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Bristol Herald Courier (Virginia)
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
April 15, 2012 Sunday
Remembering the Holocaust
by Debra McCown, Bristol Herald Courier, Va.
April 15--BRISTOL, Va. -- When Karon Smith thinks about the Holocaust, his
first thought is to draw a connection to something much closer to the
American experience: slavery.
"A lot of people suffered. It shouldn't have been," said Smith, a lifelong
resident of Bristol, Va., who talks easily about the common history of
oppression that he said is shared by Jews -- the primary victims of the
Holocaust -- and African-Americans, many of whose ancestors arrived on
slave ships after being kidnapped from their native lands.
"They suffered a lot, so I think they're just like slaves," he said of the
millions who suffered and died in the Holocaust, the systematic
mass-killing that took place in World War II Europe. "Black people and Jews
were basically the same thing: We went through a lot of turmoil."
This year, Thursday, April 19, is Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day set to
remember a rapid genocide estimated to have taken the lives of 11 million
people -- the majority of them Jews -- over the course of a decade in the
1930s and 1940s.
Shocking for the scale and efficiency of the systematic brutality and
killing that took place under Germany's Nazi regime, the Holocaust is
recalled as a time when humanity collectively failed.
Man on the Street
Smith was one of dozens interviewed by the Bristol Herald Courier and
Tricities.com regarding a few simple history questions:
--Who was Adolf Hitler? (He was the Austrian-born leader who orchestrated
the mass-killing).
--What was the Holocaust? (It was the systematic extermination of millions
of people, the majority of them Jews, in World War II Europe.)
--How did it end? (With the eventual Allied victory in World War II.)
--What should we as a society remember and learn from what happened in that
series of events that began more than 70 years ago?
In general, those interviewed at random had little knowledge of the facts
surrounding the Holocaust. This was as true of college students on the
Virginia Intermont campus as of others spending time downtown.
Some were correct, some guessed and some were incorrect when asked what
country (Germany) was the instigator.
They were pretty sure the United States was one of the good guys and that
Hitler did some bad things. As a general rule, they knew a lot of innocent
people suffered and died, that it wasn't good, and it took a world war to
end it.
Members of the generation alive when it happened knew their history the
best. Others recalled stories they'd been told about family members who'd
died at the hands of the Nazis.
"They put them all in camps, and they killed every one of them," said
Thomas Coffelt, 43, of Bristol, Tenn., "and my grandfather was one of them."
Coffelt said his grandfather, a Jewish leader at that time, was burned
alive.
Of the family members who were sent to the Nazi concentration camps, his
great-grandmother was the only survivor, he said.
"You can forgive, but don't forget," Coffelt said. "Forgive what actually
started the war. Don't forget the ones who were actually in it ... who were
doing nothing [wrong] and then got killed for no reason."
History lesson
To Joseph Fitsanakis, a King College instructor and coordinator of the
college's security and intelligence studies program, the Holocaust was not
only a horrific act of state-sponsored terrorism, but represents a failure
of the world's collective conscience.
"First of all, they tried to kick them out -- not kill them -- not because
they particularly cared about them but because it was cheaper to just kick
them out," Fitsanakis explained of the Nazis' attitude toward Germany's
Jewish population. "But nobody would take them."
Before the Holocaust began, in the 1930s, several conferences were held
among different nations to determine a solution to what they called "the
Jewish problem" in Germany, he said.
"Many Jews could see what was happening. They could tell what was coming,
and they wanted to leave but they couldn't go anywhere," he said. "The
British refused to take any of them. The Americans refused to take many of
them ... and so on and so forth. I think the only country that actually
offered to take some Jews was the Dominican Republic, and they offered to
take 5,000 people."
Even Palestine, the Jewish homeland in the Middle East, and Madagascar, an
island nation off the coast of Africa, were rejected as places where they
could be allowed to relocate, Fitsanakis said.
"That's perhaps what we should remember," he said. "The Nazi Holocaust was
not the fault of just the Nazis. It was the fault of all of those who
refused to assist and also all of those who collaborated with the Nazis."
Another lesson to be learned, he said, is that when one group is
dehumanized, it doesn't end with them.
"When a group is victimized and those of us that are not part of that group
stay aside and don't pay attention, that eventually will turn against us,"
he said.
"The Germans did not just go straight for the Jews. They first practiced
their genocidal tactics against disabled people. Homosexuals and Jehovah's
Witnesses were targeted. Gypsies, eventually communists ... and then
eventually they came to the Jews."
"Very often, you see the chain of events, and the group that knows it's the
next in that chain does not take a stand to help the other group, and
eventually that domino effect leads to the disintegration of the entire
society," he said. "I guess the lesson we should be learning is solidarity,
unity with each other."
Importantly, he said, while Hitler is remembered by history as a villain,
many others -- the generals, the political officials, the bureaucrats --
were equally responsible for what happened during the Holocaust.
"The Holocaust was not the result of one person," he said. "My opinion is
if Hitler had never existed there would still have been a Holocaust because
he was a product of his time."
American connection
After the war was over, dozens of key Nazi officials faced a panel of
American, British, French and Soviet judges in the Nuremberg Trials. They
were charged -- and many convicted -- of crimes against humanity.
But, Fitsanakis said, it was clear at the trials that the Nazis had taken
some of their cues from history -- even American history.
"They said to the American judges: 'We needed living space, and therefore
we had to exterminate some of the subhuman species. You did the same with
the Native Americans, so who are you to accuse us for trying to find living
space for our country when you did the same ... several centuries ago?'"
There is a connection, Fitsanakis said. When Europeans began to arrive in
what is now the United States, some 12 million people already lived here;
after little more than a century, only half a million remained.
"That would classify as a massive extermination," he said. "However, it
wasn't as rapid as during the Holocaust against the Jews. That's what makes
it [the Holocaust] stand out in human history."
What happened to Africans over two centuries of global slave trade could
also be classified as extermination, he said. In both cases, the targeted
groups were seen as less than human -- and that facilitated the acceptance
of their suffering and death.
"Hitler ... was a good student of history," Fitsanakis said. "He took
examples from people. One example he often mentioned was the extermination
of the Armenians in what is now Turkey in the first World War. He often
mentioned: 'Who now remembers about the Armenians? Nobody does, so that
means we have ... permission to do the same things ourselves.'"
In its history lessons, Fitsanakis said, the U.S. should address the bad
examples in its own history, with regard to the treatment of Native
Americans and African-Americans, in the same way that Turkey should teach
about the killing of Armenians in its past.
Preventing genocide
While most of the Bristol residents interviewed about the Holocaust were
sketchy on their historical facts, they remembered and understood why
they'd learned about the Holocaust in school.
They said they knew that whatever happened and wherever it happened, it
should serve as a reminder of why people must be tolerant of one another
and their differences.
"There's no reason to be prejudiced," said Taylor Scott, a 20-year-old
student at Virginia Intermont. "Take that [history] and learn from it. With
everything that happened, it wasn't right, and there should be no
discrimination."
In perhaps a testament to the success of efforts to keep the lessons of the
Holocaust from fading into history, there were very few who'd never heard
of it.
Arthur Berger, senior advisor for external affairs at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, said the prevention of genocide is still a very
real battle, as it has taken place on a smaller scale even in recent
decades.
Two examples from the 1990s: the murder of an estimated 100,000 people in
the former Yugoslavia in Europe and at least 500,000 people in the African
nation of Rwanda. In both cases, the victims were targeted because of their
ethnic background.
There are countries, Berger said, where the risk of genocide remains even
today.
"When you see the kind of evil that took place during the Holocaust and
since then, we don't have the luxury of just standing by and saying it's
none of my business," he said, "because what happens to human beings is
everybody's business."
What happened in Nazi Germany, he said, was simply an extreme form of
hatred -- and hatred can grow in any community.
"Children do not get born hating someone else," he said. "They learn it
from their friends in the schoolyard, they learn it from their parents,
they learn it from their peers, and if you allow hatred to grow in a
community, it can be totally destructive."
He said the power to prevent the kind of atrocities that occurred during
the Holocaust rests with every person -- because every person has the
opportunity to stand up to hatred before it escalates.
Once it reaches the level of genocide, he said, it's much harder to stop.
"So when people hear about hatred, when they see hatred, when they see
somebody being bullied ... don't we have a responsibility to say this is
wrong?" he said.
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, he said, people should be reminded of their
responsibility to fight hatred in their own communities -- whether they are
teachers who can tell their students about the dangers of hate or students
who can intervene to stop a schoolyard bully.
"In every country [during the Holocaust], individuals did something to save
people's lives," Berger said. "Most people didn't. Most people turned away,
and that's what we're saying: Don't turn away."
In Bristol, Smith said, it's all about people helping one another.
"It doesn't matter if you're black or white," he said. "You've got to help
each other in this world. That's all it is: Just help one another, because
everybody's just trying to make it."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
April 15, 2012 Sunday
Remembering the Holocaust
by Debra McCown, Bristol Herald Courier, Va.
April 15--BRISTOL, Va. -- When Karon Smith thinks about the Holocaust, his
first thought is to draw a connection to something much closer to the
American experience: slavery.
"A lot of people suffered. It shouldn't have been," said Smith, a lifelong
resident of Bristol, Va., who talks easily about the common history of
oppression that he said is shared by Jews -- the primary victims of the
Holocaust -- and African-Americans, many of whose ancestors arrived on
slave ships after being kidnapped from their native lands.
"They suffered a lot, so I think they're just like slaves," he said of the
millions who suffered and died in the Holocaust, the systematic
mass-killing that took place in World War II Europe. "Black people and Jews
were basically the same thing: We went through a lot of turmoil."
This year, Thursday, April 19, is Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day set to
remember a rapid genocide estimated to have taken the lives of 11 million
people -- the majority of them Jews -- over the course of a decade in the
1930s and 1940s.
Shocking for the scale and efficiency of the systematic brutality and
killing that took place under Germany's Nazi regime, the Holocaust is
recalled as a time when humanity collectively failed.
Man on the Street
Smith was one of dozens interviewed by the Bristol Herald Courier and
Tricities.com regarding a few simple history questions:
--Who was Adolf Hitler? (He was the Austrian-born leader who orchestrated
the mass-killing).
--What was the Holocaust? (It was the systematic extermination of millions
of people, the majority of them Jews, in World War II Europe.)
--How did it end? (With the eventual Allied victory in World War II.)
--What should we as a society remember and learn from what happened in that
series of events that began more than 70 years ago?
In general, those interviewed at random had little knowledge of the facts
surrounding the Holocaust. This was as true of college students on the
Virginia Intermont campus as of others spending time downtown.
Some were correct, some guessed and some were incorrect when asked what
country (Germany) was the instigator.
They were pretty sure the United States was one of the good guys and that
Hitler did some bad things. As a general rule, they knew a lot of innocent
people suffered and died, that it wasn't good, and it took a world war to
end it.
Members of the generation alive when it happened knew their history the
best. Others recalled stories they'd been told about family members who'd
died at the hands of the Nazis.
"They put them all in camps, and they killed every one of them," said
Thomas Coffelt, 43, of Bristol, Tenn., "and my grandfather was one of them."
Coffelt said his grandfather, a Jewish leader at that time, was burned
alive.
Of the family members who were sent to the Nazi concentration camps, his
great-grandmother was the only survivor, he said.
"You can forgive, but don't forget," Coffelt said. "Forgive what actually
started the war. Don't forget the ones who were actually in it ... who were
doing nothing [wrong] and then got killed for no reason."
History lesson
To Joseph Fitsanakis, a King College instructor and coordinator of the
college's security and intelligence studies program, the Holocaust was not
only a horrific act of state-sponsored terrorism, but represents a failure
of the world's collective conscience.
"First of all, they tried to kick them out -- not kill them -- not because
they particularly cared about them but because it was cheaper to just kick
them out," Fitsanakis explained of the Nazis' attitude toward Germany's
Jewish population. "But nobody would take them."
Before the Holocaust began, in the 1930s, several conferences were held
among different nations to determine a solution to what they called "the
Jewish problem" in Germany, he said.
"Many Jews could see what was happening. They could tell what was coming,
and they wanted to leave but they couldn't go anywhere," he said. "The
British refused to take any of them. The Americans refused to take many of
them ... and so on and so forth. I think the only country that actually
offered to take some Jews was the Dominican Republic, and they offered to
take 5,000 people."
Even Palestine, the Jewish homeland in the Middle East, and Madagascar, an
island nation off the coast of Africa, were rejected as places where they
could be allowed to relocate, Fitsanakis said.
"That's perhaps what we should remember," he said. "The Nazi Holocaust was
not the fault of just the Nazis. It was the fault of all of those who
refused to assist and also all of those who collaborated with the Nazis."
Another lesson to be learned, he said, is that when one group is
dehumanized, it doesn't end with them.
"When a group is victimized and those of us that are not part of that group
stay aside and don't pay attention, that eventually will turn against us,"
he said.
"The Germans did not just go straight for the Jews. They first practiced
their genocidal tactics against disabled people. Homosexuals and Jehovah's
Witnesses were targeted. Gypsies, eventually communists ... and then
eventually they came to the Jews."
"Very often, you see the chain of events, and the group that knows it's the
next in that chain does not take a stand to help the other group, and
eventually that domino effect leads to the disintegration of the entire
society," he said. "I guess the lesson we should be learning is solidarity,
unity with each other."
Importantly, he said, while Hitler is remembered by history as a villain,
many others -- the generals, the political officials, the bureaucrats --
were equally responsible for what happened during the Holocaust.
"The Holocaust was not the result of one person," he said. "My opinion is
if Hitler had never existed there would still have been a Holocaust because
he was a product of his time."
American connection
After the war was over, dozens of key Nazi officials faced a panel of
American, British, French and Soviet judges in the Nuremberg Trials. They
were charged -- and many convicted -- of crimes against humanity.
But, Fitsanakis said, it was clear at the trials that the Nazis had taken
some of their cues from history -- even American history.
"They said to the American judges: 'We needed living space, and therefore
we had to exterminate some of the subhuman species. You did the same with
the Native Americans, so who are you to accuse us for trying to find living
space for our country when you did the same ... several centuries ago?'"
There is a connection, Fitsanakis said. When Europeans began to arrive in
what is now the United States, some 12 million people already lived here;
after little more than a century, only half a million remained.
"That would classify as a massive extermination," he said. "However, it
wasn't as rapid as during the Holocaust against the Jews. That's what makes
it [the Holocaust] stand out in human history."
What happened to Africans over two centuries of global slave trade could
also be classified as extermination, he said. In both cases, the targeted
groups were seen as less than human -- and that facilitated the acceptance
of their suffering and death.
"Hitler ... was a good student of history," Fitsanakis said. "He took
examples from people. One example he often mentioned was the extermination
of the Armenians in what is now Turkey in the first World War. He often
mentioned: 'Who now remembers about the Armenians? Nobody does, so that
means we have ... permission to do the same things ourselves.'"
In its history lessons, Fitsanakis said, the U.S. should address the bad
examples in its own history, with regard to the treatment of Native
Americans and African-Americans, in the same way that Turkey should teach
about the killing of Armenians in its past.
Preventing genocide
While most of the Bristol residents interviewed about the Holocaust were
sketchy on their historical facts, they remembered and understood why
they'd learned about the Holocaust in school.
They said they knew that whatever happened and wherever it happened, it
should serve as a reminder of why people must be tolerant of one another
and their differences.
"There's no reason to be prejudiced," said Taylor Scott, a 20-year-old
student at Virginia Intermont. "Take that [history] and learn from it. With
everything that happened, it wasn't right, and there should be no
discrimination."
In perhaps a testament to the success of efforts to keep the lessons of the
Holocaust from fading into history, there were very few who'd never heard
of it.
Arthur Berger, senior advisor for external affairs at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, said the prevention of genocide is still a very
real battle, as it has taken place on a smaller scale even in recent
decades.
Two examples from the 1990s: the murder of an estimated 100,000 people in
the former Yugoslavia in Europe and at least 500,000 people in the African
nation of Rwanda. In both cases, the victims were targeted because of their
ethnic background.
There are countries, Berger said, where the risk of genocide remains even
today.
"When you see the kind of evil that took place during the Holocaust and
since then, we don't have the luxury of just standing by and saying it's
none of my business," he said, "because what happens to human beings is
everybody's business."
What happened in Nazi Germany, he said, was simply an extreme form of
hatred -- and hatred can grow in any community.
"Children do not get born hating someone else," he said. "They learn it
from their friends in the schoolyard, they learn it from their parents,
they learn it from their peers, and if you allow hatred to grow in a
community, it can be totally destructive."
He said the power to prevent the kind of atrocities that occurred during
the Holocaust rests with every person -- because every person has the
opportunity to stand up to hatred before it escalates.
Once it reaches the level of genocide, he said, it's much harder to stop.
"So when people hear about hatred, when they see hatred, when they see
somebody being bullied ... don't we have a responsibility to say this is
wrong?" he said.
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, he said, people should be reminded of their
responsibility to fight hatred in their own communities -- whether they are
teachers who can tell their students about the dangers of hate or students
who can intervene to stop a schoolyard bully.
"In every country [during the Holocaust], individuals did something to save
people's lives," Berger said. "Most people didn't. Most people turned away,
and that's what we're saying: Don't turn away."
In Bristol, Smith said, it's all about people helping one another.
"It doesn't matter if you're black or white," he said. "You've got to help
each other in this world. That's all it is: Just help one another, because
everybody's just trying to make it."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress