#holocaust history museum

[kkoehn17]

Our Trip to the Holy Land (Part 4)

[kelluinox]

"Remember guys, it's only Israel that's committing genocide. Random jews aren't responsible!"

So first thing, what you're basically saying is "Remember guys, it's only half the world's jews that are committing genocide! We only want to hate half! The other half of jews is ok (until they aren't)!"

And second: I think that accusing people who went through a genocide IN LIVING MEMORY and had entire branches of their family completely erased, their culture and religion and people almost destroyed incredibly fucked up. Not to mention amazingly, astoundingly stupid. Tell me you don't know the first thing about the Holocaust without telling me.

[sarishim]

really wish people would stop throwing around the word n.azi to just describe anything/anyone they dont like.

[vox-anglosphere]

The Imperial War Museum now has a permanent Holocaust exhibit

[totallyhussein-blog]

When “all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed”, what is to be done?

Winner of seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, Schindler’s List is the incredible true story which follows the enigmatic Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), who saved the lives of more than 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust.

It is the triumph of one man who made a difference and the drama of those who survived one of the darkest chapters in human history because of what he did. Schindler’s List is a powerful story whose lessons of courage and faith continue to inspire generations.

Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, Oskar Schindler, a German Catholic industrialist, moved to Kraków and assumed responsibility for the operation of two formerly Jewish-owned manufacturers of enamel kitchenware. He then established his own enamelworks in Zabłocie, outside Kraków. That factory became a haven for about nine hundred Jewish workers, providing them relief from the brutality of the Płaszów labor camp nearby.

In October 1944 Schindler was granted permission to relocate his defunct enamelworks to Brünnlitz, Czechoslovakia—this time as an armaments factory—and to take with him the Jewish workers from Zabłocie. He succeeded in transferring to Brünnlitz approximately eight hundred Jewish men from the Gross-Rosen camp and three hundred Jewish women from Auschwitz, ensuring their humane treatment and, ultimately, saving their lives.

In 1962, Yad Vashem awarded Schindler the title “Righteous Among the Nations” in recognition of his humanitarian contribution, and in 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council posthumously presented to him the Museum’s Medal of Remembrance. This medal, rarely presented, is intended to honor deserving recipients for extraordinary deeds during the Holocaust and in the cause of Remembrance. Emilie Schindler accepted the medal on behalf of her husband at a ceremony in the Museum’s Hall of Remembrance.

The Płaszów camp was established in 1942 under the authority of the SS and police leaders in Krakow. It was initially a forced-labor camp for Jews. The original site of the camp included two Jewish cemeteries. From time to time the SS enlarged the camp. It reached its maximum size in 1944, the same year that it became a concentration camp. Until that time, most of the camp guards were Ukrainian police auxiliaries chosen from among Soviet soldiers in German prisoner-of-war camps and trained at the Trawniki training camp in Lublin.

The German industrialist Oskar Schindler established an enamelware factory in Krakow, adjacent to Płaszów. He attempted to protect his Jewish workers, some 900 people, from abuse in Płaszów and from deportation to killing centers. When he moved the factory and his Jewish work force to the Sudetenland in 1944, he prevented the deportation of more than 1,000 Jews.

It soon became clear that her marriage would have both its passions and its betrayals. Yet Emilie stayed with Oskar through his growing involvement with the Nazis, working for counterintelligence with him. She first, then he later, came to realize the costs of the Nazi takeover and became witnesses to its terrors.

Through their work together at their two factories, saving the Jews became paramount for the Schindlers. Emilie nursed the Jewish factory workers when they fell ill, often saving their lives. She risked imprisonment or worse for her activities in the black market to feed them.

Where Light and Shadow Meet chronicles the Schindlers' flight after the war, the loss of almost all their possessions, and their eventual emigration to Argentina. There they settled on a farm, but barely scraped together an existence. Oskar returned to Germany, leaving Emilie to manage on her own. This is the story of one woman's daily acts of bravery during Hitler's reign and why it mattered.

[sourkitsch]

I think I have like 5 Jews following me . Hi

[proudvisiontv]

Auschwitz Museum Remembers Gay Men Who Were Murdered in the Holocaust

The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, located at the site of the former German Nazi concentration camp in Poland, recognized on Sunday a gay victim of the Holocaust.

“At least 77 men with pink triangles were imprisoned in Auschwitz & another 25 could have been initially arrested for their real or alleged homosexuality but had a different prisoner category. Some scholars speak of up to 140 prisoners persecuted for their sexual orientation,” the museum tweeted.

The tweet was posted on the birthday of a German man named Johann Mauler, who was born on April 24, 1897, and imprisoned at the concentration camp from November 12, 1941, until his murder on February 14, 1942. He was one of at least 77 people imprisoned at Auschwitz for the crime of homosexuality, the museum notes. Those imprisoned for homosexuality were forced to wear a pink triangle on their prison uniforms.

Every day, the museum posts images of several victims of the camp along with where they were from, their career, and when they were killed by the Nazi regime.

The account noted the museum's ‘Memory 4.0’ project, which is an online resource that explores the fate and persecutions of diverse groups of people deported to Auschwitz during World War II: political prisoners, Jews, Roma, Soviet POWs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and queer people.

The portal includes resources such as educator guides that help accurately discuss the course of history during one of the darkest periods in the world.

More than one million people were killed at Auschwitz, most of them Jewish.

About 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The institution reports that hundreds, maybe even thousands, of queer people were killed.

Read More | https://www.advocate.com/news/auschwitz-memorial-highlights-gays

[paulpingminho]

[addictedgallery]

Extract: Young learners are especially vulnerable [to disinformation], because they increasingly rely on generative tools to search the web and complete assignments.

What can museums and heritage institutions do about disinformation powered by artificial intelligence?

[hsundholm]

The Birkenau Guardhouse by Henrik Sundholm Via Flickr: I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau during my week in Poland. This place is too difficult to write about in a short caption. Go there if you get the chance. To me, visiting the center of the Holocaust felt almost like a duty.

[digifag]

going to like 3 different museums and a concert tomorrow its gonna go HARD

[umabloomer]

I got a job at a Ukrainian museum.

On the first day someone asks me if I have any Ukrainian heritage. I say I had ancestors from Odesa, but they were Jewish, so they weren’t considered Ukrainian, and they wouldn’t have considered themselves Ukrainian. My job is every day I go through boxes of Ukrainian textiles and I write a physical description, take measurements, take photographs, and upload everything into the database. I look up “Jewish” in the database and there is no result. 

Some objects have no context at all, some come with handwritten notes or related documents. I look at thick hand-spun, hand-woven linen heavy with embroidery. Embroidery they say can take a year or more. I think of someone dressed for a wedding in their best clothes they made with their own hands. Some shirts were donated with photographs of the original owners dressed in them, for a dance at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, in 1935. I handle the pieces carefully, looking at how they fit the men in the photos, and how they look almost a hundred years later packed in acid-free tissue. One of the men died a few years later, in the war. He was younger than I am now. The military archive has more photographs of him with his mother, his father, his fiancé. I take care in writing the catalogue entry, breathing in the history, getting tearful. 

I imagine people dressed in their best shirts at Easter, going around town in their best shirts burning the houses of Jews, in their best shirts, killing Jews. A shirt with dense embroidery all over the sleeves and chest has a note that says it is from Husiatyn. I look it up and find that it was largely a Jewish town, and Ukrainians lived in the outskirts. There is a fortress synagogue from the Renaissance period, now abandoned. 

When my partner Aaron visits I take him to an event at the museum where a man shows his collection of over fifty musical instruments from Ukraine, and he plays each one. Children are seated on the floor at the front. We’re standing in a corner, the room full of Ukrainians, very aware that we look like Jews, but not sure if anyone recognizes what that looks like anymore. Aaron gets emotional over a song played on the bandura. 

A note with a dress says it came from the Buchach region. I find a story of Jewish life in Buchach in the early twentieth century, preparing to flee as the Nazis take over. I cry over this.

I’m cataloguing a set of commemorative ribbons that were placed on the grave of a Ukrainian Nationalist leader, Yevhen Konovalets, after he was assassinated. The ribbons were collected and stored by another Nationalist, Andriy Melnyk, who took over leadership after Konovalets’ death. The ribbons are painted or embroidered with messages honouring the dead politician. I start to recognize the word for “leader”, the Cyrillic letters which make up the name of the colonel, the letters “OYH” which stand for Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN in English). The OUN played a big part in the Lviv pogroms in 1941, I learn. The Wikipedia article has a black and white image of a woman in her underwear, running in terror from a man and a young boy carrying a stick of wood. The woman’s face is dark, her nose may be bleeding. Her underwear is torn, her breast exposed. I’m measuring, photographing, recording the stains and loose threads in the banners that honour men who would have done this to me. 

Every day I can’t stop looking at my phone, looking up the news from Gaza, tapping through Instagram stories that show what the news won’t. Half my family won’t talk to the other half, after I share an article by a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, who says Israel is committing a genocide. My dad makes a comment that compares Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. This gets him in trouble. My aunt says I must have learned this antisemitism at university, but there is no excuse for my dad. 

This morning I see images from Israeli attacks in the West Bank, where they are not at war. There are naked bodies on the dusty ground. I’m not sure if they are alive. This is what I think of when I see the image from the Lviv pogrom. If what it means for Jews to be safe from oppression is to become the oppressor, I don’t want safety. I don’t want to speak about Jews as if we are one People, because I have so little in common with those in green uniforms and tanks. I am called a self-hating Jew but I think I am a self-reflecting Jew.

I don’t know how to articulate how it feels to be handling objects which remind me of Jewish traumas I inherited only from history classes and books. Textiles hold evidence of the bodies that made them and used them. I measure the waist of a skirt and notice that it is the same as my waist size. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Jewish homes during pogroms. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Palestinian homes during the ongoing Nakba. Clothes hold the shape of the body that once dressed in them. Sometimes there are tears, mends, stains. I am rummaging through personal belongings in my nitrile gloves. 

I am hands-on learning about the violence caused by Ukrainian Nationalism while more than nine thousand Palestinians have been killed by the State of Israel in three weeks, not to mention all those who have been killed in the last seventy-five years of occupation, in the name of the Jewish Nation, the Jewish People — me? If we (and I am hesitant to say “we”) learned anything from the centuries of being killed, it was how to kill. This should not have been the lesson learned. Zionism wants us to feel constantly like the victims, like we need to defend ourself, like violence is necessary, inevitable. I need community that believes in freedom for all, not just our own People. I need the half of my family who believes in this necessary “self-defence” to remember our history, and not just the one that ends happily ever after with the creation of the State of Israel. Genocide should not be this controversial. We should not be okay with this. 

Tomorrow I will go to work and keep cataloguing banners that honour the leader of an organization which led pogroms. I will keep checking the news, crying into my phone, coordinating with organizers about our next actions, grappling with how we can be a tiny part in ending this genocide that the world won’t acknowledge, out of guilt over the ones it ignored long ago. 

[eruditetyro]

here is todesfuge if you want to read it, with the german if you scroll down the page.

here is night by elie wiesel.

here is one of the short stories in this way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen by tadeusz borowski.

[totallyhussein-blog]

Fighting for survival, the story of Harry Haft

Harry Haft was a Polish-Jewish boxer and survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was briefly a professional boxer in post-war Germany, and boxed as a light heavyweight in the United States.

After the war, Harry Haft emigrated to the USA with the help of an uncle in New Jersey. Haft's final fight was against future champion Rocky Marciano, on 18 July 1949 in Rhode Island Auditorium.

In April 2007, Harry Haft was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. A movie on Haft’s life was released in 2022. Called The Survivor and based on the book by Alan Haft, it aired on HBO.

Holocaust Memorial Day takes place on 27th January. You can learn more about the Holocaust at the Auschwitz Museum and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. You can also develop your understanding at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre.

[your-humble-host]

Remember the part in hunger games where Susanne Collins went after the games they were turned into hotels where all of the dangers were removed and you could experience where the tributes were in years past and everybody was like oh that's fucked up as if it's not the same exact shit happening to holocaust and internment camp sites