A real Great Escape
February 24, 2017 11:44 AM Subscribe
Double-sided ramps were built inside the pits. One crew hauled stretchers filled with corpses up the ramp, and another crew pushed the bodies onto the pyre. In a week, the Burning Brigade might dispose of 3,500 bodies or more. Later, the guards forced prisoners to sift through the ashes with strainers, looking for bone fragments, which would then be pounded down into powder.
Smithsonian needs to either mod or shut off the comments on the article. Shameful.
posted by buzzman at 12:47 PM on February 24, 2017 [16 favorites]
posted by buzzman at 12:47 PM on February 24, 2017 [16 favorites]
Smithsonian needs to either mod or shut off the comments on the article. Shameful.
Jesus fucking Christ! I am, frankly, astonished. Perhaps I shouldn't be, in the age of Trump and the alt-right.
posted by Naberius at 1:04 PM on February 24, 2017 [3 favorites]
Jesus fucking Christ! I am, frankly, astonished. Perhaps I shouldn't be, in the age of Trump and the alt-right.
posted by Naberius at 1:04 PM on February 24, 2017 [3 favorites]
Cursing in Yiddish and Lithuanian, Zeidel shook his fist at the ghosts of his former Nazi captors. “Can you see me?” Zeidel asked. “I am here with my children, and my children had children of their own, and they are here, too. Can you see? Can you see?”
. ^6M
posted by mrjohnmuller at 1:19 PM on February 24, 2017 [22 favorites]
. ^6M
posted by mrjohnmuller at 1:19 PM on February 24, 2017 [22 favorites]
Jesus fucking Christ! I am, frankly, astonished. Perhaps I shouldn't be, in the age of Trump and the alt-right.
The Confederate "Lost Cause" was expanded to embrace Nazis decades ago - for the worst of us, white supremacy has always Trumped every other value.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:56 PM on February 24, 2017 [8 favorites]
The Confederate "Lost Cause" was expanded to embrace Nazis decades ago - for the worst of us, white supremacy has always Trumped every other value.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:56 PM on February 24, 2017 [8 favorites]
There were setbacks. In March, the diggers discovered they were tunneling in the direction of a burial pit and were forced to reroute the passageway, losing days in the process. Not long afterward, Dogim was on burial pit duty when he unearthed the bodies of his wife, mother and two sisters. Every member of the Burning Brigade lived with the knowledge that some of the corpses he was helping to burn belonged to family members. And yet to see one’s wife lying in the pit was something else entirely, and Dogim was consumed with sadness and fury. “[He] said he had a knife, that he was going to stab and kill the Sturmbannführer,” Farber later recalled. Farber told Dogim that he was thinking selfishly—even if he succeeded, the rest of the prisoners would be killed in retribution.
posted by My Dad at 2:05 PM on February 24, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by My Dad at 2:05 PM on February 24, 2017 [5 favorites]
Sorry about the comments, I hadn't looked at them.
posted by Chrysostom at 2:13 PM on February 24, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Chrysostom at 2:13 PM on February 24, 2017 [1 favorite]
Um. The Great Escape was the real Great Escape.
posted by chrchr at 2:37 PM on February 24, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by chrchr at 2:37 PM on February 24, 2017 [1 favorite]
You gotta embrace WWJBS.
(What Would Jean Baudrillard Say?)
posted by My Dad at 2:45 PM on February 24, 2017
(What Would Jean Baudrillard Say?)
posted by My Dad at 2:45 PM on February 24, 2017
Looks like they removed the comments?
To think there were hundreds of comparable massacres, and thousands overall, each with a thousand stories attached. And to think Anti-Semitism is more and more outspoken. Ugh.
posted by Rumple at 3:53 PM on February 24, 2017 [2 favorites]
To think there were hundreds of comparable massacres, and thousands overall, each with a thousand stories attached. And to think Anti-Semitism is more and more outspoken. Ugh.
posted by Rumple at 3:53 PM on February 24, 2017 [2 favorites]
chrchr: "Um. The Great Escape was the real Great Escape."
Oh yeah, I know. I was just saying this was *A* real great escape.
posted by Chrysostom at 4:15 PM on February 24, 2017
Oh yeah, I know. I was just saying this was *A* real great escape.
posted by Chrysostom at 4:15 PM on February 24, 2017
Looks like they removed the comments?
Indeed, they don't seem to be there anymore.
Trust me, it was the right thing to do.
posted by Naberius at 4:45 PM on February 24, 2017 [4 favorites]
Indeed, they don't seem to be there anymore.
Trust me, it was the right thing to do.
posted by Naberius at 4:45 PM on February 24, 2017 [4 favorites]
Touro Synagogue, in Newport, RI. The oldest Synagogue in these United States (before we annexed New Mexico). This is a beautiful building that was allowed to be built because John Clarke and Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were all fugitives of Massachusetts Anglican/Puritan Justice, and granted a charter to found a colony on pure religious freedom by King Charles I, a Catholic with his back against the wall.
The first Governor of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Roger Williams, despised Quakers. Hated them with the heat of a thousand suns. So when they built a giant Meeting House in Newport, as the all-powerful plenipotentiary that was the Governor of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, he did the obvious thing.
He hopped in a rowboat in Providence, by himself, and rowed all night to be at the Quaker Meeting House for an honest debate on theology the next morning!
The Quakers were expecting a different reaction, and so weren't there, so he rowed sorrowfully back up the bay.
The Meeting House, and the Quakers, are still in Newport to this day.
Touro is still here, too, the first Jewish place of worship in the 13 Colonies, because at least some of our Founding Fathers were as advertised.
It is a shame to me we didn't bring in as many refugees from horror and holocaust as we could or even should.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:42 PM on February 24, 2017 [9 favorites]
The first Governor of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Roger Williams, despised Quakers. Hated them with the heat of a thousand suns. So when they built a giant Meeting House in Newport, as the all-powerful plenipotentiary that was the Governor of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, he did the obvious thing.
He hopped in a rowboat in Providence, by himself, and rowed all night to be at the Quaker Meeting House for an honest debate on theology the next morning!
The Quakers were expecting a different reaction, and so weren't there, so he rowed sorrowfully back up the bay.
The Meeting House, and the Quakers, are still in Newport to this day.
Touro is still here, too, the first Jewish place of worship in the 13 Colonies, because at least some of our Founding Fathers were as advertised.
It is a shame to me we didn't bring in as many refugees from horror and holocaust as we could or even should.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:42 PM on February 24, 2017 [9 favorites]
Fascinating and frightening.
Why would the Nazis put a generator (I assume a diesel powered one) in their slave's dormitory/pen?
Serious question if anyone has an insight or theory on that data point.
posted by esto-again at 1:20 AM on February 25, 2017
Why would the Nazis put a generator (I assume a diesel powered one) in their slave's dormitory/pen?
Serious question if anyone has an insight or theory on that data point.
posted by esto-again at 1:20 AM on February 25, 2017
You might remember Motke, and his beautiful daughter Hanna, from Claude Lanzmann's SHOAH. "The youngest face to appear in Shoah belongs to Hanna Zaidel. She is a grandmother now, in her 60s, but on screen she is in her 20s, beautiful, taking long moody drags on a cigarette. Speaking first in Hebrew, then through a French interpreter - one of the reasons why the film is so long is that Lanzmann eschewed subtitles, insisting on consecutive translation - Zaidel tells how she learned the remarkable story of her father, Motke, in scraps, extracting one fact at a time. "I had to tear the details out of him," she says. "He was a silent man, he didn't talk to me." Addressing the camera, she adds that only "when Mr Lanzmann came" did she hear the whole story, told in one go."
posted by Prince Lazy I at 3:08 AM on February 25, 2017
posted by Prince Lazy I at 3:08 AM on February 25, 2017
Smithsonian needs to either mod or shut off the comments on the article. Shameful.
Jesus fucking Christ! I am, frankly, astonished. Perhaps I shouldn't be, in the age of Trump and the alt-right.
posted by Naberius at 16:04 on February 24 [3 favorites +] [!]
It's a day later and there is no comment section, or I can't find it/can't see it. Good, because I can't take much more of the fashionable Trumpism hatred.
posted by james33 at 9:09 AM on February 25, 2017
Jesus fucking Christ! I am, frankly, astonished. Perhaps I shouldn't be, in the age of Trump and the alt-right.
posted by Naberius at 16:04 on February 24 [3 favorites +] [!]
It's a day later and there is no comment section, or I can't find it/can't see it. Good, because I can't take much more of the fashionable Trumpism hatred.
posted by james33 at 9:09 AM on February 25, 2017
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Dear God.
My last piano teacher was an older Russian lady who once told me that when the Nazis came to her village, I let her family go after she played for them. For a long time after that, I felt like playing with this big moral responsibility that I somehow wasn't qualified for. I think I may feel the same way about singing for a little while.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:27 PM on February 24, 2017 [3 favorites]