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June 06, 2006
New perspective on D-Day
While this piece of satire was written last year, it has a timeless sort of quality, so I think it's appropriate to share: The Americans came in killing like mad men, I never thought I would say this, but life was better with Adolf Hitler.There's more, of course, and it's a fun piece. As it happens, I've been reading a lot about the Holocaust lately, in numbing detail, and is definitely not fun. Babies thrown alive into the crematory ovens. Trains so crammed with Jews that when they arrived at the death camp all were suffocated. Jews herded into gas chambers which didn't work so that they had to wait for three hours while the Nazis got the gas working. Children and the elderly being simply buried alive to save Einsatzgruppen bullets. Country after country, death camp after death camp, killing pit after killing pit, ghetto after ghetto, town after town, and shtetl after shetl. Grim atrocity after grim atrocity. Seriously, it is not easy to read about it, but that's what I've been doing for the past week. By the way, you don't have to read books like these. Looking at pictures will do almost as well. Sixty two years ago today, Americans made an enormous sacrifice which eventually led to stopping these atrocities. I wasn't even born, so I'm in no position to deliver moral lectures. But I've read enough to know the difference between Nazism and incidents like a soldier who let his dog bark too closely at a prisoner. (And who was tried and convicted for his crimes.) Contemplating the full horror -- the scope and brutality -- of the Nazi Holocaust offers something in short supply lately. A thing called perspective. posted by Eric on 06.06.06 at 10:19 PM
Comments
Thanks for sharing that sad story. Children don't understand what they're doing in those kind of situations, and sometimes neither do the adults. Eric Scheie · June 7, 2006 08:29 PM |
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Thank you. As a small child I had a second hand experience with the holocaust. I befriended a charming little girl with pig tails who invited me over to "play" after school. She was taunted by other children in class at recess for her strange dress and braids, so naturally I gravitated to her.
Her home consisted of a tiny one bedroom house in the country with chickens running loose in the yard.
Her mother was a death camp survivor, I found out years later. She had a tattoo on her wrist, short hair, and talked to herself. She had been rescued by a much older U.S. soldier who helped liberate the camp and brought her back as a war bride.
The scars of that camp were also visited upon the child. The little girl was immersed in fear by her mother. The thoughtless little heathen children in our class would dance around her in the school yard and call her names. The last I remember of her, she was in high school, encased in a protective shell, with a too bright smile and distant gaze on her face.
Yes, perspective indeed.