We have all seen the pictures and listened to the testimony's of the holocaust but sometimes its not a bad idea to remember once again what happened in the past.... So we don't let it happen again in the future. http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/10/world-war-ii-the-holocaust/100170/
Indeed we should NEVER FORGET. I have read about 100 books ,and heard survivor tales to last 100 lifetimes. I was stationed in Germany 9 years after the war, and the hatred was still alive for my tribe.
I'm of German heritage( my great grandfather was born and raised there ) but I have never been proud of that fact. The camps should always be preserved as a permanent reminder of the absolute evil that the German people perpetrated.
It's important to keep the truth flowing. Many countries, led by Iran, deny that the Holocaust ever happened. As a history teacher, I've seen evidence of the Holocaust right at my school... The fellow who hired me was a man named Larry Silverman, who has since retired. Before he became a principal, he had been a history teacher in the district, so he and I shared many stories and books about different subjects. By far the saddest story that he ever told, was about being a little boy after WWII. His family were Russian Jews and he traveled back to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union with his parents to see if they could find any survivors. They found nothing. They were all gone: even the villages where they had lived were gone. He lost all of his grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, everyone...nearly 100 in all. Last year, I ran into the Holocaust again. At the end of every school year, I have the children do the "Heritage Project." This is where they connect their own family with history, so that they realize I'm telling the truth when I say, "Everybody is somebody, from somewhere, and history is happening all around us." These reports make fascinating reading, as you can imagine. Last year, I had two students in the same class with connections to these WWII events. One was a girl who's family were Dutch Jews. They were all exterminated, more than 50 people, except for her grandfather. He had married a Catholic, so the local Nazis weren't sure what to do with him. By the time they had figured it out, he had escaped and hid out with his wife's relatives until the end of the war. Meanwhile, there was a boy in that same class who had a very different family tale to relate. You see...his last name was...Hess. Yes, that Hess... Only in America...
Interesting stuff, jim. My wifes side of the family was from Poland. Her grandparents and all aunts and uncles were wiped out. Luckily her dad and mom got out in the early 30's.
The other day I jumped down someone's throat in the discussion of Hank Williams Jr's comments... I don't agree with them, but in this course of debate that I was staying out of someone shouted down the others by saying 'Hitler should never be brought up, he should never be mentioned. Monsters should be put in the closet of history and kept there.' To which I replied, 'F*cking ********... When people don't talk about history, it gets re-written or forgotten... When that happens, people don't think it can happen again... and then, only then, does history repeat itself in its ugliest forms.' No one had a reply for that.
:idea: Germany was one of the most modern countries on planet earth. It had systems of education, science and industry that were the envy of the world. If it could happen in Germany, it could happen anywhere...