holocaust- extermination of jews by nazis anton Posted: Thu Apr 15 00:26:29 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     What is your opinion on the whole subject of the holocaust, and in particular on theories proclaiming it did not happen?   dan632 Posted: Thu Apr 15 01:40:12 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     of course it didn't happen, 36000 jews just dissapeared off the face of the earth 30 or 40 years ago. perhaps they were underground, building a giant spaceship and recolonised in a far off galaxy or the dark side of the moon, where they invented time travel where they went back a long long time ago. Star Wars was based on this theory   DanSRose Posted: Thu Apr 15 01:41:37 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     Well, what is there to say? It was one of the worst violation of humanity in the 20th century. All those who deny have anti-semitic backgrounds and ideologies and work the Holocaust and "that it never ever happened and I can 'prove' it so anyone who tells me otherwise" theories into their beliefs.   DanSRose Posted: Thu Apr 15 01:43:06 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     dan632 said: 36000 jews Okay. That's a number i've never ever ever heard before. *crosses fingers that its just a typo*   dan632 Posted: Thu Apr 15 01:45:23 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     DanSRose said: >>dan632 said: >36000 jews > >Okay. That's a number i've never ever ever heard before. *crosses fingers that its just a typo* yeah i have no idea how many died in the holocaust   DanSRose Posted: Thu Apr 15 01:52:06 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     Ah, ok. Acceptable answer. The original estimate was 6 million, but research during the 1980s showed it to be about 5.4 million, which is still a lot of blood. The image of the Holocaust that always disturbs me over all other images is the barrels and piles spilling over and around of shorn human hair of all lengths, styles, and colors. The random executions (man walks down the street, gets shot in the head) get to me as well, but the hair is 'unique' to the situation.   DaveHill Posted: Thu Apr 15 03:18:49 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     Ever been to any nazi concentration camps? I've been to Dachau (near Munich) & Westerbork (north of Holland). Westerbork isn't very impressive, it was a working camp and very few of the original structures are intact, they used the place to house immigrants in the 1960's. Dachau however, being a Vernichtungslager (Destruction camp) had gas chambres and the whole lot. The old barracks and watch towers (if i remember correctly) are all still there, and a permanent exposition is housed in some barracks. That includes cabinets, about 3 metres wide and 2,5 high, filled with shoes, glasses and hair. It's very unnerving to see it all piled up like that, the camp still breathes death. To answer the question : yes, of course it happened, there are so many things you can't deny or explain differently. Anybody in his or her right mind can't get around the fact that over 5 million people just went missing of the face of the earth. It was a faul war, not some fucking alien deportation.   ifihadahif Posted: Thu Apr 15 06:59:02 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     One of mankind's worst moments, and the sad thing is, it will probably happen again, maybe not in our lifetimes, and maybe not to the jews, but someday, we will allow someone to take charge and enslave a society, to begin killing them . . .   trogdor57 Posted: Thu Apr 15 08:43:35 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     Yeah, if you ever get the chance, find the short essay, "No News from Auschwitz." It's haunting beyond belief... *shudder*   Malik Posted: Thu Apr 15 18:22:57 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     Well, prior to my birth, I can't really prove that anything happened. I actually can't prove that events happening after my birth happened either, because I wasn't there. In fact, all I can prove are the things that I see myself. And even those can be faked. So to those that say the Holocaust never happened because there isn't enough evidence of it, I say, "Nothing ever happened. Including you, so go away."   DanSRose Posted: Fri Apr 16 00:50:21 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     trogdor57 said: > "No News from Auschwitz." Who wrote it and when?   trogdor57 Posted: Fri Apr 16 00:58:06 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     I don't have the name, but it was written about 15 years after WWII. I can't find the name at the moment, but when I find it, I'll get back to you.   ifihadahif Posted: Fri Apr 16 07:07:43 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     There Is No News From Auschwitz A.M. Rosenthal The most terrible thing of all, somehow, was that at Brzezinka the sun was bright and warm, the rows of graceful poplars were lovely to look upon, and on the grass near the gates children played. It all seemed frighteningly wrong, as in a nightmare, that at Brzezinka the sun should ever shine or that there should be light and greenness and the sound of young laughter. It would be fitting is at Brzezinka the sun never shone and the grass withered, because this is a place of unutterable terror. And yet, every day, from all over the world, people come to Brzezinka, quite possibly the most grisly tourist center one earth. They come for a variety of reasons- to see if it could really have been true, to remind themselves not to forget, to pay homage to the dead by the simple act of looking upon their place of suffering. Brzezinka is a couple miles from the better-known southern Polish town of Oswiecim. Oswiecim has about twelve thousand inhabitants, is situated about 171 miles from Warsaw, and lies in a damp, marshy area at the eastern end of the pass called Moravian Gate. Brzezinka and Oswiecim together formed part of that minutely organized factory of torture and death that the Nazis called Konzentrationslager Auschwitz By now, fourteen years after the last batch of prisoners was herded naked into the gas chambers by dogs and guards, the story of Auschwitz has been told a great many times. Some of the in mates have written of those memories of which sane men cannot conceive. Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, the superintendent of the camp, before he was executed wrote of his detailed memoirs of mass exterminations and the experiments on living bodies. Four Million people died here, the Poles say. And so there is no news to report about Auschwitz. There is merely the compulsion to write something about is, a compulsion that grows out of a restless feeling that to have visited Auschwitz and then turned away without having said or written anything would somehow be a most grievous act of discourtesy to those who died here Brzezinka and Oswiecim are very quiet places now; the screams can no longer be heard. The tourist walks silently, quickly at first to get it over with, and then, as his mind peoples the barracks and the chambers and the dungeons and flogging posts, he walks draggingly. The guide does not say much either, because there is nothing much for him to say after he has pointed. For every visitor, there is one particular bit of horror that he knows he will never forget. For some it is seeing the rebuilt gas chamber at Oswiecim and being told that this is the "small one." For others, it is the fact that at Brzezinka, the ruins of the gas chambers, and the crematoria the Germans blew up when they retreated, there are daisies growing. There are visitors who gaze blankly at the gas chambers and furnaces because their minds simply cannot encompass them, but stand shivering before the great mounds of human hair behind the plate glass window or the piles of babies’ shoes or the brick cells where men sentenced to death by suffocation were walled up. One visitor opened his mouth in a silent scream simply at the sight of boxes- great stretches of three-tiered wooden boxes in the women’s barracks. They were about six feet wide, about three feet high, and into them from five to ten prisoners were shoved for the night. The guide walks quickly through the barracks. Nothing more to see here. A brick building where sterilization experiments were carried out on women prisoners. The guide tries the door- it’s locked. The visitor is grateful that he does not have to go in, and the flushes with shame. A long corridor where rows of faces stare from the walls. Thousands of pictures, the photographs of prisoners. They are all dead now, the men and women who stood before the cameras, and they all knew they were to die. They all stare blank-faces, but one picture in the middle of a row, seizes the eye and wrenches the mind. A girl, twenty-two years old, plumply pretty, blonde. She is smiling gently, as at a sweet, treasured thought. What was the thought that passed through her young mind and is now her memorial on the wall of the dead at Auschwitz? Into the suffocation dungeons the visitor is taken for a moment and feels himself strangling. Another visitor goes in, stumbles out and crosses herself. There is no place to pray at Auschwitz. The visitors look pleadingly at each other and say to the guide, "Enough." There is nothing new to report about Auschwitz. It was a sunny day and the trees were green and at the gates the children played.   choke Posted: Fri Apr 16 23:51:58 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     thanx for finding that hif. haunting :(   trogdor57 Posted: Sat Apr 17 00:58:55 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     Told ya. Oh, thanx for finding it.   DanSRose Posted: Sun Apr 18 13:19:08 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     Thanks ifihadahif. In class recently, we were discussing Anne Frank, her diary, and why it was so widely received. I'm bringing this to the Forum. What's your take on her? Would our interpretation of the Holocaust be different with the Diary? Has it sanitized the Holocaust because of its extended use?   ifihadahif Posted: Sun Apr 18 14:53:24 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     DanSRose said: >Thanks ifihadahif. >In class recently, we were discussing Anne Frank, her diary, and why it was so widely received. I'm bringing this to the Forum. > >What's your take on her? Would our interpretation of the Holocaust be different with the Diary? Has it sanitized the Holocaust because of its extended use? > I don't think it's her diary that has sanitized the holocaust as much as time itself. If anything, her diary has help us not to forget - and we must never forget. It seems like now when kids learn about the holocaust, it's just facts from a long time ago . . . a time when 6 million jews were killed, blah, blah, blah. . . and they don't feel the pain or the passion they should be feeling. This is where I feel her diary helps us.   libra Posted: Sun Apr 18 15:38:01 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     ifihadahif said: >> >I don't think it's her diary that has sanitized the holocaust as much as time itself. If anything, her diary has help us not to forget - and we must never forget. >It seems like now when kids learn about the holocaust, it's just facts from a long time ago . . . a time when 6 million jews were killed, blah, blah, blah. . . and they don't feel the pain or the passion they should be feeling. This is where I feel her diary helps us. I agree with that....I had a really good teacher teach us about the holocaust...I will never forget that class. She was reading us excerpts from first hand accounts, notes by the doctors doing experiments on the Jews. She showed us slides of horrible horrible things being done...even though it was really traumatizing to a lot of us, people were crying and people had to leave the room because they felt sick, we got the point though, and we saw that what happened wasn't something from the distant past, it was incredibly recent.   iggy Posted: Sun Apr 18 20:51:17 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     a lot of people has heard of the extermination of jews in WW2 has anyone heard of the extermination of chinese from the japanese in WW2 especially the rape of nanking? till now the japanese government still refuses to apologise for that. they even hail some of the people responsible as heroes. even the germans were appalled by their japanese counterparts in the extermination methods http://www.tribo.org/nanking/   iggy Posted: Sun Apr 18 20:58:14 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     pictures of the atrocities http://www.fatherryan.org/holocaust/holocaust77/rapenanking.htm unit 731 the biological warfare unit so sick that the german counterparts were appalled by the methods used http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/NanjingMassacre/NMU731.html   DanSRose Posted: Sun Apr 18 21:07:55 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     Many think the Diary is inspiration as it chronicles her path to survival. I've talked to them. *ahem* Also, the play is such a sugar-spectacle that you could never know what happens in it. The play was how it became so widely disseminated in the US.   addi Posted: Mon Apr 19 08:14:51 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     chanz said: >has anyone heard of the extermination of chinese from the japanese in WW2 especially the rape of nanking? for the record that horrific event is covered in every world history text book I've had to work on in my job (to varying degrees). Strickly my opinion though and not based on anything scientific, I would guess that it doesn't recieve more attension here because the number of deaths related to both historical events (millions for the holocaust), and because of longstanding biases and prejudice against asians in the west. The jews murdered were white europeans. The chinese murdered were "yellow", and they looked like the "Japs" that were rounded up into internment camps here and denied their rights. Anyone asian looking was despised because of Pearl Harbor, and the stories of terrible treatment of captured U.S. prisoners of war only fed that hatred. So, while no one would admit it, the Rape of Nanking, has been relegated to a lesser tier in our history books because of the death total, and because of our engrained cultural biases. Truman had a very difficult decision to make regarding the use of the atomic bombs on Japan. I honestly believe it took a terrible toll on him. I can't help but wonder though what he would have done if the decision to use them would have meant dropping them on an enemy that was white, and of european desent. My guess is that it would have been even harder for him to do. Just my rambling thoughts though, and nothing more. Generally speaking European history is covered more thoroughly in our secondary schools than asian history is.   ifihadahif Posted: Mon Apr 19 08:40:46 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     addison said: The Rape of Nanking, has been relegated to a lesser tier in our history books because of the death total, and because of our engrained cultural biases. >Truman had a very difficult decision to make regarding the use of the atomic bombs on Japan. I honestly believe it took a terrible toll on him. I can't help but wonder though what he would have done if the decision to use them would have meant dropping them on an enemy that was white, and of european desent. My guess is that it would have been even harder for him to do. Just my rambling thoughts though, and nothing more. > >Generally speaking European history is covered more thoroughly in our secondary schools than asian history is. > Absolutely true, the rape of Nanking was covered in my history books with mabye a paragraph or two, while we spent spent what seemed like forever on the holocaust.   iggy Posted: Mon Apr 19 09:57:50 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     exactly. the holocaust was a dark chapter in history, but the jews are taking the anti-semitism thing too far.   choke Posted: Mon Apr 19 18:26:21 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     addison said: > >Generally speaking European history is covered more thoroughly in our secondary schools than asian history is. > Uh huh. I dont even know what the Rape of Nanking was and i just spent a term in history on the leadup to WW2. Can anyone tell me what it was? We learnt about Pearl Harbour and Manchurian Crisis but dats about it 4 da asian history   DanSRose Posted: Mon Apr 19 20:31:30 2004 Post | Quote in Reply     addison said: >The jews murdered were white europeans. For the entirety of European history, up until the begining of the 20th Century, and even during, Jews were considered a separate racial identity, ie. non-white. The phenomenon of "Jews = White" is entirely a Christian thing. Jews see themselves as a separate ethnicity, like Hispanics do. chanz said: >the holocaust was a dark chapter in history, but the jews are taking the anti-semitism thing too far. Japan viewed as the nation of China as the enemy, as it was historically and cultural ingrained in them. This view was furthered after the Sino-Japanese War, then the Emperor's edicts declaring all Chinese people the enemy of the nation of Japan. Jews are taking this Anti-Semitism thing as a threat to their entire people- all the Jews of the world, which has been tried Hitlers (nearly successfully too; foiled by his defeats on the Eastern front). This view has been taken up by the radical Islamic world.   [ Reply to this thread ] [ Start new thread ]