Tag Archives: Holocaust

Non-fiction, Reviews

A Light in the Northern Sea, by Tim Brady

1 Comment

The publisher’s presentation of A Light in the Northern Sea, by Tim Brady, treats it as an account of the remarkable rescue of the majority of Denmark’s Jewish population in World War II. That’s slightly misleading. This book is in fact a brief history of the whole Danish resistance.

As occupied nations went, it must be admitted that Denmark enjoyed a relatively easy war. The first western European country to fall to German assault, it was prevented by both unpreparedness and geography from making an effective defense. The Nazis steamrolled Denmark.

In consequence, the conquerors took the opportunity to pretend that their occupation was a friendly one, a kindly older sibling protecting his Aryan brother from the evil British.

So the German occupation operated with a somewhat lighter hand there than in other countries. Denmark was allowed to mostly police itself… for the present. Its Jews were left alone… for the present.

This situation provided opportunities for anti-Nazi Danes to organize a resistance network and carry out some limited sabotage. This underground network would prove crucial in 1943, when the Germans, increasingly desperate and “doubling down on stupid” as the war went against them, began to suppress Danish freedoms and demand cooperation in solving “the Jewish problem.”

Without going into too many details, it’s worth noting that 95% of Denmark’s 8,000 Jews were safely spirited away to neutral Sweden (which deserves credit as well for its willingness to receive them).

Things “got real” at that point. The occupation became genuine, brutal oppression. The resistance and the reprisals quickly got serious, bloody, and tragic.

If the Danes are sometimes chided for their quick surrender, and for their “easy” wartime experience, they also deserve credit for saving a larger proportion of their Jewish population than any other occupied country. No one can take that honor away from them.

I recommend A Light in the Northern Sea. The writing had a few glitches, but all in all it’s readable and highly interesting.

I was also pleased that the town of Horsens in Jutland, from where my own Danish ancestors hailed, occupies a prominent place in the story of the resistance.

Uncategorized

Escape from Auschwitz

Leave a comment

Walter Rosenberg knew that escaping from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp was a crazy idea and probably impossible, but when he turned 18, he knew he should be the one to attempt it. Others had tried and failed. Even attempting to warn someone before their deaths resulted in one’s own death for breaking the deception the Nazi’s employed to efficiently usher their prisoners into the gas chambers.

“The factory of murder that the Nazis had constructed in this accursed place depended on one cardinal principle: that the people who came to Auschwitz did not know where they were going, or for what purpose. . . . The Nazis had devised a method that would operate like a well-run slaughterhouse rather than a shooting party.”

On April 7, 1944, he and Fred Wetzler acted on all of their preparations. The UK Guardian has their story.

“Walter understood that the Nazis wanted him and every other prisoner to conclude that escape was futile, that any attempt was doomed. But Walter drew a very different lesson. The danger came not from trying to escape, but from trying and failing.”

Non-fiction

Another Girl’s Diary from the Holocaust

Leave a comment

You know what Anne Frank wrote about her experiences under Nazi oppression. Now another diary from a Jewish girl living under the Nazis is being released this month. Renia Spiegel lived in Przemyśl, Poland, and she started writing about Nazi attacks and family disappearances in 1939. Renia’s Diary has been translated by her sister, who lives in New York City.

The Smithsonian published an excerpt last November. Here’s a very small sample from it.

What a terrible night! Horrible! Dreadful. I lay there with my eyes wide open, my heart pounding, shivering like I had a fever. I could hear the clanking of wheels again. Oh, Lord God, please help us! A truck rolled by. I could hear a car horn beeping. Was it coming for us? Or for someone else? I listened, straining so hard it felt like everything in me was about to burst.

I heard the jangling of keys, a gate being opened. They went in. I waited some more. Then they came out, taking loads of people with them, children, old people. One lady was shaking so much she couldn’t stand, couldn’t sit down. The arrests were led by some fat hag who kept yelling in Russian, “Sit, sit down now!” She loaded children onto the wagon. The whole night was horrific. I couldn’t wait for the dawn to come.

Some of the people were crying. Most of the children were asking for bread. They were told the journey would take four weeks. Poor children, parents, old people. Their eyes were filled with insane fear, despair, abandon. They took whatever they were able to carry on their slender backs. They are being taken to Birobidzhan. They will travel in closed, dark carriages, 50 people in each. They will travel in airless, dirty, infested conditions. They might even be hungry. They’ll travel for many long weeks, children dying as they pass through a supposedly happy, free country.

And how many will reach their destination? How many will die on the way from illness, infestation, longing? When they finally reach the end of this deportees’ route somewhere far into Asia, they will be stuck in rotting mud huts, hungry, exhausted, ironically forced to admire the happy workers’ paradise and sing this song:

A man stands as the master
Over his vast Motherland

July 6, 1940

Authors, Non-fiction

Tipping Off the American Pedestal

Leave a comment

Cheryl Magness tells us how the recently departed author Elie Wiesel’s message will continue to resonate.

As Americans we are taught, and most of us believe, that there is something special about America. We speak reverently of the independent and pioneering spirit that sparked a new nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” We cherish the “rugged individualism” that enabled us to build a “shining city on a hill.” We think of ourselves as being the most generous and compassionate people on the face of the earth.

This view of ourselves as something unique in history, a nation markedly different from, and superior to, any other, has the potential both to motivate us for good and to lead us into laziness and neglect. For it is in believing too fully in our pedestal that we have the greatest capacity to fall off of it.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/07/05/elie-wiesel-is-gone-but-his-message-is-forever/