The Polish Anne Frank - Rutka Laskier

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

[Jaga]

Pieter, I am glad that these documentaries dig in other faiths rather than just Anne Frank. We need to know about these people also.

[pieter]

Jaga,

Anne Frank is a symbol of the Holocaust (1941–1945) and the Second World War (1939-1945). Anne Frank herself didn't knew and couldn't know that she would be so famous.

Anne Frank aspired to become a journalist, writing in her diary on Wednesday, 5 April 1944:

"I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that's what I want! I know I can write ..., but it remains to be seen whether I really have talent ...

And if I don't have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can't imagine living like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! ...

I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me!

When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that's a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?"

(The Dutch original text: "Ik realiseerde me eindelijk dat ik mijn schoolwerk moest doen om niet onwetend te zijn, om verder te komen in het leven, om journalist te worden, want dat is wat ik wil! Ik weet dat ik kan schrijven..., maar het valt nog te bezien of ik echt talent heb...

En als ik het talent niet heb om boeken of krantenartikelen te schrijven, kan ik altijd voor mezelf schrijven. Maar ik wil meer bereiken dan dat. Ik kan me niet voorstellen dat ik zou leven zoals moeder, mevrouw van Daan en alle vrouwen die hun werk doen en dan vergeten worden. Ik moet naast een man en kinderen nog iets hebben om me aan te wijden! ...

Ik wil nuttig zijn of plezier brengen aan alle mensen, zelfs degenen die ik nog nooit heb ontmoet. Ik wil blijven leven, ook na mijn dood! En daarom ben ik God zo dankbaar dat hij mij dit geschenk heeft gegeven, waarmee ik mezelf kan ontwikkelen en alles wat in mij zit tot uitdrukking kan brengen!

Als ik schrijf, kan ik al mijn zorgen van me afschudden. Mijn verdriet verdwijnt, mijn geest wordt nieuw leven ingeblazen! Maar, en dat is een grote vraag, zal ik ooit iets groots kunnen schrijven, zal ik ooit journalist of schrijver worden?" Comment Pieter: "Due to the Dutch language her diary was written in, the original version, the Diary touched me deeply. I have studied and lived in Amsterdam and so knew her city and the place where she went into hiding, I visited the Museum, Het Anne Frank Huis, the Anne Frank Huis)

Anne Frank (1929–1945), the Roman Catholic Polish girl Czesława Kwoka (1928 – 1943), Rutka Laskier (1929 - 1943), Etty Hillesum (1914 – 1943), the Sinti girl Settela Steinbach (1934 - 1944), Celine (Lieneke) de Vries (1936 - 1943; Lineke only reached the age of 6, she was a cute little girl, what could have become of her after the war in the Netherlands if she survived, she had her whole life in front of her_ and many other Jewish, Polish, Sinti and Roman children and children from the SovjetUnion that were murdered, gassed or starved to death during the Holocaust or died from diseases like tuberculosis or criminal pseudomedical experiments by SS doctors, including Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz-Birkenau or other Nazi extermination camps (Sobibor, Maydanek, Treblinka, Mauthausen, Dachau, Groß-Rosen, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen and other camps) are all symbols of the Holocaust.


Celine (Lieneke) de Vries (1936 - 1943). Remembrance sight in Judendurchgangslager Westerbork (concentration camp) where stones symbolize every killed person.


Lieneke de Vries whom reached the age of 6 years. Born in Amsterdam on 15 November 1936 and killed in the Gas chamber of Sobibor on 11 June 1943.

Settela Steinbach


The Dutch Sinti girl Settela Steinbach who was gassed in Nazi Germany's Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp

Sydney Yaeger, The Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York

I think about this picture often. Ever since I first saw it outside of the Museum by the freight car put in place for Auschwitz. Not long Ago. Not Far Away, the face of this young girl has stayed with me

Once I started working at the Museum, I did more research. The face peeking out of the train car is that of Anna Maria Steinbach, better known as Settela. She was born on December 23, 1934 in Limburg in the Netherlands into a Sinti family. The Sinti are part of the Romani people, who were targeted by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

On May 16, 1944, Settela was arrested and sent to Westerbork, a Dutch transit camp. Three days later, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau with with 244 other Roma. Settela was murdered by the Nazis most likely on August 2, 1944. She was nine years old.

This image is one of about twenty frames of footage from a film taken by Werner (Rudolf) Breslauer. Breslauer was a German Jew who was a photographer by training. He fled to the Netherlands with his family and also ended up in Westerbork, where he was ordered by the camp commander to film daily life, including Settela’s deportation. The film was meant to be internal propaganda for the Gestapo and convince commanders that the camp played an important role in the Nazis’ plans. Breslauer and his family would also be deported to Auschwitz, where all of them, except for his daughter, would be murdered.

After the war, the image of Settela became famous. She was known as “the girl with the headscarf,” and was assumed to be Jewish. Her name and Sinti identity were established in the 1990s by Dutch journalist Aad Wagenaar. Settela then became a symbol of the Roma and Sinti genocide during the Holocaust.

This is a haunting image of a young girl who was murdered during the Holocaust and a powerful reminder of all that was lost. The story of the image illustrates the need to fight against confirmation bias. It was easy for people to believe that Settela was a young Jewish girl. However, as Settela’s story illustrates, it is important that we do not forget the hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti people who were murdered by the Nazis and the persecution that they faced and continue to face today.


Present day Sinti in Limburg, whom remember Settela Steinbach. The woman with the black hair and then red dress says that she drove to Auschwitz Birkenau and that she heard that the father of Settela Steinbach died of sorrow after he heard of her terrible fate.



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Pieter's final comment.

That war was terrible for adults, but also for children. Terrible for vulnerable little children, todlers, babies, little children under the age of ten but also teenagers from 10 to 16. These children were often taken away from their parents, often helpless, and destined for destruction, death by deliberate murder. I hope that the perpetrators met their maker and destiny.

Pieter

P.S.- Today in various parts of the world we have to be warry and watch out that history will not be repeated. There are again wars and civil wars and countries where people due to their faith, ethnicity, nationality, race, ideology (political affiliation), clan or tribal background are persecuted, oppressed, ethnically cleansed, murdered or become the victim of terrorism on specific ethnic or religious targets. I think about the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China, I think about the ethnic Tibetans in the so called Tibet Autonomous Region or Xizang Autonomous Region, about the Rohingya people in Myanmar (Burma) and Bangladesh, the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and especially Iran (where the Kurds are heavily persecuted by the the Islamic Republic of Iran), the Darfur genocide, the systematic killing of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups (ethnic Darfuri people).

In 2013, the United Nations (UN) estimated that up to 300,000 people had been killed during the genocide; in response, the Sudanese government claimed that the number of deaths was "grossly inflated".[4] By 2015, it was estimated that the death toll stood between 100,000 and 400,000.[5]

The violence continued into 2016 when the government allegedly used chemical weapons against the local population in Darfur. This led to millions being displaced due to the hostile environment. Over 3 million lives are heavily impacted by the conflict.

If you understand that the ethnically and relgious targeting of the Yezidi minorities in Iraq and Syria targeted by the Islamic State (Daesh) only took place recently, and that the same counts for the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina of ethnic Muslim Bosnian people in July 1995, and the killing of Serbs, Croats and Kosovar Albanians in similar armed conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in from 28 February 1998 until 11 June 1999. I think about the genocide of Tutsi's and moderate Hutu's during the Rwandan genocide, by the Hutu extremist Hutu paramilitary organization Interahamwe in Rwanda from April to July 1994. The Interahamwe, led by Robert Kajuga, were the main perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, during which an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi, Twa, and moderate Hutus were killed.

Hutu Power

Hutu Power is a racial and ethnosupremacist ideology of the Interahamwe and other militant and extremist Hutu oprganisations in Rwanda, Burundi and that asserts the ethnic superiority of Hutu, often in the context of being superior to Tutsi and Twa, and that therefore they are entitled to dominate and murder these two groups and other minorities. Espoused by Hutu extremists, widespread support for the ideology led to the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi and moderate Hutu who opposed the killings.

The Hutu extremist Interahamwe thus had a dangerous toxic mix of Hutu Power, Hutu ultranationalism, Tropical fascism and Anti-communism in it's ideology, with Belgian colonialist influences, in which the racist colonial differences between Tutsi's and Hutu's were exploited. The Hutu Power ideology was the mirror image of the Belgian idea of the superior aristocratic Tutsi above the primitive Hutu peasent.

The Rwandan far-right Hutu Power political party Coalition for the Defence of the Republic and larger Hutu Power movement, a Hutu ultranationalist and supremacist movement that organized and committed the Rwandan genocide aimed at exterminating the Tutsi people of Rwanda, has been described as an example of "tropical fascism" in Africa.

In various places in the world we see what danger a mix of ideology, fanatism, militancy, ethnocentrism, racism, militarism, hatred and propaganda. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) played a significant role in inciting the Rwandan genocide that took place from April to July 1994, and has been described by some scholars as having been a de facto arm of the Hutu government. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines was the propaganda arm and incited the hatred and called Hutu's to kill fellow Tutsi citizens, Belgians and moderate Hutu's whom tried to protect Tutsi family, friends, colleagues and neighbours.





On Russian tv ultra nationalist agitators and propagandists do not only call the Ukrainian government the enemy but also the Ukrainian people as the enemy which should be exterminated and occupied.

[pieter]

The image of Czesława Kwoka (15 August 1928 – 12 March 1943) a Polish Roman Catholic girl who died at the age of 14 in Auschwitz is the image that stays with me from my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. I saw her photo in Block 6 in Auschwitz-Birkenau. A Block was a sort of primitive barrack where concentration camp prisoners were kept for their forced labour for the night. I was and am deeply saddened and touched by her suffering, her innocence and her gruesome death in a terrible place, just because she was a Western Slav, Polish, Roman Catholic girl from Wólka Złojecka, a village in the administrative district of Gmina Nielisz, within Zamość County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland. Wólka Złojecka lies approximately 13 kilometres (8 mi) north-west of Zamość and 64 km (40 mi) south-east of the regional capital Lublin.



Czesława Kwoka was born in Wólka Złojecka, a small village in Poland, to a Catholic mother, Katarzyna Kwoka (née Matwiejczuk), and a father named Paweł who probably died when she was little, with his last residence was at Wólka Złojecka. Along with her mother (prisoner number 26946), Czesława Kwoka (prisoner number 26947) was deported from her village, and transported from a resettlement camp at Zamość, General Government, to Auschwitz, on 13 December 1942, during *Aktion Zamosc which was initiated in November that year to create Lebensraum for Germans in eastern Europe. On 12 March 1943, less than a month after her mother's death on 18 February, Kwoka died at the age of 14; the circumstances of her death were not recorded. Her death certificate, issued on 23 March, falsely noted that she died of cachexia from intestinal catarrh. However, reports indicate that the cause of death was a phenol injection to the heart.

* en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_of_Zamojszczyzna_by_Nazi_Germany

[pieter]

Jaga,

The diaries of Anne Frank, Rutka Laskier and Etty Hillesum are very important historical documents, literary works, personal stories and eye witness reports of the system of Nazism, persecution of minorities and the discrimination, racism and ethnocentrism and totalitarianism that goes with that.

Pieter