#Concentration camp survivor

[whatareyoureallyafraidof]

  Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In honor of this observance, watch this video to learn more about the history of Auschwitz and hear powerful stories from some of the survivors.

#Holocaust #Holocaust Remembrance Day #Auschwitz #Never forget #remember #remembrance #Germany #Nazi #Nazis #Concentration camp #Jew #Jews #Jewish #history #survivors

[rotzaprachim]

I’ll defend the end of rogue one to my dying day as good narrative storytelling BUT it is retroactively noticeable that it killed off the most notable canon concentration camp survivors (cassian, jyn, and melshi) and therefor literally killed off one of the darkest canon recognitions of fascism, therefor also avoiding the ethical questions of imperfect survivors rather than peaceful corpses

#Tw concentration camps #Tw Shoah #Like sw as a narrrwirce doesn’t *have* to come back to that because the canon survivors are now dead #And idk obviously I’ve been thinking about inconvenient survivors versus peaceful corpses a lot #The fact sw never made itself seriously think about what would happen to men like cassian and their children and grandchildren #After the war feels really significant in a way #Jandor #אנדור #Like idk not to metaphorize but it means cassian never had to go back to niamos and then live #Next to that one stormtrooper who arrested him and threw him in the court #Never had to like. Share awkward lunch with that one guy for the rest of his life #And all those uh uncomfortable experiences

[cqcandchill]

I'M FREE!!!!! got myself a little treat with my last textbook (book i was looking for that my uni bookstore had in stock for some reason??) and now i am going the fuck home to do NOTHING

#the book is a memoir from a gay concentration camp survivor #... i really am about to do this video essay arent i!

[calvins-dad]

it's such a shame that taylor has some songs i genuinely really like but she insists on being the worst, most annoying kind of celebrity to the point i can't listen to her music anymore

#like girlie pop if you want to release annoying music like the man and karma and have your whole revenge-girl-boss-sona you need to quit #making decisions that are almost a parody of white feminsism #'biggest pop star in the world writes song about how if she was a MAN she would be even bigger' #'pop star who wrote pro-gay you need to calm down song dating guy who did japanese concentration camp survivor impression' #'girl who was born with oodles of money and is a blonde haired blue eyed conventionally attractive white woman writes song about how life #always works out for her. because of karma.' #there's plenty of ~problematic celebs or whatever and i don't think it's useful to say taylor is uniquely problematic. but imo she has #become uniquely annoying! #sorry to any swiftiemutuals but i had to get this off my chest #mine

[thedreadvampy]

callout posts will truly be like:

and the post they're talking about will be like

and then they'll be like "what do you mean I'm overstating harm?"

#red said #so um. i do not know the user this post is about btw #but like i don't know bc this is literally the only link in the callout that was not broken. #so like. if the way this. the only link where i could see what she actually said. was framed was imo so wildly hyperbolic #what does that imply about the other strongly worded links? which i can't check? #and why given that all but one link is broken in a callout would you be linking to that callout other than that #you anticipate that people won't look past the long long looooong list of links titled like this? #i mean jesus christ you fucking people #and look it's entirely possible this person has done some fucked up shit idk her. but if you want people to hear you or #is uhhhhhhh is framing something this benign as 'moving a concentration camp survivor for using the wrong language about his experience' #(note that takei isn't. talking about his camp experiences in the tweet which the user compared to the existing tweet abt liberals) #is that. helping your case? or priming anyone who like. LOOKS at what you're linking to give your points less credence #bc it makes it look like you're scrambling for anything you can paint in a negative light rather than responding to actual harm #every callout is like this. get ya fuckin priorities in order babes.

[hussyknee]

An earnest interrogation of our systems of knowledge reproduction is what I live for, as a disability advocate and student of decolonisation. But whenever I see someone griping about how inaccurate Wikipedia is, dollars to donuts they turn out to be either a right wing covid truther or a Tankie. I'm sorry that hard facts and other people's lived realities are inconvenient to your worldview boo. Here, have a lollipop. 😂

#the two camps of people who have attacked my 'stop trying to vandalise wikipedia' reblog have been covid truthers and tankies #one of the 'comrades' were complaining that Wikipedia 'made up a concentration camp' #and 'let senior contributors say whatever they wanted' #tfw people believe global south genocide survivors over your western tinhattery 😔 #the covid truthers accused me of 'promoting human rights abuses' asdfghjklnjsnjs #the perfect symmetry of the horseshoe is a beautiful thing #anyway if you have beef with wikipedia Im going to be justifiably suspicious #reminder that you have as much of an ethical obligation to chase off tankies and antis as much as radfems terfs and fash #they are all of the same cruel unethical and anti-intellectual poison well #tankies #anti intellectualism #anti communism #anti radfem #tumblr wank #wikipedia #knee of huss

[miqojak]

What is the worst thing you have put your OC through story-wise?

Hm. Other people have put her through some shit - but me, personally... that's a good one. The only thing I can think I've done to put her through the wringer that wasn't brought on by someone else ICly, or someone leaving the game OOC, is her backstory! Everything else since has happened organically, and has hurt almost worse by virtue of being people she actually cared about who hurt her - but I mean, I gave her a backstory where she was a (reluctant) teenage guerilla fighter during the Garlean occupation of Ala Mhigo who ended up in a concentration camp! I don't go into the specifics of what she went through there, because we were all taught what goes on in that kind of place, at some time or another... and I don't think it gets a whole lot worse than that!

#ffxiv #ffxiv rp #ffxiv oc #garlemald #ala mhigo #gyr abania #she was a native fighting for her land and suffered as so many have in the real world - what's worse than losing that fight? #it's an angle I wanted to dig into and is more relevant than ever these days it would seem #true story I researched actual concentration camp survivors for her backstory #and every single one I read about/watched mentioned that they held no animosity for their former captors/abusers #which cannot be said for Jak - she couldn't fathom giving up her hatred

[quotesfrommyreading]

Standing in this punishing winter wind that blasts through the gas chamber doors and into the vents and flues of the gaping crematory ovens, Martin is at peace. He prefers these common and clichéd horrors of the Holocaust, those he has seen with his own eyes, heard with his own ears, those he shares with a million other survivors, those he has read of in books and seen in films, to the personal horrors of his wife and daughter, horrors he can only imagine. These eyes that have begun to fail him here in Dachau, these ears that no longer accept the sounds around him. In Dachau, Martin has seen and heard the worst of horrors that man ever committed against man, but they are nothing compared to his inner vision of the flaming barn that lit Jedwabne's night-time sky and cast its dancing flames against the rising twin-spired church.

Martin comes to the gas chamber, to this place of palpable horror, to escape the horrors he never knew, the screams he never heard but that have called to him every silent day, every silent hour of his long life, the cries of a wife he once loved, and possibly still does, the screams of a daughter whose age he cannot speak, whose name he cannot utter, whom, out of sheer horror for what she must have suffered, he can only describe with an extended arm and an open palm.

At the age of eighty-seven, Martin feels the biting wind on his cheeks, the chill in his legs, the numbness in his fingers, and the gnawing hunger in his stomach, and knows he is alive. He has survived another day in Dachau. He can slam the gas chamber door at will, he can run the body trays in and out of the crematory ovens a hundred times if he wishes, and no one, not Max Mannheimer, not Barbara Distel, not the voices that call him on the phone or in his dreams, can touch Martin Zaidenstadt here. This is Martin's domain.

Ich bringe Martin zur Gaskammer. He revels in these words, in the fact that they can be repeated day after day. He has survived the gas chamber today as he did fifty years ago, as he has done for the past four years, as he has done, so he believes, for the last half-century. The watchtowers are vacant, the electrified fences idle, the gas ovens cold, and Martin stands triumphant in Dachau. It is the story of death and rebirth, reenacted day in and day out within this walled compound. Ich bringe Martin zur Gaskammer. Once again, Martin has entered the gas chambers and come out alive.

  —  The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau(Timothy W. Ryback)

#book quotes #timothy w. ryback #the last survivor: legacies of dachau #history #nazism #antisemitism #psychology #trauma #ww2 #holocaust #germany #nazi germany #dachau #dachau concentration camp #martin zaidenstadt

[weakzen]

man, now i'm thinking again about how obsidian gave your courier the opportunity to canonically speak latin, a language that was obscure and functionally dead even before the apocalypse, but it was apparently too much for bethesda to assume that a player character would be able to speak any form of chinese, y'know, a language spoken by billions of people around the planet lmaooo

#fallout #really loved that for my (canon) chinese-american sole survivor #lemme tell ya #also just l o v e d being forced to pine for how 'good' it was before the bombs fell #like the concentration camps weren't a thing #like most of her relatives hadn't been murdered in them #like she didn't actually feel *safer* a lot of ways in a post-apocalyptic world #more free to be herself #'cause at least the people trying to kill her now weren't doing it because of her race #anyway gettin' mad about video games again lmao #💀💀

[emeraldcreeper]

I will accidentally and inadvertently use my fanfiction therapizing the miserable experience within a paper about literally providing therapy to the entirely miserable and hopeless

#it’s with existentialism #which is an old school of psychology before cognition and biological psychology took over #it’s about giving life meaning through suffering is my thesis and it’s useful cause boy fuckin howdy ain’t we sufferin in 2022 #had to read man’s search for meaning to do it and it’s about a concentration camp survivor who pioneers logotherapy which is a branch #of existentialism this is so circular but not it’s fun and cool #and I was writing and went wait #this is just me writing the sad old men being nice #despite and including their traumas from their lives #it’s all existentialism baby #there’s a ton of papers supporting it’s use in the clinical setting it’s literally just because meaning is hard to study in a clinical #setting so unlike cbt you can’t go yeah it’s clinically proven to work with this margin of error that we beat it works in these cases #that’s all well and good until you got treatment resistant cases #where it’s a crushing loneliness or a fear of death #where it’s a logical fear to have with no cognitive errors so the now widely used methods #don’t work #ergo we use existentialism #also it works for the terminally ill for obvious reasons #Srry to therapize I gotta shittily infodump before I scholarly infodump

[cruelsister-moved2]

ugh i dont want to always go on abt it but i really wish extians were better at like... Reading the room 😭

#has anyone else seen that mb going around #w a bunch of quotes abt like grrr I want to fight god or whatever #but one of them is like something someone wrote on the wall of a concentration camp #and people in the notes are like 'wow imagining my ocs saying this gives me the feels' or whatever the hell #I've seen it several times and it just kind of makes me really uncomfortable and upset #I can never tell if im just like a sensitive gatekeeper n there doesn't seem 2 be anyone else in the notes expressing any discomfort im #just like I don't know if the feelings of someone being tortured and waiting to die bc of the god they or their ancestors believed in #really belongs on your like ex catholic trauma web weaving or whatever it is :(idk #kinda upset now😭😭😭 #they did the same w Dan pagis as well that except from his poem which is abt his parents being holocaust survivors #and they just took out one line to be like wow parents hahahs<3 or whatever #like. can you stoppppp put it back

[rotzaprachim]

why the andor fandom own you money? :o

the answer might have something to do with a) the whole fandom treatment of narkina 5 and b) the treatment of the removal of cassian’s sandals (a Mexican fan pointed out that they’re huaraches too, I think this is an essential part of the intersectional analysis here) as some kind of Easter egg foot fetish content that the creators had No idea what they did, throwing this out to the Thirsty fans, rather than an explicit reference to the Shoah. Fandom in general not clocking that the removed shoes are used as an international symbol of genocide rememberance by Jewish and Indigenous peoples to honor and remember members of our peoples who were murdered

#I’m not Mexican but I am mestiza & Jewish so this is some nuanced territory #Furthermore while I’m well are that Diego Luna isn’t Jewish - and neither is Felicity jones for that matter #There’s something to chew on about movies in which characters are unambiguously death camp or concentration camp survivors #So there’s Jewish death in the script #But these characters are never treated as living Jews or represented as living Jews in aus and fixits #This is a nuanced area that’s more symptomatic or Hollywood as a whole than these specific shows but it’s sure something to me #Shoah Tw #If you are going to symbolize the deaths of our people as the worst thing that could possibly happen #Why can you not have our lives and cultures even if they’re uncomfortable to you?

[sapper-in-the-wire]

Liberals wincing at the brutality of Hamas’ attack is even more smoothbrain when you consider that the Gaza Strip is objectively the worst concentration camp in the world.

It’s the 2nd most densely populated area in the entire world, 95% of water isn’t safe, they are only given 4 hours of electricity (imagine this with the population density and Mediterranean heat), medicine and basic foodstuffs like juice are embargoed. The average age in Gaza is 19 - the old and weak die quickly as their health care system cannot get supplies and doesn’t have stable electricity. More than half of youths under 18 expressed that they have no real desire to live and contemplate suicide regularly. 45% unemployment. Children get blown up playing soccer on the beach by advanced warships. It’s probably the most surveilled and spied upon place in the world. It’s a tiny strip of land 25 miles wide that is regularly subjected to bombing.

In 2018 mass peaceful demonstrations were organized, thousands and thousands of Palestinians marched along the border wall. Israel shot 2,000 of them with live ammunition, but only killed around 200 because they deliberately aim at legs to place even more strain on the depleted medical infrastructure and make an invalid that can’t contribute as well. 36,000 Palestinians were injured peacefully protesting.

Every year the IDF invades Al-Asqa mosque, gasses the worshippers and cracks heads open, and then they leave because there’s no point aside from violent harassment. And then there’s the constant news from other occupied areas of Palestinians being evicted, homes being bulldozed, the survivors fined and harassed. Palestinian olive trees, generational in their age, bulldozed by the occupiers.

Shooting civilians wantonly might be morally dubious in a situation like Hawaii, some place where an occupation makes you disadvantaged and a second class citizen. But Gaza is just flat out a death camp. Of course the commandos went berserk with rage, of course they brought bodies back to parade in the streets - everyone has been dehumanized for their entire lives. Treat people like animals and they might just act like animals once they get their hands on you.

#Palestine #Israel

[youtwitinmyface]

THAT TIME I MET A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR‏

I was talking to one of my coworkers today, who mentioned watching some documentary about the Holocaust, and what a horrible event it was. It reminded me of the time I met a survivor. It was during the first year I was working at my current job, back in 2002. In addition to shipping orders out we also sometimes have customers come to pick up their orders from us (we call those “Will Call”…

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#concentration camps #holocaust deniers #holocaust survivor #the holocaust

[mariacallous]

Goldie Finkelstein was just 13 when she was sent to Wiener Graben, a work camp that later became a concentration camp. The youngster lost her entire family in the war, and among the things she never learned from them was how to cook. She had no family recipes and, according to her son, when she married Sol Finkelstein, also a Holocaust survivor, she didn’t know how to boil water or cook an egg.

Eventually, other survivors taught Goldie the necessary skills, and she was a quick learner. She soon became known for the copious amounts of baked goods she would provide for any occasion. Her recipes, some of which are included in the “Honey Cake and Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors” cookbook, include cake mixes and other ingredients that wouldn’t have been used in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. Her whiskey cake, for example, calls for both yellow cake mix and vanilla pudding mix.

Goldie’s experience illustrates the ways in which recipes, including those we think of as quintessentially Ashkenazi Jewish, have changed over the years. Survivors lost the ancestors who passed along oral recipes. Families’ personal artifacts, such as handwritten recipes, were abandoned when Jews were forced to flee. 

Most significantly, perhaps, after the war, survivors had access to different ingredients in their new homes. Sometimes that was due to seasonality, such as was the case for those who moved from Eastern Europe to Israel and had access to more fruits and vegetables year-round, including dates and pomegranates. Other times, it reflected changing tastes or newfound wealth  — liver soup, pates with liver and offal were classic Eastern European dishes in the early 1900s, when there was an intention to use every part of the animal, but became increasingly uncommon. In other cases, like Goldie’s, packaged goods replaced homemade. Another survivor whose recipes appear in “Honey Cake and Latkes,”Lea Roth, detailed making noodles for Passover from the starch leftover at the bottom of a bowl after grating potatoes before the war. After the war, most people added “noodles” to the grocery list.

“Some of these recipes changed because of New World versus Old World,” explains Jeffrey Yoskowitz, author of “The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods.” Yoskowitz and his co-author Liz Alpern work not to replicate pre-war Ashkenazi Jewish recipes, but to reclaim and modernize them. To do that, they’ve had to examine the ways in which recipes have changed.

In the Old World, for instance, almost every recipe called for breadcrumbs. At Passover, the leftover crumbs from the matzah were used to make matzah balls, leaving nothing to waste. But when immigrants in the U.S. could use Manischewitz pre-made matzah meal, then recipes started calling for it to make matzah balls.Today’s recipes for kugels with cream cheese, cottage cheese and sour cream would not have been made in the Old World, where dairy products were expensive. Again, ubiquitous cows in the New World made that “celebration of dairy” possible, Yoskowitz says.

At first, recipes may not seem like the most essential thing to recover from Holocaust survivors, but they paint a picture of what life was like before the war. It is essential to see the Jewish experience as one that is not solely as victims, and learning what people ate and cooked is part of that.

“Bringing back recipes can help bring people back to life,” says Edna Friedberg, a historian and senior curator with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “In particular, it was women who were in the kitchen in this period, and so this is a way to make the lives of women very vivid and real for people.”

The idea is not to romanticize Eastern Europe, says Maria Zalewska, executive director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, which published “Honey Cake and Latkes,” but to see the memories connected to togetherness, like picking fruit toward the end of the summer and using that fruit in a recipe, such as cold cherry soup with egg-white dumplings. 

In addition, examining recipes gives us a sense of what role cooking and food played in trauma processing, Zalewska says. “Remembering the foods and the food traditions of their lives before imprisonment were some of the ways that survivors coped with starvation,” Zalewska adds. These are things that survivors say they are not often asked about, but when asked they report remembering dreaming about food during incarceration. 

“We have quite a number of testimonies, where survivors talk about being in situations of starvation, and food deprivation and ghettos and camps and in hiding, and that dreaming about and remembering food from before gave them emotional sustenance,” explains Friedberg.

Exploring such memories have been meaningful for those survivors who were young when they lost their families.

New Orleans’ Chef Alon Shaya has been working for several years to recreate recipes from a book belonging to the family of Steven Fenves, a survivor and a volunteer for the museum. The book was rescued by the family cook, Maris, when the family was forced to flee their home on the Yugoslavia-Hungary border in 1944. The recipes are largely written without measurements, times or temperatures, and many of the ingredients are different from those used today. (Like the Fenves family, Goldie’s son, Joseph Finkelstein, says his mother wasn’t big on using measurements as we think of them in recipes today. She knew the quantity of an ingredient, for example, if it would fit in her palm.) Unlike Yoskowitz, who is looking to update recipes, Shaya has been working to replicate them as closely as possible  — and has come across a few surprises.

Many of the desserts use a lot of walnuts, for example, which, of course, are also used in contemporary baking. But Shaya is using what he says are “copious amounts of walnuts” in various ways, such as grilled walnuts and toasted walnuts. The Fenves family walnut cream cake, which includes both walnuts ground in the batter and in a cream in-between the cake layers, has featured on the menu at one of Shaya’s restaurants, Safta, in Denver.

For all the recreation, and Shaya’s goal to bring the tastes of his youth back to Fenves, he says “it is impossible that a recipe in New Orleans would be the same as one in Bulgaria. The seasons are different, what animals are butchered are different, and the spices taste different.”

Indeed, place matters, Yoskowitz says. Ashkenazi food has a reputation of being terrible, he says. Take mushroom soup, for example. “There is no good mushroom soup in a deli. It is made with mushrooms that don’t have much flavor. But if you have it somewhere made with mushrooms grown in the forest, then that is going to be good soup.”

Many Holocaust survivors settled in new lands with new ingredients, and little memory of how things were made before the war. They knew they used to eat mushroom soup but didn’t specifically remember the forest-grown and harvested fungi. So, dishes morphed depending on what survivors had in their new home. In Eastern Europe, veal was plentiful, but in the U.S. and Israel, schnitzel began being made with chicken instead (a process Yoskowitz calls the “chickentization” of cuisine). And the beloved Jewish pastrami on rye? The pastrami would have traditionally been made with kosher goose or lamb. It wasn’t until Jews came to the U.S. that beef was easily accessible. 

The same is true of what is likely the most iconic Jewish American dish. “Bagel and lox are what we think of as the most Jewish food. But the only thing that came over was the cured and smoked fish,” Yoskowitz says. “Cream cheese was a New York state invention. Capers were Italians. It was a completely new creation, and it became a taste associated with Jewish people.”

One of the most poignant recipes in the “Honey Cake and Latkes” book is a chocolate sandwich, a basic concoction of black bread, butter and shaved dark chocolate. Survivor Eugene Ginter remembers his mother making it for him in Germany after the war, to fatten him up after years of starvation.

Adds Shaya: “We have to continue to adapt, and I think that that is part of the beauty of it.”

[quotesfrommyreading]

As with so many other survivors, the siblings tried to blot out all memories of their barbarous history and rarely spoke about them, because it was 'too hard'. In the days when talking therapies were relatively new, some of those who lived through the Holocaust suffered from tremendous guilt that they had survived when so many had died. Others sought oblivion through work or alcohol, family or suicide. As survivor Esther Bauer put it, 'The first twenty years we couldn't talk about it. For the next twenty years no one wanted to hear about it. Only in the next twenty years did people start asking questions.'

Instead, each dealt privately with the experiences seared into the memory. They coped as bet they could with the unwelcome flashbacks brought on by the triggers that were constantly lying in wait. It might be a jackhammer or a car backfiring; a high stone wall or a passing freight train; someone speaking German or the smell of singed hair; a random pile of clothes or the sound of dogs barking. One survivor broke down when his hairdresser produced electric clippers to trim his hair. Others developed paranoia about insects and blowflies. Some had panic attacks in crowded subway trains. All sense of proportion had shifted as the survivors tried to acclimatise themselves to a life without fear.

  —  Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope (Wendy Holden)

#book quotes #wendy holden #born survivors: three young mothers and their extraordinary story of courage defiance and hope #history #psychology #trauma #mental illness #mental health #holocaust #concentration camps #ptsd #survivor guilt #suicide