of History the Jews Genocide Video Paper
Matthew Zabinsky 4/24/07
World at War: Genocide
An Ashkenazi Jew of Polish, Ukrainian and Byelorussian extract, I have watched dozens of documentaries about the Holocaust. Before viewing Genocide, I felt I had accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge concerning the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime and its Schutzstaffel military organization. Yet every new image of their godless brutality stirs up all-too-familiar emotions: sadness, frustration, and anger. "I'm not your friend. You're a Jew, I don't know you." Anti-Semitism had developed into an accepted part of Germanic culture centuries before the rise of Hitler, but the complete disownment of Jews by their Gentile counterparts in 1930s Germany is still a particularly disturbing occurrence. This nationwide escalation of hostility almost certainly resulted from the darkly brilliant efforts of Paul Joseph Goebbels and his Nazi propaganda machine. Through films, posters and educational programs (German youths were encouraged to celebrate their Aryan strength and unity), Minister Goebbels burned terrible images into the minds of his German subjects: Jews were dirty, cheap, selfish, ugly, and solely responsible for Germany's economic depression. This policy of fullscale indoctrination, along with Gestapo terrorization, compelled many of our otherwise innocent neighbors to extricate themselves from any connections with Das Juden. Abandoned at our time of greatest need, we were eventually rounded up and marched off to the Nazi death camps. What happened to morality? What happened to humanity? Centuries of relatively peaceful, if not quite amicable relations between "Aryans and nonAryans" had disintegrated in little more than half a decade.
History of the Jews Genocide Video Paper
Matthew Zabinsky 4/24/07
Especially difficult to absorb is the horrifying treatment of Polish Jews (among whom my maternal ancestors claim membership) after the Nazi invasion of September 1939. Even before the introduction of the Final Solution, the old Pale of Settlement inarguably suffered far greater retribution than any other areas of concentrated Jewish populations in Europe. It was in Poland where the worst hammer blows fell, for Hitler made no attempt there to hide the violence as he did in Germany. Nor did he make major distinctions between Jews and other ethnic Poles, because he regarded the entire native population as "subhuman". The AB Action resulted in the detainment of 30000 Polish intellectual and political figures, of whom nearly a quarter was murdered. Any Polish Jews who objected to Nazi occupation policies were executed on the spot, either by hanging or firing squad. Giant trenches and pits, dug in the forests by Jewish workers under armed guard, served as mass graves for tens of thousands of bullet-ridden corpses. I do not know what part my ancestors played in these early undertakings, and lack of contact with European remnants of my family ensures that I will probably go on not knowing... On October 16, 1940 occupation officially forces established the Warsaw Ghetto. Half a million Warsaw Jews were forcibly resettled within the Ghetto walls and literally cut off from the outside world. Typhoid (spurred on mercilessly by the cramped living conditions) and starvation rations combined to maintain a zero percent growth rate in the Ghetto population. Yet these atrocities served as a mere backdrop for the most revered display of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust era: the fabled Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Responding to massive deportations to the Treblinka death camp, over a thousand men and women transformed themselves into an army of fearless insurgents.
History of the Jews Genocide Video Paper
Matthew Zabinsky 4/24/07
Pitting SS and Gestapo troopers against ZOB and ZZW resistance fighters, the urban warfare erupted on January 18, 1943 and improbably dragged on for four long months. By the time major fighting ceased on May 16, almost 7000 residents had lost their lives. The 50000+ survivors were immediately transported to the gas chambers of Treblinka. Despite the gut-wrenching footage, watching these immeasurably brave people fight without thought of surrender against heavily armed Nazi soldiers granted me a temporary elevation of spirits. I recalled the mantra that defines Jewish history: our suffering is always countered, and eventually overcome, by our indomitable will to survive. The death camps put that indomitable will to survive to the ultimate test. The Nazi invasion of the Stalin's Soviet Union in June 1941 destroyed the settlements of millions of Soviet citizens, leaving Hitler and his assistants with a very big problem: what to do with 8 million homeless Jews? The answer to this question took several months to solve and eventually resulted in the implementation of Hitler's Final Solution; the Wannsee Conference of 1942 officially launched the construction of six death camps for the mass extermination of European Jewry. First to open was Belzec, followed by Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, and finally Auschwitz-Birkenau. The camps were "to be machines for killing human beings by the million, utilizing the byproducts, and disposing of the waste." That is a nice way of putting it. Jewish laborers, known as Special Detachment workers, were forced to strip dead bodies of clothing, hair, gold teeth, jewelry and fillings- anything that could be reused or recycled for the Nazi war machine. Some say that the Nazis even molded human skin into lampshades, a claim whose validity I do not doubt. Very few Special Detachment workers survived to tell the
History of the Jews Genocide Video Paper
Matthew Zabinsky 4/24/07
tale, but in the film a reporter interviewed an old Hungarian Jew who described his work in a death camp crematorium. His job entailed loading gassed corpses into the crematoria for incineration. My stomach squirmed uncontrollably while listening to his speech. This man may have handled the mutilated bodies of his own kin without even knowing it. Over 100 of my relatives perished in Nazi death camps between 1942 and 1945.