Tag Archives: Jewish

April 6, 2012

A message of freedom and remembrance

By davidgroen1

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.

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April 5, 2012

Good against Evil

By davidgroen1

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.

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March 28, 2012

Why is shock important?

By davidgroen1

When writing a book about a time so significant and devastating to the Jewish people, one has a moral responsibility to acknowledge and honor those who perished from the brutality and suffered the horrors perpetuated by one of the most, if not the most evil governments in the history of civilization.  On the surface this seems to be an uncomplicated task, but when confronted with decisions on how to present the story, one must use their own judgment in choosing the means that best accomplish the goals set out in putting pen to paper.

Once on a visit to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I made the comment that although I live my life almost entirely different than the Hasidic Jews that live there, I love going there because when I walk through the neighborhood I realize that with all the death and destruction Hitler orchestrated against the Jewish people, in the end he did not win.  Nazi Germany is long gone and the specific threat that it posed to the very existence of the Jewish people no longer exists, but the war of the anti-Semite against the Jewish people has not ended and still needs to be fought.  The attempt at intellectualizing Holocaust denial and the efforts by those who wish to accomplish this on a global scale threatens the Jewish people in a deceptive and methodic way.  Little by little there is a danger that more and more people will choose to believe that it did not happen and that 6 million Jewish lives were not killed by Hitler’s Germany.  In writing this book, and titling it “Jew Face”, even at the risk of offending some of my fellow Jews, I do so with the purpose of getting the attention of as many people as possible.  The alarming title will startle people, but if it gets many to read what happened and be aware, then it has served a positive purpose.

You can’t fight fire with smoke.  You must fight fire with fire.  And if giving this book a title that shocks people and makes them interested in its content I increase awareness of what truly took place, I have been successful in accomplishing the book’s most important task.  Honoring the victims and helping the world never forget what took place.

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March 10, 2012

February 1941

By davidgroen1

The significance of this picture is that it directly and indirectly represents the 3 major aspects prevalent during the Nazi occupation of Holland in regard to the Jewish community.  Firstly it shows Nazi soldiers and the fear they instilled in the community even before their intentions were revealed.  Secondly it shows Jewish victims, in this case young men, one of which was my mother’s cousin David Van Hasselt, lined up before being transported to their death merely for being Jewish.  And lastly, as a result of this raid that was widely recognized throughout Jewish and Non-Jewish Amsterdam as being retaliation for something not done by a Jew, Dutch leftists  organized “the February strike” (” De februaristaking”) , showing early on that the average Dutchman would not support Nazi persecution.

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