I’m not going to get in the way. This story speaks for itself:
I’ll only add that I found Francine Christoph’s story to be both a reminder of the evil of which human individuals and societies are capable, and a glorious rebuke to those then and now who would urge us to surrender to our yetzer hara.
Omnes Omnibus
I swear it is just a little speck of dust in my eye.
ETA: Thanks for posting this.
Patricia Kayden
That was beautiful!! Would make a great movie.
MazeDancer
Powerful stuff. Thanks for posting that vid. Remarkable.
mai naem mobile
An eyelash just managed to just into my eye.
japa21
@Omnes Omnibus: You are not alone. Must be an epidemic of dust.
Betty Cracker
Wow. Amazing story. Amazing woman.
Aleta
Thanks. Good to be pointed to that series today when depression is pulling at me like a monster tide.
rikyrah
That was very powerful. Thanks so much
JPL
Wow!
Today the GA pardons board denied clemency to Kelly Renee Gissendaner. The boyfriend who murdered Kelly’s husband is up for parole in eight years. I also listened to the house hearing on Planned Parenthood.
I needed something to remind me of the goodness in the world.
Paul
Mercí.
the Conster
She said the baby was a he – but a woman said the baby was her?
Aleta
Another good one in the same series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE_8zXKhkKw, from a Palestinian in Canada named Aziz, about anger, revenge, demonization of the enemy.
,
scav
@the Conster: Probably translation/different language thing. I assume as she’s talking about that bebe at that time, it takes a masculine, irregardless of the actual baby’s gender. When the woman’s on stage she says “Je suis le bebe.” so again, masculine despite the woman knowing what her personal gender is.
the Conster
@scav:
OK, thanks. I thought there might have been a little transgender twist to the tale, making the point of the story not just amazing, mais un peu surréaliste.
skerry
Wow
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Wish I could watch videos at work. I’ll have to wait and see what people are talking about.
Belafon
A little more info for those of us video impaired at work.
The Fat Kate Middleton
Thank you so much for this, Tom. Like many reading here, I especially needed this today.
Emma
Add me to the others who needed this. Sometime we need a reminder that we can also do great things. Be greatly human.
mark k
Fantastic!! I shouldn’t have started peeling onions at the end.
Thank you
Betty Cracker
@Belafon: The elderly woman in the video is a Holocaust survivor. She describes being imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen as a child with her mother, who saved a little square of chocolate for her and said she would only give it to her when she really needed it.
Some time later, a fellow prisoner who was pregnant went into labor. The mother asked the girl if it was okay to give the woman who was having a baby the chocolate square since it would be very hard to deliver in the camp and she might die. She said the chocolate might help, and the girl said okay.
The woman had her baby and returned with it to the barrack. The baby never cried. A month later, the camp was liberated, and someone unwrapped the baby from its swaddling and it wailed. The woman in the video said that’s the day the baby was truly born.
Years later, the woman in the video, now grown up and a mother herself, was talking to her daughter about the camps, and the daughter asked what it would have been like if survivors had had access to mental health treatment. This inspired the survivor to hold a conference on that topic.
People came from all over the place, including one speaker, a woman who was a psychiatrist in France. Before she gave her talk, she gave the conference organizer (the woman who narrates the video) a square of chocolate and said, “I am the baby.”
Belafon
@Betty Cracker: Thanks.
PurpleGirl
Thanks for posting this Tom. Wow. I’m not doing too badly today mood-wise, but this story is powerful in so many ways. It does remind us that even within evil stituations, good is possible.
MomSense
My allergies must be really bad right now.
PurpleGirl
@PurpleGirl: FYWP won’t let me edit my comment. As “American Heroes Channel, aka Military Channel” reminds us with a series about WWII, this year is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and other camps.
dedc79
Relatedly – interesting review in the New Yorker of Snyder’s followup to Bloodlands.
seaboogie
Wow – right to the heart! I don’t post on fb frequently, but I did just post this and I hope that it gets shared beyond my small circle….thank you Tom.
Gin & Tonic
@dedc79: A thoughtful review, thanks. I have, of course, not yet read the book, but Snyder is a historian who has taken great pains to research his subject very thoroughly.
Betty Cracker
@PurpleGirl: My paternal grandfather was one of the American troops who participated in the liberation of the Buchenwald camp. He was one of the kindest, gentlest souls I’ve ever known. One of the only times I ever saw him get truly angry was when we were watching the news one night and there was a segment on a Holocaust denier (this would have been back in the mid-80s, I think).
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@PurpleGirl:
I’ve slowed in my reading of “Five Came Back” because I’m close to the part where George Stevens is sent to film the liberation of the concentration camps, which changed him forever. It’s not something I want to read right before bed, so I need to wait for a weekend afternoon.
dedc79
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah, I don’t think there can be one true account of what happened, and Snyder’s books are important correctives, even if you don’t buy all of his arguments.
I know that it came as quite a shock to me, as much as I thought i’d known about the Holocaust, to understand just how much of the killing happened in the east, far from any concentration camps.
Have also been doing some reading about the extermination of Hungary’s jews, which happened right at the end of the war, and which many think the US/England could have stopped if they’d just bombed the train tracks that were being used to transport them from Hungary to Poland.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@dedc79:
I learned about the einsatzgruppen back when I was doing research in the late 1990s. I think it was Christopher Browning who first exploded the myth that they were reluctant killers who were “just following orders.” On the contrary, by reading their letters and the army’s archives, Browning discovered that soldiers who were uncomfortable with the duty of murdering groups of men, women and children were allowed to transfer to other duties without a penalty.
The story of the Holocaust is not a simple one, much as people would like it to be, and there were many acts of omission and cowardice that enabled it. People point fingers at Eastern Europe so they can ignore that French Jews were nearly wiped out thanks to enthusiastic deportations. (By contrast, Mussolini didn’t really care about exterminating Jews, so relatively few Italian Jews were deported until he was overthrown.)
Occupied countries in Western Europe have a lot of blood on their hands as well, which I think is part of Snyder’s point.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Also, too, people who are interested in such things should keep an eye out for the BBC’s excellent documentary series, “The Nazis: A Warning From History.” It explodes a lot of the myths (the Final Solution, as Snyder also discusses, was much more scrambling and improvised than most people seem to think) and, like Snyder does, presents the Holocaust not as a singular, never to be repeated event, but as a warning about how “civilized” people can convince themselves that doing horrible things is in their self-interest.
Ridnik Chrome
@dedc79: It used to be, whenever I read something really smug and condescending in the New Yorker, the kind of thing that makes you go “what idiot wrote this drivel?”, I’d look at the byline and it would be Adam Gopnik. It finally got to the point where just seeing his name on a story would be enough to make me skip it, even if it was about a subject in which I was interested. He’s the kind of writer who has a compulsive need to demonstrate his supposed superiority to whatever or whoever he’s writing about. He reviewed the Mark Twain autobiography, and was condescending. To Mark Twain, for God’s sake! So it’s been years since I’ve read anything by Gopnik. Is he any better these days? Has he finally grown up?
grumpy realist
What really shocked me was when I was looking at the death rates of the Jewish population in different countries (part of thesis…long story) and it turned out that Germany had a higher survival rate than Poland. (Poland was awful–only 10% of the Jewish population survived.)
Aleta
@Ridnik Chrome: I liked his description of his young daughter’s drive to become a dog owner, at the beginning and end of Dog Story. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/08/dog-story-adam-gopnik
Ridnik Chrome
@grumpy realist: Hannah Arendt wrote about that at some length in “Eichmann In Jerusalem”. Been a while since I read it, and I don’t have the book handy right now, but a lot of it had to do with how the Nazis defined who was and wasn’t a citizen and who therefore could or could not be deported. I seem to remember that a large portion of the Jewish population in France were refugees who had never been granted French citizenship, so “legally” it was easier for the Nazis to deport them to the camps.
dedc79
@grumpy realist: the percentages for Greece were also staggeringly high, but the Jewish population in greece was much smaller than in poland.
Mitchell
@scav: For those who may still be confused about the gender of the baby: the subtitles are very sloppy translations. The woman never identifies the gender. What she actually said was: “The baby never cried. Never. Not even a wail.” and “That was the moment of its birth. We took it back to France.”