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ANOTHER TASTE OF THE BOOK
With the release of the book “Jew Face: A story of love and heroism in Nazi occupied Holland” scheduled for April 13, 2012, I will be putting up photographs daily that pertain to important events and stories from the book. The book is the story of my parents, Nardus and Sipora Groen mainly during the period between 1940-1945. Today’s picture is of the Hollandse Schouwburg, the main Concert Hall of Amsterdam that would be turned into a detention and transit center by the Nazis. Besides being a symbol of the devastation that befell the Jewish community at the hands of the German occupiers, one of the most defining moments in the book also takes place in the Hollandse Schouwburg.
A TASTE OF THE BOOK
With the release of the book “Jew Face: A story of love and heroism in Nazi occupied Holland” scheduled for release on April 13, 2012, I will be putting up photographs daily that pertain to important events and stories from the book. The book is the story of my parents, Nardus and Sipora Groen mainly during the period between 1940-1945. Today’s picture is of the “NIZ” (Nederlandse Israelitsche Ziekenhuis ) which was the main Jewish Hospital in Holland up until the Nazi occupation. When looking at the photograph, take note on the left side of the building where it says “Zusterhuis”. This was the nurses quarters and is of significant importance in the book’s Prologue and in future chapters.
A message of freedom and remembrance
Passover begins tonight at sundown, and as Jewish people all over the world prepare to celebrate being freed from slavery and oppression, I can’t help but feel an added responsibility to use this forum to draw a connection to what took place in Europe between 1933-1945.
It is difficult to get a clear understanding of what took place in Egypt since it happened so long ago, but what is clear was that the goal was to deprive all Jews of their freedom and ultimately destroy the very existence of the Jewish people.
Passover is a time of celebration. As a people we sit around the Seder and celebrate our freedom and our liberation from the oppressor whose sole purpose was to wipe us off the face of the earth. The similarity between the purpose of the Pharaoh and that of Hitler is almost eerily similar. Yet when we discuss the story of Passover we do so with a levity and comfort we do not have when discussing the Holocaust. The reasons are fairly obvious. The magnitude of the destruction done by Nazi Germany is clearly greater. Six million is a staggering, incomprehensible number. And the visual evidence and personal testimonials make it so real to all of us that it becomes more abhorrent and more painful to acknowledge. Even with this being so, the suffering of one person being forced to do slave labor, or the significance of the murder of one individual is just as important and meaningful when they are one of tens or hundreds of thousands as when they are one of six million. The value of their life is the same. Subsequently the value of a people being freed from either oppressor is just as significant and liberating.
It has always been my personal feeling that regardless of what part of history inspires us on a day we celebrate freedom, we must use this day to not only celebrate it, but appreciate it as well. For if there is one thing we must learn from the more recent suffering, is that we should never take our freedom and even survival for granted. And the lesson we learn from sitting down and having a Seder where we tell the story of Passover is that we must never forget what happened, and that the best way to accomplish this is to tell the story.
I wish all of my fellow Jews a Happy Passover, and a Happy Easter to all of you who will be celebrating this Sunday.
Good against Evil
All human beings are flawed. The average normal human being will have flaws ranging from minimal to unbearable. However, most of them will be decent people. Even with their flaws. This is a philosophy I used as a guideline in the writing of my book, “Jew Face: A story of love and heroism in Nazi occupied Holland”. Not only did I not focus on the flaws of the average person, I hardly ever came close to describing them. For in this book there is one clear evil, and that is anyone who supported or participated in the Nazi effort to systematically eliminate the Jewish people. Everyone else, for lack of a better word, was good. When evil is so distinctive, what is left can easily be classified as good. And in reality, failed marriages, family arguments, lost friendships, are all results of decent people doing or being the recipient of, mistakes or misunderstandings. But the evil perpetuated by the Nazis and their sympathizers during the reign of Hitler’s Germany has no justification. And in the book I make that distinction clear. Not only do I hope to increase awareness of what took place, maybe I can also help people keep things in perspective by revealing these evils from a different angle.
Sobibor: Part 1
Of the 104,000 Dutch Jews killed by the Nazis, more than 34,000 were killed in Sobibor. This post is part 1 of a series on the death camp in the forest of eastern Poland.
Holocaust Denial: Deceptive hatred
I found the following paragraph on the Anti-Defamation League website regarding the topic of Holocaust denial:
“Holocaust denial, which its propagandists misrepresent as “historical revisionism,” has become one of the most important vehicles for contemporary anti-Semitism. It is the invention of a collection of long-time anti-Semites and apologists for Hitler…” http://www.adl.org/holocaust/introduction.asp
This is a significant problem facing the worldwide Jewish community. The logic is simple. You can’t fight the battle to make sure it never happens again if you have to fight the battle of whether or not it happened in the first place. Hitler’s Germany persecuted the Jews of Europe in systematic fashion. In my upcoming book, “Jew Face: A story of love and heroism in Nazi occupied Holland”, I show how the Nazis destroyed most of the Dutch Jewish community in incremental fashion, ultimately murdering 104,000 of what was a community of close to 150,000 people. The concept of Holocaust denial can only be seen as ultimately having the same goal. The evidence is clear. The photographs are there, the names are there, the personal accounts have been given. To anyone other than the avid anti-Semite, there is no doubt that these atrocities took place. It is my hope that by getting the attention of as many people as possible, I am helping increase awareness of what took place. For if we allow acts of barbarism to be forgotten, we increase the chances of them happening again and again. Not only to the Jewish people, but to innocents all over the world.
The Dutch Resistance
This site will not only remember and honor the victims and survivors of the Nazi occupation, but it will also chronicle the activities of the Dutch Resistance. The following is a link to the Verzetsmuseum, the Dutch Resistance Museum and provides some insight to those remarkable Dutch citizens who stood up to the evil of the time, sometimes at the cost of their own lives. http://www.verzetsmuseum.org/museum/en/museum
Holland's Heroes 