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Post by hollister on Jun 5, 2007 5:54:32 GMT -7
JERUSALEM - The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl dubbed the "Polish Anne Frank" was unveiled on Monday, chronicling the horrors she witnessed in a Jewish ghetto — at one point watching a Nazi soldier tear a Jewish baby away from his mother and kill him with his bare hands. The diary, written by Rutka Laskier in 1943 shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz, was released by Israel's Holocaust museum more than 60 years after she recorded what is both a daily account of the horrors of the Holocaust in Bedzin, Poland and a memoir of the life of a teenager in extraordinary circumstances. the rest of the article: tinyurl.com/yoe2bu
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george
Cosmopolitan
Posts: 568
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Post by george on Jun 5, 2007 14:30:19 GMT -7
Hollister.....It never ceases to amaze me the cruelity of the Germans ( not Nazis ) that name lets them off the hook. I hope and pray those who did such things are presently suffering in some kind of hell. Screw them!!
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Post by bescheid on Jun 5, 2007 15:31:25 GMT -7
Hollister.....It never ceases to amaze me the cruelity of the Germans ( not Nazis ) that name lets them off the hook. I hope and pray those who did such things are presently suffering in some kind of hell. Screw them!! It is important to speak your mind and of your thoughts. I was in first to post of a different reply, but, with some thought, No. For this man is speaking of his intrinsic feelings and thoughts, I do respect that... And yes, of course the Nazi was and is, a political party {it is still alive as a closet organization} it was German of course only the leader was a foreigner and he was Austrian. I know and realize truth, for truth is what it is. I am of a cruel people, we are a people of action, some like us, some hate us for this, but, this is what we are. We are builders and creators. If we have nothing to build, we will create the need and build it any way only as large as we may imagine. For you Americans are not so different, for many of you, are of us. Count the wars you have been in for shall we say {30 years}how many? You have taken our combat machines and made them better, you have taken our weapons and devoped them further for your own use, and they are still in use. Your aircraft development used as a basis the inventions of ours. It is the spoils of victory. Your economy is dependant upon the use of our invented Otto cycle motors and Diesel. For your infrastructer is dependant upon personal transportation and transport of goods. Am I angry or hurt, good heavens no, by no means. I have spent a life time living this. The only situation that will really irritate me is this {wet toilet paper}, this for sure. For those who have suffered from our war time actions: I am very sorry, and this for sure. For those Germans who left the home land with the skills, knowledge and information to be a prostitute of knowledge for the victors, to them I hold very little regard. It is the here and now that is important, the past is departed. The world of today is the new world, with new issues, experiences, a world of promise, a new world of opportunity. It is our world to share with one another. But, it is a fickle world that requires a competitive nature and demands much from the inhabitants that partake of the pleasures, it provides, for in all things, nothing is for nothing and not cheap. Either a people are willing to work, compete and maintain proper focus, or they will be left behind as a 3rd rate beggar nation. That is the manner nature works, if not believed, history will say other wise. For I am not that smart. Charles
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Post by hollister on Jun 5, 2007 15:54:20 GMT -7
This is from an article in the Washington Post today... tinyurl.com/29qm6h"At every point, there was part of me resisting, part of me enjoying," Lagouranis said. "Using dogs on someone, there was a tingling throughout my body. If you saw the reaction in the prisoner, it's thrilling." In Mosul, he took detainees outside the prison gate to a metal shipping container they called "the disco," with blaring music and lights. Before and after questioning, military police officers stripped them and checked for injuries, noting cuts and bumps "like a car inspection at a parking garage." Once a week, an Iraqi councilman and an American colonel visited. "We had to hide the tortured guys," Lagouranis said. Then a soldier's aunt sent over several copies of Viktor E. Frankel's Holocaust memoir, "Man's Search for Meaning." Lagouranis found himself trying to pick up tips from the Nazis. He realized he had gone too far. At that point, Lagouranis said, he moderated his techniques and submitted sworn statements to supervisors concerning prisoner abuse. "I couldn't make sense of the moral system" in Iraq, he said. "I couldn't figure out what was right and wrong. There were no rules. They literally said, 'Be creative.' " I think the thing that really scares all of us ... is the deep down realization that the veneer of civilization and gentility is just that - a very thin veneer. What scares us is the realization that we all have the capacity to commit these type of horrors. There is a very good book out there, that I can not remember the title of at the moment - but the author looks at active church going Germans and examines how they responded to Hitler and how they justified participation with his policies. It is a horrifying read.
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Post by bescheid on Jun 5, 2007 15:54:45 GMT -7
Thank you Holly for presenting this. It was very terrible years in that war and should not be forgotten. I remember reading this some time in the past of Rutka Laskier and attempted to match up the name with a photo list {e-net information} and failed to do so. Perhaps she had no photo. Non-the-less, it is a very sensitive and reveling personal young girls account, of her experiences and feelings. If perchance it becomes of an interest to you, if available in the local library. There is a personal account written by: Anita Lobel. Book title { No Pretty Pictures}-a child of war. The publisher is: Greenwillow Books 1350 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10019 www.williammorrow.comShe is of a family of Jews in Krakow Poland. Her father left his family to escape to and live in Russia until wars end. Her mother left the children with a family friend to hide her self in seporation as a proclaimed Christian. The children were in short time arrested in absence of their parents. The remainder you must read for your self. I have not mentioned of this book in past out of respect, for she has a hatred for Poland and is very vocal. Charles
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Post by ludikundera on Jun 6, 2007 2:02:25 GMT -7
" You have taken our combat machines and made them better, you have taken our weapons and devoped them further for your own use, and they are still in use. Your aircraft development used as a basis the inventions of ours. It is the spoils of victory. Your economy is dependant upon the use of our invented Otto cycle motors and Diesel. For your infrastructer is dependant upon personal transportation and transport of goods." Reminds me of some dialogue from the film The Right Stuff, about the beginning of the U.S. space program. An American compares U.S. space engineering to Soviet engineering: Our Germans are better than their Germans. I think there's more, about how the U.S. paid their Germans while the Soviets kidnapped, but I love that line!
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george
Cosmopolitan
Posts: 568
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Post by george on Jun 10, 2007 13:27:12 GMT -7
I guess what gets me going is when i hear of atrocities commited by the German Army during WW 2 , hear "Nazi atrocities". It doesn't matter what atrocitie, ( and there were too many to even mention ) it is always " Nazi" atrocities". When German death camps in Poland are described it is always Polish Death Camps" because of the location where the Germans put the camps. There seems to be a political correctness. Lets call a spade a spade. Were some of the German soldiers forced to commit these atrocities? Im sure many were. If it were me i would eventually hang myself than to live with that deed on my mind. That would the manly thing to do.
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Post by bescheid on Jun 10, 2007 14:17:37 GMT -7
I guess what gets me going is when i hear of atrocities commited by the German Army during WW 2 , hear "Nazi atrocities". It doesn't matter what atrocitie, ( and there were too many to even mention ) it is always " Nazi" atrocities". When German death camps in Poland are described it is always Polish Death Camps" because of the location where the Germans put the camps. There seems to be a political correctness. Lets call a spade a spade. Were some of the German soldiers forced to commit these atrocities? Im sure many were. If it were me i would eventually hang myself than to live with that deed on my mind. That would the manly thing to do. George There is extremely little I have to offer as to reason that is understandable to non-German people. I am today,not so sure I know, but,I understand. In as much to this term of{Political Correctness} that is not in my senses. There are only to answers in this world {yes or no} the remainder is a wast of breath. If per-chance,you were subject whilst in the military, to training in {interrogation} then the term of {Psychology of Brutality} will come to mind. For a better understanding of those times of your referral, the below url is very very long, but also a very good out line of the frame work of the operations of control in war time Germany. Once you have brought up the page, at your option, you may use the primary index for the entirety,or scroll previous or next. How ever your time/interest or patience. tinyurl.com/yvg8bfCharles
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Post by pieter on Jun 10, 2007 14:45:43 GMT -7
Holocaust diary of Polish teenager unveiled 60 years later By The Associated Press The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl, dubbed the Polish Anne Frank, unveiled yesterday by Israel's Holocaust museum more than 60 years after the teenager wrote it, vividly describes the world crumbling around her as she came of age in a Jewish ghetto. "The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter," Rutka Laskier wrote in 1943 shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz. "I'm turning into an animal waiting to die." Within a few months Rutka did die and, it seemed, so did her diary. But last year, a Polish friend who had safeguarded the notebook finally came forth, exposing a riveting historical document. Rutka's Notebook is both a daily account of the horrors of the Holocaust in Bedzin, Poland, and a scrapbook detailing the life of a typical teenager in extraordinary circumstances. The 60-page memoir includes innocent adolescent banter, concerns and first loves - combined with a cold analysis of the fate of European Jewry. "I simply can't believe that one day I will be allowed to leave this house without the yellow star. Or even that this war will end one day. If this happens I will probably lose my mind from joy," she wrote on Feb. 5, 1943. "The little faith I used to have has been completely shattered. If God existed, He would have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with butt of guns or be shoved into sacks and gassed to death." The following day she opened her entry with a heated description of her hatred toward her Nazi tormentors, but then, in an effortless transition, she speaks about her crush on a boy named Janek and the anticipation of a first kiss. In addition to chronicling her life in the diary, between January-April 1943, Rutka also shared it with her friend Stanislawa Sapinska. The two met after Rutka's family moved into a home owned by Sapinska's family. Sapinska randomly came to inspect the home and the young girls - one Jewish, one Christian - formed a deep bond. When Rutka feared that she would not survive, she told her friend about the diary. Sapinska offered to hide it in the basement under the floorboards. After the war, she returned to reclaim it. She wanted me to save the diary, Sapinska, now in her late 80s, recalled Monday. She said "I don't know if I will survive, but I want the diary to live on, so that everyone will know what happened to the Jews." Yet, Sapinska stashed the diary away in her home library for more than 60 years. She said it was a precious memento and thought it to be too private to share with others. Only at the behest of her young nephew did she agree to hand it over last year. "He convinced me that it was an important historical artifact," she said in Polish. Rutka's father, Yaakov, was the family's only survivor. He died in 1986. But unlike the Anne Frank's father, he kept his painful past inside. After the war, he moved to Israel, where he started a new family. His Israeli daughter, Zahava Sherz, said her father never spoke of his other children, and the diary introduced her to the long-lost family she never knew. "I was struck by this deep connection to Rutka," said Sherz, 57. "I was an only child, and now I suddenly have an older sister. This black hole was suddenly filled, and I immediately fell in love with her." Rutka's last entry is dated April 24, 1943. In August, she and her family were shipped to Auschwitz. She is believed to have been murdered upon arrival. Here some other links about Rutka Laskier: katowice.naszemiasto.pl/pamietnik_rutki (In Polish) www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,,2096512,00.html en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutka_Laskierpl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutka_Laskier (In Polish) fzp.jewish.org.pl/spot29.html (In Polish)
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Post by pieter on Jun 10, 2007 15:59:52 GMT -7
Not out of political correctness, but out of objectivity I want to say, yes a large amount of Germans supported the NSDAP, yes there were a lot of German war criminals, and yes the Nazi-period left a scarf on the German soul for 50 or 60 years. German Patriotism or Nationalism was not accepteble in Europe and inside Germany. The war caused the separation of Germany in two opposing countries and created two types of Germans, which still exist today, Ossi's and Wessi's. In West-Germany (the Bundes Republic Deutschland) the legacy of the Second World war lead to a split between generations, and a mental and physical (violent or agressive) confrontation between generations whuch lead to scarfs that still exist today. In the late sixtees, seventees and early eightees the first and second Post-war generations clashed with their fathers and grandfathers when they found about their past. In Die Deutsche Herbst (German Autumn) of 1977 the radical left terrorism of the Bader Meinhof Gruppe (Rote Army Fraction) reached it's peak after years of terrorism and nearly a state of civil war between the Social-democratic government of Helmut Schmitt and these terrorists emmerged. Antifascists became red fascists themselves, by attacking German employers, American soldiers, Israeli's (together with their Palestinian colleages) and others. In the ninetees one of these former RAF mitglieder (members), Horst Mahler became the lawjer of the Far right NPD party and even their ideologue. He said; Meine eltern waren NSDAP mitglieder und anständige leute (My parents were Nazi-party members and good civilians), and talked about the Allierten kriegsverbrechen (the allied warcrimes) only, meaning the bombardments of the German cities by the Americans, Brits and Poles. What he forgot to mention was who started bombarding Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Kiev and other places. From the other side I want to state that it were not only Germans who collaborated with the Nazi's in Europe, all over Europe police, local militia and collaborating local fascists and opportunists handed over Jewish compatriots, or hunted them down or killed them themselves. These same people betrayed dissisents and resistance fighters and fought for the Germans on the East Front and during the Warsaw uprising. Dutch, Flemish (Belgian), Wallon (Belgian), Luxemburg, French, Danish, Norwegian, Albanian and Bosniak (Muslim) SS fought under German command. The state bureacracies of the occupied European countries cooperated perfectly with the Nazi regime (exept Poland, Denmark and Bulgaria). The Dutch railways transported the Dutch (and escaped German) jews to the concentration camps in the East, and people signed Arayan declarations without protest, so that the Germans could see who was Jewish and who was not. German Social-democrats, Communists, conservatives and even Catholic opponents of the Nazi's were one of the first victims of the Nazi concentrationcamps after Hitler came to power. A minority of the Germans rebelled against the Nazi's in Underground resistance groups. Students, youth groups, clergymen and even militairy. After the war West-Germany did a lot to pay it's depth and tried via education to raise new generations of Germans as concious independant thinking people with awareness of their countries terrible past. Germany has the strictes anti-Nazi and anti-totalitarian laws in the world. For a long time far left and far right parties were prohibited, the Swastica is an illegal symbol, there is a special Police squad for far right groups. The German Federal Secret service monitors far right, far left and fundamentalist groups. The Communist party was forbidden in Germany for decades, Scientology too, and most German democratic parties from left and right wanted to ban the Neo-nazi NPD. Most Germans know what the Third Reich did to their country, Europe and the Jews, Gypsies, Russians and Poles, and they don't want the Nazi era back. Even Wojtek of Warsaw wrote that to me, the Germans of today are differant than the Germans of 1933 or 1944. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Police (collaboration in Poland) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Movement_in_the_Netherlands ((collaboration in the Netherlands) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederlandsche_SSen.wikipedia.org/wiki/6th_SS_Volunteer_Sturmbrigade_Langemarcken.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Degrelleen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ustašeen.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Waffen_Mountain_Division_of_the_SS_Handschar_(1st_Croatian)en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_Franceen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidkun_Quisling
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