Remembering what the willfully ignorant want you to forget

The following is an excerpt from an essay by Dr. Alex Grobman (Hat tip Larwyn, sorry no link):

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When we refer to the Holocaust, we mean the systematic bureaucratically administered destruction by the Nazis and their collaborators of six million Jews during the Second World War. The Jews were found "guilty" only because they were viewed inaccurately as a race. The Nazi state orchestrated the attempted mass murder of every person with at least three Jewish grandparents.



Millions of civilians and soldiers were killed as a consequence of war. Communists, political and religious leaders were eliminated because they were viewed as a potential threat to the Nazis. When the Nazis murdered approximately 10,000 Polish intelligentsia, in 1939-1940, and Polish Catholic priesthood in western Poland, for example, they were trying to prevent these groups from becoming a political and spiritual force that could unite the country against them. Similarly, when the Nazis murdered more than two and one-half million Soviet prisoners of war, they were killing a military force that had fought them on the field of battle.



European Jews, on the other hand, were the only people marked for complete destruction. To the Nazi leadership, the Jews were a satanic force that controlled both the East and the West and, posed a physical threat to the German nation. There was no way to stop this alleged international Jewish conspiracy from gaining total control of the world, the Nazis reasoned, except to physically destroy every Jewish man, woman, and child. Failure to do so, Hitler believed, "would not lead to a Versailles treaty but the final destruction, indeed, to the annihilation of the German people."



When the executioners questioned their superiors about the need to kill every Jewish woman and child, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, claimed that he would not have been "justified in getting rid of the men-in having them put to death, in other words—only to allow their children to grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons. We have to make up our minds, hard though it may be, that this race must be wiped off the face of the earth."

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And try they did. There are now 250,000 survivors in Israel. For many things are still not so good as Ynet reports.

"I felt deeply ashamed, the situation we're faced with in terms of the conditions Holocaust survivors are living in is completely absurd," said Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog on Sunday as Israel prepares to mark its annual Holocaust memorial day.


Herzog was addressing the data presented to him at an emergency meeting summoned earlier that morning with representatives from the National Insurance Institute, the Ministry of Welfare, the Jewish Agency and officials from the prime minister's office to discuss the difficult situation faced by thousands of Holocaust survivors forced to make ends meet with minimal government stipends.


According to the updated figures presented to Herzog there are currently 250,000 Holocaust survivors currently living in Israel, some 20,000 of which receive reparations from Germany and an additional 40,000 receive stipends from the State, leaving over 180,000 survivors who receive no support.


"I ask myself - how did we get to a situation where they are not entitled to anything?" said Herzog, himself descendant from a family of survivors.

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Herzog said he fails to understand how so many survivors are deemed ineligible for reparations or government support and are forced to live on a pitiful $300 monthly stipend. One working assumption, according to Herzog, is that a large number of survivors are relatively new immigrants from the former Soviet Union who do not have personal savings and did not receive reparations from Germany....

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There is more.

Most of these survivors are from a generation that is shrinking on a daily basis. These people deserve better.

While many Muslims deny the Holocaust because they believe that it gives legitimacy to the state of Israel, they are wrong. The state of Israel would be legitimate of the Holocaust never happened. The importance of the Holocaust to the Jews living in Israel is that they will never forget what happened and that they will fight with all their might to keep it form happening again.