possible terms to describe the unthinkable holocaust –from the ancient greek for a “burnt...
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POSSIBLE TERMS TO DESCRIBE THE UNTHINKABLE
Holocaust –from the ancient Greek for a “burnt offering,” used metaphorically by English writers since Milton to describe hideous destruction by fire
Shoah –Hebrew for “catastrophe”, the term preferred by Israeli scholars
Genocide –a term coined by the Polish-born expert on international law, Rafael Lemkin, to describe the attempt to murder an entire people, outlawed by international treaty in 1948
Most Germans today speak of “the mass murder of the Jewish people during the Second World War”
The British military governor of Jerusalem, Borton Pasha, on December 11, 1917
THE BALFOUR DECLARATION(from a letter of November 2, 1917, by Foreign
Secretary Balfour to Lord Rothschild and the Zionist Federation)
“His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”This language was incorporated into the formal League of Nations mandate for Palestine in 1922
Trilingual documents of “Palestine, E.I. [Eretz Israel]”
“Palestine: Promised Land, Land Regained:
The Most Extraordinary Effort
of our Time”(Zionist recruitment
film, 1935)
THERE WERE ABOUT TWO MILLION PEOPLEALTOGETHER IN INTERWAR PALESTINE
DATEJewish
Population
1921 69,000
1926 150,000
1931 172,000
1936 384,000
1939 425,000
Jewish immigration accelerated to 60,000 per year after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933
The Western Wall, beneath the Dome of the Rock
Orthodox rabbis provoked bloody riots in August 1929 by placing a screen here
Amin el-Husseini, “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem,and the Arab Committee in 1936
Scottish troops hunt Arab rebels, 1936/37;thousands of Palestinian militants were killed.
THE PUBLIC RECORD OF THEJEWISH REFUGEE CRISIS
300,000 of 500,000 German Jews flee persecution from 1933 until September 1939. 1937: Britain responds to Arab uprising in Palestine by restricting Jewish immigration to 15,000 per year. July 1938: At the Evian Conference delegates from 32 countries refuse to help Jewish refugees. April-December 1940: The German occupiers confine 3 million Polish Jews to ghettoes.1942: Berlin orders that all Jews under German rule be “evacuated” to “labor camps” in Eastern Europe.
Burning Synagogues in Siegen and Bielefeld
on Reichskristallnacht, November 9/10, 1938
Jews arrested during Reichskristallnacht aremustered in Buchenwald, November 1938. The SS now
took charge of pressuring all Jews to flee Germany.
Entrance to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941, where 500,000 Jews were crammed into a district built for 50,000
Crowded street in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1941/42:Jobs were scarce and food rations, grossly inadequate
Administering racial
discrimination: A German food ration card from February
1940 and the Yellow Star
The Secret History of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”
Preparations for the invasion of the USSR call for the “annihilation of the Jewish-Bolshevik system” and execution of all “commissars”.The top Nazi leaders agree in secret, probably in July 1941, that the policy of expulsion must be replaced by mass murder.Mass shootings of Jewish men, women, and children in occupied Soviet territory begin in August/September 1941.Genocide became the policy of the German government at the secret Wannsee Conference in January 1942.
Soviet POW’s fill in the ravine where the SS shot 33,000 Jews from Kiev at Babi Yar on September
29/30, 1941
Site of the Wannsee Conference, convened on January 20, 1942, by
the Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich and SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann.Bureaucrats learn that “it is the Führer’s wish” that all Jews be “evacuated” and that most are
expected to perish….
German Jews deported from Würzburg, spring 1942
Nazi propaganda in 1942 blamed the Jews for the
war
“The Jewish Conspiracy”
“THE JEW:Warmonger
War-Prolonger”
Map of the operations associated with the Holocaust, 1942/43
Auschwitz-Birkenau, February 1945
Auschwitz when Elie Wiesel arrived
THE RAILWAY ENTRANCE TO AUSCHWITZ
Elie Wiesel in 1943(at age 15),
the year before his deportation to
Auschwitz.His family in Sighet
came under Hungarian rule in 1940.
Hungary had grown through alliance with Hitler.Sighet was just northeast of Baia Mare
Admiral Miklos Horthy,Regent of Hungary,
1919-1944:He bowed to German
pressure to deport 100,000 “alien” Jews (such as Moishe the
Beadle) but refused to deport the 800,000 Hungarian Jewish
citizens. Germany occupied
Hungary in March 1944, and mass deportations to Auschwitz began in
May.
Hungarian Jews newly arrived at Auschwitz, May-June 1944
Hungarian Jews undergo selection on the Auschwitz train ramp
Hand-carved model of the main gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau
(U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Details
Geographic distribution of the six
million Jewish victims
Elie Wiesel, liberated in Buchenwald, 16 April 1945
Elie Wiesel on the Day of Remembrance in the U.S. Capitol with President Carter & Senator Robert Byrd, 1978
WIESEL ATTENDED NETANYAHU’S SPEECH TO CONGRESS ON MARCH 3 AS A GUEST OF JOHN
BOEHNER
"And I wish I could promise you, Elie, that the lessons of history have been learned. I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past. But I can guarantee you this, the days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over."
Netanyahu: "Elie, your life and work inspires us to give meaning to the words, 'never again.'