|
Among all the others.
The Master Race needed Liebensraum you see, so Poles were also (and very conveniently) deemed subhuman... it didn't hurt they were evicted out of some of the most fertile land in Europe. (Good thing they don't have oil)
I don't want to demean or detract from the shoah the European Jew's have suffered. I do not desire to disenfranchise, if you will, their 6 million deaths. But it is extremely frustrating when all one hears is "Six million people" died in the camps. This quoted figure is alarmingly widespread, (especially on The History Channel, no less, but it's also all through The Discovery Channels, National Geographic and many others -- ALL others!). I haven't heard the figure 11 Million in years. Truly.
Nobody ever speaks for those other 5+ million. It's incredibly sad.
I was just wondering if anyone remembered anymore... it sometimes appears there is yet another piece of holocaust history being rewritten.
Half of my heritage is Polish. My great-aunt is still in Poland. She has sat on a hard chair in the very center of the main room of her dark dingy "house", which is little better than a hut, for decades. It's close to catatonia, it probably IS catatonia. Every window is permanently shuttered. She doesn't go outside, she won't answer the door. If she has to go outside she waits until long after dark. And when she goes outside she creeps.
My auntie was in Birkenau. Five of her immediate family died there, she somehow survived. For what kind of life? She has none. She has never been offered any help in terms of her mental health, the one person to ever render help is one neighbor who will go to the market for her, and that neighbor still cannot enter her house to deliver her groceries until nighttime. But to be truthful, as for that other one neighbor, I must admit my aunt's pathological distrust of everyone and her constant terror is not conducive to having many helping friends.
On top of it all my mother married a very fine man but his ancestry is pure German (Bavaria). Even though his lineage, his foreparents have been in the United States since about 1820, that does not sit well with her, to say the least. And we children are also, in her mind, German.
I received a call just a little while ago that my aunt has died. All those words above now should be in the past tense. It appears she's been dead, an old God-forsaken woman sitting in that God-forsaken chair, for at least a week.
So I was just wondering if people did indeed remember those almost 6 millions more humans which were exterminated, not only because it appears that most have forgotten, but in some small memory of what my aunt and others like her experienced. Sometimes surviving can be just as bad as the death.
Along with her self, her pain and terror are also finally laid to rest. May she rest in peace.
I am extremely grateful and I deeply thank you all (mostly all) for remembering. I am in tears. If you are religious, please say a little prayer for her. Bless you. Thank you.
|