What, exactly, did I miss? The disingenuous comparisons to the Soviet Union and the War on Drugs? Or perhaps his claims that the “alleged” events of the Holocaust are not what we think, but somehow different. And he knows, since he’s got a degree in history.
No, he was most certainly insulting Holocaust survivors and alleging that they are engaging in shameful behavior.
Nobody has said that. Obviously (but evidently it still needs to be over-elaborated) in order to be a Holocaust survivor not only does one need to have survived the Holocaust in regions in which it was going on, but they also need to have been a target of the Holocaust. So members of the Nazi party are not Holocaust survivors, but European Jews, Poles, Slavs, Romani, etc… are.
They’re not mutually exclusive. And sure, some people survived by betraying other people. The mere fact of being a Holocaust survivor does not grant moral amnesty.
As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor who wasn’t in the camps, please let me be the first to say that your armchair psychoanalysis has taught me about my true motivations for deception and manipulation, and your anger at the very facts of my heritage has shown me that I should most certainly be afraid of those facts lest people think mean things about me.
Claiming that it is “shameful” for a person who was not actually in a death camp to identify as a “Holocaust survivor” when they may simply have been lucky enough to not be caught while spending years hiding from Einsatzgruppen and other terrors is a ludicrously narrow definition that appears to be posted simply to cause bad feelings.
Similarly, making the absurd claim that anyone who notes that their ancestors were survivors of the Holocaust is making a deliberate effort to garner unwarranted sympathy is baseless.
Both of you will ratchet back your vitriol and give some thought to your posts. I am not sure that the OP has all that much merit, but it can be discussed in a way that is not deliberately insulting to other posters.
I’m afraid I’m not. If you were in the Warsaw ghetto and got away to join the partisans before it was liquidated, you’re a Holocaust survivor; if you got forged papers saying you were an Aryan, or your parents got forged baptismal records and nuns hid you in a convent, you’re a Holocaust survivor. If you snuck across the Pyrenees from France and bribed Spanish guards to let you in because you knew you faced almost certain death if you stayed in Vichy France, you’re a Holocaust survivor.
Earlier you compare the Holocaust to 9/11, but it’s not the same. 9/11 was an event in a few distinct, easily delineated places over the course of about an hour. The Holocaust was a process, mad up of many events, affecting a whole continent over more than 10 years, starting with ostricization and ending with elimination.
Until HH returns to clarify, I’m not willing to hazard a bet that 9/11 wasn’t being used in exactly the same way as the Soviet Union and the War on Drugs (and the etymology of the word “Holocaust”) and will later turn out to be some sort of “ah-hah, of course I didn’t mean that!” sort of bait.
It’s also worth noting that we’ve been trying to debate the impact of the Holocaust with someone whose argument not only contained such rhetorical gambits, but who’s on record as stating:
I’d wager that, should this tangent continue. HH will have to define what he meant by (emphasis mine):
Without knowing what he claims “really happened”, or what the exact nature of his JAQ’ing and “semi” Holocaust denial is, trying to debate who validly can be listed as a survivor of the Holocaust seems to be pointless.
Get a dictionary.
In some previous threads I noted that I am a semi-Holocaust denier, because, I don’t trust anybody’s histories for something that has such strong feelings associated with it. THAT is the reason that I wrote “ALLEGATIONS”, or whatever declension/parsing I used. I am not going to paint anything in a way that is distasteful to me just to calm YOU down. I think it was fair usage, since I didn’t call you or the State of Israel a bunch of liars.
But, you are changing the subject. I am trying to get you to look up the word Holocaust so we can define “Holocaust Survivor”. And you are changing the subject to “let’s find out what handsomeharry means because he’s a Holocaust denier”. Is the N-word far behind?
I am obnoxious, and churlish, and, I am, and have noted in other threads, that I am a Fascist, but I don’t think that any of that is quite relevant to addressing the question.
I don’t know/care “what really happened.” I didn’t use that terminology. You seem to delight in putting whole paragraphs into my posts, and then being rude to me because of that!
I don’t care what really happened, btw. Ten trillion genocidal victims don’t ask about me, I don’t ask about them. That’s a fair trade, I think. But, that’s still off topic, isn’t it? In your world, you may think I speak in code, and you have the key, but in reality, I try to be less casual with my language.
I was addressing the main. You would do well to do the same.
tomndebb, can’t speak for any other poster, but there is no vitriol here. I am just offering my opinion on what qualifies someone as a holocaust survivor.
I’ve also branched out into the reasons why someone might call themselves a survivor or child of a survivor, even if they know that is not true. Folks here have speculated on my reasons for doing so, which I find a more direct attack against me. I have no knowledge of who is or isn’t a survivor or relative of a survivor of the holocaust on this board unless they identify themselves as one.
FinnAgain, I know not your personal story or your family’s personal story. So, I make no judgement of you directly, and I am not chastising you (or anyone on the board, for that matter).
I don’t understand how you can jump from what I said to “[my] anger at the very facts of my heritage.” I’m not angry. I’d have to care about you to be angry. I just don’t agree with the definition you’ve chosen. I know nothing about your grandparent’s experience. I never said one had to be in the camps. I believe I pointed that out in a posting above. Clearly, if someone was under duress during the time of German occupation, (i.e. being chased or hunted, or forced to live in hiding like Anne Frank, for example… there are others), then being counted as a survivor makes sense to me. The psychological and emotional toll that one suffers is just as valid as someone in a camp.
As for you personally, I have a question. Why does anyone need to know that you are the grandchild of a HS? How is that relevant to anything that’s going on in your life? I’m guessing that, because of social parameters and good manners, someone isn’t asking you a direct question (say, are you related to a holocaust survivor?) in public, the only way anyone knows this information is if you volunteer it. Why would you feel a need to do that? This is not a nugget of information that goes in one ear and out the other of whoever hears it. It’s not like you said “that car is blue.”, which would immediately be forgotten by any listeners.
My question is a serious one. Other than your family, I can’t imagine too many people need to know this about your grandparent. Just like not too many people care if your child is an honor roll student at WWII H.S. And, since I can claim the same status as you in this regard, I feel like I can put myself in your shoes in this one case. And I can’t think of one way to push that into a conversation unless I wanted to put it there. And THAT would require me to inform others directly. It’s not like I’m wearing my “I am the grandson of a holocaust survivor” T-shirt.
nah. Even if someone was being obnoxious to you, or saying something that you took offense to, I doubt you telling people that does anything but make you feel better about yourself. If someone said something like “I don’t think the jews were treated as badly as we’ve been taught.”, you might jump in with a comment like “well, I’m the grandson of H.S. and I can tell you from the stories I’ve been told…”
The fact that you are a grandson of a HS is irrelevant. But not to you. You didn’t do anything in WWII, and you didn’t experience it. It’s also a way to tell the world that you are jewish, even if you don’t state it directly. Because H.S. translates to jewish person in the minds of 99% of folks, regardless of their knowledge of the other groups hounded by Nazis. I don’t recall ever seeing a “Schindler’s List” - type Hollywood movie focusing on the plight of the Poles only. Not the Jewish Poles. Just the Poles.
If I come across one of your relevant threads in my normal SD perusal, fine.
Just taking a stab here, though… I’m guessing you’re jewish.
If you are not, I’m shocked.
by the way, I’m glad your relative survived. I’m just guessing that they weren’t a gypsy, homosexual, pole, or norweigen.
We would all like to imagine ourselves to be ideal victims. My mother can’t even imagine not being like Harriet Tubman, leading slaves on the Underground Railroad. The two of us actually got into an argument because I told her it’s all fine and good to say what you WOULD do from the safety of 150 years. But she doesn’t know what kind of person she’d be if she grew up seeing her parents sold away from her, saw fellow slaves being beaten and mutilated for running away, and had been taught her whole life that she was too stupid and immoral to live on her own.
You don’t know what kind of Holocaust survivor you would have been. Count yourself lucky that you don’t have to find out.
I can see your point here. And yes, sitting in the safety of my own world, it’s easy to say what I would and wouldn’t do in a case like the holocaust. But until I’m actually put into that position, I really can’t possibly know.
Fair enough. However, I’d like to think I’d be unable to live with myself after spending a day tossing bodies into an oven. I’d like to think I’d take as many germans as I could with me before I was cut down myself, but I’ll never know. And as you put it, I’m very lucky that I don’t have to find out.
I disagree. Obviously I am not the only person on this board who has (or had, in my case) a fairly narrow definition of what a Holocaust Survivor is. There seems to be plenty of room for a debate.
Argent Towers summed it up better than I. It’s
Now I think AT and I agree that either person could consider themselves a HS, but I could see how someone who has relatives who survived the death camps or were otherwise directly persecuted would feel it diminishes the term “Holocaust Survivor” when applied to so many people who were not directly, personally affected.
Well, but that’s pretty much the definition of a relevant time to bring it up. Just like if someone said “Medics in WWII all had it really cushy” I might point out that my grandfather served as a medic in the Africa campaign, and on more than one occasion he’d crawled into mine fields to rescue enemy soldiers as well as friendly soldiers. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to earn any sort of points from it, just that, hey, I’ve got a very good example at my finger tips that shows that a blanket, absolute generalization isn’t accurate.
Sure, sometimes things are brought up to obvious effect, but this isn’t one of those sorts of cases.
I can assure you, the fact that virtually my entire extended family was butchered and those who did survive generally happened to have been in other regions of the world at the time? That is quite relevant on quite a few dynamics. Not the least as a way to falsify certain overblown claims.
And here I thought that a small gold magen david on a chain was the preferred way to do that. Ya know, like all the Christians who wear crosses.
I’m still curious as to what, exactly, HH contends really happened as opposed to the version endorsed by pretty much every single Holocaust scholar (and the nation of Germany itself).
If Belorussians count, one movie I’ve seen recently which is pretty famous and focuses exclusively on their plight is Come and See.
It may not be a hollywood movie, but it directly inspired the (later) Schindler’s List - indeed, director Spielberg screened “Come and See” repeatedly for his cast and crew, to get them to appreciate what they were aiming for.
Otto Frank. Leo Frank was the manager of an Atlanta pencil factory whose lynching after he was accused of killing a factory worker led to the formation of the Anti-Defamation League and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
