Herky Pollock’s Post

The Forgotten Stories Chapter 14 The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators during World War II. Here are some key points: Background: - Nazi Ideology: The Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, believed in the racial superiority of the Aryan race and viewed Jews as an existential threat. - Anti-Semitic Policies: From 1933 onwards, the Nazis implemented laws and policies to marginalize and persecute Jews, culminating in the "Final Solution"—the plan to exterminate the Jewish population. Atrocities: - Concentration Camps: Jews were deported to concentration camps and extermination camps, such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor, where they were subjected to forced labor, starvation, medical experiments, and mass executions. - Mass Killings: The Holocaust also involved mass shootings, death marches, and other forms of systematic murder. Impact: - Death Toll: Approximately six million Jews were killed, along with millions of others, including Romani people, disabled individuals, political dissidents, and homosexuals. - Survivors: Many survivors faced immense challenges in rebuilding their lives, and the Holocaust left a lasting impact on Jewish communities worldwide. The Holocaust remains one of the darkest chapters in human history, serving as a stark reminder of the consequences of hatred and intolerance. Sources: 1. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM): https://lnkd.in/eXKunXEs). 2.https://https://lnkd.in/eNVk6p5h). 3.https://https://lnkd.in/ePBWpEGN). 4.https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/

As we approach Holocaust Memorial Day, I find myself deeply disturbed by the hateful rhetoric that is becoming so prevalent in our world today. It is painful to see the “language of hate” being normalized, especially when we are about to reflect on one of humanity’s darkest chapters. The Holocaust is not just a reminder of what happened—it’s a call to action. It’s a reminder that we must never, ever let hate take root again. As someone who has dedicated a large part of his life to fighting for a better world and co-organizer of the Anne Frank Declaration, a pledge signed by global leaders like Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, and Bill Clinton, I know how powerful it can be when people from all walks of life come together for a common cause. And this day—Holocaust Memorial Day—reminds us that we must do more than remember. We must act. The Holocaust was the systematic murder of six million Jewish people, but it wasn’t just the Jewish community that was targeted. The Roma and Sinti, Romani Gypsies, Muslims, LGBTQ+ individuals, the disabled, political dissenters—all were branded as "undesirable" by a regime that sought to erase them from existence. This was not just the tragedy of one people, but the tragedy of us all. It’s a warning that when hate is allowed to grow, it can destroy everything in its path. But the horrors of genocide didn’t end with the Holocaust. We’ve seen the same brutality in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Bosnia, in Darfur. Thousands, millions, have perished simply because of who they were, where they came from, or what they believed. The brutality is not confined to history—it’s a present danger with the extreme far right and neo nazis activism on the rise across Europe. It's a painful reminder that we must remain vigilant. The lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten, and we must pledge to never allow such hatred to destroy lives again. In my work with Holocaust survivors, including Eva Schloss—Anne Frank’s stepsister—I’ve seen the raw pain and strength that comes from those who lived through these atrocities. Their stories are not just about survival; they’re about fighting for a better world. They remind us that we cannot afford to be passive. We cannot just talk about tolerance—we must live it. We must fight against prejudice wherever it arises, and we must ensure that future generations never forget the consequences of hate. We must stand together, not let the merchants of hate devide us and recommit ourselves in 2025 to fighting for a world free from hate.

Tomorrow is Holocaust Remembrance Day, otherwise known as Yom HaShoah, a Jewish day of commemoration that remembers the six million Jews who were killed during the horrific atrocities of the Holocaust, honors the survivors and their stories, and educates against the terrible consequences of hate and racism. In recent months, we have seen an alarming increase in hatred and antisemitism across the globe, reminding us of the consequences if hate is not actively addressed. Jewish people are once again experiencing hate and violence due to their identity, and on this day, we should be weary of history repeating itself. No group of people should experience discrimination, fear or prejudice at the hands of others, and we are called upon to stand up against hate in all of its forms. As we honor Yom HaShoah, we encourage you to take the opportunity to connect with your communities, share educational resources on Antisemitism, such as materials from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and work towards a better future for all. Never Again is Now. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum resources: https://lnkd.in/eY-wMdEC

In a week’s time, on Monday 27 January, we commemorate 80 years since the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. 80 years after the horrors of the Holocaust, Jewish communities and those survivors who built new lives here after the war, are living through a new wave of Jew hatred that they never expected to see in their lifetime. For Australia’s Jewish community, the past weeks have been overshadowed by acts of vandalism, violence and personal targeting that eerily hark back to the pogroms and actions against the Jews of Europe that led to the Holocaust. Statements like ‘Hitler on top’ and ‘F**k the Jews’ graffitied on private property and synagogues have sought to intimidate Jewish people where they live, gather and worship. These violent attacks are painful reminders of past horrors. Reflecting on this disturbing rise in antisemitic violence, Sydney Jewish Museum’s Head of Education, Sandy Hollis, says: “What we understand about the history of antisemitism is what is playing out in our streets today is unique and has its roots in centuries-old stereotypes and tropes: beliefs that Jewish people are to blame for global politics, that they are conspiratorial, that they control the media. While these ill-founded beliefs might show up in new ways, they are all reflective of a unique, long history of scapegoating, defaming and discriminating of Jewish people for society’s perceived ills. “Today we see a disturbing rise in division across our society and a fraying of our social fabric. Whilst we can pinpoint the conflict in the Middle East as the trigger for this recent surge in antisemitism, we can also be sure that a ceasefire won’t be a single salve. How deeply rooted Jewish hate is in this country is yet to be fully understood.” Read the full statement on our website.

ref Jewish Voice for Peace Yom HaShoah, Holocaust remembrance Day, marks the Holocaust and honors the 17 million people murdered during Nazi Germany’s genocide, including 6 million Jews. This year, this day of remembrance falls on the day the Israeli military ordered the over 100,000 Palestinians sheltering in east Rafah to flee, but with nowhere to go. The decision to assault Rafah on this day is grotesque. The parallels between the dehumanization and persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, and the ongoing US-backed cataclysm in Gaza, where Palestinians are enduring the Israeli government’s genocide, are too stark to be denied. We know our remembrance is hollow if we cannot apply the lessons of our past to the present day. The experiences of our ancestors’ persecution and mass death under fascism now serve as the foundation for how we define modern genocides. As Jews, we recognize the Israeli government’s tactics of dehumanization, intentional starvation and mass slaughter of Palestinians from the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany in the Holocaust, all too often against our own ancestors. Many of us grew up on the images of emaciated people, starved in ghettos and concentration camps. Today’s images from Gaza are a rattling echo. We remain steadfast in our commitment to resisting oppression and advocating for justice in Palestine. Never again means never again for anyone. As Jews, as we continue to witness and struggle against the Israeli government’s oppression of Palestinians, we also recognize exactly where these ongoing atrocities will lead, and we do everything we can to stop that outcome. Our beliefs, our history and our duty demand we stand up to stop the Israeli military’s genocide of Palestinians before it escalates even further. We invoke our ancestors as we affirm our commitment to ensuring that their values of solidarity, collective liberation, and anti-imperialism are carried on into the future as we fight for justice in Palestine.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. We should all pause to remember the horrors of the past, which we collectively promised to never forget. In Israel this morning, sirens sounded across the country to mark the Day, honoring the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. We should all also remember the global promise "Never Again." October 7 was the most vicious and widespread attack on Jews since the Holocaust. It now seems that grotesque, unspeakable acts of sexual violence against Jewish women were also committed on that day. As we pause today to remember the Holocaust of the last century, we should also reflect on the existential fear and sorrow our Jewish friends must be feeling anew today, particularly as so many hostages taken on October 7 remain in captivity, we hope still live. But we also now read about new seemingly credible allegations of genocide in Gaza. We read how U.S. officials and independent aid agencies are declaring full-blown, human-caused famine. This famine is already obliterating not only so many innocent lives in Gaza, many of them children, but also causing harms that are certain to endure for generations to come. Prohibitions under the international Law of War or other areas of Humanitarian law are conditioned on concepts like proportionality, necessity, and the right to self-defense. Genocide, by contrast, is an absolute prohibition. Genocide has a precise legal definition and no conditions that can justify it. The Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of five acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." These five acts include: --killing members of the group, --causing them serious bodily or mental harm, --imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, --preventing births, and --forcibly transferring children out of the group. As we empathize with our Jewish friends on this Day of Remembrance, we should also hope for an immediate ceasefire and dramatic increase in aid needed to prevent mass death and suffering among the people of Gaza.

The continuation of separating the experiences of the Holocaust from the traumatic experiences of American racial violence persists. The genocidal events happen on different soil but the results were the same. Call America's history and continued employment of holocaustic practices for what they are -- genocidal. Mass incarceration = genocide. Underperforming schools=genocide. Poverty and homelessness = genocide. THE ORIGIN OF STUDIES OF INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA EFFECTS The concept of intergenerational trauma was introduced in the psychiatric literature through descriptions of behavioral and clinical problems in offspring of Holocaust survivors8. In a pivotal paper describing three patients who presented for psychiatric treatment, Rakoff8 wrote: "The parents are not broken conspicuously, yet their children, all of whom were born after the Holocaust, display severe psychiatric symptomatology. It would almost be easier to believe that they, rather than their parents, had suffered the corrupting, searing hell”. This initial report generated mostly negative reactions, including caution about generalizing from what might have been idiosyncratic observations in a small number of extreme cases9. Some stakeholders may have felt that the suggestion that surviving the trauma of genocide had deleterious implications for progeny was stigmatizing in the face of the emerging cultural narrative regarding the Holocaust, which was one of survival against all odds, resilience, and defiance in the hope of preventing such occurrences in the future10. The initial anecdotal report, and the reactions to it, generated much empirical research on the question of whether and how Holocaust offspring, conceived and born after World War II, were affected. Hundreds of articles appeared, beginning in the 1970s and continuing for some decades thereafter. The studies described in these reports either failed to find effects in Holocaust offspring, corroborated earlier clinical descriptions, attempted to restrict the observations of damaging effects to a subgroup, or pointed to serious methodological challenges in attempting to address this question empirically11, 12, 13.

Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of Smokey the Bear. Incidentally, it was also Holocaust Remembrance Day. What do they have in common? Both are meant to warn the world about fires. And the world right now is definitely on fire. Maybe that’s the problem with Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s just one day, when we really need to be vigilant everyday against the evils of terrorism, political, cultural, and academic institutional decay, persecution of any social group, the long-smoldering chaos of far-left ideologies or far right conspiracy theories like replacement, or the religious extremist intentions of Iran and its proxies to take down the west. All of these have been happening over decades. My favorite line since 10.7 is still Jim Gaffigan’s tweet, “Does anyone else feel the need to call all their Jewish friends and say, “Okay, you weren’t being paranoid.”? We weren’t. We’ve been saying to you Never Again a long time for a reason. Yet we’ve all been so accepting of a constant, historic #antisemitism, that this is just how it is for Jews, that the outrage just wasn’t there, by Jews and non alike. Though #Neveragain always felt more aimed at Non-Jews. After all, (sorry not sorry) Non-Jews are the ones persecuting us. Again. So again, the world Jewish population being about 15 million, and Israel being the size of New Jersey and virtually alone politically, we could use a little more help. For Jews, every day since 10.7 has been Holocaust Remembrance Day. That’s why every day it needs to be remembered that evil is possible, that we need to stand by our brothers and sisters, that hateful ideologies and threats of annihilating a people should be taken seriously, that anti-semitism is racism, that we are all capable of moral courage, that we all have a stake in the world and a voice to do something about it, that it isn’t too late. After all, remembering the Holocaust is less about remembering the dead, but standing by the living. If we blink, the moral pillars of the West can easily catch fire and fall. They haven’t burned down yet. But the match is lit, and it will take all of us to put it out.

The Wave 2.0 - be Laurie. On this holocaust memorial day, I couldn't help but think of the movie "The Wave", where a highschool teacher aims to teach his students what autocracy means de-facto, and experiments how easily group pressure can take over a full community. Things quickly get out of control until hardly anyone demonstrates clear, critical thinking. The movie makes you wonder if it's truly possible to turn young people into fascists or 'simply' brain-washed to a point of no / low return.  2024 reality makes you understand that it is possible and it's very worrying not only for Israel but for any person who values liberty, inclusion and peace. Back to "The Wave" - when the teacher shows the class a documentary about the holocaust, Laurie (image below, IMDb) is emotionally affected by concentration camps footages, and deeply ponders how ordinary people could commit such terrible atrocities - or merely stand by while they occurred. She resists joining The Wave, despite her boyfriend and classmates' pressure and intimidation. Her bright, individual thinking, truth and justice seeking, and courage separate her from her classmates and show the power of a single person's free will in the face of evil. Fast forward to 2024, showing us The Wave 2.0 all over. What is terribly sad is not only that terror proxies are taking over many geographical locations, but that "normative" people have become blind, their thoughts distorted, and the bystander phenomenon - reliving. Where do you stand post October 7th Hamas attack, massacre and kidnapping? Where do you stand when innocent civilians are still held in underground terror tunnels for 7 months?! Where do you stand when students chant 'from the river to the sea' not understanding which river and which sea, demonstrating they either have historical amnesia or are deliberately calling for the destruction of the state of Israel?  Any connection between Hamas and 'freedom fighters' is dilussional, as is any connection to US woke movement. Moving to Europe, the Eurovision's opening festivities in Malmow were inappropriately held on Holocaust Remembrance Day eve. The Israeli team were absent from the event. Just one event and still, were the rest quiet bystanders? There are examples galore worldwide, forcing us to see clearly what is happening in our communities. Please stand on the actively moral side of history - be Laurie.