I just got done reading a story about a woman named Luba Gercak who saved around 50 children from certain death in the camps and I’m sure most of you know about Oskar Schindler.
I would like to read(or watch) more about people like this. Any suggestions?
Chiune Sugihara, the “Japanese Schindler.”
http://www.immortalchaplains.org/Prize/Ceremony2000/Sugihara/sugihara.htm
There is a book and a movie about the revolt of the Sobibor concentration camp.
Wikipedia has a list of people who assisted Jews during the Holocaust.
My mom and dad were heros.
In the camps my Mom snuck out of her barracks to steal food and bring it back to the others she was housed with.
She also worked slave labor in a munitions plant for the Germans. Her job was to quality control bullets and throw away the underweight ones. She passed the underweight ones through and threw away any good ones as she could, even though she knew it would mean her life if she was caught. She wanted to save the lives of whomever was fighting against the Germans by suppling defective bullets.
After all they went through, my folks went to Israel after they were liberated and fought in the Israeli Independence war.
I could go on.
I would like that,if you are ok with it.
Wow. Your mother was very brave.
Back during the whole “France has betrayed us!” idiocy a few years back, someone started a thread about French people you admire. I submitted the following post about my grandparents:
I read this book. I remember being impressed by it. But when I was a teenager, I went to a Holocaust Museum in Detroit, and we spoke with two brothers who had survived the Holocaust. It was the damndest thing. They spit on the ground and one of them barked, “Never believe anything you hear about Oskar Schindler! The man was a monster!” Then he vividly described watching babies’ brains being beaten out on concrete.
I’m afraid I have a hard time reconciling the two versions of him. Not saying the book is wrong… just saying, you know, it’ s hard to let go of something like that.
If you’re into these personal tales, you might be interested in reading “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. He specialized in survivor psychology (as a licensed psychologist) at the time of his internment, and spent the majority of his time in the camps analyzing the behavior of those around him, trying to figure out what the difference was between those who lost their spirits and those who retained their humanity. When he was released from the camp, he wrote the book. In the first section he talks about his own experiences in the camps and what he observed both in himself and others. In the second section, he introduced a new kind of therapy, logotherapy, based on his findings. His work was interesting and he struck me as an extremely compassionate man… just as compassionate toward a man who had lost his job as he was toward other camp survivors. Very quotable, very inspiring book.
ETA: the basic gist of logotherapy is that one can suffer through anything as long as one has a contextual meaning through which to view that suffering. Those who had narratives, a sense of purpose–whatever it was–were the ones whose spirits survived.
I can’t imagine what reason Mr. Schindler would have had for doing that - can you elaborate? It just sounds so random and nonsensical.
I am not really invested one way or the other, it’s just that one version of the story makes sense and can be corroborated, and the other one is just a random accusation of infanticide.
I’m not really invested either way myself. To be honest, individual memory is not all that reliable, especially not in cases of severe trauma… there’s been a great deal of work into the phenomenon of traumatic memory and how many holocaust survivors remember things that couldn’t have happened. (Nope, not picking on Holocaust survivors here, just talking about the mechanics of human memory.) I’d be more likely to go with the journalist who wrote the book in terms of reasonable veracity. Of course, when I was a kid, I didn’t know about the unreliability of personal narrative memory… I just knew these dudes were weeping and describing horrible things… and it’s still hard, in light of that visceral moment, for me to reconcile the two versions of what happened. What I’m trying to say is, my mind knows that “Schinder’s List” was likely quite accurate, but emotionally I’m still with those two men. I’ve always taken that as a lesson in the variability of human perception.
I am sure that they saw and experienced horrible things, I just wonder what reason they had to believe that Schindler was responsible for them (other than the fact that he appeared to be a collaborator with the Nazis and their death machine).
Very few of my parents stories (and frankly, I haven’t tried to remember many- we have them on audio tape and they particpated in Spielberg’s Shoah project- but I can’t bring myself to think on them for long) are inspirational- most are horrifying and shocking.
My mother recollects being saved by “Dr.” Mengele- she was underage- 16- (should have been sent right to the chambers) and he pulled her aside because he liked the look of her.
My father talks of little until you get to after the war, although he has spoken about running to Warsaw to be part of the resistance and having the Polish resistance fighters reject him because he was Jewish…
He speaks of his time as a soldier in Israel with a tremendous dergee of pride, though. Many survisors turned around and risked their lives fighting for Israel after the war.
There’s not a whole lot more I talk about easily. The Holocaust denyers send me insane, especially since the actual survivors are quickly a vanishing breed.
Thank you for sharing what you have here.
Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch woman who built a secret closet in her bedroom in which to hide Jews. She and her family ended up in a concentration camp because of their efforts. After the war, she turned her house over to be used as a rehabilitation center, not only for camp inmates but for ex-Nazis, whom she felt needed healing, too.
I always enjoyed the book she wrote about her experiences, The Hiding Place, though I warn that it is very heavy on Christian themes. Corrie was an incredibly strong and compassionate woman who didn’t allow the horrors of her capitivity to destroy the person she was.
It may have been as simple as that. I’m sorry I don’t remember the connection they were trying to make. They seemed to really have a disconnected, discombobulated view of things… it wasn’t so much a narrative as it was a collection of randomized horrible experiences. Which is extremely typical for trauma survivors, but it doesn’t do much to answer your question about why they believed Schindler was so horrible. I think they were talking about how all the sick and the infants at the hospital were being murdered during the round-up by the Gestapo, and that’s when they mentioned Schindler. It was totally out of the blue. I really don’t know what was going on there. I’m sorry I can’t elaborate. In this context, mentioning it as I did seems kind of pointless. I guess I was wondering if anybody would be able to provide evidence that Schindler wasn’t a stand-up guy after all… I was throwing it out there to see if anybody had encountered similar ideas. Apparently not. They were old men. It is possible they were quite confused about who they were talking about… and again, with the trauma… it’s very typical.
I’ve heard the the “list” was sort of political and that it was “who you knew” - that apparently caused some people to think less of Schindler. Others don’t think he did enough or took enough risks and that he could have done a lot more and saved more lives.
I figure he took more risks and did more than many.
Your mother’s heroics and sheer courage deserves to be told on a greater scale. You need to write it down for all of humanity.
Slightly off topic:
What is the meaning or origin of Corrie Ten Boom’s last name? I’ve never found a exact meaning of it, I’ve always guesstimated that Ten meant from and Boom was a town or family name.
I’ve seen other variations of Ten (Something) and have never found out.