Bloodthirsty Liberal

Holocaust remembrance

[Written by Helen Zegerman Schwimmer]

Lilly Friedman doesn’t remember the last name of the woman who designed and sewed the wedding gown she wore when she walked down the aisle over 60 years ago. But the grandmother of seven does recall that when she first told her fiancé Ludwig that she had always dreamed of being married in a white gown he realized he had his work cut out for him.

For the tall, lanky 21-year-old who had survived hunger, disease and torture this was a different kind of challenge. How was he ever going to find such a dress in the Bergen Belsen Displaced Person’s camp where they felt grateful for the clothes on their backs?

Fate would intervene in the guise of a former German pilot who walked into the food distribution center where Ludwig worked, eager to make a trade for his worthless parachute. In exchange for two pounds of coffee beans and a couple of packs of cigarettes Lilly would have her wedding gown.

For two weeks Miriam the seamstress worked under the curious eyes of her fellow DPs, carefully fashioning the six parachute panels into a simple, long sleeved gown with a rolled collar and a fitted waist that tied in the back with a bow. When the dress was completed she sewed the leftover material into a matching shirt for the groom.

A white wedding gown may have seemed like a frivolous request in the surreal environment of the camps, but for Lilly the dress symbolized the innocent, normal life she and her family had once led before the world descended into madness. Lilly and her siblings were raised in a Torah observant home in the small town of Zarica, Czechoslovakia where her father was a melamed, respected and well liked by the young yeshiva students he taught in nearby Irsheva.
He and his two sons were marked for extermination immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. For Lilly and her sisters it was only their first stop on their long journey of persecution, which included Plashof, Neustadt, Gross Rosen and finally Bergen Belsen.

Four hundred people marched 15 miles in the snow to the town of Celle on January 27, 1946 to attend Lilly and Ludwig’s wedding. The town synagogue, damaged and desecrated, had been lovingly renovated by the DPs with the meager materials available to them. When a Sefer Torah arrived from England they converted an old kitchen cabinet into a makeshift Aron Kodesh.

“My sisters and I lost everything - our parents, our two brothers, our homes. The most important thing was to build a new home.” Six months later, Lilly’s sister Ilona wore the dress when she married Max Traeger. After that came Cousin Rosie. How many brides wore Lilly’s dress? “I stopped counting after 17.” With the camps experiencing the highest marriage rate in the world, Lilly’s gown was in great demand.

In 1948 when President Harry Truman finally permitted the 100,000 Jews who had been languishing in DP camps since the end of the war to emigrate, the gown accompanied Lilly across the ocean to America. Unable to part with her dress, it lay at the bottom of her bedroom closet for the next 50 years, “not even good enough for a garage sale. I was happy when it found such a good home.”

Home was the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. When Lily’s niece, a volunteer, told museum officials about her aunt’s dress, they immediately recognized its historical significance and displayed the gown in a specially designed showcase, guaranteed to preserve it for 500 years.

But Lilly Friedman’s dress had one more journey to make. Bergen Belsen, the museum, opened its doors on October 28, 2007. The German government invited Lilly and her sisters to be their guests for the grand opening. They initially declined, but finally traveled to Hanover the following year with their children, their grandchildren and extended families to view the extraordinary exhibit created for the wedding dress made from a parachute.

Lilly Friedman and her parachute dress on display in the Bergen Belsen Museum

There’s more at the link, if you’re interested.

- Aggie

I think this Dutch bitch misunderstands the nuanced meaning of “Never Again”.

It doesn’t mean we’re not going to talk about it anymore.

“Holland’s powerful Jewish lobby is playing on the country’s sense of guilt over the Holocaust,” a prominent Dutch activist said last week, triggering angry reactions and accusation of anti-Semitism from pro-Israel Dutch Jews.

Gretta Duisenberg, the widow of the first president of the European Central Bank and a friend of the Queen of the Netherlands, said in an interview for Islam Online that “the Jewish lobby in Holland, like in the United States, is very strong and powerful, and it is still playing on our guilt feelings although it is 63 years since the Holocaust.”

Duisenberg, a leading pro-Palestinian activist and well-known member of Holland’s high society, added that “whenever you have something against the Jewish people in Holland, they call you an anti-Semite.”

Can’t imagine why.

[T]he interview does contain a quote by Duisenberg saying that “Holland’s right-wing government is Christian radical, and the radical people within the Jewish people have very strong feelings toward Israel, and they dominate our government.”

Duisenberg once said she wants to collect six million signatures for a pro-Palestinian petition. In a 2005 television discussion, she said: “I hope the Jews realize they can’t take over the south of Amsterdam the same way they took over the West Bank.”

“The Jews”: shouldn’t you hear an alarm when you use those words?

Jews should:

[I]n 2009, the number of anti-Semite incidents in Amsterdam doubled compared to 2008, when 14 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in the Dutch capital. Jews in Amsterdam feel increasingly “besieged” as they are exposed to a growing barrage of name-calling, hate mail, firecrackers in their mailboxes, graffiti and - occasionally - physical abuse, CIDI said.

Well, if they just stopped banging on about the Holocaust all the time, maybe they’d have less name-calling and fewer firecrackers.

PS: I don’t want to mention the H-word, but how can she fix her mouth to say the words “Holland’s powerful Jewish lobby” after… well, I said I wouldn’t say it, but it rhymes with The Diary of Stan Flank?

Holocaust survivors have much higher cancer rates

The Germans created so much misery.

An Israeli study, believed to be one of the first of its kind, has found significantly higher cancer rates among European Jews who immigrated to Israel after the Holocaust than among those who left Europe for what is now Israel either before or during World War II.

The rates of breast and colorectal cancer were particularly high among those who spent the war years in Nazi-occupied Europe, according to the paper, published Nov. 4 in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The most striking disparity was among those who were youngest during the war. Of the 315,544 subjects in the study, men born from 1940 to 1945 who were in Europe through the war years developed cancer at three and a half times the rate of men the same age who immigrated to Israel during the war; women in Europe throughout the war years were at more than double the risk, the study found.

It just never stops.

- Aggie

Following anti-Semitism, as we do here in Bloodthirstan, means becoming aware of the fact that certain groups wish to eradicate the Jewish people, and all traces of their history, from the face of the earth. Groups in the Arab world, aided by the political Left, would like to deny ancient Jewish history in Israel, as well as their modern right to exist. This core belief was the stated goal of the Holocaust. Holocaust Deniers deny that, that the Holocaust happened at all. I’ve even heard modern Leftists claim, quite seriously, that “there is no such thing as a Jew,” the denial of the very existence of the people.

It’s ugly out there

The effort to destroy physical remnants of ancient Jewish history in Israel is related to the burning of Torahs, synagogues and eventually human beings during WWII. Modern Jew haters in Poland have removed the symbol of Auschwitz, the sign that greeted prisoners at the gate.

A sign synonymous with the Nazi work camps of World War II was stolen overnight from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp memorial in Poland, police said Friday.

Police were “alerted at 5 a.m. local time on Friday by museum guards” that the infamous sign reading “Arbeit Macht Frei” — “Work Sets You Free” in German — was stolen, according to police spokeswoman Agnieszka Szczygiel.

The heavy iron sign “was removed by being unscrewed on one side and pulled off on the other,” Szczygiel said. “It is also believed that this was a planned event and that several people were involved as the sign was at remarkable height.”

Police have launched an investigation.

Israeli deputy PM Silvan Shalom, seen here on April 21 2009, stands in front of the sign that was stolen from Auschwitz.

- Aggie

Beautiful.

Risking everything, the Christians of Zakynthos saved the Jewish population. Go to the link and read it. You won’t be disappointed.

- Aggie

We’re all sympathetic to Holocaust survivors—well, okay, Mahmoud, maybe not you—but could they just relax a little bit? After all, it’s been sixty-four-and-a-half years.

It’s not like the Shoah was that big of a deal, was it? (I think G-d might send a lightning bolt my way for even writing that.)

A newly formed blue-ribbon government committee to combat anti-Semitism is embroiled in a dispute over a discussion of whether to avoid working with survivors of the Holocaust because they are not “objective” and “too emotional” The Jerusalem Post has learned from sources who have access to committee meetings.

That revelation last week, along with statements from Dr. Juliane Wetzel, an academic and member of the government commission, who allegedly said in the meeting that she will not allow herself to be “blackmailed by lobby-groups,” caused turbulence among the committee members.

…

Elke Gryglewski, from the House of the Wannsee Conference and one of 10 members on the commission, said in a meeting in early November, that Holocaust survivors are “not objective and too emotional,” according to sources. Asked about the statement, Gryglewski told the Post, “One cannot expect that survivors are objective. We are all not objective…the commission will, of course, continue to work with the Jewish community.”

Professor Arno Lustiger, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and a leading historian in Germany, rejected Gryglewski’s understanding of Holocaust survivors as lacking objectivity. He told the Post last Friday that “I have heard that all my life. That is well known of German historians.”

…

While the House offers seminars dealing with anti-Semitism, Gryglewski told the Post that the educational facility of the House conducts no workshops devoted exclusively to hatred of Israel, the most common form of modern anti-Semitism in Germany, according to experts.

Gryglewski said the “‘lobby’ term is very charged” and denied using the expression.

There had been a discussion about the “autonomy of the group,” said Gryglewski.

Wetzel declined to respond to multiple requests for comment. It remains unclear if Wetzel’s purported use of “lobby-groups” refers to non-Jewish and Jewish non-governmental organizations.

However, Wetzel wrote in several e-mails to the commission that she is “appalled” about the disclosures and urged the members to confirm that she did not use the controversial term “lobby-groups.” The term “lobby” is considered to have a pejorative meaning in Germany.

Dr. Charles Small, the head of the Yale University Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism and former Israeli professor, told the Post, “The reported comment pertaining to ‘the lobby’ is at best insensitive. One of the most pernicious stereotypes of the Jewish community - particularly in Germany - is the nefarious conspiratorial power of the Jewish people or so-called ‘lobby.’”

You can take the Nazi out of the Germans, but you can’t take the German out of the Germans.

I’m tempted to write something like “only in Germany could a Holocaust conference and anti-Semitism seminar turn into a pogrom”. But we all know that’s not true. Britain, Sweden, Norway—they’re taking notes.

Aw, hey guys, you shouldn’t have.

No, really, the Palestinians say you shouldn’t have:

Palestinian schoolchildren in UN-run schools may soon learn about the Holocaust as part of a new curriculum on human rights that is being developed by a UN relief agency.

Despite strong opposition from Palestinians, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees is pushing forward with the new curriculum, currently in its draft stages, which will be circulated among parents, educators and human rights experts in the coming weeks.

“The issue is not whether UNRWA’s Human Rights Education will include the important education on the Holocaust or not. It will,” a spokesman for UNRWA in Gaza told The Jerusalem Post. “But this is not the only subject.”

Rumors about the proposed curriculum erupted in controversy last month, when Palestinians protested plans to teach students about the Holocaust. At the time, UN officials said the curriculum would not be introduced this year, but they stuck by the concept. Since then, UN officials have said the Holocaust will be taught within the context of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Currently, the Holocaust is not taught in UN-run schools in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, or in Palestinian schools in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where officials said teaching Palestinian children about the Holocaust would first require peace with Israel. UN schools in Gaza are bound by Palestinian curriculum, but they may make changes. Since 2002, the schools have incorporated lessons on human rights.

John Ging, UNRWA’s director of operations in the Strip, said any human rights course would be incomplete without a discussion of the Holocaust.

“No human-rights curriculum is complete without the inclusion of the facts of the Holocaust, and its lessons,” Ging told Britain’s The Independent.

And, as we all know, the Holocaust just happened. You can’t blame the UN for not being aware of it before now.

Thanks for your concern, guys, but if you’ve been enabling Palestinian rejectionism for all this time, why should we think this will be any different? They’ll probably teach it as good news—or, at the very least, as a trigger for the founding of the state of Israel (ignoring any historic right or claim to the land).

I just died at the ripe old age of 90. But my early life promised no such long life and prosperity. I was lucky to make it out of my 20s. Hell, I was lucky to make it into my 20s. You see, I and my people had the unlucky fortune to be both Jewish and Polish some 70 years ago.

Know where I’m going?

Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the ill-fated 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis, died Friday at the age of 90.

Edelman died of old age at the family home of his friend Paula Sawicka, where he had lived for the past two years.

“He died at home, among friends, among his close people,” Sawicka told The Associated Press.

Most of Edelman’s adult life was dedicated to the defense of human life, dignity and freedom. He fought the Nazis in the doomed Warsaw ghetto revolt and later in the Warsaw city Uprising. And then for decades he fought communism in Poland.

His heroism earned him the French Legion of Honor and Poland’s highest civilian distinction, the Order of the White Eagle.

…

One of the few survivors of three weeks of uneven struggle in the Warsaw ghetto, Edelman felt obliged to preserve the memory of the fallen heroes of that first large-scale Jewish revolt against the Nazis. Each year, on the revolt’s anniversary, he laid flowers at Warsaw’s monument to the ghetto heroes, and called for tolerance.

“Remember them all - boys and girls - 220 altogether, not too many to remember their faces, their names,” he said of the young fighters in a 2008 interview with The Associated Press.

‘Man is evil, by nature man is a beast,” he said then. Therefore people “have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred.”

He also felt obliged to appeal repeatedly to the world for freedom and peace - even when it had to be won in a fight.

I subscribe to both those sentiments, but it’s nice to see them validated by someone who kind of knows what he’s talking about.

Oh, by the way, for those of you who feel uneasy about acknowledging Jewish suffering because of, you know, Israel, Edelman was your kind of Jew:

After the war Edelman served as the right-hand man of uprising leader Mordechai Anielewicz and was a long-time activist in the Bund, the General Jewish Labor Union. The organization was known in part for being anti-Zionist, believing that Jews must assert themselves as a part of the societies of the countries of origin.

Or is that just editorializing by Ha’artez, the anti-Zionist rag of the Zionist entity?

Because there’s also this version of his post-war life:

After the war, Edelman became a cardiologist in Lodz. He joined the democratic opposition and the Solidarity freedom movement, and was interned under the Dec.13, 1981, martial law aimed against Solidarity.

In the end, the Solidarity movement led to the ouster of communists from power in Poland in 1989.

Edelman’s wife, Alina Margolis-Edelman, worked as a nurse in the Warsaw ghetto and after the war became a pediatrician. With their son, Aleksander, and daughter, Anna, she left Poland for France following the communist-sponsored anti-Semitic purges of 1968. She died in Paris on March 23, 2008.

But Edelman never wanted to leave Poland.

“When you were responsible for the life of some 60,000 people, you don’t leave and abandon the memory of them,” he told the AP.

Heroism is never as simple as it seems. Under analysis it diffuses into translucent shades. But in its moment, heroism is clear, sharp, and never to be forgotten.

This is the only existing footage of Ann Frank. All my life I have marveled at the way the dominant culture defines itself as morally superior to “out” groups - more intelligent, cleaner, more ethical. One would think that after WWII, people would have quietly given up the notion that Europe is somehow superior to the rest of us in any way, shape or form. But, just listen to the Left (hard and soft, mainstream and fringe), and you will hear about how Europe does everything the best way possible. We should emulate them. And look at this footage - don’t they look like nice people?

So, gentle reader, as you view this 20 second video, think about how the people on the streets treated their Jewish friends and neighbors. Holland had the lowest rate of Jewish survival in all of Europe.

- Aggie

One of my favorite Israeli bloggers, Arlene Kushner (who’m I kidding?—she’s about the only Israeli blogger I read) had a link to this quick hit interview of Netanyahu. I hope you watch: it’s about the best minute and a half you’ll ever spend:

I lived in New York at this time, and as a goy, I found it difficult to take the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson (whom Netanyahu is quoting) seriously. The literature that one would see proclaiming him as the Jewish messiah seemed a bit of a stretch. But the wisdom of what he told Bibi, the naive but faithful optimism of his comment, is profoundly moving. It’s almost miraculous how it resonates a quarter of a century later.