Museum of the History of Polish Jews
I would dare say a Jewish person today would be safer in Poland than just about any other European country. Sure there are some jerks like in any other country, but overall, Poland would still the best place.
Posted on 04/21/2015 4:10:39 PM PDT by presidio9
Edited on 04/21/2015 4:31:18 PM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
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No...it's that ‘the citizens’ knew what was happening at the camps . They knew what the Nazi Agenda was regarding the Jewish population.
Poland took a hit...and after they fell there was great underground resistence against the Nazi's....but I'm not addressing that...I'm addressing that the neighbor hoods of all these camps knew what was happening.
BTW...Save your anti-catholic finger pointing for somebody else....that very mindset is one of the many reasons catholicism is opposed. Stop playing victim. Just because you're indoctrinated to use that excuse doesn't mean you have to fall lockstep in line with your leadership....
Yep. But we must add something else to the mix. The treaties after WW I shifted a lot of borders in eastern Europe. Many ethnic groups went along with the Nazis in the hope that these "unfair" borders would be redrawn in their favor.
Plus, if you didn't at least appear to cooperate with Germany, you risked being crushed, then occupied.
Hungary from 1939 to 1944 is a good example of all this.
Some years ago now, I read an article about the last 5,000 Jews in Poland.
Made me sad, even with the pretty pictures.
Correct in many cases, I guess. And those in the camps and deemed fit for work "knew" that those who were not were headed for the gas chamber.
And yet they did nothing.
Were they also complicit?
That certainly happened. There is a sizable percentage in any population that will do immoral things to survive when conditions are harsh.
That's not to excuse those folks. Those folks are criminals. But, as I'm sure you'll agree, it's wrong to blame the Polish nation as a whole.
This is the same logic that the “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” crowd uses to wrongly imply that all cops have it out for black people.
Even the Jewish people complied against one another. I don’t think we can possibly understand what continueous starvation, sleep deprivation, an atmosphere of utter fear and brutality, injury and mental anguish, and this without relief can do to ones mental capability for making decisions. It does become an inner war of utter moment by moment survival....the will to even live.
When you listen to the stories of the survivors...it gives you a better idea of what their mental state was at the time.
One man was able to get a small piece of cake...which he wanted to share with his dying brother. But the person who gave it to him told him if he did that he himself would get killed so he forced the man to eat all of it. When he returned to his brother and shared what had happened, he broke into uncontrollable sobbing because he had eaten the whole piece of cake.... It was the only time he cried while in Auswitzh Death camp.
I cannot relate to that at all. But it does attest to the fact their world surrounded food and protecting themselves from harm. That’s it.
I addressed that in my last post on this thread...but you cannot put trapped starving and brutalized people on the same level of sanity and decision making that free well fed and functional people have.
Either follow your asinine point to through to its illogical conclusion, or keep it to yourself.
I repeat...Post 48.
Either follow your asinine point to through to its illogical conclusion, or keep it to yourself.
She said she never would have imagined that human blood could could run like water in the street gutters.
The Germans and Soviets turned the whole country into a human slaughterhouse.
Museum of the History of Polish Jews
I would dare say a Jewish person today would be safer in Poland than just about any other European country. Sure there are some jerks like in any other country, but overall, Poland would still the best place.
Witold Pilecki - Murdered by Communist Pigs.
You realize that Poland had the MOST Jews in Europe before the war. So it stands to reason that the Germans, with their typical attention to efficiency, would choose to build the death camps near where the Jews were.
Also NOT ONE SINGLE ETHNIC POLE served as a guard at the camps, there were plenty of Ukrainians and Lithuanians who did serve.
You seem to think some heroic action on the Poles' part could have changed things: you're forgetting that over 600,000 non-Jewish Poles died in the same death camps as the Jews-- if they couldn't save themselves, how do you expect them to have saved the Jews?
We can play that game and say that there were Jews who were complicit in the Soviet Union's Crimes when they occupied their portion of Poland.
What does playing that game accomplish?
You are entering this conversation late, so I will spare you the confusion and explain that this debate is about whether or not the Poles were complicit in the Holocaust for not doing anything about the concentration camps "in their neighborhood."
What would you have them do? Just giving a Jewish person some water could result in that person and their entire family being put to death. Poland was the only country where this was the case.
War brings out the best and the worst of the human condition. Some Poles were admirable, some were opportunistic and eagerly took advantage of the situation, and the vast majority just tried to do whatever they could to survive a situation that neither you nor I have any idea what it truly must have been like.
Why? Because at least some Poles were throwing food and clothing over the wall, before the Germans starved them as well.
Unless you've talked to someone who survived WWII inside Poland, it's really hard to imagine the hell on earth the Germans created.
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