Content note: This is basically about the Holocaust.
It's the international day of remembrance for the Holocaust. And my mom's side of my family came over to the USA during that time, leaving because we are Jewish and because being Jewish in Germany at that time was very, very dangerous.
My great-grandfather was among those taken on the Night of Broken Glass. He got out, after, both from the camp they took him to and from Germany.
Did you know that to immigrate to the United States, you often had to have someone who would vouch for you and promise to provide for you for the rest of your life, if necessary? Someone did that for him, and then he worked, until he could bring over his wife and two sons. The younger of those two sons is my grandfather.
Did you know that at the time, you could enter Shanghai without a visa, so long as you had the money to get there? There was a ghetto in Shanghai, but unlike the Warsaw one, the Jews who lived in the Shanghai ghetto lived. At the time, it may well have been safer to be Jewish in Shanghai than Chinese in Shanghai. (Shanghai is not far from Nanjing, or Nanking, depending on which version of the Anglicization you're using. Really, it's 上海 and 南京. If you've never heard of the Rape of Nanjing/Nanking, that's what I'm saying Shanghai was located pretty close to. By train, it's about an hour and a half.)
Did you know that the temple they made in Shanghai during that time was used for a Bar Mitzvah in the last few years? It's mostly a museum now, but there is a Torah there, and it can be used for services.
Did you know that the first deaths in Germany began after a petition for the legal ability to kill a disabled dependent?
Did you know that when concentration camps were liberated, gay people were not always liberated, because homosexuality was considered a crime?
There's a lot that people tend not to teach about the Holocaust, that people remember less. This is always so with history- today, I ask you to remember some of what is thought of less.
I shudder in fear both at Aktion T4, and how we in the US think that could never happen here, but fail to realize we were rounding up all the Japanese during that time too, and thankfully didn't commit genocide. And until WW2, eugenics was debated openly in polite company.
ReplyDeleteAnd more? That Hitler came to power through entirely legal means always makes me shudder when we pass more laws to "stop terrorism" that seem to concentrate power in the hands of a few, very scary people. When I accompanied my ID/DD disabled aunt to the gate at the airport last year, and the TSA separated us to conduct a full pat down search of my confused and frightened aunt despite my protests, I became convinced that these people are not here to protect me. (to say nothing of the difficulty that a 30 year old guy who is anxious, fidgeting and won't make eye contact has when getting a gate pass while trying to articulate the reason to a very skeptical airline representative without having to say anything insulting about her or himself to get the message across that she's incapable of traveling safely through the airport without accompaniment, despite being in a wheelchair that someone else could (theoretically, hah!) push.
Man, sorry to dump all this here, it kind of fits the overall narrative of the event in my mind, while nothing will ever compare to the Shoah, i feel perhaps society hasn't learned all the lessons it could from it.
No need be sorry, it's relevant.
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