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AIBU?

To be upset after reading a book about events that happened over 70 years ago

14 replies

sandycove · 13/08/2015 22:51

It was a factual book about life for the Jews in Nazi Germany. It was reading about how thousands of children were sent off to safety in "Kindertransports". The parents weren't able to leave and had to stay and await their fate but a lot of them managed to get their children accepted in other countries. It was heartbreaking, they filled trains with these poor children, some only a few months old. One of these children is describing how it was for him as a six year old staring out of the train at his mother and father and imagining how desperate they must have felt to have to put their only child on this train and knowing that they'd probably never see him again. So unbearably sad. I can't get the image out of my head.
It was so long ago but this has touched me so much, that poor little boy and all the other poor children, and their heartbroken parents.

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squoosh · 14/08/2015 01:02

I watched Shoah Solas. I can usually shake off harrowing things I may see or read about but I felt low for a good two weeks after watching that.

Such an important piece of documentary.

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caroldecker · 14/08/2015 00:54

Unfortuately it has not gone away. Jeremy Corbyn, the favourite to win the Labour party leadership, is friends with people who want to finish what the Nazi's started.

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SolasEile · 14/08/2015 00:39

Don't ever watch Shoah, Claude Lanzemann's documentary about the Holocaust. It is mostly first-person testimony and very raw as it was made the in 1970s talking to people who had really lived through it. I felt sick watching it but couldn't stop as it was so gripping. The testimony of local people who witnessed what went on at Treblinka (extermination camp not 'just' a labour camp like Buchenwald etc) is horrifying. Pregnant women and babies gassed on arrival etc. Truly unbelievable.

Unfortunately similar things are going on around the world still today, ISIS and their treatment of Yazidis, for example, and people are doing nothing - me included.

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sandycove · 13/08/2015 23:27

Cashewnutty yes I can imagine it causing depression. It's so unbelievably harrowing.

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sandycove · 13/08/2015 23:25

The book is called Kristallnacht.....Prelude to Disaster, by Martin Gilbert.
It's about events leading up to The night of broken glass and the horrors during and after it.

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sandycove · 13/08/2015 23:21

Well queenbean I have been told a few times that I dwell on things too much and "oh that's all in the past now". I just get so upset, some think it's out of proportion because it was so long ago.

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cashewnutty · 13/08/2015 23:17

I ask what book as my DD did her theology dissertation on this subject. She looked at the writings of Primo Levi and Elie Schwartz in relation to the biblical book of Job . She found it deeply affecting and had to battle deep depression whilst finishing her work. That she got a first makes me so proud and i know she is now more humble through reading these works

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DeeWe · 13/08/2015 23:16

My great aunt was on it too. She wasn't Jewish though. Her parents were Quakers and saw it as their duty to stand up for what they saw to be wrong. They died in a concentration camp. Very brave. I salute them.

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treaclesoda · 13/08/2015 23:15

I don't think of it as long ago really. Some of those children were the same age as my parents, and I'm only 40.

I used to read a lot of WW2 history books but ever since becoming a parent I have had to avoid books on this aspect of it because I can't just read it as 'facts' and 'history' it is too raw, and I know it is a cop out to avoid reading about it but really my mental health isn't robust enough to be able to cope.

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feetheart · 13/08/2015 23:13

It's not that long ago, my lovely MiL was 12 when she left Germany on the Kindertransport. DD is exactly her age now, I can't imagine the pain of both the parents and children.

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Bambambini · 13/08/2015 23:12

I don't think of it as long ago. Seeing and reading about the horrors always just feels like yesterday.

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Queenbean · 13/08/2015 23:08

Is this really an AIBU? Do you imagine anyone will actually come along and tell you YABU?

As obviously, so so obviously, you aren't

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VivaLeBeaver · 13/08/2015 23:08

Stories surrounding what happened to jewish families in the war upsets me badly to be honest. I just keep imagining dd going through that.

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cashewnutty · 13/08/2015 23:06

What book was it?

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