shekinahcancook

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

2/??

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.

We know. We all know...

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

3/??

"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..."

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

4/??

"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.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

5/??

"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.