Day of remembrance for Holocaust victims
Israel came to a standstill on Thursday morning as a two-minute siren sounded nationwide at 10 a.m., marking Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah). …
“We bow our heads in memory of the victims,” Netanyahu said during the ceremony. “Their legacy obligates us to defend our existence and ensure never again means never again.”
The words have taken on even more meaning since 10/7/2023.
I’ve written many many previous posts on the subject of the Holocaust, but for now I’ll direct you to this one as well as this one.
If I ever pull a trigger again, it will be for these guys
Never forget.
Doesn’t seem like many remember, especially when you look at the support Hamas gets on American universities.
Oh they remember alright….
That Schicklgruber was/is/will be “the last best hope on Earth”…
…Speaking of which, here’s the grand rationale for THE Global Commie Oppo operation (INCLUDING Americans and other enlightened westerners) to squelch, kneecap, hog-tie, derail , UTTERLY VANQUISH AND OBLITERATE Trump and everything HE STANDS FOR (IOW Truth, Justice and the American Way):
“The American Menace: Leading Liberals Call Upon Europeans To Resist The United States”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/american-menace-leading-liberals-call-upon-europeans-resist-united-states
Key graf:
Oops…
Key phrase (IOW, in a nutshell):
[Emphasis mine; Barry M.]
To be sure, it’s not only Yurpeons “calling upon Americans”—something totally unnecessarily that the former DOES NOT HAVE TO DO. It’s likewise (a certain cohort of Uber-Patriotic) Americans CALLING UPON YURPEONS…to do the right, necessary, proper AND UBER-MORAL thing….
File under: Yawohl COMRADE!
News that should be shouted from the rooftops:
“Unsung Heroes: For The Last 6 Months Amish Volunteers Quietly Rebuild Devastated NC Town”—
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2025/04/25/unsung-heroes-for-the-last-6-months-amish-volunteers-quietly-rebuild-devastated-nc-town/
Not just the Amish, to be sure; but those Don’t-Tread-On-Me heroes have—CONTRA-“Biden”—selflessly and lovingly demonstrated CORE American values and priorities, catapulting these to a whole ‘nuther dimension….
Barry. There is, or perhaps some has been taken down, heaps of youtube pieces under “Helene Relief”.
Endless help of that nature.
And “God bless the Good Old Boys and their diesel toys.”
Those videos of all of Israel coming to a stop are fascinating. Cars stopped, people standing next to them. People stopped in their tracks on the sidewalks. Strangers facing each other silently in cafes or markets. For two minutes, life stops and all is memory for every Israeli.
We don’t even stop for 9/11 anymore, and it’s only been 24 years. We’re a vastly different country than Israel, and whatever unity we had began crumbling after only weeks back then. But nothing else causes us to pause. Not July 4th, not Memorial Day, Veterans Day. Each of those days is still fraught.
This is a country that overcomes, but so is Israel. We’ve been lucky. The most horrible catastrophe our country has ever faced, the Civil War, is so long ago that it doesn’t have the visceral power the Holocaust has for Israelis. Think about what would have to happen to really unite the United States. It’s unthinkable. If California had The Big One tomorrow morning and slid into the ocean, by nightfall “Serves Them Right” would be trending on X.
I guess I hope we never have something happen that would unite us like the Israelis on Yom HaShoah.
Born in 45. Grew up among veterans. Heard about concentration camps long before schools got around to it.
Holocaust was something else. Our guys didn’t see it, the death camps being in Poland and liberated by the Russian Army.
See Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”. Hard to imagine.
American troops liberated Dachau.
@Alan Colbo: American troops liberated Dachau.
Yes. J.D. Salinger, author of “The Catcher in the Rye,” was among the liberators.
________________________________
In April 1945 [Salinger ] entered Kaufering IV concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau. Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant and served in five campaigns. His war experiences affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated, and later told his daughter: “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Salinger
________________________________
Salinger fought in the Army across Europe from the day after D-Day to the German surrender. IMO it’s important to read Salinger in the context of those shattering experiences.
@ Huxley: “… it’s important to read Salinger in the context of those shattering experiences.”
Which raise the question/ issue of whether all humanities (written, musical, artistic, poetic, etc.) should be interpreted based on the work/output itself [i.e., as stand alone], or incorporate the writer’s (et al.) experiences for added context and understanding/ appreciation.
I can see that also snowballing into related interpretations of the presumed contextual background and its relevance, validity, authority, etc. Then of course we get into the recursion of the interpreter’s background and experience, etc. etc.
This kind of parallels my prior assertions about learning history, that you have to already know a lot of related contextual history to really understand the history you are currently reading/ learning. From my perspective as an engineer, I would also add we might benefit from a review of the relevant technological state within which these people did their work, and how that might also have influenced their thinking or output. What did they know about chemistry, electricity, nuclear power or similar issues; was their world pre or post steam powered railroads and telegraph, or jet planes and internet; etc.
Which raise the question/ issue of whether all humanities (written, musical, artistic, poetic, etc.) should be interpreted based on the work/output itself [i.e., as stand alone], or incorporate the writer’s (et al.) experiences for added context and understanding/ appreciation.
R2L:
I understand. It’s an old see-saw in literature — understand a work in terms of the times and the biography of the writer, or treat the work on its own terms as a self-enclosed literary object (which was the quest of the New Criticism movement).
I can see both approaches and take both myself depending.
However, I specifically mentioned Salinger’s horrific experiences during WW II because many people, particularly conservatives, write off Salinger as an adolescent proto-hippie, unworthy of serious attention and a blight on youth reading him in high school.
No. Salinger was shattered by WW II and much of Holden Caulfield’s ranting against phonies and his desire to rescue innocent children in “The Catcher in the Rye” was a cry from an American soldier who had stared straight into the blast furnace of world war and death camps.
Kurt Vonnegut had a similar story.
Alan Colbo.
Dachau was a concentration camp, begun in 33 as a forced labor camp.
It was not a post-Wansee death camp as in, off the train, through selection, into the showers.
Officially, it had a 20% death rate. If we triple it, it’s still below Auschwitz’ rate of 85%. The remaining Jews were likely in the last transport not “processed” or those kept around to do the dirty work when the Russians showed up.
However, as the war progressed, camps of all sizes and types, anticipating being overrun, sent their prisoners to other camps more likely to last a few more months. Bad as Dachau was, the results of the shipments (see “The Train Near Magedurg for one which was lucky) made it look infinitely worse. Before getting to the main camp, US troops found a trainload of dead people. For starters.
There was a significant difference between “concentration camps” and the post-Wannsee extermination effort.
My father’s division (104th ID Timberwolves) liberated Mittelbau-Dora. And, with hardly a breath after VE Day, the Infantry guys were going up and down back roads and forest paths looking for the dead of the death marches from one camp to another. Idea was to put them into a mattress cover and make a note on a map for the Graves Registration guys to come along and pick them up. “We used up every mattress cover in Third Army,” my father said.
The back lesson of the Magedeburg story is the Germans would lose a war in order to kill more jJews.
huxley:
“For Esme, With Love and Squalor.”
neo:
Absolutely.
Rumor in my part of New England was that Salinger was treated periodically for recurring PTSD at the VA Hospital in White River Junction, Vermont–across the Connecticut River from Cornish, New Hampshire, where he lived.
Salinger’s family was in the food import business and he spent some time in Europe before the war, picking up German and French. That’s how he wound up in the Army Counterintelligence Corps. The CIC guys followed right behind the combat units, searching corpses for documents and interrogating prisoners. Salinger must have seen a lot of decomposing, burned, and mutilated soldiers.
Other WWII CIC alumni include writer and philosophy professor J. Glenn Gray (“The Warriors”, which contains descriptions of Gray’s CIC work), Cold War journalist and probable CIA asset George Bailey (“The Germans”, which also describes his CIC work), and poet Anthony Hecht. I saw Hecht read at Auburn shortly before his death. He read an essay on “the Good War”, which described how the infantry unit he was attached to shot down surrendering German civilians after a costly firefight at the end of the war. None of the WWII veterans I grew up among ever called it “the Good War”. My uncle, who fought at Bitche, said “we called it Bitchy and that’s what it was–bitchy”.