To be annoyed at some views on The Holocaust

[M0naLisa]

I've just seen that one of the last surviving Holocaust survivors has died aged 110! It came up on ITV news page on Facebook. Some of the comments are vile and very nasty!!

Why don't people believe what happened in WWII actually did happen?! Makes me so angry

I was educated on this at school in History, and when my children do WWII at school we will speak to them about what happened etc. do these people who don't believe pass their views on to their children?!

The website of Yad Vashem may be interesting to you.

Primo Levi's 'If this is a man,' is very powerful.

There is so much first hand testimony about what happened not only from the relatives and the survivors, but also from liberators and even from the guards. It is an absolute scandal that there are deniers still.

The deniers really are thick nasty shits and always, in my experience, a certain type of white male, who thinks he is a little bit cleverer than everyone else and that life hasn't dealt him a fair hand.

I've visited Bergen-Belsen. It is awful. The camp was burnt because of typhus so the original buildings aren't still there, like they are at Dachau. When you see a mound and the number, 13,000 on it, with similar mounds next to and opposite, it is too difficult to visualise that number of people, that number of families. It was a very disturbing experience. Anyone who denies it is wilfully closing their eyes and mind to the cold-blooded extermination of many types of people. What type of person would do that?

I've heard the radio report by Richard Dimbleby from Bergen-Belsen. It's easily found on a google search. It think it will tell you all you need to know.

Facebook is not representative of the views of the majority of people and bad news is always popular with the media.

One of the things I think is quite hard to grasp is that Europe generally was anti-Semitic around the time of WWII. When Hitler rose to power, but before the war actually started - ie, before there was a direct threat to the UK - there were plenty of British sympathisers towards some of his policies. Some people here did believe Jews shouldn't hold office or own businesses - google Blackshirts or Oswald Mosely.

When you recognise that, it's easier to see that holocaust deniers are on a continuum of anti-Semitism, which has been around for hundreds of years - it's in Shakespeare FGS.

Of course, that doesn't excuse it or make it OK far from it, holocaust deniers are arsewipes of the first order but hatred of the Jewish people is something that, unfortunately, runs very, very deep. It's not just a few idiots who have popped up in the last ten years as memories start to fade, iyswim, it's part of a very real, very dangerous hatred towards a certain group of people.

My friend read a book about a POW who escaped from Auschwitz 14 times I think it was. She said it's very sad.
I cry everytime at Schindlers List so reading/watching something of a first account will be heartbreaking. It's gut wrenching knowing that many people were killed because of 'who' they were!!!!
The deniers make me sooooo mad

I've met two survivors. They were incredibly dignified women who volunteer to talk to schoolchildren. They had both kept their tattoo numbers on their arms. Heartbreakingly both had lost children to suicide, they were very matter of fact that suicide amongst survivor families was common :(
I'll be popping over to Facebook shortly to report all those antisemites, thanks for the tip off!

On the ITV news fb group? Good idea!!!

It's thought that Primo Levi (may have) committed suicide - tragically suffered from the terrible memories as a camp survivor.

To start with, All hell let loose, the world at war 1939-45.

I also highly recommend Max Arthur, "Voices From" series, it's just a wonderful record of how people like us saw and experienced war. Specific to the holocaust is this book www.amazon.co.uk/Forgotten-Voices-The-Holocaust-Survival/dp/0091898269/ref=pd_sim_b_9?ie=UTF8&refRID=0E2F6N3T9CBZF29R9XE4

Your local library will certainly stock them.

I can recommend a wonderful course run by Coursera, just called the Holocaust. Its a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) originally convened by the University of Santa Cruz CA.

It gives a lot of the background leading up to the Holocaust, and also covers the literature and poetry of the Jews, so it isn't negative, actually it is very enlightening and uplifting. Although it is difficult not to, it is important not to define Jews only by the Holocaust but to also to have a broader understanding of their diaspora (spreading of Jews round the world).

I loved the Coursera course because it has video captures from lectures by two venerable elderly gentlemen one of whom was a Hungarian Holocaust surviver, the other being an expert Jewish historian. It isn't a live course any more, so you can't do the accredited essays, but the materials are so unique interesting and very educational.

To think they must be in their 80's at least, and yet they stood there for many hours over the duration of those weeks, lecturing young Uni students, to keep the message alive. Also they were joined by a Holocaust survivor who gives a lot of details about her experience in the ghetto - so many decades ago, yet she remembers the detail as if it were yesterday!

Yes, mycat Primo Levi most probably did take his life. He was a brilliant scientist, a chemist, and wrote a book about the Periodic Table of Elements, where he tells a story about each of the Elements.

Another book very worth reading is called "Man's Search for Meaning" which was written by a Jewish psychiatrist called Vicktor Frankl - his theory was that people can endure any deprivation, any hardship, any challenge provided they have meaning in their life. So, in the concentration camp, when you have had every human dignity stripped away from you, where you feel there is nothing left, just search inside yourself for meaning, even if it is seeing a ray of light through the bars of your prison, you can survive.

A thought transfixed me - for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love

My impression from reading a little on Holocaust denial back in university is that deniers always have another agenda - its motivated either by Arab / Muslim opposition to Israel's existence or racist right-wing hatred of Jews. In the former case the Holocaust is perceived as legitimating the state of Israel, and therefore has to be denied. So Holocaust denial was official policy in Iran under Ahmadinejad for example. I'm not sure anyone has ever become a denier because they weighed up all the evidence rationally blah blah.

Aged 18 I was privileged to hear Holocaust survivor Freddie Knoller give a talk at the Holocaust Museum in Newark. It was one if the most amazing, most humbling experiences of my life and until the day I die I will be grateful that I got to hear and meet him. You've never seen a room full of rowdy 18 year olds as silent or seen any as transfixed as we were. He spoke for more than two hours and you could have heard a pin drop the whole way through. A truly amazing man. Here's his book, which talks about his time in Auschwitz www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1843580284

A few years later I visited the camp and I wish that everyone in the world was able to visit. It's a part of history that we must never forget. In my opinion Holocaust denial should be illegal here, as it is in most of the rest of Europe.

I used to work with holocaust survivors and met Freddie Knoller a few times. Such a lovely man and his story is so so moving and hard to listen to.

I find it incomprehensible that people can still deny that it happened, and it is all the more terrifying when we know hear about the atrocities happening in North Korea now. It makes me feel utterly depressed and helpless.

I would recommend If this is a Man by Primo Levi, it is an incredible first person testimony of his experience of Auschwitz. The most important book I have ever read.

My Uncle was involved in the liberation of one of the concentration camps, it affected him hugely, he never really talked about it until the end of his life.
I am not sure what he would have said/done to a holocaust denier but it wouldn't have been pretty! His personal experience was very real.

Glad to hear FK is as nice as he seemed Gwendoline. I went and got him to sign my copy of his memoir after and we talked for a while shout my Jewish relatives from Eastern Europe. He was incredibly warm and easy to speak to.

A lot of the Holocaust denial comes from racism thickness mentalhealthissues some guy in the 1960s, I think it was, who was an industrial engineer who insisted that he could prove that the gassing and chimney system at Auschwitz as described and depicted in photographs wouldn't work, and thus people were lying and had falsified pictures. This idea became quite popular at the time,even though it was quickly proved that he was totally wrong, and was a massive far-right anti-semite.

As Wilson points out, Europe was so incredibly anti-semitic at that time that it's hard for our modern minds to grasp (and there's still a huge problem with it, even in the UK). Most people know stuff about Oswald Mosley, and how the Daily Mail backed Hitler and the nazis; lesser known is that the Queen Mother was a supporter of nazi policies, and that it was said that Edward VIII was actually forced into abdication not entirely because of his affair with Wallace Simpson, but because he was a close personal friend of Hitler. Also that the UK, along with the rest of the world, was given the chance to take Jewish refugees in the 1930s, at a global conference (date and place escapes my mind) where Germany was totally explicit about what they were going to do to Jews, and every country except for a couple of small ones, like Dominique and the Netherlands, refused.

People also always say that no-one knew what was going on with the Jews and other persecuted groups under the nazis, and yet, every old person I've ever talked to on the subject always says that most people knew, and it was in the papers, and on the radio, at the time, and that people just wanted to pretend they didn't know, then and now.

The best book on the topic that I've read, is The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert. It is totally comprehensive, and he is a world-reknown expert on the topic. Another good, but chilling book is Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen, which exposes just how much the German population (and others) were involved in the murder of the Jews and other groups. I will never forget reading about how ordinary men used to beg to be allowed to take part in the shootings of Jews into mass graves, and that the things they did to them, before and after death, was so abhorrent that the SS soldiers who undertook the shootings on a regular basis were traumatised by it.

for me, recently reading up on WW2, the laxity of the sentences given to the people who ran the camps appalled me. Some went to prison for a year or two then came out and carried on their jobs. You only have to look at the huge companies that profited from the camps. Last year BASF advertised themselves as the "friendly chemical company" must have forgotten the Zyklon B gas then.

if you can get to the Imperial War Museum in London after it reopens in July, they have a Holocaust Memorial Exhibit which I visited a few years back and have never forgotten. It is powerful and distressing - under 11s are not allowed and it needs caution with those older.

but I feel that everyone should see it when they are ready.

I was in a production of Kindertransport a few years ago and we were asked to perform it for Holocaust Memorial Day - several survivors and people who had been resettled in the UK as part of the Kindertransport attended, and being able to talk to them afterwards was a great honour and deeply moving.

DH's Grandmother narrowly escaped the camps - her first husband didn't, and died there. It infuriates me that people can deny what happened. The trouble is, these days people can barely remember what happened 30 years ago (I keep reading threads where people say 'oh, that was the 80's, there wasn't an awareness of xyz then' - having lived through the 80's as a teenager/young adult, yes there bloody well was!!), so the message has to be kept alive or it will fall into the realms of legend.

Just an update
I did report any deniers I found on the itv site. Facebook however didn't agree with my reporting - it looks like it fell foul of their reporting clause which allows "difference of political opinion."
I'm pretty amazed to be honest.

Sadly, I wouldn't be amazed - FB takes down pictures of breastfeeding, but allows hate groups to post pictures of domestic violence, rape and murder of women under the bullshit of 'free speech'.

As a Jew I just wanted to say that the term holocaust is offensive in itself to many Jews. I don't think I am able to justice to explaining why, but I would suggest a read into the meaning of the term.