Touching video: Holocaust survivor meets the Americans, and one American in particular — 19 Comments
If only American school kids could see this. Instead, they get Zinn’s “People’s History.”
Aww. What a lovely story.
Thank you! I needed a moment of human decency today.
What a wonderful restorative after all the depressing dreck of the last few weeks! :>))
Thank you, Neo.
very old…
tons of that stuff..
but only the jewish stuff matters..
everyone else can go to dirt…
[as evidenced by what everyone knows, will read, particpate in etc… [
“Ruta U. was fourteen, her sisters twelve and nine years old, when they and their mother, as well as their grandmother, were taken by the Russian secret police from their home in Riga, Latvia, and sent on a journey in cattle cars across the Soviet Union to the far reaches of Siberia.”
big deal… stalin did the same thing hitler did but to a half dozen countries
no one gives a sh*t… they only care about the jews in those countries…
try to be one of the ones erased… unknown that your country even exists!
why woudl anyone care? only one people matter…
who gives a crap about the OTHER SIX MILLION?
Not neo… not once in 10 years (she will deny it now)
Though Ruta’s narrative style is simple and self-effacing, she wins a big place in the reader’s heart as a noble soul living out a life enveloped in tragedy far beyond her making.
its all 5 and 4 stars, nothing less.. Dear God, I Wanted to Live
too bad… you cant even be heard in death…
your not made of the right religion, the right color, the right anything to be remember like the other six million… since your part of a larger number from a bigger despot who was the friend of the man who did the shoa, and the partner in pogroms
your lucky, the unlucky ones survived Stalin to come to where? .
a place which will exterminate them just the same, but much slower than a gulag?
never a part of anything cause, well, no one has any way to connect to a place that they dont even knows exist… they have no time for you, for your stories… you dont exist.. and if you try to particpate with stories from your history, your past, your life, your thing… to freaking bad… your not jewish… your not german.. your not russian…
after all, there were only 2 million of us… jews were 6 million
there just wasnt enough of us before or after to care about
or to own publishers, or politics, or anything like the power the jewish victims had
even the 8 million holodomor are forgotte
funny thing…
you cant learn from history if you dont know it
and you cant prevent what you dont know
we arent worth it…
not once in 10 years… not a paragraph..
so why would i bother?
we got the hint, americans wanted the baltics to be exterminated and still do
they have already erased us… so they wont miss us
to hear an uplifting story again, of thousands of them again, and each one buries everyone else a bit more as no one wants this war or this holocaust to be about anything other than the important people… we are not important enough to even get a mouses voice.
we get it
you win
erase us
why bother to comment to people who dont care to know anything about you?
with all the replays, republishing, reworking and repeats
you just dont have time to hear anything you didnt hear before
its as if the wont share the stage with anyone
cause being teh biggest victims on the planet for the longest time works only as long as you dont share that stage with anyone else who suffered with you, along side you, and even to defend you..
erase them, give them no chance…
cover one jewish girl in an attic, screw everything else
even if anotehr people have their own, theirs would diminish yours
and by sheer volume of people, just erase them
When my Uncle was rescued from Buchenwald he could barely whisper to the the US Army Medical Corps doctor… his name and serial number.
My mother was part of a work commando in Hamburg at the end of the war. Their job was to clean up the rubble each day after Bomber Command did what it could to level the city each night. When the end was obvious, the SS rounded up all the women, put them in box cars and shuttled them around for days on a trip to nowhere. When the British found them, most of the women were dead. After they rescued the living, she wound up in the hospital for two weeks with typhus.
My parents had known each other in the ghetto and found each other again in a DP camp set up by the Allies. They were married for 62 years until he passed away at 95.
Thank you for this uplifting interlude. America ain’t perfect but is the best humans have ever achieved. Now, we need to put the left out of power for a few generations.
Nice. Something similar but different, and more depressing, that I’ve been wanting to read is,
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary
– by Anonymous
I seem to have gotten something in my eyes.
What a beautiful story, made more so by the insanity of the last few weeks.
Thanks Neo… That’s why I keep coming back to this blog site..Good Stuff instead of all of the Crap that flows forth from the internet each day
Artfl, are you aware of Bryan Caplan and his Museum of Communism at George Mason U.?
“Never again.” The tyranny and atrocities of Nazi Germany have been justly condemned by world opinion for over 50 years. But it is only recently that Communist despotism has begun to receive remotely similar attention.
It would be a great tragedy if Communism disappeared from the earth without leaving behind an indelible memory of its horrors. Communism was not essentially about espionage, or power politics, or irreligion. Rather it was a grand theoretical synthesis of totalitarianism… a theory which millions of people experienced as the practice of murder and slavery.
Western awareness of mass murders and other major atrocities committed by Communist regimes remains exceedingly low. How does your knowledge compare? Take this test to find out.
Headed by a quote from Solzhenitsyn,
I dedicate this
to all those who did not live
to tell it.
And may they please forgive me
for not having seen it all
nor rememberered it all,
for not having divined all of it.
–Alexsander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
32 questions on the horrors committed by Stalin, Lenin, the Soviets in general, although Latvia isn’t mentioned specifically.
.
Search on string Bryan Caplan Communism gets lots of results, including articles by Prof. Caplan and also other websites; among them, at
there are these excerpts (some of which is quoted material):
In 2007, anyone who doesn’t understand that communism is murderous and brutal is either willfully blind or woefully ignorant.
[Julian Sanchez is quoted as saying,]
“the unique reaction to the Nazi case has to do with a special horror at the intentions of that regime: Soviet communism, one might say, turned out to be massively murderous, while the extermination of an entire group of people was a core goal of Nazi ideology.”
Quite a few people believe that particular communist myth.
Communism was certainly supported by some based on ideals of “brotherhood” and “sharing”. But a large part of it was also based on hatred.
The myth of “good intentions” was eloquently answered by Bryan Caplan a couple of years ago on this blog.
[“The Road to Hell was Paved with Bad Intentions”]:
I absolutely agree that the horrors of Communism and the ignorance about it, and the — glamour! that it seems to have for some of the populace are shameful.
And what about Latvia in particular? Search for Communism Latvia and similar terms. There is material out there. For instance, you may or may not be aware of the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in Riga, which is discussed on Wikipedia as well as having its own website.
And there is a pdf of a paper, “CRIMES OF COMMUNISM IN LATVIA,” at
It begins with a quote from the book With Dance Shoes in Siberian
Snows, by Sandra Kalniete:
My mother had three wishes: returning to Latvia, seeing her brothers and our family and having a flat. All of these wishes have been fulfilled. But even today my mother wakes from a dreadful dream. Again it is night and someone is knocking at the door. Strange men enter and order her to get ready. The deportation nightmare begins, and my mother in despair thinks: “The last time it was a dream. Now it’s real.” On waking she gazes long into the empty night until she calms down and understands: she is home again. In Latvia.
.
It’s probably only a small percentage, Artfl, but many people do share your frustration (anger) and dismay at the widespread ignorance about the 1000-pound gorilla in the room that seems to be successfully hiding behind a relatively tiny jackal.
Personally, I am still fighting the Viet Nam war. (This Kavanaugh disgrace is depressing and then some, but for me maybe the most depressing national event of my own life was our abandonment of Viet Nam.)
Paul in Boston on October 5, 2018 at 4:57 pm at 4:57 pm said:
..
My parents had known each other in the ghetto and found each other again in a DP camp set up by the Allies. They were married for 62 years until he passed away at 95.
* * *
Beautiful story – they were meant to be together!
Neo, there’s one other thing about this video that lifts my spirits a lot, and that is that for once it implies something good about our country.
I can remember a time when pride in the United States was the general baseline condition.
So thanks for that too.
Paul in Boston:
That’s a wonderful story about your parents.
Thanks, Neo. I shared this powerful video with everyone in my address list.
Withing the overall theme, a couple of touches tugged at me as they illustrated how small gestures can mean so much. She felt her humanity restored by simple courtesies, such as using the term “ladies”, and that he held the door for her to precede him. Despite her awful experiences, these were important to her. There was a time when they were extended and received in civilized society as gestures of respect. Young men were taught those courtesies by their mothers and grandmothers; and young women were taught to accept them graciously in the spirit they were extended.
From Kurt’s point of view, it was a miracle that they could celebrate together. Kurt survived the Holocaust
because he was sent to New York in February 1941 by his mother Tini when he was eleven. Peter was born in the first place and could become one of the most popular Austrian sports officials through volleyball,
because Kurt’s brother Fritz and father Gustav had survived six years in five concentration camps.
The book was written by US historian Jeremy Dronfield. It is titled “The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz”, recently it was also published in German.
It is based on entries in a diary that Gustav Kleinmann could hide from the Nazis over all the concentration camp years, on many interviews and meticulous research, as well as on another book that Fritz Kleinmann published together with Reinhold G?rtner in 1995: “But the dog doesn’t want to die “.
Gossip – it lies on all fours,
but the dog does not want to die.
Gustav Kleinmann wrote many poems in his diary – that was a little help in dealing with the atrocities committed by the Nazi henchmen, the daily murders that they saw up close.
If only American school kids could see this. Instead, they get Zinn’s “People’s History.”
Aww. What a lovely story.
Thank you! I needed a moment of human decency today.
What a wonderful restorative after all the depressing dreck of the last few weeks! :>))
Thank you, Neo.
very old…
tons of that stuff..
but only the jewish stuff matters..
everyone else can go to dirt…
[as evidenced by what everyone knows, will read, particpate in etc… [
“Ruta U. was fourteen, her sisters twelve and nine years old, when they and their mother, as well as their grandmother, were taken by the Russian secret police from their home in Riga, Latvia, and sent on a journey in cattle cars across the Soviet Union to the far reaches of Siberia.”
big deal… stalin did the same thing hitler did but to a half dozen countries
no one gives a sh*t… they only care about the jews in those countries…
try to be one of the ones erased… unknown that your country even exists!
why woudl anyone care? only one people matter…
who gives a crap about the OTHER SIX MILLION?
Not neo… not once in 10 years (she will deny it now)
Though Ruta’s narrative style is simple and self-effacing, she wins a big place in the reader’s heart as a noble soul living out a life enveloped in tragedy far beyond her making.
its all 5 and 4 stars, nothing less..
Dear God, I Wanted to Live
too bad… you cant even be heard in death…
your not made of the right religion, the right color, the right anything to be remember like the other six million… since your part of a larger number from a bigger despot who was the friend of the man who did the shoa, and the partner in pogroms
your lucky, the unlucky ones survived Stalin to come to where? .
a place which will exterminate them just the same, but much slower than a gulag?
never a part of anything cause, well, no one has any way to connect to a place that they dont even knows exist… they have no time for you, for your stories… you dont exist.. and if you try to particpate with stories from your history, your past, your life, your thing… to freaking bad… your not jewish… your not german.. your not russian…
after all, there were only 2 million of us… jews were 6 million
there just wasnt enough of us before or after to care about
or to own publishers, or politics, or anything like the power the jewish victims had
even the 8 million holodomor are forgotte
funny thing…
you cant learn from history if you dont know it
and you cant prevent what you dont know
we arent worth it…
not once in 10 years… not a paragraph..
so why would i bother?
we got the hint, americans wanted the baltics to be exterminated and still do
they have already erased us… so they wont miss us
to hear an uplifting story again, of thousands of them again, and each one buries everyone else a bit more as no one wants this war or this holocaust to be about anything other than the important people… we are not important enough to even get a mouses voice.
we get it
you win
erase us
why bother to comment to people who dont care to know anything about you?
with all the replays, republishing, reworking and repeats
you just dont have time to hear anything you didnt hear before
its as if the wont share the stage with anyone
cause being teh biggest victims on the planet for the longest time works only as long as you dont share that stage with anyone else who suffered with you, along side you, and even to defend you..
erase them, give them no chance…
cover one jewish girl in an attic, screw everything else
even if anotehr people have their own, theirs would diminish yours
and by sheer volume of people, just erase them
http://webtv.un.org/search/nadia-murad-basee-taha-isil-victim-on-trafficking-of-persons-in-situations-of-conflict-security-council-7585th-meeting/4665835954001/?term=Nadia%20Murad%20security%20council&lan=English&cat=Meetings%2FEvents&sort=date&page=4
Nadia told her story to the #UN Security Council in Dec 2015. It was powerful, emotional and diplomats applauded her.
Watch Nadia in #UNSC – https://tinyurl.com/y7qbsncg
Read about it here: https://tinyurl.com/yb6zbvxe
When my Uncle was rescued from Buchenwald he could barely whisper to the the US Army Medical Corps doctor… his name and serial number.
My mother was part of a work commando in Hamburg at the end of the war. Their job was to clean up the rubble each day after Bomber Command did what it could to level the city each night. When the end was obvious, the SS rounded up all the women, put them in box cars and shuttled them around for days on a trip to nowhere. When the British found them, most of the women were dead. After they rescued the living, she wound up in the hospital for two weeks with typhus.
My parents had known each other in the ghetto and found each other again in a DP camp set up by the Allies. They were married for 62 years until he passed away at 95.
Thank you for this uplifting interlude. America ain’t perfect but is the best humans have ever achieved. Now, we need to put the left out of power for a few generations.
Nice. Something similar but different, and more depressing, that I’ve been wanting to read is,
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary
– by Anonymous
I seem to have gotten something in my eyes.
What a beautiful story, made more so by the insanity of the last few weeks.
Thanks Neo… That’s why I keep coming back to this blog site..Good Stuff instead of all of the Crap that flows forth from the internet each day
Artfl, are you aware of Bryan Caplan and his Museum of Communism at George Mason U.?
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/museum/musframe.htm
.
Holocausts of Communism Test
http://www.bcaplan.com/cgi-bin/museum1.cgi
Headed by a quote from Solzhenitsyn,
32 questions on the horrors committed by Stalin, Lenin, the Soviets in general, although Latvia isn’t mentioned specifically.
.
Search on string Bryan Caplan Communism gets lots of results, including articles by Prof. Caplan and also other websites; among them, at
http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2007/06/14/good-intentions-really/ ,
there are these excerpts (some of which is quoted material):
.
I absolutely agree that the horrors of Communism and the ignorance about it, and the — glamour! that it seems to have for some of the populace are shameful.
And what about Latvia in particular? Search for Communism Latvia and similar terms. There is material out there. For instance, you may or may not be aware of the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in Riga, which is discussed on Wikipedia as well as having its own website.
And there is a pdf of a paper, “CRIMES OF COMMUNISM IN LATVIA,” at
https://www.ustrcr.cz/data/pdf/konference/zlociny-komunismu/COUNTRY%20REPORT%20LATVIA.pdf
It begins with a quote from the book With Dance Shoes in Siberian
Snows, by Sandra Kalniete:
.
It’s probably only a small percentage, Artfl, but many people do share your frustration (anger) and dismay at the widespread ignorance about the 1000-pound gorilla in the room that seems to be successfully hiding behind a relatively tiny jackal.
Personally, I am still fighting the Viet Nam war. (This Kavanaugh disgrace is depressing and then some, but for me maybe the most depressing national event of my own life was our abandonment of Viet Nam.)
Paul in Boston on October 5, 2018 at 4:57 pm at 4:57 pm said:
..
My parents had known each other in the ghetto and found each other again in a DP camp set up by the Allies. They were married for 62 years until he passed away at 95.
* * *
Beautiful story – they were meant to be together!
Neo, there’s one other thing about this video that lifts my spirits a lot, and that is that for once it implies something good about our country.
I can remember a time when pride in the United States was the general baseline condition.
So thanks for that too.
Paul in Boston:
That’s a wonderful story about your parents.
Thanks, Neo. I shared this powerful video with everyone in my address list.
Withing the overall theme, a couple of touches tugged at me as they illustrated how small gestures can mean so much. She felt her humanity restored by simple courtesies, such as using the term “ladies”, and that he held the door for her to precede him. Despite her awful experiences, these were important to her. There was a time when they were extended and received in civilized society as gestures of respect. Young men were taught those courtesies by their mothers and grandmothers; and young women were taught to accept them graciously in the spirit they were extended.
From Kurt’s point of view, it was a miracle that they could celebrate together. Kurt survived the Holocaust
because he was sent to New York in February 1941 by his mother Tini when he was eleven. Peter was born in the first place and could become one of the most popular Austrian sports officials through volleyball,
because Kurt’s brother Fritz and father Gustav had survived six years in five concentration camps.
Peter Kleinmanns Familie und der Holocaust