The one way track to Auschwitz-Birkenau, German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp. (IMAGE: Adam Tas, Flickr)
Posted on 05/22/2016 11:34:43 PM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
Bad things happens when good people stay silent. Dr David Berger is speaking out.
Above is a photo of my grandmother, Margot von Bentheim, taken with my mother in the Spring of 1925. She would have been 60 when I was born, but she died at the age of 35.
A Jewish refugee from the Nazis, she committed suicide, alone, despairing and destitute in Chile in 1941, leaving a six-year-old girl with no Spanish – my aunt – to be brought up in an orphanage.
The girl was not found again by the family for nine years, by which time she could no longer speak German, but was able to apologise, in Spanish, for not having been able to prevent her mother’s death.
Meanwhile, Margot’s own mother and sister were sent to the concentration camps, which they survived, but which her sister’s husband and two sons did not.
On my father’s side is also written the history of Jewish persecution in the first half of the 20th century. The family fled west at the turn of the century to escape the Russian pogroms. The lucky ones, the prescient ones perhaps, kept going and ended up in Britain and America.
The ones who stayed in mainland Europe ended up caught in the maelstrom.
One day in 1942, gentle, dignified Uncle Solomon and his wife were taken from their apartment in Marseilles and vanished into the ‘Nacht und Nebel’ of wartime Europe. Their fate remains unknown.
The one way track to Auschwitz-Birkenau, German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp. (IMAGE: Adam Tas, Flickr)
There are many other tragic tales of my family from that period which I could relate, but these will suffice. I am a Jew, then, with a personal history in refugee matters, now a doctor in Australia who advocates forcefully for individual refugees caught in the Hell of offshore detention and who also campaigns more generally against these inhumane policies.
There can be few with a bigger, angrier, more ferocious dog in the fight over whether it is justified to draw analogies between the systematic regime of torture, persecution and extermination of the Nazis and the present regime in Australia of indefinite incarceration in appalling conditions of innocent people seeking refuge here.
Some Jewish groups in particular get upset when such analogies are made, accusing the people who make them of ‘trivialising’ the Holocaust. They are completely wrong and here is why.
There can be no doubt that many acts of the Nazis in the Holocaust were unique, not just in their scale, but in the overt, calculated expression of their ideology of genocide and racial purity and the industrial manner in which this was put into practice.
A visit to Auschwitz illustrates this graphically in just one gut-wrenching afternoon.
Auschwitz 1, the original camp, was a Polish army barracks, converted into a place of fiendish torture, the echoes of which remain so vivid today that it is an unspeakable trauma to visit.
So far, so horrific, but the real eye opener is Auschwitz 2, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death camp a few kilometres outside town, which was opened later as a key element in the ‘Final Solution’.
On the face of it, there is much less to see here – the gate with its mendacious sign (‘Arbeit macht frei’), rows of drab, anonymous barracks, a few chimneys, a railway siding – but this was a polished death factory, the likes of which the world has not seen before or since.
With methodical, emotionless Teutonic efficiency, Jews arrived in cattle trucks at one end and, with surprisingly little fuss, left mostly within a few hours as ashes out of the chimneys.
The banality of the place, the matter of factness of it, the industrialisation of evil, make it so much more horrific even than Auschwitz 1. If you can get your head round it, that is, which isn’t easy.
As a boy in England, I grew up with the Holocaust ever present. I used to lie awake at night from a very young age, five or six years old, wondering what it would have been like standing in line, naked, waiting for the gas chambers. I still do.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp. (IMAGE: Adam Kuśmierz, Flickr)
I used to share my mother’s anger at her own mother for being so ‘weak’ as to have committed suicide. I used to debate long and hard with my mother over why it all happened. For years, I refused to accept her uncompromising assertion that what happened in Germany could have happened anywhere: “Not in England, Mum! No way. English people aren’t like that.”
Of course, now I know she was right. When her father fled Berlin in 1936, first for Argentina, then for Egypt, the family decided that she and her grandparents would be safe to stay: “They won’t do anything to the children and old people.” By late 1938, the truth finally dawned and they managed to flee to England; and so here I am.
They had not been able to believe what was happening around them. They had not been able to believe that their friends and neighbours, good Germans all, would allow anything awful to happen to them. They could not believe that Hitler and his thugs would be able to ‘get away with it’. It was incomprehensible to them.
And there is the real lesson the Nazis have taught us, the lesson we must draw on every day in 2016 if the gruesome experiences of 1933-1945 are to teach us anything from history: if you tell a big enough lie, a lie so far out of the experience of ordinary people that they cannot comprehend it, if you tell them that you are doing nothing more than keeping them safe, if you tell them that desperate times require desperate measures and if you do your utmost to conceal from them the unpleasant reality of what you are actually doing, then eventually you will find you can get away with absolutely anything, even the industrialised killing of millions of people.
So when Malcolm Turnbull tells us that ‘We must not be misty-eyed’ about border protection, it is indeed appropriate to recall the words of Joseph Goebbels in 1942: “There should be no squeamishness about it”.
And when we consider the ‘Nacht und Nebel’ (the ‘Night and Fog’) of the Nazis, it is indeed appropriate to draw an analogy with the information blackout which successive Australian governments have sought to place over immigration detention, and which has been solidified into the profoundly anti-democratic Border Force Act and the repeated lies of Peter Dutton, who told us recently that refugee advocates were ‘encouraging certain behaviours’ for political reasons, implying that the self-immolations of the last week were the fault of the advocates, a proposition so preposterous that it is Nazi in its magnitude.
And when we call these places of horror in the Pacific ‘concentration camps’, that is an appropriate term, because that is what they are.
(IMAGE: Global Panorama, Flickr)
And when we accuse the Australian government of selectively torturing brown-skinned people in the way the Nazis chose the Jews and other groups to torture and ultimately eliminate, that is an appropriate thing to do, because we all know, in our heart of hearts, that if these people fleeing oppression were white, English-speaking Christians (white Zimbabweans, say) then their treatment would be completely different.
The Holocaust is not something to be memorialised as if it were a granite monolith, a ‘Holy of Holies’ to be approached in sombre dress on remembrance days only, to the tolling of a bell or the mournful wail of a bugle, something so unique and grave that nothing else dare be mentioned in the same sentence.
My grandmother wasn’t at all like that. She was a vivacious young woman in the swinging Berlin of the 1920s. She used to dance on the piano at parties with Victor de Kowa, Lotte Lenya, Marlene Dietrich and other film stars, directors and celebrities of that magical era. She apparently did a mean imitation of Felix the Cat.
I will not allow anyone to tell me how I may or may not use her memory and I am using it today to tell the world that it is completely appropriate to draw on Nazi analogies when we contemplate the horror of immigration detention in Australia, and reflect on how this could possibly be happening in what is supposedly one of the world’s leading democracies.
If we fail to do so then we will have failed to learn anything from the Nazis, and my grandmother’s death and Uncle Solomon’s death and the deaths and tragedies of all those other millions of people tortured and killed by the Nazis will be robbed of any meaning.
And no-one has the right to do that.
With no link my guess the poster is a liberal mole here on FR. Someone should tesearch his posting history.
I tried to follow the “logic” of this idiot.
There isn’t any. Because it is simply “Bushitler”.
People oppose the cultural suicide of the West and Australia.
Therefore they are Hitler.
It is ignorant, stupid, and ideologically non-sensical.
“I will not allow anyone to tell me how I may or may not use her memory and I am using it today to tell the world that it is completely appropriate to draw on Nazi analogies when we contemplate the horror of immigration detention in Australia”
The families of victims killed by illegal aliens and muslim terrorists would say your analogy is completely inappropriate.
And stupid.
Another Jewish apologist begging for himself, his family, and friends to be exterminated.
I am not familiar with him. It would not surprise me, knowing the typical reader of or writers for Salon.
I think the only constructive thing about being aware of Salon is for example of the twisted mindset that the Left in general and that community specifically.
Shows the sickness of our age.
found this on him:
https://newmatilda.com/author/david-berger/
David Berger
Dr David Berger is the child of Jewish refugees, a UK-trained doctor, who now works in remote, mainly Aboriginal, healthcare in the far North of Australia.
This appears to be the original source of your article:
Sorry about my reference to Salon. Posted to the wrong thread. Have not finished my first cup of coffee yet. hee hee hee
Sorry about my reference to Salon. Posted to the wrong thread. Have not finished my first cup of coffee yet. hee hee heeIt happens, and thanks for the link I mistakenly omitted. After seeing some consternation, I am glad someone finally figured how to google the title before my return. What did that take you, 15 seconds in total?
On my 2nd cup. I understand...lol
Probably less.
But it is frowned upon to post without referencing source. Filter factor.
It is amazing how quickly FR posts are in the search engine. Google vacuum cleaner at work.
By the way, my father saw Dachau not long after it was liberated. He spent that winter near Munich.
He never talked about it when I was young. He is 90 now, I work with him most days, he is still very sharp (some name memory holes).
He served under Gen. Patch & Patton in Germany, Belgium & CZ. You should see his face when I show him news that reveals the Fascists here in this country. He has not forgotten the consequences.
His response is always visible anger.
I’m still new here having arrived on Australia Day. I am a citizen so I will be voting. However, I really don’t know the candidates, so will end up voting party line unless you’ve got some advice.
I’m a limited govt conservative (Constitutional Conservative in the USA). Obviously I won’t be voting for Labour. I’m all to aware of what the savages did on Manus and feel they got lucky and our security forces got railroaded.
I’m leaning towards Liberal, but ONE has caught my eye, but I really know nothing about them.
Well, you can compare any two things, a watermelon and a tire iron, for example, but that does not imply that they are the same. Nor are they in this case unless Australia has begun to gas and cremate a few million people and use a millions of others as slave labor and the subjects of medical experimentation.
This is silly and hysterical. Refugee camps are never nice places but having a roof over one's head is a huge improvement over not having one. To compare these with Nazi extermination camps is simply obscene.
The Senate is somewhat different - there, minor parties, have a more realistic chance of gaining seats. You may want to look at the Liberal Democrat Party, Family First, and Rise Up Australia as possibly in line with your values there. Australian Liberty Alliance and One Nation may also appeal - although in both their cases, I worry that they do cross into actual xenophobia, rather than just a healthy level of concern about immigration.
Hey Joseph,
You would have to check out your local candidates for a limited government conservative = there are some around but they are thin on the ground - seems everyone likes their well paying jobs. The Libs are the better of two evils. The last Prime Minister may have done ok in that area but he never had the ability or desire to negotiate with the Senate or even his own party and that is why he is now sitting on the back benches.
Good Luck
Mel
Berlin_Freeper: this article is ridiculous.
There is no real or actual comparison of Australia today to Nazi Germany of yesterday.
Realistically, over the last 20 years, Australia has taken in more immigrants & refugees (legal ones) than it’s infrastructure and capacity allow. Many immigrants from South East Asia, in particular.
If illegal, you can’t jump the queue.
Yes, I’d call that “Nacht und riesigen Nebel”.
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