Rabbi and child compare age in Buchenwald

These are the kinds of descriptions from an eyewitness Rabbi that are so valuable in understanding what the holocaust victim went through surviving Buchenwald.The child's description of his own age as compared to the Rabbi shows the deep damage this kind of imprisonment did to the victims. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/nyregion/rabbi-herschel-schacter-who-carried-word-of-freedom-to-buchenwald-dies-at-95.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

Thanks Victor. Great story.

It is incredibly important for us to remember what happend to the Jews of Europe during the war-as the Rabbi recounted, one of the first questions that many of them asked after liberation was if the rest of the world knew what had been going on. The reason it is so essential is because what happened to the Jews wasn't simply a matter of the Nazis, what happened to the Jews was the culmination of 2000 years of ostracization. By the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century there was a shift to where antisemitism was not only rampant by the uneducated masses, where one would expect to find bigotry, but was now gaining impetus in Academia. It was being seen as a continental, even worldwide struggle between the Aryans and the Jews.

No, the Holocaust was not just a handful of Nazis murdering millions of Jews. There were hundreds of thousands of participants, even millions if you consider those who knew what was going on and did nothing to stop it. It is easy to excuse this behavior because these people may have been afraid for their lives, but what we find is that in some occupied areas in Western Europe where the populace resisted the efforts to round up the Jews there was varying degrees of success in impeding those efforts. It is no accident that the death camps were for the most part built in Eastern Europe where antisemitism was the strongest.

 

Thank you for a most poignant and moving link.

Gaines