produced the word genocide.
Stalin's intentional destruction through famine of the Ukrainian kulaks where 5-7 million were starved to death.
Stalin's 20-40 million other victms, not to mention Lenin's millions and the later victims of the gulag.
Pol Pot's 2 million Cambodians.
The 70 million+ sent to an early grave by Mao's pursuit of power. He killed around 35 million citizens in the Great Leap Forward alone. The unknown number of Tibetans murdered as well.
The rape of Nanking by the Japanese pre WWII.
The hundreds of thousands of Kurds massacred by Iranians, Turks and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
The millions lost in the Sudan, the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi etc.
The forgotten thousands murdered or who are still sitting in Che and Fidel's gulag.
Mass murder; a way of life.

mud
 

[Ami]

The Milgrim  studies shows it could happen again, easily.
I forgot most of what I learned as a Psych major in college but I NEVER forgot the movie about the Milgrim studies.
All you do gooders-----when you persecute anyone----you are repeating what Milgrim was talking about.

[ann3]

Hi Ami,
Good to hear from you.  Hope you are well.
ann