In the Hall of Names, a vast archive surrounds a powerful collection of faces of people killed during the Holocaust. Of the roughly six million Jews murdered, about half have been identified by surviving family and friends. Pages of their testimony are archived here. The purpose of it all: to give as many victims as possible, whose deaths were as ignominious as their killers could manage, the simple dignity of being remembered.
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I read that Stephen Hawking has refused to speak at a prestigious Israeli forum on world affairs because of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. This country is sort of like our own in that has a history worth knowing about but its current day politics are anathema to many.
I wonder sometimes what this newer German generation feels about this, it is so startling to think that this many Jewish people were killed in such a cruel way.
We should also remember the other groups targeted by the Nazis. From the US Holocaust Museum site:
“While it classified Jews as the priority “enemy,” the Nazi ideological concept of race targeted other groups for persecution, imprisonment, and annihilation, including Roma (Gypsies), people with disabilities, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Afro-Germans. The Nazis also identified political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and so-called asocials as enemies and security risks either because they consciously opposed the Nazi regime or some aspect of their behavior did not fit Nazi perceptions of social norms. They sought to eliminate domestic non-conformists and so-called racial threats through a perpetual self-purge of German society. ”
Also, the authorities in other Eastern European countries cooperated with the Nazis in the extermination programs – as did the Vichy government in France.
This blog is much calmer than RS’s Facebook page.