October
When you post on social media or a blog like this it often feels as if you are writing on water. Down the memory hole your post goes — if you’re lucky to have an afterlife with new readers arriving via internet searches, but in most cases not. This one I have chosen because it really is needed more than ever now.
Unfortunate looseness with the facts of history
Posted on by Neil
Remind ourselves of the particular evil of what happened during my childhood but far away
Looking back through my own archive triggered this
BBC – History – Historical Accuracy and the Making of ‘Auschwitz’
I saw the third episode of this outstanding series last night. The sheer evil of those times is breathtaking; if ever a series deserves to be compulsory viewing, this is the one. If ever you doubted that Holocaust apologists or deniers and neo-Nazis deserve utter contempt, watch this series.
BBC – History – Genocide Under the Nazis
Tonight on ABC-TV in Sydney this brilliant and thoroughly documented series deals with Dr Josef Mengele. Compulsory viewing in my opinion. Brazil, to its shame, sheltered this monster, as earlier had Argentina and Paraguay. He died, would you believe, in 1979.
Of particular interest to Mengele were twins; beginning in 1943, twins were selected and placed in special barracks. Almost all of Mengele’s experiments were of dubious scientific value, ignoring the lack of ethics involved, including attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes, various amputations and other brutal surgeries, and in at least one case attempting to create an artificial conjoined twin by sewing the veins in two twins together; this operation was not successful and only caused the hands of the children to become badly infected. Subjects of Mengele’s experiments were almost always murdered afterward for dissection, if they survived the experiment itself.
I learned today that my colleague Betsy B’s mother-in-law and one sister survived Mengele in Auschwitz. Six degrees of separation… Less in Betsy B’s case.
And there are my classmates of the Sydney High Class of 1959
Alfie van der Poorten (16 May 1942 – 9 October 2010)
Van der Poorten was born into a Jewish family in Amsterdam in 1942, after the German occupation began. His parents, David and Marianne van der Poorten, gave him into foster care with the Teerink family in Amersfoort, under the name “Fritsje”; the senior van der Poortens went into hiding, were caught by the Nazis, survived the concentration camps, and were reunited with van der Poorten and his two sisters after the war. The family moved to Sydney in 1951, travelling there aboard the SS Himalaya.
Van der Poorten studied at Sydney Boys High School from 1955 to 1959, and earned a high score in the Leaving Certificate Examination there. He spent a year in Israel and then studied mathematics at the University of New South Wales, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965, a doctorate in 1968 under the joint supervision of George Szekeres and Kurt Mahler, and a Master of Business Administration. While a student at UNSW, he led the student union council and was president of the University Union, as well as helping to lead several Jewish and Zionist student organisations….
Clive Kessler
I am a child of World War II. I was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1942. My earliest childhood memories are of my mother’s parents, German Jews who had managed to escape from Europe before the war broke out. For my first three years of life, I lived in the midst of the dark cloud of hope, fear and doubt in which they were constantly enveloped: hoping that their many relatives still in Germany would somehow survive the war; fearing (as the war went on and news began to emerge of the dreadful happenings there) that they would not; and doubting whether other people could, in any way, imagine, or even cared about, their anguish.
By war’s end, it became clear that none of their large extended family in Europe had survived. As a child I grew up in the aura of their awful pain and I somehow absorbed into myself their terrible loss – a loss for which there were then no words and no name. Now it is called the Shoah, the holocaust.
But my grandparents had some relatives who, in the mid-1920s, for a mixture of religious and political reasons, had gone to live in Palestine. From time to time, amidst the wartime gloom and in the years immediately after 1945, we would receive letters – I still remember their fascinating postal stamps, picturing a domed building, and bearing Arabic as well as English and Hebrew characters – that also provoked mixed feelings in my grandparents: a mixture of relief and hope, of anxiety and fear, as well as some gratitude that others had somehow survived the slaughter in Europe. After 1945, the tempo of my life, following theirs, began to be set by the daily radio broadcasts detailing the collapse of the British Mandate in Palestine, the declaration of Israel’s statehood, and the subsequent 1948 war. In many ways, I was formed by those experiences….
After later experience, especially a time living in Israel and seeing what the lives of Palestinians were like, Clive by 1989 was expressing this view:
I had wept to read of the destruction of the many Jewish communities, large and small, of Central and Eastern Europe, and was entitled to do so. Now I wept, too, to read of the expulsion, in 1948, of the Palestinians from Lydda and from Ramleh. I was entitled and also obliged to do so. This is not to equate Lydda and Ramleh in 1948 with the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943 – all such events are unique and, in some sense, incomparable – but we can find, and must recognize in them (despite their differences of time and place and circumstance), some common human themes, moral lessons and imperatives.
As new maps were drawn to reflect these newly created “facts on the ground” in Israel/Palestine, legitimization was incrementally given to processes for which the world has since coined the ominous and chillingly appropriate term “ethnic cleansing.” This process – of possession, of new map-creation, and of the framing and legitimization of new triumphalist, national narratives on the basis of those newly drawn maps, with all their renamed towns and villages – happened, not once, but twice (the immediate historical events don’t matter here) in 1948 and again in 1967.
Yes, I too deplore the injustice and relentless killing that mar the story of the State of Israel
But I beg all of us to examine very carefully all glib and loaded parallels between present events and the events this post has dealt with from the world into which I was born at a safe distance, and others I have known at a rather smaller distance. This applies to parallels drawn by both sides today. Those events deserve special abhorrence, a special place in the sad story of humanity’s worst crimes.
And I commend too this earlier post: Rant warning! Yes, I sounded off on FB again…
Neil's Commonplace Book 