nightmare strikes again

[darkoshi]

It goes like this:

Last night:
Check TV guide to see what's on TV.
PBS is showing "1916 - The Irish Rebellion. The story of the Easter Rising rebellion...."
Do a search on something related to that. Irish Volunteers, etc.
Skim various pages.
Start wondering if the U2 song "Bloody Sunday" refers to the Easter Rising.
Do a search.
Oh. There are a whole bunch of Bloody Sundays.
One of them: Stanislawow Ghetto Bloody Sunday massacre, a massacre of 10,000 to 12,000 Jews before the Stanisławów Ghetto announcement.
Read about horrors.
Ghettos, concentration camps, mass killings, mass graves.
Click links; read about more horrors.

I never can wrap my mind around it. In a way, I don't want to. That's why I try to avoid the topic. But for my own sanity, I want to understand it. How could such things happen? How could people come to commit such atrocities? I'm terrified of it happening again. I'm terrified that it is happening, constantly around the world, in smaller versions. How can I be safe? How can I be sure that I'd never be involved in such a thing? What control do I have over the things my government is doing? Am I really any different from the average German civilian back then?

And it also puzzles me, in reading some things, as to why the victims didn't fight back more? Some parts I can understand. If soldiers come for you and your family with guns, yes, you're likely to do what they say rather than to be shot to death right there. Maybe going where they tell you to go, will let you survive in the end.

But I have a hard time understanding the mass shootings. Surely it can't be that 10,000 people would stand together in a crowd, letting themselves be shot to death, for hours on end, as some of those articles imply? Surely they would have surged forward against the shooters, knowing that death was imminent anyway? Were the shooters up on walls? Wouldn't piles of dead bodies would have gotten in the way of further shooting? Did the shooters take breaks so that the bodies could be moved out of the way? Were the Jews so starved and demoralized by that point, that they welcomed death? Who would want to remain living in a world like that?

And it wasn't only Jews being killed. There were mass killings of ethnic Poles too, by both the Nazis and the Soviets. And masses of people being deported to Soviet labor camps. How could mass killings be so common back then? How could people so callously disregard life? Was it a state of mind? That to have revolutions and change society, you need to kill the existing society that stands in your way?

The German side of my family came from the area right near Poland, so that's another reason I'm often drawn to reading about these kinds of things.

After over an hour of that, I managed to make myself to switch gears, and return to doing my taxes.

Today:

Read an email about local events.
One event is "South Carolina survivors and victims of the Holocaust".
Am reminded of that first page I read last night. I bring up the page again, and read it again. Again trying to wrap my mind around it. Yesterday wasn't the first time I'd read those kinds of things. But as many times as I read them, it seems I'll never be able to come to terms with them.

Clicked some other links related to the history of Germany before World War II. Republic, unification, Holy Roman Empire, Kingdoms, duchies... All of history seems to be full of wars and fighting and horrors. I've always hated history.

Here I sit, in my peaceful house, in front of my computer. Relatively clean, fed, clothed, and warm. Even if I'm not particularly enjoying life, it's not particularly bad.

But the world is full of horrors, and I'm quietly terrified that someday they will strike me personally, and this relatively peaceful world will be blown to bits.

Comments

[marahmarie]

I'm not going to get into the history of how the Jews came to be killed en masse as they often were within the Holocaust, because a) I'm only alive because my paternal grandmother survived one of the camps and fled the country and b) it's emotionally draining to explain, but basically the Jews were first disarmed - their guns and weapons literally confiscated after laws were passed forbidding them from owning firearms - then tricked into compliance. Told they were going to "work" camps, not death camps. It didn't say "work will set you free" at the entrance to many death camps just because some Nazi assholes thought it would be funny to use that phrase as these camps' welcome signs - though that was part of it, too - but also to keep up the ruse that it was indeed a work camp.

Jews weren't told they were being gassed, they were told they were getting showers. They didn't know the truth until gas instead of water came on. As to being mowed down by gunfire in the thousands, I'm not familiar with that, but chances are that being tricked about the nature of every gathering and kidnapping they were subjected to was part of it, along with, as you said, being worn down from starvation and other severe mental and physical stresses.

I used to think the same thing - why did my people not fight more, fight harder, or at least run faster from this surely-well-known threat - but when you're in a Germany where Hitler got elected on the premise that he was merely talking up his hatred of Jews to get the popular vote because hating Jews was one popular stance to take, let me tell you - and would surely turn down his rhetoric and not seriously harm Jews upon winning office, when as a Jew your rights as a human being are taken away not all at once but step by tiny step, little by little over the course of 10 years, when you are lied to as a Jew about every step in the process being taken to eliminate you - not just to fool you, but also to fool the surrounding populace so as not to alarm them, which could send waves overseas that might also alarm unfriendly countries - then yes, a lot of damage can be done.

I'm assuming you don't know exactly how much Hitler and the Nazis lied - to the German public, to the Jews themselves, but it's all easily researchable so as another person, like you, of German origin (I'm also Irish, but let me not touch that with a 10 foot pole right now), I would ask if you might read more on it if you're concerned about similar things happening here. The sheer amount of lies told in Nazi Germany can explain, to my mind at least, easily 70-80% of "how it happened".

And it can easily happen again.

[darkoshi]

It's that last sentence that bothers me so much. Including the atrocities going on currently, and in the past, in other places of the world.

It's ironic, how the older one gets, the more recent the past seems to be. When I was young, WWII seemed like so long ago. But it was actually only 30 years before I was born. Even the Civil War doesn't seem so long ago to me anymore.

[marahmarie]

For me, it's how the older I get, the more history seems to (at least want to) repeat itself. Nothing I ever thought I'd see in my lifetime, but then, among other things, the Republicans gave birth to Donald Trump.

Carpet Bombing

[(Anonymous)]

Not difficult to understand when we have a presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz who in early December, said that his military approach to ISIS would be "carpet bombing." He said that "we will utterly destroy ISIS. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don't know if sand can glow in the dark, but we're going to find out.
Sounds like genocide against most people in Syria and a large part of Iraq.
Wasn't that long ago in the U.S. that we looked the other way towards our governments treatment of Blacks, Indians and Mexicans. Maybe we still do.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I know that in a lot of the fairly famous massacres, people were led off in small groups to where they were shot. That's not to say they didn't know what was happening. Maybe they thought that someone would intervene. In many cases, I think they were just too tired from days of no food and forced marching, and at some point it was easier to not resist than to keep being beaten and marched.

[darkoshi]

Being led off in smaller groups is what the German Wikipedia page mentioned too. To a cemetery, with ready-dug pits. They were made to take off their clothes and either stand at the edge of the pits, or get down into them. So at that point at least, there must have been no doubt as to what was about to happen. I'd heard similar accounts of other mass killings. It's all so unimaginably horrible.

Some people who did escape from one place, got captured again and killed at another. It must have seemed so hopeless.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

It sounds much the same with massacres in Serbia in the 1990's. Presumably the same today in Nigeria.
I feel fairly sure our specific culture isn't sufficiently polarized and desperate for that to happen, but I could be wrong.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

And unfortunate people still do such horrors/