Bringing this long thread over from Universeodon...the first one will be visible, so click through for the rest.
🧵 I know a lot of you have not read any #holocaust memoirs. Last night I finished up a bound volume of "An Interrupted Life" & "Letters from Westerbork" which were the diary & correspondence of Etty Hillesum, who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation.
In the first half of her diary she tells us of her wild romp through the men of her circle of friends. Anyone who thinks the US in the 60s invented sex is...wrong, lol.
Then Westerbork: a transit camp, a holding place while you waited to be shipped to the concentration camps.
In this thread I'm going to post some of the things I underlined for various reasons in the book.
Not everything is profound. It's just things I wanted to think about. I invite you to think about them with me.
I won't say Etty was a brave person. In fact I often found her forced, willful optimism to be grating.
She was highly intelligent, reading and speaking a few different languages. But at times she is quite...idiotic, I would say, though you might not agree. She's 27 & basically an overgrown teenager with little responsibility. Her time is filled with analyzing her love life in excruciating detail...until the Nuremberg Laws were imposed. (We'll get to those in due time in the narrative...)
At one point she says she can't can't stand to listen to the "rumors" about the concentration camps. But as an employee of the Jewish Council (collaborators who selected people to be deported) she had to have known that nobody in their right mind would ship the crippled, elderly, infants, and chronically ill off to a "labor" camp. She knew. They all knew.
Just like we know now what the right wing intends to do to women, to lgbtq people, to POC, and to non-christians.
"She could not bear the ugliness that was flooding the world," the introduction says.
"The position into which she and her fellow Jews were forced was horribly, hopelessly, twisted...The meaning of staying alive had become utterly perverted, and perhaps the only way for her to save meaning was by accepting death."
There are many of you out there who have never been at the edge of that precipice. And in truth we can't know how we will react until something that terrible is happening to us, or our children.
"The macrocosm of historical events almost completely crushed the microcosm of individual lives."
In Texas, the state is taking away the children of lgbtq people, especially trans children, not to mention separating immigrant children from their parents. It's an abhorrent system, created by disgusting people. I will say that with conviction.
"Mysticism must rest on crystal clear honesty, and can only come after things have been stripped down to their naked reality..."
"The Jewish Council...was formed at the instigation of the Germans to mediate between the Nazis and the mass of Jews. The Nazis gave orders to the Council and then let it decide how to implement them."
Plausible deniability.
"The Council was under the illusion that by negotiations it could save the Jews from the worst. Its declared purpose was to decide who was fit to be sent away for 'labor service' and who was indispensable at home. Its real purpose was to calm the fears of the panic stricken Jews. In this way the Council became a subtle weapon in the hands of the Nazis."
The leadership of the German Reich told them lies, the same way the Republicans tell us lies about what they're doing. Lies like abortion restrictions won't kill women. Lies that all lgbtq people are groomers. Lies that putting prayer to their hateful god in schools and public will somehow solve gun violence caused by their hateful teachings. Lies that the poor are just lazy, not oppressed and underpaid.
"Westerbrok (the transit camp) would be the last stop before Auschwitz for more than 100,000 Dutch Jews."
Not much attention is being paid to the detention of immigrants on the border in red states, but you should. Because this is what the republicans have in mind for anybody who won't bow to their false god, and anybody who isn't white.
[In September of 1943] "No one in Westerbork had heard about the gas chambers, but many suspected that their fate was sealed."
Etty's diaries and letters were published finally about 40 years after her death, in the 1980s. I'm guessing that's probably due to all the, umm, fun she had before the occupation. Just like republicans can't deal with the fact of Anne Frank's sexual thoughts, or anybody's for that matter, the idea of a woman living a very modern life back in the 1930s and early 40s gives lie to their claims that our current culture is somehow new - and aberrant.
In fact, it's quite normal for humanity. They're the oddballs.
The introduction was written by Eva Hoffman. Now the book goes into the diaries. The volumes that were found begin in March of 1941.
I'm going to skip over most of her self-psycho-analysis and her love life, sorry. You'll have to read it yourself. She's an aspiring writer who has terrible self-doubt and anxiety about her talent, and accomplishes pretty much nothing in creating any artistic works. But bits and pieces about the war elsewhere in Europe creep in.
[At times] "You must make a stand, wax indignant at time, try to get to the bottom of things. But indiscriminate hatred is the worst thing there is. It is a sickness of the soul...I used to believe that my inner conflicts were due to a particular cause...I thought that they simply reflected a clash between my primitive instinct as a Jew threatened with destruction [by the Germans] and my acquired, rationalist and socialist belief that no nation is an undifferentiated mob...Life cannot be forced into pre-set molds."
And that's exactly what the republicans are doing - casting unmarried women, lgbtq people, non-christians, and other cultures into these bizarre caricatures and labeling anyone and everyone even remotely outside their "in-group" as evil in outlandish and obviously untrue ways. Yet they cling to these self-serving fantasies not because they don't know any better, but because those lies give them justification for the evil and hatred and oppression and yes, violence and death, they dearly want to afflict on other people.
She asked, "Do you think it makes sense to escape? ...Do you think democracy can win?" Her companion replies, "It's bound to win, but it's going to cost us several generations."
With hindsight we know they should have left the country by any means. She clung to the belief people were basically good. He thought the arc of history bends, but slowly.
Many people today think that, too, when they should be thinking about fleeing red states. We know how it ends.
"We are always in search of the redeeming formula, the crystalizing thought. ...Perhaps I am making everything much too complicated because I don't want to face the sober facts."
Yep. We say to ourselves this court or this case or this election will fix things. Hope is good. False hope is fatal.
"Perhaps the true, the essential emancipation of women still has to come. We are not yet full human beings. We are the 'weaker sex.' We are still tied down and enmeshed in centuries-old traditions. We still have to be born as human beings, that is the great task that lies before us."
Someone could have penned this thought yesterday, so little has changed in the patriarchal expectations women face. The problem, of course, is that republicans intend to force women with state coercion back into a mold that didn't work back in the bronze age when it was first articulated - women as property, as livestock.
October 1941, more intrusive laws begin to be enacted against the Dutch Jewish community. In November she writes, "Mortal fear in every fiber. Complete collapse. Lack of self-confidence. Aversion. Panic...." They start hearing bad news, rumors, and stories.
But she sweeps it all aside, rather like Scarlet O'Hara who said, "I'll think about that tomorrow," over and over. Etty starts to have physical symptoms of stress, like rashes, headaches, nausea, etc but somehow convinces herself it has nothing to do with what's going on around her.
A lot of us do that.
"Oh well, which of us knows anything, all is chaos within and without. And it is that very chaos that also threatens me, that I must make it my life's task to shake off instead of reverting to it time and time again."
She's telling herself to stop over-reacting, when instead she should be listening hard to the message her body and spirit are trying to get through her thick head.
One of her companions who lived through WWI tells her, "So much rebelliousness, so much hatred, the passion, the arguments, the call for social justice, the class struggle, etc - we have been through it all. ...It's happening all over again...the same old slogans..."
The women of the boomer generation thought they had won the war against women, overall. Not entirely - a few straggling issues like equal pay lingered still, but for the most part, women were now adult human beings with rights. Occasionally grumblings would be heard about some right wing nonsense, but nothing serious.
The attitude was that all that had been defeated, and in time would fade away entirely.
And about antisemitism, too. The old farts will die off & the younger generation will never know what being hated for your faith looks like.
We were so wrong. Like this guy. He thinks it's the same old thing in new clothes. Yes, people die in war, but honorable rules of war apply.
"What is it in human beings that makes them want to destroy others? ...Pitiful young men [with unhappy childhoods] are dangerous as soon as they are let loose on mankind. But all the blame must be put on the system that uses such people. What needs eradicating is the evil in mankind, not people themselves." [Paraphrasing]
It is too easy to make excuses - bad upbringing, mental illness, poverty, or what have you - for evil actions.
"All the appalling things that happen are no mysterious threats from afar, but arise from fellow beings very close to us. ...The terrifying thing is that systems grow too big [to control] and hold them in a satanic grip, the builders no less than the victims of the system..."
There is some truth to that, of course. But such excuses and such social structures cannot remove mankind's agency in what is happening in the environment, in the economy, in the community - we are all responsible for what we do, and don't do.
March of 1942: "There are few illusions left to us. Life is going to be very hard. We shall be torn apart, all who are dear to one another. I don't think the time is very far off now. We shall have to steel ourselves inwardly more and more."
The laws get more onerous.
"We [Jews] are not allowed to walk along the Promenade any longer, and every miserable little clump of 2 or 3 trees has been pronounced a 'wood' with a board nailed up: No admittance to Jews. More and more of these boards are appearing all over the place."
The war comes in earnest to the Amsterdam area, planes overhead, bombs and the sound of gunfire in the distance.
"Any minute now a piece of shrapnel could come through that window. It's quite possible. And it's equally possible that there would be a lot of pain. ...All disasters stem from us. Why is there a war? Because [everyone does] not have enough love."
Like the legislator who, televised, said that ISIS hates gays "even more than we do." Republicans.
But she clings to her optimism even as these morbid thoughts flash by. "Even if the whole of this world is bombed to bits, we shall build a new world, and that one too will pass, and still life will be beautiful, always beautiful...Only if we...rebel against every kind of evil, will we be able to put a stop to it. [Until then] we will find ways of adapting ourselves, and the horrors will continue."
Those who stand by and do nothing, who acclimate themselves to the situation, afraid to do anything to draw attention to themselves, are understandable. But still wrong. The text essentially says, if someone knows about it, and says nothing, does nothing, the blood is on their own hands.
Republicans don't like being reminded of that one, now, do they? No need to ask why.
"That cup of coffee...must nowadays be drunk with reverence, for each day it may be our last."
Climate collapse is killing coffee plants, you know. So savor your java, too. It's going to be too rare to afford very soon.
"Unless every smallest detail in your daily life is in harmony with the high ideals you profess, then those ideals have no meaning."
Oh, my, how the centrists hate that thought. If they say they don't want climate collapse, but continue to subsidize and to permit fossil fuel projects, they are liars.
If they say they want a fair society but balk at living wages indexed to inflation, they are liars.
If they say healthcare and medicine needs to be affordable but refuse to enact a single payer nonprofit system, they are liars.
If they stand by and let religious laws be passed against women & lgbtq people & non-christians while pretending we are a nation of science and reason, they are liars.
If they say racism is ancient history, and redlining doesn't exist anymore, and discrimination is over with, they are liars.
And we let them lie. Because we aren't willing to do the boycotts, the name and shaming, the strikes, and the divestment necessary to stop it from happening.
April 1942. Her friend says, "Well, are you coming over here with your yellow star?"
Such a short question, packed with so much meaning it's hard to parse.
Labels. Othering. Hatred. Supremacy. Stereotyping. On & on & on. It's all intellectual laziness by people who have already made an irrational and barbaric decision, and look for ways to justify it after the fact.
"Only a few months ago I still believed that politics did not touch me and wondered if that was 'unworldliness,' a lack of real understanding. Now I don't ask questions anymore."
So many people today think the things in the news, the crisis du jour, has nothing to do with them.
And they're so, so wrong.
She fools herself, saying "You can't tell how things will turn out in the long run."
There is some truth to that. But in Judaism we are taught that relying on a miracle is not acceptable. The universe has no obligation to serve up a special fix just for you. That's not the way it works. Never has been.
"In the years to come, children will be taught about ghettos and yellow stars and terror at school and it will make their hair stand on end."
Not in red states they won't, because republicans don't want people to know how racism and bigotry and hatred and intolerance work and affect people, even the "in-group."
They want their hideous teachings and beliefs to be perceived as normal and necessary, acceptable and even laudable.
They're garbage, actually. And should be treated as such.
June 1942. "I know how very nervous people are, I know about the mounting human suffering. I know the persecution & oppression & despotism & the impotent fury & the terrible sadism. I know it all. ...I fear that I might not be able to pass that test." Her companion replies, "The test is something all of us will have to face."
We're facing it now, already. If you ever wondered what you'd do in 1930s Europe, you're doing it now.
And if you're doing nothing to fight it, well, there you are.
"And now Jews may no longer visit green grocers' shops, they will soon have to hand in their bicycles, they may no longer travel by tram, and they must be off the streets by [8pm]. ...Food is getting increasingly scarce, we shall have less resistance to the cold."
Like christian business owners who refuse to provide services to immigrants or lgbtq people, like laws are passed preventing lgbtq kids from participating in sports, or requiring girls to let men "inspect" them & report their periods in order to play, those types of restrictions will spread out like a cancer to other areas of life. Even now we see it's not enough to just (supposedly) protect kids - now they have to regulate adults too, to conform to their false religious beliefs.
Just like before.
It won't stop with lgbtq people, either. Ask the women in Iran before the revolution. Ask the women in Afghanistan how #TheNewInquisition is working out for them. Republicans are chomping at the bit to bring that here.
"I must persevere and remain productive. I should be preparing myself even now for physical handicaps [sic] so that I don't come to a complete standstill every time I encounter some unexpected obstacle. I shall have to adapt myself in advance, make incapacity part of my daily life, of my whole self, the better to control and then dismiss it."
As a modern writer put it, "Collapse now and avoid the rush." We know climate collapse is going to upend the consumerist lifestyle. We know we are going to have to take in climate refugees - friends and family in coastal and desert areas. We know crops are going to fail. We know the electricity is not going to be reliable. We know antibiotic resistance is rising.
We too need to take an honest look at ourselves, our home, our work, our lives, and make changes in advance of the necessity. Once the crisis hits, it's too late to prepare.
"We could be ordered at any minute to go to those barracks [at the transport camp]."
She almost reaches out to touch her deep fear, but then brushes it off again. "Just have a good night's sleep and stop carrying on so. You should be ashamed of yourself," she says to herself.
Stop over-dramatizing the situation, right?
"Everywhere signs barring Jews from the paths and the open country. ...They can harass us, they can rob us of our material good, of our freedom of movement, but we ourselves forfeit our greatest assets by our misguided compliance."
It begins to inch into her mind that there is no reasoning with the deranged plans the nazis have. Yet she backs away from it again and again, an imposed optimism that is itself irrational.
Like a lot of people today, she just cannot, cannot believe, cannot trust her inner senses, cannot face the truth, because the truth of the situation is unfathomably insane.
Right wing nutjobs want us all enslaved or dead. Preferably dead. And they're open about it - in books, on the web, on social media. It's no secret.
"More & more we must learn to do without those of our physical necessities that are not absolutely vital...especially when it comes to food, for it looks as though we are going to face some very lean times."
Middle class America has no idea what's coming. The poor have always had to make things stretch, do without, or find under the radar ways of getting what they need. Middle class America has only brushed the edges of a real economic collapse, the kind the republicans want to inflict on the nation to force their religious laws to be imposed on people who are not members of their cult.
Middle America has no idea what losing the dollar as the reserve currency means. Has no idea what climate collapse will do to the economy. Has no idea what it's like with ZERO social safety net.
But if they don't get off their duffs and vote, boycott, divest, strike, and create real mutual aid societies, they're going to find out.
*[originally] This is all I'm going to do tonight, class. Sleep well.
[Next day] OK, going to add a bit more before Shabbat...
21/??
"It is easier to train oneself to go without in times of abundance, voluntarily, than in scarce times, through necessity. What one does freely of one's own accord is always more soundly based and longer lasting than what has been forced upon one."
Don't let the formality of the translation here interfere with the message, because Etty is right about this.
Like any motivational guru will tell you, feeling like you "have" to do something causes psychic resentment, leading to failure. You have to want to do something, for yourself, to really be motivated to do it and maintain it.
This is why Americans are failing miserably at lots of things, but especially at adapting to climate collapse.
They don't want to get in shape to ride bikes instead of driving, much less walk. They don't want to stop buying things packaged in plastic. How hard is it, really, to shun 2 liter bottles or cans with plastic bands that choke wildlife?
"There may come a time when I shant know where [my parents] are, when they might be deported to perish miserably in some unknown place. I know this is perfectly possible. The latest news is that all Jews will be transported out of Holland through Drenthe Province [ie Westerbrok transit camp] and then on to Poland [to the concentration camps]."
Every child of lgbtq parents is feeling this right now. Every lgbtq child in a red state fears this fate themselves - being taken away & never seeing their parents again.
It's not an irrational fear - it's a very real possibility, which is why we need networks of safe houses, an underground railroad, for lgbtq families.
This is not a drill, class. This is the ugly realty of white-nationalist christo-fascist America, who have spoken openly about establishing such camps in the US.
"Even if we stay alive, we shall carry the wounds with us throughout our lives. ...In Poland the killers seem to be in full [force]."
July 1942. "I was cast into alarm and despondency brought on by the new [anti-Jewish] regulations. ...What is at stake is our impending destruction & annihilation. We can have no more illusions about that. They are out to destroy us completely. We must accept that and go on from there."
Etty has moments of clarity like this, then goes right back to her self-imposed optimism. She blames her mood on "a blister on her foot." Really. The lengths that some people will go to hide the truth from themselves is astonishing.
How many of us are guilty of that now, knowing what we know about the christo-fascist plans for America?
She then tries to rationalize being ok with being murdered, as if she were a cancer patient stuck down randomly by something the world cannot control - instead of a victim of intentional violence by a regime hellbent on murder. "By admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it. ...I greet death as an old acquaintance."
"A good lunch, which we used to take for granted, is now a special treat. As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer."
I am guilty, we are all guilty, most likely, of gulping down our food in order to run out the door and do some interesting activity. We don't appreciate it when have it. We should slow down and savor everything, not just food. Enjoy life, knowing each bit is sacred spacetime.
"You're in a poor state, Etty. Your body is completely unfit and has no resistance. In a labor camp you'd break down inside three days."
Hard to think about, isn't it? To imagine how long we'd last if it came to that.
"Many who are indignant about injustices are only indignant because the injustices are being inflicted on them[selves]. Their indignation is skin-deep."
Bingo!
Those who ignore the news, ignore politics, don't care about those "other" people - who will help them when there's nobody left to help?
Then she reverts back to baseline, saying, "We must count neither on being preserved nor on being destroyed. These are the extreme possibilities, but neither is a certainty."
Oh, Etty. Your mental shields are so impressive. I don't see how she does it - but she's hardly alone.
Eventually, though, she allows a crack of reality back in. "Perhaps I shall be able to stay here for another month, but by that time any loophole in the regulations will surely have been closed. Every day I shall put my papers in order, and every day I shall say farewell. And the real farewell, when it comes, will only be a small outward confirmation of what has been accomplished within me from day to day."
How noble our intentions - to call friends and family, to get around to that long-planned outing with so-and-so, to send those nice birthday cards you bought, to bake a cake for the old couple down the street... Yet we let these opportunities pass by, because we think we have plenty of time.
"We [will] still have to go through a great deal. We shall become poor, then destitute, until in the end our strength will go, not only because of all the fears and uncertainties but also, very simply, because we are banned from more and more shops and therefore have to cover longer distances on foot, which is already undermining the health of many people I know. From all sides our destruction creeps up on us, and soon the ring will be closed and no one at all will be able to come to our aid."
The christo-fascist republicans are closing the ring on lgbtq people right now, and women, too.
"This much I know: you have to forget your own worries for the sake of others, for the sake of those whom you love."
Fear stops us from doing what we know we need to do. We are afraid of moving, of finding a new job, of losing touch with our friends, of being a burden on those who can help us find a new path. Yes, it's hard. There's no reason to downplay that. But it's necessary. Yes, it is.
"It is so different from everything you read in books, altogether different."
Oh, yes, all of us wanna-be mages, bards, dragon-slayers, questing knights in shining armor, call-of-duty and world-of-warcraft warriors (and yes, even the right wing preppers) think they know and are ready for what could happen.
No, class, you don't, and you aren't.
In Etty's world, the deportations of her community have now started. "A hard day, a very hard day. We must learn to shoulder our common fate. Everyone who seeks to save himself must surely realize that if he does not go [when called to be part of the quota to be shipped off to the concentration camps], another must take his place. Ours is now a common destiny, and that is something we must not forget."
This is a hard passage to read.
A hedonistic calculus.
We can't know what we would choose. We can't imagine that situation. It's evil and abhorrent. But to republicans, it's no big deal. They're willing to kill to win. Even kids.
Etty convinces herself that she is noble enough to make the ultimate sacrifice.
"Many accuse me of indifference and passivity when I refuse to go into hiding, they say that I have given up. They say everyone who can must try and stay out of their clutches. It's our bounen [sic] duty to try. But...vast numbers are nevertheless disappearing. ...It is sheer arrogance to think oneself too good to share the fate of the masses."
That's easy to say when you haven't yet been put into a camp. Afterward, as she will find, not so much.
"The Jewish Council seems to have become a hotbed of intrigue, and resentment against this strange agency is growing by the hour. And sooner or later it will be their turn to go, anyway."
You know what will happen. The rich will try, and sometimes succeed, to bribe their way out of deportation. And collaborators who think they and their family will be spared if they play along nicely will continue to throw the am ha'aretz under the proverbial bus.
"Nothing can ever atone for the fact, of course, that one section of the Jewish population is helping to transport the majority out of the country. History will pass judgement in due course."
I think this sort of thought every time I hear about some lgbtq person, or some woman, or the cheredi communities, or a POC who is shilling for the republican party.
"People seem to fritter away what could be their last moments. So many [others] make themselves ill or refuse to get better for fear of being dragged away. Many even take their own lives..."
Florida, anyone? Texas? Several other red states, too. I'm not sure what she means exactly by "fritter away," presumably going blithely on thinking nothing can really happen to them in this day and age.
Or maybe she means doing useless things they think are helpful, but aren't. Maybe she is referring to those who have paid bribes and think they'll get passes out of the country. (spoiler alert, most just got nicely robbed, essentially)
"After this war, two torrents will be unleashed on the world: a torrent of loving-kindness and a torrent of hatred."
As an American, I relate this thought more to the Civil War than to WWI or WWII.
September 1942. "We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies. We make mental provision for the days to come, and everything turns out differently, quite differently."
I think all of us draw imaginary lines in the sand. I would do this. I would never do that. This thing will probably happen. That thing could never happen. And we dig in to those boxes and refuse to let go, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
"I have not been entirely honest with myself."
Really? You think?
"Yet another well-laid plan turns out to have been nothing but vain speculation."
Such is life. But it helps to make realistic plans in the first place, not rely on self-deluding reassurances than have no basis in fact.
December 1942. "The soul has a different age from that recorded in the register of births and deaths. At your birth, the soul already has an age that never changes. One can...be born with a thousand year old soul..."
Judaism does recognize the concept of reincarnation, called gilgul in the Talmud. Here perhaps she is trying to reconcile herself and her companion's genocide by thinking perhaps they'll all get to live again. Can't say, off-hand, that I find that a compelling reason not to fight against being murdered.
We have now reached the end of her diary and the beginning of her letters to friends in Amsterdam. At this point Etty is employed by the Jewish Council to assist the selection process in the transit camp at Westerbrok and to help relieve the hunger and nakedness of many of the newcomers. She works in the hospital for a while, too.
She still has the ability to come and go at intervals, she is not interred there, yet.
"And what do I actually do in this place? I'm back to juggling 5 miserable mugs to share out coffee amoung hundreds of people. Now and then I run away out of sheer frustration...there wasn't a single drop of water to be had in the whole camp, because the water supply had been cut off. ..I still can't get it into my head that people can do such things to each other, and that some live to tell the tale."
The conditions at the transit are squalid, and inhumane, to put it mildly.
I assure you the republicans will not care when lgbtq people are rounded up and subjected to this. Like the nazis they are, they will rationalize that lgbtq people deserve this, that they brought it on themselves by refusing to change (what cannot be changed).
"I met people...who traveled on that ship [the St Louis] without being allowed to disembark at any port."
They were sent back to Europe and most of them died in the concentration camps, because the west had a "quota" of Jews and didn't want more.
I wonder a lot about this - what will happen when the exodus of lgbtq people, POC, women and non-christians begin to flee America. How many will be turned away by Canada, or Mexico, or will buy tickets overseas only to be turned around and sent back on the next flight.
It's not an impossible scenario.
"...little children...are probably now growing up in some unknown corner of the earth. Who knows whether they will even recognize their parents - if they ever see them again?"
The republicans intend to take lgbtq children away from their parents, or cis kids from lgbtq parents, and never give them back. Florida has already passed laws allowing this to happen. Texas has already tried it.
LGBTQ youth who refuse to pretend to be cis will be mentally and physically tortured, told their own sense of self is a lie, and punished for being who they really are.
All in the name of "saving" them - who will save us all from the unscientific, disgusting & bigoted laws of the christian cult?
"With horror, the old camp inmates [from earlier in the war, when the Germans were still pretending the deportations were for labor in factories or farms], witnessed the mass deportation of Jews from Holland to Eastern Europe [to the concentration camps]. From the very beginning they had to make their own considerable contribution in terms of human lives when the quota of 'voluntary workers' was not completely filled."
The Germans set a quota of how many people had to be on each train that left the transit camps. And if there weren't enough out-of-towners there to fill the quota, the people of Holland had to send their own community members in order to fill the tally.
The Jewish Council selected who would go - thinking that by sending some voluntarily, the bulk of the community would be saved. At least, they thought that at first. At some point it had to be clear to even the densest of them that no "labor" camp would really take invalids, the elderly, and orphaned children.
"The whole of Europe is gradually being turned into one great prison camp. The whole of Europe will undergo this same bitter experience. To simply record the bare facts of families torn apart, of possessions plundered and liberties forfeited, would soon become monotonous Nor is it possible to pen picturesque accounts of barbed wire and vegetable swill to show outsiders what it's like. ...There is mud, so much mud. ...The physical effects such as broken shoes and wet feet, you will certainly understand."
She is writing this back to her friends who are living under the oppressive laws, but are not interred in camps yet. She herself is at this point not yet prevented from coming and going once or twice a month, in her capacity as a Jewish Council employee.
"There are watchtowers. ...It is a camp of people in transit, great waves of human beings constantly washed in from the cities & provinces, from rest homes, prisons, and other prison camps, from all the nooks & crannies."
"[All of these disparate people arriving in] the Netherlands - only to be deported a few days later to meet their unknown destiny."
There is no sorting out of people to figure out who is "fit" and who is "not fit."
Nor will the republicans be sorting out non-whites and non-christians and non-cis people in their camps, either. All those now collaborating with the republican party will find, like the Jewish Councils of Europe before them, that being a useful idiot is a temporary assignment. When they're done with you, you get sent to the camps like everybody else - because there never was any intention to sort "groomers" from "non-groomers" or anything like that.
Every non-white non-christian is a defective in their eyes.
Every. One.
"You can imagine how dreadfully crowded it is in half a square kilometer."
The nazis didn't care about the conditions, because they knew the goal was to kill them anyway. Just like republicans don't care about the hurt they're causing now.
Time to go fix shabbat dinner - a thing for which I am grateful to be able to do still. I will continue the thread more tomorrow night or Sunday.
I cannot understand how the cheredi support the republican party. Are they so blind to the intentions of the christian dominionists? Is US govt support for the State of Israel really worth being forced to flee America or losing their lives when #TheNewInquisition reaches their doors?
I don't know. It makes no sense to me.
My adult trans daughter lives in Minneapolis, thank heavens. If she still lived here I would be moving heaven and earth to get her out of this red state. And I know the day is coming when I myself will have to move, too.
What is the "sign" that it's too late? I don't know. All I can say is that deep red states are legislating genocide against lgbtq people. They are legislating their religious beliefs and don't care that it's unconstitutional They don't care about other people's rights.
Etty chronicles the thoughts & feelings of herself and the people around her during the growing darkness, while maintaining an emotional distance. It's clear she & the rest of the Jewish Council still think, one, they won't be deported, two, by carefully choosing who gets sent off, they can save the "best" people.
By now you've figured out "best" really means "wealthy," of course.
"It is terribly crowded in Westerbork, as when too many drowning people cling to the last bit of flotsam after a ship has sunk. People would rather spend the winter behind barbed wire in Holland's poorest province than be dragged away to unknown parts and unknown destinies within Europe.
...But the quota must be filled. So must the train, which comes to fetch its load with mathematical regularity. You cannot keep everyone back as being indispensable to the camp, or too sick for transport, although you try with a great many."
She never mentions the allies or how the war is going. Lack of news?
What follows is a terribly harrowing description of...becoming numb to the evil of what you are doing. We should not gloss over this part. Collaborators rationalize to themselves, a lot. Even today.
"When the first transport passed through our hands, there was a moment when I thought I would never again laugh and be happy, that I had changed suddenly into another, older person. ...But on walking through the crowded camp, I realized again that where there are people, there is life. Life in all its thousands of nuances, with a smile and a tear, to put it in popular terms [of a well known song]."
Remember, she is not interred. She can leave, and does leave to go see her friends in Amsterdam. She has rationalized to herself that what she is doing is good and necessary. She blinds herself to the terror and fear and cherry picks the "nice" things to see, like children playing or old people reminiscing.
It's all mental masturbation. A smile and a tear? Really? It's asinine.
She matter-of-factly analyzes the deportees without empathizing with them, because she doesn't really think, yet, it can happen to her.
"It made a great difference whether people arrived prepared, with well filled rucksacks, or had been suddenly dragged out of their homes or swept up from the streets. In the end we saw only the last [type].
After the first of the police roundups, when people arrived in slippers and underclothes, the whole of Westerbrok, in a single horrified and heroic gesture, stripped to the skin. And we have tried, with the close cooperation of people on the outside, to make sure that those who leave are equipped as well as possible."
We should stop here to take in the fact that this is EXACTLY what republicans would like to do to lgbtq families, non-christians, and non-whites.
They want us rounded up and...eliminated from their communities, and they don't give a rats rear end what happens to us once we're gone.
A hint of remorse penetrates her self-imposed fog, but not so much for the victims as for her own conscience.
"But if we remember all those who went to face the winter in Eastern Europe without any clothes, if we remember the single thin blanket that was sometimes all we were able to dole out in the night, a few hours before departure...
The slum dwellers arrived from the cities, displaying their poverty and neglect in the bare barracks. Aghast, many of us asked ourselves: what sort of democracy did we really have?"
Seriously, she is just now realizing this. She has the same infuriating blindness that the comfortable classes have in America right now.
It has never crossed her mind that if we had a real democracy, there would not be slums. There would not be abject poverty. People's basic rights to housing, water, food, energy, and medical care would be provided.
Our "democracy" is just a prop to insulate the wealthy from the am ha'aretz, the ordinary working people.
"There ws a remarkable day when the Jewish Catholics or Catholic Jews, whichever you want to call them, arrived - nuns and priests wearing the yellow star on their habits."
Like the "one drop" here in the US, it DID NOT MATTER to the nazis if you yourself had done "all the right things" if you had even a single Jewish grandparent. Just one.
Which means in #TheNewInquisition if you have only one lgbtq family member, you are probably "defective," too. If you or your parents or grandparents were not always christians, well, you're suspect. And yes, that old "one drop rule" will be back with a vengeance. The white nationalists don't want mixed race people in their communities.
Perhaps at this point it's starting to occur to you that very few people would survive those tests.
That is, actually, one of the underlying points of the new nazi movement.
There aren't enough resources for everyone on the planet. They intend to make sure only cis white christians get those resources.
"And amoung all this, the unremitting clatter of a battery of typewriters - the machine gun fire of the bureaucracy.
Through the many little windowpanes one can see other wooden barracks, barbed wire, and a blasted [meadow that was formerly full of] heath."
We can't lose sight of the fact that legal & illegal are meaningless terms when the government has made evil legal.
And "just doing your job" is no excuse. And should not be one.
"But what about the old people? All those aged infirm people? What use is my philosophy [of rationalization] when I have to face them? In the history of Westerbrok, surely the saddest chapter will be the one that deals with the old. Probably even sadder than the story of the people from Ellecom, who arrived mutilated, sending a shudder of horror through the camp."
All those republicans wanting to eliminate social security & refusing to lift the cap on the income that social security taxes are collected upon - they're a genocide on the elderly.
"Masses of old people were just being unloaded from dilapidated trucks onto our heath. There we stood, almost beyond speech. That was really going too far, we thought. But later on we knew better and would ask each other with every new transport: How many old people and invalids this time?"
How do people who want to raise the retirement age think the elderly are going to be able to do jobs that will support them? What do they plan to do with all the elderly people, exactly? They seize the homes of people on Medicaid when those people die, to recoup costs of their care, but what about all the people who don't own homes? What will they do with the elderly when the cost for putting them in decent care facilities becomes onerous?
They'll dump them in glorified camps, like the Romanians dumped the millions of unwanted kids after abortion was banned.
It's only a hop, skip, and jump from warehousing unwanted old people & unadoptable kids to exterminating them. For their own good.
"In a few months the population has swelled from a thousand to roughly 10 thousand. The greatest influx dates from the awful days of October, when after a massive Jew hunt throughout the Netherlands, Westerbork was swept by a human flood... You can find every attitude here, every class, ism, conflict, and current of society."
Imagine the newly deputized morality police in Texas going house to house of people known to be lgbtq or having lgbtq children or relatives, and having everyone in the house arrested with nothing but the clothes on their backs and hauled away for internment.
We are inches away from that. The courts are completely stacked with christo-fascists who will suddenly be very interested in "public health," & "protecting kids," but not protecting them from being sold into marriage as children, or protected from gun violence, or protected from the next pandemic.
No, this is a self-serving lie, to implement christian theocratic law & eliminate religious freedom.
"In retrospect is that really so surprising [that people cling to their class distinctions in hardship], since every individual carries deep in his inner being the trend, the part of society, the cultural level he represents? But what always strikes one anew is that even t a time of shared distress, these distinctions are maintained. ...Everyone views his own case [emphasis hers] as an unfortunate accident. We have not yet gained a common sense of history."
Just like the leader of the MAGAts recently intoned, why should a rich person have to put up with all this? The idea that the wealthier classes should not & could not be subjected to this sort of treatment was deeply ingrained - just like the comfortable classes in America think today.
Just like the republican collaborators think right now, that they themselves would not possibly be affected by the rhetoric being spewed by the far right. It's just campaign nonsense to appeal to the rubes, right?
"Matters of hygiene I shall not mention in this modest account. lest I cause you some unappetizing moments."
This, I think, is why we don't hear about conditions in the immigrant internment camps on our southern border (and ICE facilities elsewhere). If we saw it for real, and heard about it every day, we'd have to do something about it. We'd have to at least speak out, name and shame our politicians.
But no. Out of sight, out of mind. The filth, the stench, the lice, the fleas - can't happen here, you say?
Can't happen to you?
"Leading lights from the cultural and political circles in the big cities have also been stranded [here]... Their armor of position, esteem, and property has collapsed, and now they stand in the last shreds of their humanity. They exist as an empty space...which they must fill with whatever they can find within them. There is nothing else."
At least a famous person might make the news when they're dragged off. Will anyone care if you are? Really?
"One suddenly realizes that it is not enough to be an able politician or a talented artist. In the most extreme distress, life demands quite other things. Yes, it is true, our ultimate human values are being put to the test."
And a lot of today's vapid celebrities are failing that test miserably.
"Rebellion born only when distress begins to affect one personally is no real rebellion and can never bear fruit."
It will be too late when middle and upper America figures out they're in danger. They're in danger right now. They're just blind to it, actually or willfully.
"...Why [do] we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way?"
The sunk cost fallacy - I can't leave behind everything I've built up! Fear - what if I can't find a good job in a new place? Aggrandizement - I can take on these a$$hats! False sense of security - I can weather this storm. Misplaced faith - they won't let this really happen.
Who are "they," and why do you think they care about you?
January 1943. Etty doesn't know it yet, of course, but her life ends this year.
She has returned to Amsterdam for a while to rest from her "illness," which we can see is really depression and psycho-somatic symptoms, but she seems to think her state of mind is the normal one, and everyone else is strange.
"My realities may be different from what most people call reality, but still they are realities."
But are they? Is it not rather a fantasy she has concocted for herself, to protect herself from the real realities?
And are we ourselves doing that now?
"We should look to nature for restoration." Sure, just as soon as they let us out of this squalid camp, we will.
May 1943, she writes: "On the morning of April 24th my call-up came. I was to report on the 25th. I started getting my rucksack ready right away, but was told in the afternoon my call-up had been an "error." That seems a curious expression, as if it wasn't an "error" for everyone else."
"Today I heard that 15 colleagues from the Jewish Council...will get leave and 15 volunteers will be needed as replacements."
So, the Council is still enjoying the privilege of coming & going at will, not having to face actual internment. Etty decides to volunteer to return to the camp.
"But I think we shall soon see each other in any case now that the 'liquidation' of 'Jewish Remnants' has taken on a faster tempo."
She says this as if she's reading it in a screenplay from her theater days. She is totally disassociated from the reality of the situation, even as her volunteer hours start:
"First we underwent a Lysol treatment [for lice]. From four until nine I dragged screaming children around & carried luggage for exhausted women. It was hard going & heart rending. Women with small children, 1600 - and tonight another 1600 will arrive. The men had been deliberately kept back. The morning transport is ready. ...Large empty cattle cars."
"The people have already been loaded onto the freight cars. The doors are closed. There are many...police who sang in the morning as they marched by the side of the train."
Imagine in Florida, a bunch of christian nutjobs shouting prayers and slurs at the train as you're being loaded - pro-lifers celebrating your death.
"The quota of people who must go is not yet filled. Just now I met the matron of the orphanage, carrying a small child...who also has to go, alone. And a number of people have been taken out of the hospital barracks. ...The engine gives a piercing shriek. The whole camp holds its breath, another 3000 Jews are about to leave. There are babies with pneumonia lying in the freight cars."
What would you do?
"Sometimes what goes on here seems totally unreal."
I'm sure it does. A nightmare from which you can't escape, where opening every door leads you back to the monster.
The only real solution was to defang the monster before the nightmare began.
Now Etty must come to real life personal terms with what's happening, because her brother and parents arrive at the transit camp from their hometown.
"The jam packed freight train drew into the camp this morning. I stood beside it in the rain. The cars were shut tight, but there were a few small openings here and there high up, where the planks had been broken. Through one of these I suddenly spotted Mother's hat and Father's glasses and Mischa's peaky face."
But she doesn't cast aside her forced optimism for her family's fate just yet.
"The Jewish Council thinks it imperative that you [the friend in Amsterdam she's writing to] pursue the Barneveld option strenuously with the Zentralstelle on behalf of Mischa and the family..."
Barneveld was a relatively comfortable place for "cultural treasures," like musicians, authors, artists, and of course rich people, politicians, etc, to go instead of transit camps right away. Her brother was a famous musician, so it was plausible.
"They are so indescribably efficient in this utter hell. In the early morning a line of freight cars pulled into the muddy camp. ...What we have now is a complete catastrophe. During the last 24 hours the camp has been engulfed by successive tidal waves of Jews. ...They are in a big barracks now, a jam packed human warehouse, people sleeping 3 to a bed on narrow iron bunks, no mattresses for the men, nowhere at all to store anything, children terrified & screaming, the greatest possible wretchedness.
I shall try to get through it as best I can. I even feel quite strong & brave, although sometimes I can see nothing but blackness and nothing makes any sense at all."
As a Jewish Council employee, of course, her personal quarters are a bit better. And she pulls strings to keep her parents & her brother out of the worst of the barracks.
She also mentions at this point people can still receive packages of food & medicine from rich relatives or friends on the outside, if any.
"Four hundred people from the hospital will apparently have to go on the next transport. Walking through the barracks, particularly the one with most of the old women, is an act of despair. ...In the face of something like that, I feel like running away."
She still can, of course. She has not yet been interred herself, and could in theory go into hiding on her next leave to Amsterdam. So in the back of her mind she is thinking it's possible to get out of this.
"We are expecting a transport from Hollandsche Schouwburg any day now. Everyone thinks that it will be sent straight through to Poland [to the concentration camps]."
She writes to her friend that she knows another of their friends lives there & says she'll keep an eye out for him and try to "hold on to him here, but there's no way of forcing things to happen. Everyone just has to accept the fate allotted to him. There is nothing else for it."
I think it's not accidental that the translator put "him" and not "one" here.
As the war goes badly, the Germans continue to step up their exterminations, and the Jewish Councils are becoming unneeded. She writes:
"Oh, yes, there is something else, something the whole Jewish Council here is so full of that I put it completely out of my mind." No, really?
"The latest news [is that] 60 of us may stay [at the camp]. The other 60 must go back to Amsterdam [and apply for] special exemptions. Because my parents are here, naturally I am one of those who want to stay on, come what may. Most of us do, actually, since almost everyone has family here who he can still protect a little by his presence. So you have a paradoxical situation: while each of us would give anything to get away from Westerbrok, many of us would have to be thrown out before we'd go. People are terribly wound up - debates, computations, laws of probability are the order of the day...nothing comes of it in the end."
There's a whole universe in this one paragraph: The collaborators dilemma.
Etty writes to friends that parcels they mentioned sending never arrived.
"In front of us, people with yellow stars are digging a moat to stop us from running away, beyond that stretches the barbed wire."
Her brother Mischa declares that he will stay with his parents, if he alone gets a pass as a "cultural treasure."
"Everything here is mad and incredible and desperate and comical, all at the same time...but that's the way things are.
Oh, yes, it's quite possible that I will shortly be stripped of my privileged position, because the Jewish Council here is about to be dissolved."
The next several letters detail close calls with keeping her parents and Mischa off the cattle cars to Poland.
"I myself would ten times rather go to Poland or wherever if only I am able to get my dear ones away from this place first."
She devises a "code" that she sends to her friends, to be used on short postcards since regular sized writing paper is now very scarce & censorship is common.
"We are all beginning to feel the pinch badly now that the outside world, which used to send supplies regularly, has shrunk so much. For all the families & acquaintances of most Jews are here now."
We know, of course, that the German soldiers were stealing any packages of supplies the workers (or the interred people) were being sent, as well.
"The hygiene problem is really the most desperate of all." She asks her friend, "Can you still get [women's] sanitary napkins? And ordinary rolls of bandages? An obstinate eczema that I once had for a few years...has flared up again, and I keep it bandaged because of the dust."
She mentions her father may write a letter, but that it has to "pass a special censor."
The Germans made every effort to hide the conditions at the camps from the outside world. Republicans here will do the same, you know.
"...The misery here is really indescribable. People live in those big barracks like so many rats in a sewer. There are many dying children."
"We keep meeting lots of relatives whom we haven't seen for years - lawyers, a librarian, and so on - pushing wheelbarrows full...and in untidy ill fitting overalls, and we just look at each other and don't say much."
If you were a collaborator, and your family saw you, what exactly could you say to them? Will they be happy at least someone might make it? Will they be furious at you?
How will red state people feel when their lgbtq friends disappear?
I wonder what the token lgbtq republicans and token right wing POC will say to their friends and relatives? Of course, in real life, none of them would volunteer to work in the camps, now would they? They will be hauled in kicking and screaming, and being tazed. You just know it.
Many will suicide & kill their children with them - and then the white nationalist christo-fascists will say: See, these people are not fit to be parents. It's just temporary, a course of treatment to cure them. No reason to over-react.
"You speak about suicide [the person she is writing to], and about mothers and children. Yes, I know what you mean, but I find it a morbid subject. There is a limit to suffering. ...People are dying here of a broken spirit, because they can no long find any meaning in life, young people. The old ones are rooted in firmer soil and accept their fate with dignity and calm."
Maybe. Perhaps they remember the pogroms which were not so long ago, and are resigned.
But today's Americans have no such experience to draw upon.
And as more and more laws are passed against lgbtq families, and laws taking medical care away, certainly suicides will go up dramatically. And people always use that fact in arguments with republicans and right wing politicians, trying to appeal to a sense of humanity and mercy they do not in fact possess.
To them, the only good lgbtq person is a dead one. And many feel the same way about unmarried women and people of color.
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