Holocaust Blog #4 (Friday)

Guide Questions:

1. What motivated Rush to write Red Sector A?
2. According to the lyrics, what impact did the camp have on its captives physically and mentally?
3. In the song, what hope surfaces for the camp's captives?
4. According to the final stanza of the song, what are the captives left thinking and feeling after being freed?
5. "Grace Under Pressure" was a concept album that illustrated a bleak, distant future. Given the initial motivation for Rush to write thins song, why do you think Rush chose not to name a particular camp or time period in the song?

Rush's 1984 album "Grace Under Pressure" included the track "Red Sector A." The song, written by drummer Neal Pert, focuses on the experience of a person struggling to survive at an unnamed prison camp. "Red Sector A" was particularly meaningful to the band's lead singer/bassist/keyboardist Geddy Lee:

From "How the Holocaust rocked Rush front man Geddy Lee", Jewish News Weekly, June 25, 2004:

The seeds for the song were planted nearly 60 years ago in April 1945 when British soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Lee’s mother, Manya (now Mary) Rubenstein, was among the survivors. (His father, Morris Weinrib, was liberated from Dachau a few weeks later.) The whole album “Grace Under Pressure,” says Lee, who was born Gary Lee Weinrib, “is about being on the brink and having the courage and strength to survive.”

Though “Red Sector A,” like much of the album from which it comes, is set in a bleak, apocalyptic future, what Lee calls “the psychology” of the song comes directly from a story his mother told him about the day she was liberated.

“I once asked my mother her first thoughts upon being liberated,” Lee says during a phone conversation. “She didn’t believe [liberation] was possible. She didn’t believe that if there was a society outside the camp how they could allow this to exist, so she believed society was done in.”

The Lyrics to Red Sector A:

All that we can do is just survive
All that we can do to help ourselves
Is stay alive...

Ragged lines of ragged grey
Skeletons, they shuffle away
Shouting guards and smoking guns
Will cut down the unlucky ones

I clutch the wire fence
Until my fingers bleed
A wound that will not heal-
A heart that cannot feel-
Hoping that the horror will recede
Hoping that tomorrow-We'll all be freed

Sickness to insanity
Prayer to profanity
Days and weeks and months go by
Don't feel the hunger-too weak to cry

I hear the sound of gunfire
At the prison gate
Are the liberators here-
Do I hope or do I fear?
For my father and my brother-it's too late
But I must help my mother
Stand up straight...

Are we the last ones left alive?
Are we the only human beings
To survive?...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sector_A]

Holocaust Blog #3 (Thursday)

Guide Questions:

1. Describe the subject of this poem. How was she dehumanized?
   
2. What did she experience upon entering the camp?
   
3. What was her act of "resistance?"
   
4. What kept her going in such a difficult existance?
   

Saving the Children
by Frieda Singer
(to Gizelle Hersh)

[from Voices of the Holocaust, Perfection Learning, 2006]
[pictures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp]

They had taken away
her hair
her shoes
her name a bluish number
under the skin1
her gender denied
in a sea of men
yet something of her
as she was remained.

In the barracks
where work makes one free2
she learned to stand motionless from five to ten
for Zeile Appell3
camouflaging her skin where
blemishes meant selection to the left,4
urging her sisters
who refused the moldy soup
the sawdust bread
that to eat was to resist
to eat, even to eat
the pain.



To eat, even when
the throat gagged
from the disinfecting stench;

to eat, even with
swollen ears
and frozen feet
in cubicles too narrow
to stand or sleep
where one worn blanket
was assigned to cover ten;

to swallow
even the teeth marks
of the snarling kapo guard
doubling back upon them
the injuries from above.

To remember always
that first day
when a flick of the wrist
sent her to the right
her parents to the left.

Mother, where are you,
twelve year old Katya would scream
night after night.
At sixteen, more adult than child,
she had promised
to care for the children
the promise that kept her
and them alive.

1. bluish numeral: tatoo. Jewish prisoners were given an identity number to dehumanize them.
2. work makes one free: translation of the motto above the gates of Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei.
3. Zeile Appell: roll call.
4. selection: sorting process. Healthy prisoners went to the right; the young, the old, and the ill were sent to their deaths.

Holocaust Blog #2 (Tuesday)

Use the following questions to guide your reading and your response:

What are you left thinking and feeling after reading Crystal Night?

What does the last stanza of the poem describe? What does it seemingly predict?

What is the main idea of Niemoller's piece?

What does Niemoller's piece mean for us as citizens of the United States and of an increasingly interdependent global community?

November 9, 1938: Kristallnacht literally translates into the "Night of Broken Glass." Hitler ordered the SS to attach Jewish synagogues to see how the world would react. He then continued his efforts to eliminate all Jewish people in Germany.

[from Voices of the Holocaust, Perfection Learning, 2006].


Crystal Night
by Lyn Lifshin

windows slashed
like skin pulled
tight frozen with a
stone slammed thru
it smashed blue

glass crystal a
whole lake of ice
a plane crashes
into smashed
tea cups bowl of

glass glass
shattering in the
night something like
a mirror walked
into they came beat

people up blue
jars the glass piled
in an alley calf
deep. All night the
sound of ice in

the branches poking
holes in the roof
A warning stained
glass from the
synagogue slashed

plum peach cherry
frosting over in
the chill NOvember
light an arm
torn bleeding

a whole family
in shards and this
just the beginning


The next is a famous piece from Pastor Martin Niemoller. Portions of this poem were used in the play we watched at Nazareth College. Niemoller spent seven years in concentration camps after protesting the Nazi mistreatment of Jews.

[from Voices of the Holocaust, Perfection Learning, 2006].

In Germany, first they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Jew

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics
and I did not speak out -
because I was a Protestant

Then they came for me -
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

Holocaust Blog #1 (Monday)

As you read the following primary sources, consider the following:

1. Who carried out the 'Final Solution?' Why?
2. Who bears responsibility?
3. Soldiers must carry out orders. How could a soldier refuse an order?

Rudolf Hoss, commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp:

I personally never hated Jews. I considered them to be the enemy of our nation... Himmler gave me the orders personally in the summer of 1941 to prepare a place for mass killings [of Jews} and then carry it out... At the time I wasted no thoughts about it. I had received an order; I had to carry it out. I could not allow myself to form an opinion as to whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not... Since the Fuhrer himself had ordered 'The Final Solution of the Jewish Question.' there was no second guessing.

[excerpted from Rudolf Hoss, Death Dealer, The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz]


Robert Fisch, Jewish Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust:

Responsibility is a very complicated issue. Eichmann was originally assigned to make emigration possible for the Hungarian Jews, for $400 each in trucks or other merchandise. But no country would "buy" the Jews. You cannot blame a Hitler when millions of people were taken by trains, "assisted" by local guards and train engineers. Roosevelt knew exactly what was happening, so why were the trains not bombed, to stop the concentration camp activities?... We should raise our voices when a mass extermination is taking place.

[excerpted from Witnesses to the Holocaust, Jewish Community Relations Council/Anti-Defamation League of Minnesota and the Dakotas, edited by Rhoda G. Levin. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990]

Hans Friedrich, 1st SS Infantry Brigade:

Hans Friedrich: Try to imagine there is a ditch, with people on one side, and behind them soldiers. That was us and we were shooting. And those who were hit fell down into the ditch. …
They were so utterly shocked and frightened, you could do with them what you wanted.
Interviewer: Could you tell me what you were thinking and feeling when you were shooting?
Hans Friedrich: Nothing. I only thought, 'Aim carefully' so that you hit properly. That was my thought.
Interviewer: This was your only thought? During all that time you had no feelings for the people, the Jewish civilians that you shot?
Hans Friedrich: No.
Interviewer: And why not?
Hans Friedrich: Because my hatred towards the Jews is too great. … And I admit my thinking on this point is unjust, I admit this. But what I experienced from my earliest youth when I was living on a farm, what the Jews were doing to us—well that will never change. That is my unshakeable conviction.
Interviewer: What in God's name did the people you shot have to do with those people who supposedly treated you badly at home? They simply belonged to the same group! What else? What else did they have to do with it?
Hans Friedrich: Nothing, but to us they were Jews!

[http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/40-45/victims/perps.html#freidrich]

Intro/Directions

As we continue our study of World War II, we will now focus on the Holocaust: the murder of aproximatley 11 million people (6 million Jews and 5 million others) at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War. We have already studiesd the concept of genocide when examining the Armenian Genocide during the First World War unit and have gained an insight into the Anti-Semitisim in Europe pre-dating the war in previous units and from the play "The World of Anne Frank" at Nazareth College. For this particulat activity, you will be examining various primary and secondary source materials, posting your reactions to each on this blog.

To make a post:

1. Click on the comments link at the bottom of each post in the white bar.
2. Type in your response.
3. Below your response, please type your name -- first name only for safety reasons!
4. Type in the anti-spam code provided by Google.
5. Click anonymous.
6. Press submit.
   
   Remember:
   
   -You are required to post a response to each document.
   -Your post must be a serious, appropriate reaction using FREDs; you must also be identifiable. Failure to meet these requirements will result in a zero, nadda, zilch, nothing, etc.