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Behind the Aegis

Behind the Aegis's Journal
Behind the Aegis's Journal
January 27, 2015

The Lesser Known "Schindlers": Heroes of the Holocaust

Chiune Sugihara,
the Japanese Consul-General in Kaunas, Lithuania, issued thousands of visas to Jews fleeing Nazi occupied Poland in accordance with Japanese policy. The last diplomat to leave Kaunas, Sugihara continued stamping visas from the open window of his departing train.

Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews by providing them with diplomatic passes.

Aristides de Sousa Mendes, between June 16 and 23, 1940, frantically issued Portuguese visas, free of charge, to over 30,000 refugees seeking to escape the Nazi terror.

Dimitar Peshev, Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria and Minister of Justice during World War II. He rebelled against the pro-Nazi cabinet and prevented the Deportation of Bulgaria's 48,000 Jews.

littlewolf

Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, a Jewish couple from Philadelphia who followed their conscience, traveling to Nazi-controlled Vienna in spring 1939 to save a group of children.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1223719


During one of humanity’s darkest chapters, when millions of Jews, gays, communists and racial minorities were rounded up across Europe, many Albanians put up a fight to save complete strangers.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1223334


Dr. Mohamed Helmy is the first Arab to be honored in the 50-year span of the project, which has recognized 24,911 individuals from 44 countries.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014608528


Irena Sendler: Polish Woman Who Saved 2,500 Jewish Children Gets Walkway Named For Her

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/15/irena-sendler-poland-jews_n_3280035.html


Feng-Shan Ho was a Chinese diplomat who saved approximately 2,000 Jews during the early years of World War II. Ho was consul-general of the Chinese embassy in Vienna during the Austrian annexation.


Also: Hugh O'Flaherty, Giorgio Perlasca, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, and Frank Foley

From the UK, Nicholas Winton.

Bright lights in a sea of darkness!
They are The Righteous Among The Nations!
.

January 27, 2015

(X-post from GD) They Wore Pink Triangles: Gay Victims of the Holocaust

Jews comprised the largest single group of victims of the systematic slaughter by the Nazi Third Reich. However, several other groups were also targets of mass extermination, among them were homosexuals, especially gay men.

Prior to the rise of the Third Reich, Germany had a large, and thriving GL community, especially in Berlin, which boasted several gay bars, clubs, newspapers, and organizations. The larger cities were much more tolerant, but homosexuality was still frowned upon, so people were discreet and cautious. However, with a crushing depression in post WWI Germany, many started looking for scapegoats to the problems of Germany and the reason for her defeat in WWI. Jews, of course, were the main target, but gays and others also became singled out for blame. When the Nazis started to rise to power, a long standing, but mostly unused law, Paragraph 175, was enforced. It criminalized all sexual acts between men. Gay men started to be arrested, tried, and imprisoned throughout Germany.

When the initial work camps were established, gay men were among the first to be sent to the various camps. They gay men were identified with a large "A" on their clothes. It stood for Arschficker, "Ass Fucker". Eventually, they would come to be identified by a pink triangle. While there were a few other identifiers employed, the pink triangle became the most recognized and used. Gay men were made to wear a pink triangle on their chest, as well as a large one on their back. The pink triangles were made larger, like the yellow triangles for the Jews, than other triangles, so that guards and other prisoners would know a gay man was approaching.

Gay men were brutalized in the work camps. They were made to do chores so grueling as to work them to death. They didn't just face hate and degradation from the guards, but other prisoners could be just as cruel, as they viewed them as "perverts". The men were sometimes forced to work nude, raped, beaten to death, lynched, and even had dogs set upon them. Eventually, with the death camps establishment, they would die in the gas chambers. Most other prisoners avoided them so there would be no "guilt by association."

The liberation of the camps didn't have the same meaning for gay men. Many were simply moved to German prisons to serve out their sentences from their prosecutions under Paragraph 175. Some were given "time served" shorter sentences or reprieves. Those who didn't go directly to jail, faced discrimination because their families were "shamed" by having a "homosexual" in the family. While others received compensation for loss of money and property, gay men didn't get any reparations. It would 54 years (1999) before the first memorials of the Holocaust included gay men!! But it was the dawn of the 21st century (2000), before the German government officially apologized for the persecution of gay men after the liberation of the camps and acknowledged the devastation brought down on gay men in during the Holocaust.


Believed to be the last gay survivor of the Holocaust, Gad Beck passed away on June 24, 2012.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. We must remember.



The pink triangle is no longer a symbol of shame and persecution; it is a symbol of PRIDE!



January 27, 2015

They Wore Pink Triangles: Gay Victims of the Holocaust

Jews comprised the largest single group of victims of the systematic slaughter by the Nazi Third Reich. However, several other groups were also targets of mass extermination, among them were homosexuals, especially gay men.

Prior to the rise of the Third Reich, Germany had a large, and thriving GL community, especially in Berlin, which boasted several gay bars, clubs, newspapers, and organizations. The larger cities were much more tolerant, but homosexuality was still frowned upon, so people were discreet and cautious. However, with a crushing depression in post WWI Germany, many started looking for scapegoats to the problems of Germany and the reason for her defeat in WWI. Jews, of course, were the main target, but gays and others also became singled out for blame. When the Nazis started to rise to power, a long standing, but mostly unused law, Paragraph 175, was enforced. It criminalized all sexual acts between men. Gay men started to be arrested, tried, and imprisoned throughout Germany.

When the initial work camps were established, gay men were among the first to be sent to the various camps. They gay men were identified with a large "A" on their clothes. It stood for Arschficker, "Ass Fucker". Eventually, they would come to be identified by a pink triangle. While there were a few other identifiers employed, the pink triangle became the most recognized and used. Gay men were made to wear a pink triangle on their chest, as well as a large one on their back. The pink triangles were made larger, like the yellow triangles for the Jews, than other triangles, so that guards and other prisoners would know a gay man was approaching.

Gay men were brutalized in the work camps. They were made to do chores so grueling as to work them to death. They didn't just face hate and degradation from the guards, but other prisoners could be just as cruel, as they viewed them as "perverts". The men were sometimes forced to work nude, raped, beaten to death, lynched, and even had dogs set upon them. Eventually, with the death camps establishment, they would die in the gas chambers. Most other prisoners avoided them so there would be no "guilt by association."

The liberation of the camps didn't have the same meaning for gay men. Many were simply moved to German prisons to serve out their sentences from their prosecutions under Paragraph 175. Some were given "time served" shorter sentences or reprieves. Those who didn't go directly to jail, faced discrimination because their families were "shamed" by having a "homosexual" in the family. While others received compensation for loss of money and property, gay men didn't get any reparations. It would 54 years (1999) before the first memorials of the Holocaust included gay men!! But it was the dawn of the 21st century (2000), before the German government officially apologized for the persecution of gay men after the liberation of the camps and acknowledged the devastation brought down on gay men in during the Holocaust.


Believed to be the last gay survivor of the Holocaust, Gad Beck passed away on June 24, 2012.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. We must remember.



The pink triangle is no longer a symbol of shame and persecution; it is a symbol of PRIDE!




January 26, 2015

Interview: Krystyna Chiger, holocaust survivor

KRYSTYNA Chiger was four years old when the Germans invaded Poland. Her brother Pawel was, as she puts it, “just half a year old”.


Born into a successful, middle-class Jewish family in Lvov, she spent the first years of her life in a grand apartment overlooking one of the most vibrant cities in Poland, now part of the Ukraine. “It was a magical place, a Renaissance city, only it was not the best place to be a Jew,” writes Chiger, with typical restraint, in her memoir.

Lvov, known as Little Venice, was a city of winding cobbled streets opening on to old squares of flowers, fountains, and stone churches. Beneath those streets ran their counterpart: the city sewers, as cold and mysterious as the underbelly of a snake. This network of dark, fetid tunnels would become the family’s home for more than a year. The sewer would save their lives.

Chiger’s first inkling of peril had come on the morning of 1 September, 1939. Chiger’s father took her to the balcony of their apartment. He pointed to the Messerschmitts overhead and told his daughter that the Germans, already at war, were on the outskirts of Lvov. “That was the same year my mother first took me to kindergarten,” she recalls. “I remember holding her hand, not wanting her to leave. It was difficult, but of course it was nothing compared to what was coming. I stood on our balcony with my father and he told me to look up. ‘My Krzysha,’ he said. ‘This is our end.’” As a child, it must have seemed incomprehensible. “Yes,” she says with a tiny, surprising laugh. “I knew it was bad, but of course I didn’t know just how bad.”

Chiger is now 76, a retired dentist living on Long Island with her husband, Marian, also a Holocaust survivor. She has a wonderfully low, cracked, heavily accented voice, as lived in as an old shoe. She laughs softly and often, and believes that humour was essential to her family’s survival.

more...

[hr]

Soon, these stories will not be available in first-person.

January 26, 2015

Auschwitz Survivor: Being Alive Is The Best 'Revenge'

TEL AVIV, Israel — Shortly after the Nazi invasion of what was then Hungary in May 1944, Renee Ganz's family and most of the 25,000 Jews in the city of Oradea were forced into cattle cars and transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Men and boys were placed in one line, while women and girls were led to another when they arrived at the camp in Oświęcim, Poland. Ganz was just 15 at the time.

"I asked a German soldier why we were being separated and he said, 'You've had a long journey. You need to take a shower,'" Ganz, now 86, recalls. "That's when the selection began."

German officers took one look at the prisoners and decided who would live and who would die.

more...

[hr]

January 21, 2015

SOTU speech: "It's why we speak out against the deplorable anti-Semitism that has resurfaced...."

"As Americans, we respect human dignity. It's why we speak out against the deplorable anti-Semitism that has resurfaced in certain parts of the world,” -- President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address 2015

January 14, 2015

YouGov study surveys attitudes towards British Jews

Nearly half of the British population agreed with one of four antisemitic statements presented to them according to a new poll, which found that one in eight of those surveyed believe that Jewish people use the Holocaust as a means of gaining sympathy.

It also found that one in four (25%) Britons believed that Jews chase money more than other British people, a figure which rose to 39% of those participants who identified themselves as Ukip voters.

The research by YouGov was commissioned by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA), a network of activists in the UK which said that Britain was at a “tipping point” and warned that antisemitism would grow unless it was met by “zero tolerance”.

The group also carried out its own separate survey of British Jews, which found that 54% feared they had no future in the UK and that a quarter had considered leaving the country in the last two years.

more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/14/uk-jewish-antisemitism-rise-yougov-poll

January 13, 2015

Charlie Hebdo: first they came for the cartoonists, then they came for the Jews

When terror strikes, we all become mind-readers. With no words to accompany the violence, it’s left to us to supply the motive. We insert our own guess, ventriloquising the killers who remain enigmatically mute. It happened again this week, following the slaying of 12 people at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine with little more than an “Allahu Akbar” to go on. They hated the cartoons, we say. Free speech was the target, we declare. They wanted to silence satire and gag dissent.

Then on Friday, a siege at a kosher supermarket, four hostages confirmed dead, the murderers apparently linked to those behind Wednesday’s carnage. Oh, we say. So perhaps the killers’ problem was not with ugly cartoons or vicious depictions of Muhammad after all. Maybe their motive is of a different order, one we find much harder to comprehend. Perhaps the murderers are bent on killing people not only for what they do, but for who they are.

It’s hard to live in a senseless world so people, even well-intentioned people, will try to make sense of this latest, desperate twist in Paris. So far there have been mercifully few attempts to make the usual, kneejerk move, insisting that the animating grievance must be western foreign policy. It is hard to draw that conclusion when the targets have been a satirical magazine and a shop selling salt beef and pickles. Some will doubtless talk about Muslim antagonism to Israel, as if an infant in a kosher deli is somehow responsible for the conduct of a government 2,000 miles away.

Others might note the curious kink in the ultra-Islamist mindset that has anointed Jews as a kind of ultimate symbol of the west. Witness the Iranian newspaper that in 2006 responded to the Danish cartoons affair with a competition for “the best Holocaust caricatures”, as if the most efficient way to hit back at Europe was by attacking … Jews.

---snip---

It follows that our responsibility is to thwart that effort. For Muslims, that has meant spelling out that these killers speak only for themselves. Note the speed with which a delegation of 20 imams visited the Charlie Hebdo offices, branding the gunmen “criminals, barbarians, satans” and, crucially, “not Muslims”.

Of course they should not have to do it. The finger-wagging demand that Muslims condemn acts of terror committed by jihadist cultists is odious: it tacitly assumes that Muslims support such horror unless they explicitly say otherwise. The very demand serves to drive a wedge between Muslims and their fellow citizens. (As it happens, Jews have some experience of this feeling: we too are sometimes told we have to condemn this or that action taken by others – and over which we have no control – if our place in polite society is to be secure.)

more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/09/charlie-hebdo-cartoonists-paris-killers-fascist-death-cult

January 12, 2015

Compare and contrast (how anti-Semitism is viewed) (left vs. right)

THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!

[hr]

Netanyahu, in Paris shul, thanks France for ‘firm’ stance on anti-Semitism

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday he appreciated the “very firm position” taken by French leaders against “the new anti-Semitism and terrorism” in France, speaking after millions of French gathered to rally for unity in the face of terror.

He also thanked Lassana Bathily, the Muslim employee of a Jewish supermarket who saved several hostages during a jihadist attack on Friday.

“Our common enemy is radical, extremist Islam — not normal Islam,” Netanyahu said in an address at the Grand Synagogue in Paris, after briefly joining other world leaders in a mammoth march against extremism through the capital that drew up to 1.6 million people.

---snip---

Netanyahu went on to once again extend an invitation to French Jews to emigrate to Israel, just a day after he said the Jewish state was their home.

“Jews have the right to live wherever they want,” the prime minister said.

“But Jews these days have an opportunity that did not exist in the past, to live freely in the only Jewish state, the State of Israel.”

more: http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-thanks-france-for-firm-stance-on-anti-semitism/

[hr]

Netanyahu to French Jews: ‘Come home to Israel from terrible European anti-Semitism’

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has invited Jews from France and the rest of Europe to immigrate to the state of Israel, referring to what he sees as a “rising tide of anti-Semitism” there. The statement comes in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

“To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said in a televised statement on Saturday, referencing the Jewish tradition of facing Jerusalem when praying.

--snip---

"This week, a special team of ministers will convene to advance steps to increase immigration from France and other countries in Europe that are suffering from terrible anti-Semitism,” Netanyahu said.

“All Jews who want to immigrate to Israel will be welcomed here warmly and with open arms. We will help you in your absorption here in our state that is also your state.”

more: http://rt.com/news/221499-israel-pm-immigration-france/

[hr]

COMMENTS FROM RT:

GREAT-IDEA Net-In-Yahoo, “Summon ALL the Jews of France, ALL the Jews of Europe (and don't forget ALL the Jews in Asia and the America's too) to say that, Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home,”......and that's where ALL 'Ashkinazi Zionest-Jew Global Bankers' belong, home in ISRAEL.


Where are the videos of the bodies of these terrorists being removed from the store by the coroner wagons? Where are the videos of the dead accomplices being removed from the warehouse? Where's the pictures of the bodies? We got to see a lot of videos of the terrorists leaving the Hebdo building but where are the videos of them smoking them out of their holes and them rounding them up? If someone knows where they are can they post a link?


Another reason to think that this was a false flag. How convenient to include a Jewish supermarket in the attack.


After invitation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both French presidents Sarkozy and Holland will make aliya
Whole Polish national assembly (Sejm) would qualify too.


Yes, all Jews come to 3rd Reich! Jews that represent Judaism will never support you or your illegal regime Hitleryahoo! How can you treat ISIS terrorists in Israeli hospitals, kill Jews who represent Judaism then invite them using the scare tactic to live in Israel??


Anti - Semitic Europe?? French Jews to go to the terrorist entity that is Israel “rising tide of anti-Semitism” in Europe boy that's rich
Lets be clear here, French Jews (European for that matter) are not Semitic, over 90% of Israelis are also not Semitic that includes the fascist Netanyahu (polish) So the real anti Semite in the room is Israel. Palestinians are semitic by the way.
By the way there have been reports of french Jews joining ISIS, so netanyahu anti semite of polish decent the only “rising tide of anti-Semitism” is what you have and are continuing to create since the holocaust of 1948, these attacks in Europe are there to justify your own actions of genocide that you are committing.


Every year 3000+Palestinians of all ages are slaughtered by Israel as part of their ongoing Genocide against the Palestinians. Holocaust is what the IDF is doing in Palestine and Gaza strip and West Bank and the proof that Wallace the Jew was the chief of the Klou Klux Klan and also the many jews who have joined Al-Qaeda and ISIS is enough proof to know that the USA is doing all these atrocities with the guidance of israel.


[hr]

Some things are as stark as ever.



January 9, 2015

Wikileaks: ‘Jewish pro-censorship lobby’ legitimized attacks on Charlie Hebdo

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!)

Wikileaks accused the Jewish lobby of legitimizing attacks on the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, which was assaulted Wednesday by Islamist terrorists in one of the worst such attacks on French soil.

The organization, which serves as an online clearinghouse for leaked documents, tweeted on Thursday about "How the Jewish pro-censorship lobby legitimized attacks on Charlie Hebdo for 'offensive' speech," linking to a 2009 article in the magazine perceived by some to be anti-Semitic.

http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Wikileaks-Jewish-pro-censorship-lobby-of-legitimized-attacks-on-Charlie-Hebdo-387183

Three gunmen entered Charlie Hebdo's Paris office on Wednesday and opened fire, killing 12 people, including Jewish cartoonist Georges Wolinski. The attack drew fierce condemnation worldwide, including from Jewish organizations.

The article to which WikiLeaks linked was from the British newspaper The Telegraph, which details accusations of anti-Semitism leveled against Charlie Hebdo writer Maurice Sinet for commenting on the engagement of then-president Nicolas Sarkozy's son to a Jewish woman amid rumors that the younger Sarkozy planned on converting.

MORE: http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Wikileaks-Jewish-pro-censorship-lobby-of-legitimized-attacks-on-Charlie-Hebdo-387183

[HR]

Anyone surprised?

BDS Leaders Promote Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory Linking Mossad to Charlie Hebdo Atrocity

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