sunset, April 11, 2018 – nightfall, April 12.
“While the term Holocaust generally refers to”
the systematic mass murder of the Jewish people [seized throughout Nazi/Axis-occupied Europe and surrounding subjugated nations], the Nazis also murdered [non-Jews designated as] subhuman (Untermenschen) or undesirable [including those falling in multiple categorgies, Jewish or not] targeted for extermination… Slavs (e.g. Russians, Poles, Ukrainians and Serbs), Romanis (gypsies), French, Belgians, Dutch, Greeks, Italians (after 1943), LGBT people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, pansexual ...[a], the mentally or physically disabled, mentally ill;[b] Soviet POWs, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Buddhists, Muslims, [c] Spanish Republicans, Freemasons,[d] [Bahá'í], people of color (especially the Afro-German Mischlinge, called "Rhineland Bastards" by Hitler and the Nazi regime); leftists, communists, trade unionists, capitalists, social democrats, socialists, anarchists, and every other minority or dissident not considered Aryan (Herrenvolk, or part of the "master race") [and all] who disagreed with the Nazi regime.[e][20]
Taking into account all of [these], the Nazis systematically killed an estimated six million Jews and an additional 11 million people...
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THIS LINKS TO WIKIPEDIA’S PAGE ON “The Jewish Skeleton Collection”, part of a Nazi project of “all races” for which living human beings were selected, measured, murdered, butchered, their corpses cast in plaster, and their flesh rendered from their bones, as attempted anatomical proof of ‘subhuman-ness’...
...compared to the Forster-Nietzsche perfectable (including by adoption of/breeding with superior subhuman specimens) Aryan (“noble”) master-race…
“… Zarathustra first announces [this] as a goal humanity can set for itself. All human life would be given meaning by how it advanced a new generation of human beings.
The aspiration of a woman would be to give birth to an Übermensch, for example; her relationships with men would be judged by this standard...”
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The US Holocaust Museum estimates deaths of “as many as 1.5 million children” and 200,000 thousand handicapped people whose love and promise and hope our world will never see — they were categorized as subhuman and undesirable, undeserving of resources that sustain life, undeserving of life itself. Can the world move forward so loveless and so unknowing how to look after and believe in the future of those in need in our families and community? ‘Those in need’ are constantly more of us on the planet. Have we moved forward, or only kept turning in meaningless, repetitive cycles...
This wik page links to 22 lists by occupation/profession of undeserving lives tortured and murdered in concentration camps and death camps, in ghettos, in “transit”, mass slaughter, executions, condoned mob violence, “medical” experiments, slave labor, individually targetted, or casually cut down. The categories are alphabetical, appalling itself, yet what is there left to us for knowing what dreams and potential were torn from this world.
They were actors, architects, artists, athletes, businesspersons, chess players, composers, engineers, historians, jurists, linguists, mathematicians, musicians, philosophers, physicians, politicians, prisoners, religious workers, resistance fighters, scientists, spies (many of them women) against the Reich, and writers in every field.
And plumbers and protesters, manufacturers and nurses, instrument and watch-makers, bakers of bread, cobblers and inventors, lab workers and factory laborers, bookkeepers and fishermen, shopkeepers and shepherds, teachers in children’s schools and in universities, ditch-diggers and industrialists, road-builders and bookbinders, farmers and economists, foresters and entrepreneurs, psychologists and seamstresses, tailors and theologians, carpenters and clerks, bee-keepers and biologists, boatwrights and vintners, glaziers and sail-makers, masons and homemakers, cleaners and child-carers … printers and publishers once smeared with ink, then blood and reduced to ash...
...reduced to invisibility.
Their achievements the credit of thieves, stolen as their homes and their livelihoods and their part in daily-life civilization were, all traces usurped along with their reputations and the very fillings from their dead mouths. The world accepts it when identifying them only by their deaths, as if they lived no significant lives.
So everything they did for their families, towns, countries and cultures, all whom they loved and who loved them, everything they could have been, are wiped out. All their holding back of floods with bare hands and know-how, all their holding up the sky day-to-day, all their courage in the face of fear for a glass-shattered boycotted business, a sick infant or elder, a starving neighbor, or simply a tomorrow at all ... all erased as if they never had been. Millions up in smoke.
Once they were someone’s sister or brother, aunt or grandparent, with sparkling or rheumy eyes, with faces and hands wrinkle-laden by hardworked years or lithe and quick to the gesture or task, the flash of a ready smile or a slow, gentle dawning, frowns of concentration, scowls of anger, cries of joy or outrage, lullabies —
Weren’t they at birth someone’s fragile child? Weren’t they a grandparental and great-grandparental generation before us all? Weren’t they each a passionate gift from the very universe, fulfilled or realized or not?
Or were they only happenstance odd unfortunates the world chose to finish with and harvest the spoils.
Faceless objects of pity now, symbols and allegories and moral lessons good only for using in slogans or for rhetorics of comparison that distance their humanity, trivialize their fate, shrink them to a mere useful image on a page, a distanced, painless, faded consequence of hate-mongering for reward or other profit.
Much in that way, the world did away with the different and undeserving, to close their mouths, to empty their hands and blank out the shape of the space they filled with spirit and breath. To still their minds and silence their hearts. To pocket what remained for ill-gotten gain.
For that objective they were made undeserving, undesirable excess population pressure upon scarce resources, to be used and discarded, to focus the unifying power of hate by accusing as different and ‘wrong’, and then to make dust of.
And so the world made itself the less, for lost love, lost talent, lost skill, lost diversity, lost education, lost cultures, lost caring, lost knowledge, even lost foolishnesses and mistakes. We learn more from our mistakes than our successes, it’s true. But that mistake ...
Do we even grasp yet that the world would have been better today if the world had refused to relinquish them, had demanded to keep them, all those implicit and overt disagreers, all those undeserving undesirable different wrong ones? Do we grasp yet that the saving of them might have been the saving of us now?
See how the world was set backward in thoughtfulness, in creativity, in science and medicine, in soul-saving art, in life-sustaining wisdom, in earth-shaking discovery, in imaginative energy, in caring and commitment, and in teaching to disagree and be different and treasure it… The world set itself backward in letting them be ripped away. All the fine toys and technologies of the present moment are spindrift beside that fact, that chasm, that abyss of how much the world lost from all they could have brought to it, and all that their children and children’s children might have brought to us. And with us.
How much less frightened a planet from which friendship had not been so reft, less nightmared an earth unpolluted by poisonously successful schemes, uncultivated in horrors too tolerated. How much more understanding and valuing of one another now if the world had been then. How better equipped the world’s spirit to meet trouble together and bring each other through dry-shod, to safety, to repair of the world, the better in goodwill and fellowship, if the world had done that.
From hate-ridden convenience in that time, from eager lust for simplistic final solutions —as in so many times and in so many places to so many others past, present and ….
Therefore the world is the poorer now, as the rich get themselves richer, and care-lessness multiples in more corners of the earth, so tutored well in avarice and malice —all consequences be damned— and in more directions than we can assess far less attend.
Of course it multiples! Those millions who would have stood guard with us at so many turning points in destiny since then, joining muscle and breath to decree with us, “No, this is wrong, and we shall not back down!” were stilled 70 years ago. Those millions who might have stood fast with us, joining their knowledge and commitment to ours, to authoritatively undeniably declare, “There are better ways, and we will find and invent them, we will do what it takes, no matter how difficult — we are here for each other!”...
Instead, we now are the weaker and the smaller and the less. Parentless of some of our best —the ones who disagreed and differed— we are over and over self-made under-civilized orphans blundering and burdened and numbed with the toxic residues, too few of us enlisted in these battles now. Many millions too few.
We lost their strength alongside us, and we lost the loving touch of their hands lifting us up. We lost their encouragement, their warning and guidance, the compassion they would have felt for us, and the passion to rebuild for love of us, and for the world that gave them life.
We lost a world that every generation should have inherited, and so it’s become all to do over again, all to learn over again, all to struggle to grow again, stumbling amid such poisoned roots: we still have not caught up.
Have we learned just to talk with one another across boundaries and divides? How to join hands across any common ground we share despite what in the moment we might not? Have we met the challenge of new work together and the always-since-time-began STOPPING TO THINK and to rescue and save and redeem instead of to waste, to dismiss, to discard upon whim, upon emotion, upon delusions of certainty...
Will we only remember how to shout, accuse, ridicule, blame, hate…
Can we embrace a higher legacy from this dust to honor and respect and learn from their memory as a blessing upon the earth, to multiply that blessing by learning together to build and to share.
Or do we believe they were never much that mattered, ancient history, fated to be ghosts, with nothing bequeathed us but momentary mention that they ever lived at all, and died, convenient proof of the goodheartedness of those so much later who will not approach their reality too painfully close, yet claim to know and remember them, with little but a sentimental, fleeting sigh.
יִתְגַּדַּל וְיִתְקַדַּשׁ שְׁמֵהּ רַבָּא.
בְּעָלְמָא דִּי בְרָא
...
... עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם...
הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה בְּרַחֲמָיו שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ
וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל
וְאִמְרוּ
אָמֵן: