Patterico's Pontifications

6/19/2019

Follow-up: Ocasio Cortez Says “I Will Never Apologize” For Concentration Camp Remarks

Filed under: General — Dana @ 5:58 pm



[guest post by Dana]

After Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared ICE detention facilities with Nazi-era concentration camps, saying that “the U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are,” there were immediate calls for the freshman lawmaker to apologize. However, no such calls have come from Democratic leadership. To the contrary, Nancy Pelosi essentially brushed it off.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said:

She does not understand what is going on at the border at the same time. But there is no comparison … and to actually say that is embarrassing. To take somewhere in history where millions of Jews died … and equate that to somewhere that’s happening on the border … she owes this nation an apology.

The Jewish Communities Relations Council wrote:

“We are deeply disturbed by the language used in your recent Instagram live video which seeks to equate the detention centers on America’s southern border with Nazi-era Concentration Camps,” the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York wrote in a letter. “The terms ‘Concentration Camp’ and ‘Never Again’ are synonymous with and evocative of the atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, in which 6 million European Jews were systematically denied civil and human rights due to their race and ultimately murdered in a state-sponsored genocide.”

CNN commentator John Avlon said her comments were “unacceptable” and called for her to apologize as well:

“Holocaust metaphors are beyond problematic,” he argued.

“And it’s clear,” he continued, “because she said ‘never again means something,’ that she was referring to it [the Holocaust]. She said later that she meant to make the comparison to internment camps. Look, internment camps are horrific, the key difference being millions of people systematically murdered by a state,” the journalist said.

“When we start to rationalize and put it in context, we’re [did she says this or ‘we’] say words don’t matter anymore in politics,” Avlon went on. “We’ve become numb to it. This is across the line. It’s not that hard to apologize. She should do it. It’s unacceptable.”

In spite of calls for her to apologize, Ocasio-Cortez dug in her heels, and responded with a firm “no”:

Untitled

DHS ripped 1000s of children from their parents & put them in cages w inhumane conditions.

They call their cells “dog pounds” & “freezers.”

I will never apologize for calling these camps what they are.

If that makes you uncomfortable, fight the camps – not the nomenclature.

Ocasio-Cortez knows that Pelosi is unlikely to pursue this any further, let alone demand she apologize. And that’s because she doesn’t have to: Remember how Pelosi jumped to Rep. Omar Ilhan’s defense after the freshman lawmaker used anti-Semitic tropes, saying “I don’t think our colleague is anti-Semitic. I think she has a different experience in the use of words, doesn’t understand that some of them are fraught with meaning, that she didn’t realize.”? Well, Pelosi was exampling a successful strategy for Democrats to employ when one of their colleagues really steps in it. Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas learned the lesson well:

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, explained during a CNN interview Wednesday that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared the migrant detention centers to concentration camps because she has a different “usage” and “perception” of words.

“With all due respect to her, she has a different usage of words, maybe a different perception. I live at the border, I’ve been to those detention centers, I’ve been to those shelters, as you know. There are adults in detention centers, but if they’re children, they are put in shelters that are run by nonprofits,” Cuellar said.

That Pelosi is one clever fox. It’s a great strategy. It provides cover, and allows a Democrat to say well, anything.

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana

78 Responses to “Follow-up: Ocasio Cortez Says “I Will Never Apologize” For Concentration Camp Remarks”

  1. Oh these crafty Democrats!

    Dana (bb0678)

  2. AOC what a mess. Pelosi what a mess. in 24 hours she has gotten every major Jewish Holocaust survivor group upset with her and the DNC. Simply astonishing not how crafty either of them are but how ignorant and blind they are.

    but hey this is the party of those who support murdering a new born baby. what did we expect?

    Where Eagles Dare (f30ac6)

  3. Lucky for AOC there are no Jewish voters in Brooklyn.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  4. Which proves she wants to put a target on ice personnel

    Narciso (f8a289)

  5. BTW, I’ve now finished the first 2 Bernie Gunther books, and for counterpoint, the second Black Chamber alt-history book (Theater of Spies) by S. M. Stirling which has scenes in a similar-feeling Berlin. There’s a neat homage in the latter book, where the author does a call-out to Turtledove’s American Empire series.

    I recommend the Stirling series highly — great fun and both books would make great movies except for a likely comparison between TR and Trump, which would never do. And maybe a little violence.

    The Gunther books, well the second book was much better than the first, whose mystery had an obvious (and correct) solution well before half-way, except to Bernie.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  6. The first March violets introduced the character, metropolis his last is actually his origin story

    Narciso (f8a289)

  7. I’m curious about this: How many commenters have used the term “concentration camp” without it having absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust, Jews or Nazis? Because I’m a lot older than AOC and I can say with certainty that the only times in my life that I’ve used the term is when it is referencing the Holocaust, etc. am I an outlier?

    Dana (bb0678)

  8. There were more non-Jews in the Nazi concentration camps than there were Jews. Greeks among them. And I might have pointed out, a time or two in my life, that they were invented by the British during the Boer War, as Beldar did in the other thread. But otherwise, to me, “concentration camp” means WWII and Nazis.

    nk (dbc370)

  9. I have heard people use the term when they were probably thinking about internment camps and misspoke. They know the difference but I think it can be easy to misuse.

    DRJ (15874d)

  10. “Concentration camp” could describe certain similar prisons, from the Soviet Gulags, to Castro’s treatment of AIDS patients, to Vietnam’s re-education camps. Probably some things in North Korea or the PRC would be similar. To me, a “concentration camp” is how a not-particularly-murderous fascism deals with its criminals and political outcasts. People die there, but not usually by being killed.

    The Nazis had concentration camps long before they became extermination centers for Jews, Gypsies and such. They were merely harsh prisons for political prisoners and undesirables, where the killing was retail and mostly by failing health. For things like Auschwitz and Treblinka, a better word is “death camp” or “extermination camp.”

    I’m not sure what to call America’s Japanese internment camps, as they never approached the terrible conditions of a Gulag or Germany’s pre-Holocaust concentration camps.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  11. I note that Wikipedia refers to Auschwitz as “a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust.”

    This doesn’t prove anything, other than they chose those words carefully, probably with some debate. It would differentiate some of the camps in the complex from others.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  12. I suspect that many on one fringe think the folks on the other side are planning camps for them any day now, and are quick to find such camps in their midst.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  13. Better stated:

    I suspect that many on a fringe think the folks on the other side are planning camps for them any day now, and are quick to find such camps in their midst.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  14. Kevin M and DRJ,

    But have you yourselves used the term personally in any context other than related to Jews, Nazis, Holocaust?

    Dana (bb0678)

  15. As for whether the Democrats will continue to go along with Pelosi’s “English is not their first language” hand-wave, I think, will depend on whether they continue to get the Benjamins. If the count from Jewish donors drops off, they’ll change their tune.

    nk (dbc370)

  16. The tent peg was ft. Sill that was used as an internment camp of the nisei

    Narciso (d8f070)

  17. Dana,

    In the 80’s, I may have referred to Gulags as “concentration camps.” Since they were.

    Germany was calling it’s own camps “concentration camps” long before the Final Solution was set in motion. At that time, Jews were not the most likely occupants. Socialists, criminals, gays and turbulent priests mostly. The systematic killing of Jews did not begin until 1941, although being Jewish in Poland was pretty bad before then.

    If anything, calling the death camps “concentration camps” lessens their impact.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  18. There were some “relocation centers” too, operated by the Einsatzgruppen and Police Battalions along the Eastern Front.

    nk (dbc370)

  19. Wow it almost seems that we have a politician on our hands who will take to social media to say inflammatory things in a quest for attention, with little regard for their veracity or the effect such words might have on the populace. Surely that politicians party must denounce that politician in the very strongest terms.

    JRH (52aed3)

  20. I don’t think so, Dana. I don’t remember ever using it except in reference to WWII.

    DRJ (15874d)

  21. @ Dana, who asked (#7):

    How many commenters have used the term “concentration camp” without it having absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust, Jews or Nazis? Because I’m a lot older than AOC and I can say with certainty that the only times in my life that I’ve used the term is when it is referencing the Holocaust, etc. am I an outlier?

    I think you are not. But I probably am:

    The summer before I started law school in 1977, a friend and I visited Dachau, a short train ride from Munich. We spent a full day viewing what remains of the camp — which takes all of 20 minutes — and the educational displays about it. We learned that Dachau was the first major German concentration camp, the center of an eventual hub-and-spokes system that provided slave labor for years before the start of the war, and that like other such camps, while it was wildly inhumane and had spectacularly high rates of death through disease, malnutrition, and occasional random executions, it was intended both as punishment by segregation and an ongoing source of slave labor. Dachau was never a death camp like Treblinka or ‎Sobibór far to the east, where millions who couldn’t do useful slave labor were promptly exterminated on a production-line basis and sent up the chimneys. This was well before the collapse of the GDR and dismantling of the Berlin Wall, and those locations were well inside Soviet-dominated territories that we couldn’t easily or safely visit. Since then I’ve been meticulous in distinguishing between the terms “concentration camp” and “death (or extermination) camp.”

    I think if you asked AOC the difference between Dachau and Treblinka, though, she’d reply, “I was not blinking!” She probably meant death camps.

    Despite that distinction, she’s still wildly and offensively inaccurate, of course. She’s an emotional child despite her age, and what she knows of world history could leave room to spare on a postcard.

    Beldar (fa637a)

  22. Her constituency — meaning, those who voted for her in her surprising upset in the Dem primary, not even all Democrats in her district — think that being sufficiently “woke” excuses all errors and inaccuracy. She’s truthy enough for them, and the older ones among them still believe the Killian memos were genuine.

    Beldar (fa637a)

  23. Kevin is right that concentration camps (like Dachau) and extermination camps (like Auschwitz-Birkenau) were really two different things. Both terrible, but not equally terrible.

    About 30,000 are believed to have died at Dachau over 12 years (and a significant fraction of those due to a typhus epidemic in the final months of the war). About a million perished at Auschwitz, most in the three years between 1942-1944.

    Dave (1bb933)

  24. “Surely that politicians party must denounce that politician in the very strongest terms.”
    JRH (52aed3) — 6/19/2019 @ 7:52 pm

    … and rally around the label NeverAOC.

    Munroe (8ed3fd)

  25. It seems some young people believe or have been taught that American internment camps are ethically the same as Nazi concentration camps. They aren’t and this is no excuse but if you feel that way, then you are likely to use the terms more expansively and it is easy to view Americans as bad.

    DRJ (15874d)

  26. Where’s Sammy Finkelman? His father was in three of them. The first two were labor camps. If I remember what Sammy related correctly, he was sent to the third to be killed but the Allies either bombed it or liberated it.

    nk (dbc370)

  27. This is a good op-ed on the lack of teaching about the Holocaust, and it references a troubling statistic:

    According to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, they interviewed 1,350 adults and found two-thirds of American millennials surveyed could not identify Auschwitz — the largest concentration camp where more than 1 million of Jews were exterminated — and 22 percent said they haven’t heard of the Holocaust or are not sure whether they’ve heard of it.

    Dana (bb0678)

  28. The new age woke sisters of the democrat party don’t give a darn about anyones feelings except their own.

    mg (8cbc69)

  29. I think Pelosi is trying to keep a safe distance from Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s ignorant stupidity. The freshman House member denied using the term “Nazi” yet literally used the terms “Holocaust” and “never again” when calling the detention facilities “concentration camps” (link).

    Paul Montagu (ed450b)

  30. @24. There was Dora at the Mittelwerk at Nordhausen which was primarily a forced labor ‘concentration’ camp. ‘Course in the end, being literally worked to death assembling V-1s, V-2s & other advanced weapons doesn’t make much difference.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  31. @30.You know what the difference between today’s bomb throwing AOC and yester-year’s bomb throwing Newtie is?

    Nothing.

    They know how to press buttons and get attention.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  32. I don’t know what was taught to earlier generations, but I don’t think I actually learned much about WWII in school in the 80s other than what I learned in English reading Anne Frank in 8th grade and Maus in English in college, and my guess is that they don’t learn much more now (if not less). I had the advantage of living in Europe for a few years as a kid and having a grandmother who lived through it, which is where I think I learned most of the WWII history that I know. My guess is that what most people know about WWII at this point is more cultural “knowledge” rather than actual knowledge.

    Nic (896fdf)

  33. 32- And Ted killed Mary-jo.

    mg (8cbc69)

  34. Granted, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez engaged in rank irresponsible hyperbole, but then the Trump administration was trying to claim that “the government is not required to give soap or toothbrushes to children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border and can have them sleep on concrete floors in frigid, overcrowded cells, despite a settlement agreement that requires detainees be kept in ‘safe and sanitary’ facilities” (link). Even prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions are entitled to better treatment.

    Paul Montagu (ed450b)

  35. It seems some young people believe or have been taught that American internment camps are ethically the same as Nazi concentration camps.

    The internment of Americans of Japanese decent was a terrible thing, but only because of the denial of the rights of citizens, not due to some horror of conditions. The conditions were primitive in most camps, but movement outside the camps, education of children, religious service, retained rights and other differences make it misleading to all them “concentration camps”, although it has become common. It seems a complete loss of perspective, bordering on intellectual dishonesty, but this is the current historical term.

    There were some camps which held “enemy aliens”, both Japanese and European, where political activity prior to war had been noted and those who had expressed allegiance to the now-enemy powers were interned in separate camps.

    The Japanese Exclusion order ending Jan 2, 1945. A similar exclusion in Canada did not end until 1949.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  36. I suspect a sizable portion of Americans don’t know what the swastika was a symbol of, let alone anything else about WW2.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  37. The internment of Americans of Japanese decent was a terrible thing, but only because of the denial of the rights of citizens, not due to some horror of conditions.

    The denial of rights for those American citizens was bad enough. One of the guys in my Friday men’s group is the son of a Baptist pastor who ministered to Japanese Americans who were sent from the Seattle area to internment camps in Idaho. The imprisonment not only damaged the lives of those Japanese Americans, it also damaged the lives of those who tried to help those imprisoned Japanese Americans, my friend included.

    Paul Montagu (ed450b)

  38. Yes, we have chosen to forget. We don’t educate about the Holocaust and some of us try to seem enlightened by parsing words.
    Let’s get directly to the unvarnished truth: the Jews (and gypsies and millions more) were intentionally sent to their deaths in concentration camps by the Nazis. They were worked to death, starved to death, gassed to death and burned to death. They were never intended to get out alive.
    Concentration camps were death camps and no amount of Wikipedia based parsing can soften the truth.
    The Japanese internment camps and the current US immigration facilities are not, never were and never will be concentration camps.

    Marv (fb9410)

  39. It never hurts to know the facts and be accurate, instead of relying on feelings and emotions like some politicians.

    DRJ (15874d)

  40. I’ve been looking for a song that fits AOC:

    Safe for work

    Chuck Bartowski (bc1c71)

  41. @30.You know what the difference between today’s bomb throwing AOC and yester-year’s bomb throwing Newtie is?

    40 IQ points?

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  42. #42 —

    It’s a mistake to consider AOC lacking in intellectual firepower. She knows what she is doing. It’s not stupidity or ignorance. It is mendacity, for our own good, of course.

    Appalled (d07ae6)

  43. She’s a barmaid who lucked into good handlers and ~16,000 idiots who voted for her over the incumbent’s ~14,000 drones in the primary in a safe Democratic district.

    nk (dbc370)

  44. She’s a Donnie Jr. or Eric jump-off made to earn her payoff, isnt it obvious?

    urbanleftbehind (5eecdb)

  45. Like the freakshows which are now the mayors of New York and Chicago. You don’t need a majority of the population. You don’t even need a majority of the voters. All you need is more votes than the other person running against you.

    nk (dbc370)

  46. She was hired by cenk uygur, the max Landis of progressives,

    Narciso (d8f070)

  47. I thought you loved living in that metropolis that is gotham?

    Narciso (d8f070)

  48. At least she’s attractive. When she keeps her mouth shut.

    nk (dbc370)

  49. But see, no one will ever elect a mayor from Staten Island (you could have at least ran, Dan Donovan) or Edison Park.

    urbanleftbehind (5eecdb)

  50. It doesn’t matter if she is smart or dumb. If she says what people want to hear, she will have followers and influence. Republicans should know that better than the Democrats.

    DRJ (15874d)

  51. If she says what people want to hear, she will have followers and influence.

    In that regard, you have to give her credit for not saying what people want to hear. She’s thinking independently, even if the way she thinks is way out of whack.

    Chuck Bartowski (bc1c71)

  52. I don’t think many Democrats want her to apologize. They want her to fight. They want her to be like Trump.

    DRJ (15874d)

  53. Yes they are In league with Hamas, and Iran. During the Iraq war they were in league with the terrorist, Michael Moore and kos particularly.

    Narciso (478783)

  54. She’s a useful tool. For now.

    Dana (bb0678)

  55. What would she have to do to get pulled off a committee, you know how Republicans will in person their own, at a blink.

    Narciso (478783)

  56. These are partisan times dominated by Trump so she would have to embrace Trump to become persona non grata in the DNC, just as Republicans jettison one of their members for not embracing Trump.

    DRJ (15874d)

  57. No you will find a Republican first to rush to the microphones against him,

    Narciso (478783)

  58. Funny how nothing happens when the left is involved in campaign finance schemes.

    mg (8cbc69)

  59. As to partisan times, Kerry, Kennedy Harkin Dodd Durbin just right off the top of my head

    Narciso (478783)

  60. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got into an argument wih Liz Cheney in which she wound up complaining that Liz Cheney had used the term “exterminated,” which, she said, she shouldn’t have done because that word came from the Nazis, only she complained about it in a more politically coreect abstract and stupid way than the way I am putting it here.

    https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1141112550702141440

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

    @AOC

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Retweeted Liz Cheney

    Also @Liz_Cheney, the fact that you employed the horrifying word “exterminated” here (co-opting the language of the oppressor) tells us that it’s *you* that needs to brush up on your reading.

    Hope you enjoy defending concentration camps. I won’t back down fighting against them.

    Liz Cheney
    Verified account

    @Liz_Cheney
    Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this. https://twitter.com/realsaavedra/status/1140846386042171392

    3:36 PM – 18 Jun 2019

    Note: The phrase “extermination of the Jews” was used quite a lot during the first 20 years after World War II.

    Sammy Finkelman (9974e8)

  61. 27. nk (dbc370) — 6/19/2019 @ 8:43 pm

    27.Where’s Sammy Finkelman? His father was in three of them. The first two were labor camps.

    he was in 6, if you count the three days he spent in Buchenwald in November 1943 being transported.

    (The reason for this, we can now tell because so much is known, is that Hitler had ordered all remaining Jews in Poland to be killed, but that order did not apply to Germany, which he probably thought no longer had any Jews, so a lot of forced labor prisoners where the prisoners were Jews were transported to Germany. This order did not apply to Auschwitz because Hitler had expanded he borders of Germany so that Auschwitz was no longer in Poland, but in Germany. It did apply to Maidenek and tghe result was he “Maidenek massacre” but somehow it stoppe short of completion.

    And also no longer in Poland was the city of Lodz. The Lodz ghetto had earlier been reclassified as a concentration camp, so it was never closed. A diminished Lodz Ghetto continued to exist until augist 1944, when, apparently, Adolf Eichmann noticed that a sizeable community of Jews was about to survive the war so he ordered all the people there to be taken away for the usual special handling. An uncle of mine had managed to keep a child alive until that point. The child was killed but he was taken to Auschwitz. So late in the war that he survived.

    If I remember what Sammy related correctly, he was sent to the third to be killed but the Allies either bombed it or liberated it.

    The last concentration camp was Theresienstad, better known for its earlier history, but at the end of the war a lot of prisoners were being taken there.

    He was saved from being killed by the end of the war – May 8, 1945. The Russians arrived.

    Sammy Finkelman (9974e8)

  62. that is remarkable, sammeh, I knew a neighbor who had spent three years at dachau, I have known others who were detained in the umap labor camps in cuba, the most neutral term is detention facility, like the one we have in south florida, near homestead,

    narciso (d1f714)

  63. She’s a useful tool. For now.

    That’s what Cruz thought about Trump, circa Jan 2016.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  64. Republicans jettison one of their members for not embracing Trump.

    I think it was more for embracing the Democrats’ charges against Trump. Not quite the same thing.

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  65. Thanks for your comments at #63, Sammy Finkleman. They add a lot to the discussion.

    Dana (657ffd)

  66. Nothing quite like a loudmouth broad from New York cheapening history.

    mg (8cbc69)

  67. I look at Los Angeles and San Francisco as concentration camps.

    mg (8cbc69)

  68. Thank you, Sammy. And my apologies for misremembering. I knew you had related your father’s story before, but it was some time ago in a thread I could not find.

    nk (dbc370)

  69. 63. In addition to that, my father’s parents were killed, and his older sister and her husband and her children, and a younger brother, born in 1920 (shot in a prison) and the wife and children of the uncle who survived.

    My father’s parents and his sister and her family (I think) lived in Otwock (a suburb of Warsaw, pronounced Otwosk. There is a question about the date they were killed. My father had always thought they were taken to Treblinka, he told me when I found a book TIME capsule 1943 (I didn’t even know that they lived on Otwock) that said the Jews there were shot. I just showed it to him to show what was known because that was interesting to me.

    This came from the March 8, 1943 issue of TIME magazine, which in turn was based on an American Jewish Congress report which I finally obtained a copy of in 1991 (somebody had apparently stolen the copy the New ork Public Library had but I got phhotocopies from somewhere else.)

    According to that a general massacre occurred in the ghetto of Otwock (pronounced Otwosk) on Augist 19, 1942 lasting 8 hours. It sad the German army did it. But the book The River Remembers by S.L. Schneiderman (Horizon Press, 1978) says on page 175 that a plaque dated 1947 gives the date as August 21, 1942.

    But a book that was published in Poland in 1993 and now in the United States called _Am I A Murderer_ supposed to be the memoirs of a Jewish policeman and sold in the 1990s by the History Book Club (associated with the Book of the Month Club) describes a round-up for Treblinka on August 19. that was what I first noticed, I later read some more in the book. I discovered first of all, that mention of death by shooting was in there, and there was a monument or memorial plaque (in Otwock) too, although it gave the date as August 19.

    The book implied over a period of time. Further reading led me to realize that the ghetto in Itwock was much bigger than I had tthought – I think 85,000 Jews there and also that the killing
    stretched out over weeks. It began on August 19, 1942 and ended on September 6, 1942. I had thought (FROM THE time mAGAZINE REPORT) it all took place in one day.

    The writer is Calel Peredchodnik who gave it to some person called a magister (that’s an academic degree) It wound up in the hands of his brother who hsad spent the war in Russia and was taken to Israel. Perechodnik gives no real details beyond that of the first day. The person who prepared it for publication (in Poland) who added notes says that things he recounts in it are inaccurate.

    There were seven brothers in father’s father generation (born circa 1880s) One went to America and one went to Israel and the rest were all killed.. The one in New York died in 1944 from smoking.

    My mother was born in Vienna. Her mother died in January 1939. Probably from some kind of worry or asthma. But not before she had managed somehow to get her son, my mother’s brother, released from Dachau. He went to England. (tha was the condition – in many cases they could be freed that year if they would leave the country, and it was hard to do, although it hadn’t been hard at all before World War I.) My mother went to England a week before the war, and her father said to her he would see her in a week. He spent a year on a ship and wound up in what was then Palestine. My mother’s brother, I learned from him in 1969, was arrested in England as an enemy alien after the war broke out (there was some stubborn stupidity there – this happened to many male Jewish refugees from Germany) but eventually was transported to Canada and freed. My mother spent the war in England, during all the bombing. She was amazed at hw calm they were, She didn’t know enough English at that time I guess to know how Winston Churchill had inspired them and why they were like that.She carried all her family papers and pictures with her into the bomb shelters. She emigrated to Canada in 1947. My mother’s father died in Israel of a heart attack at the beginning of 1949, so she never saw him again. She expected to get a telegram that he was coming because he was supposed to vsisit, ut instead she got a telegram that he died.

    And this has comment has gone on long enough, maybe too long.

    Sammy Finkelman (9974e8)

  70. Sammy
    God Bless you and your family.
    thanks so much for sharing.

    mg (8cbc69)

  71. Thank you Sammy. And this is why the Holocaust, and death camps in all places, should not be confused with immigration detention, wartime internment*, or even prisons, even the worst sort.

    ————-
    *Question: if we were at war with Iran, would Iranian citizens in the US be subject to detention, given a cause?

    Kevin M (21ca15)

  72. Sammy thank you for sharing that.

    Dustin (08654d)

  73. Not too long, Sammy, definitely not too long. Thank you for sharing. The timing of this subject and your comments comes at an interesting times as I am currently re-reading Elie Wiesel’s Night.

    I would ask, as you are very informed on the matter, what resources would you go to to locate Jewish family members who fled Eastern Europe because of the pogroms during the late 1800’s – early 1900’s? The problem I am having is that the country where my grandmother and her people came from is no longer in the same place due to the war and balkinization of the region over time. All she left me is the name of her mother (phonetically spelled) and the name of her village (also phonetically spelled). As of today, the village could either be in any of three countries. I’ve gone through all the usual resources, to no avail. Can you think of anything that might provide more specific info, or lead me to something more specific?

    Dana (bb0678)

  74. 73.

    And this is why the Holocaust, and death camps in all places, should not be confused with immigration detention, wartime internment*, or even prisons, even the worst sort.

    And, as a mater of fact, as I mentioned, my mother’s brother was confined in both Dachau and a British internment camp. I don’t think the British internment was remotely like Dachau.

    Where they killed people. And sent ashes back to the family. And that was before the war.

    Sammy Finkelman (9974e8)

  75. 75. Dana (bb0678) — 6/20/2019 @ 6:48 pm

    I would ask, as you are very informed on the matter, what resources would you go to to locate Jewish family members who fled Eastern Europe because of the pogroms during the late 1800’s – early 1900’s? The problem I am having is that the country where my grandmother and her people came from is no longer in the same place due to the war and balkinization of the region over time. All she left me is the name of her mother (phonetically spelled) and the name of her village (also phonetically spelled). As of today, the village could either be in any of three countries. I’ve gone through all the usual resources, to no avail. Can you think of anything that might provide more specific info, or lead me to something more specific?

    I am not actually all that well informed but i can say afew things:

    First, the name of aplace used by Jews is often different than the name used by non-Jews. Second, I think they made abad mistake in organizing things on geneology websites and so on like that according to the current name and country. In some cases the anme has been spelled that way oinly since 1991 and the country it si in is ony since 1991 or even 1993. You should look under the od name. Therte is probably much more writetn there.

    Thrid, apossible resource is the original application for Social Security number. This is god for oeople who applied till about 1973, when it started to be required to enroll achild in school, and maybe it was 1979, at birth. Theearliest Social Security applications apaprently don’t ahve very much (Soc Sec says no one born before 1865 would have one and no one born before 1910 would have parents’s name but thsi doesn’t go according to date of birth. Enrollment startted in 1936 but many jobs were exempt and many more needed it after 1951, so you might have it.’

    Nowaadays you can request it online. It costs $24 to get it printed from microfilm. It is fro any deceased person

    https://secure.ssa.gov/apps9/eFOIA-FEWeb/internet/main.jsp

    This is a Freedom of Infromation Act request for what is now called a Form SS-5. It will have the place of birth and the name of the ,pther and teh fatehr Spellingis whatever the person making the application chose. But you can do Google searches to find other variants.

    https://www.ssa.gov/foia/readingroom.html where they ahve previous requests probvably msotly statistical data.

    Another place is the American Jewish Historical Society. It now a place in New York but perhaos more resources are with the Boston office.

    https://jewishheritagecenter.org

    I remember a Massachusetts address. that’s where I got the copy of the American Jewish Congress report (that had been misisng from the New York Public Library around 1986)

    Sammy Finkelman (102c75)

  76. One other small difference between the detention centers and concentration camps:

    See cartoon.

    Kevin M (21ca15)


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