Samira wrote:
Annabella wrote:
I do remember how they deemphasized how much it was aimed at the Jews and the Roma and thought that was part of the same @#%^ed up anti-Semitism that I'd been hearing from my students all year..
What the hell? What did they say? "Funny coincidence"?
No more like they talked about Polish losses more than specifically Jewish or Roma losses. I remember how many camps you would find--smaller concentration camps built beneath the earth. I was living in Silesia, a center for alot of this activity and damn, Poland was devastated by WWII. If you consider that Warsaw was like 80% destroyed and Gdansk even more, the rebuilding of the Warsaw Old Town during the Communist era is incredibly impressive.
Quote:
Well, they killed a few million other people who weren't Jews. Jews were just the most intensely persecuted out of all of them.
And Roma. But the biggest differences between the Jews and other persecuted groups, like communists and homosexuals is that the Jews almost exclusively went to Death Camps--that were mainly in Poland and others were more likely to be sent to Labor Camps, which were more likely to be in Germany and some other countries. While both had pretty horrific conditions, Death Camps were much more likely to result in execution while Labor Camps were work camps where people were somewhat more likely to survive.
It's a complicated history where people were shuffled around and goals changed but at the end of the war, especially, when things were really bad, Jews were being exterminated en masses at places like Sobibor where there was not even attempts at working them to death anymore. The ***** killed as many as they could right at the end. It was tragic in general. I remember in particular that the Jews of Budapest had survived throughout much of the war due to some complicated negotiating between the leadership and the **** party and some marginal attempts to reach out to the British--and then were mass executed in 1944-45.
Edited, Aug 28th 2009 6:23pm by Annabella