Holocaust Remembrance Day 2020

April 21 is Holocaust Remembrance Day.  If you do not know the history of the Holocaust in some detail, you may think of the Holocaust as the death camps, particularly Auschwitz, where a million Jews died. 

During the last four years I have visited Holocaust sites and Holocaust memorials and read the history of the Holocaust in country-by-country detail.  The numbers tell a much different story than the Auschwitz-centered narrative of the Nazi death camp.  Auschwitz went into operation as a death camp in 1942. Previously, it was a slave labor camp. Half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust, more than three million, were already dead by 1942.

Beginning with the invasion of Poland in 1939, Jews were rounded up and killed by the SS, by German police and by local police in Poland.  When the Nazis invaded Russian in June 1941, SS units spread out in conquered territories. The Nazis told local people in eastern Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Belarus and Russia that the property of Jews could be seized by those who killed its Jewish owners.

Jews were dispossessed and murdered by their neighbors.  Some were killed on the spot, others were rounded up and shot over pits, sometimes the victims dug the pits.  Lviv, Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Vilnius and other cities in the east were the sites of mass shootings of hundreds of thousands of Jews.  The shooting was done by tens of thousands of German police, SS men, local police and sometimes German regular army units.  Thousands and thousands of men pulled the trigger on a rifle or a pistol and watched a Jew die in front of them. 

Almost no one survived the early personal slaughter. By contrast, every death camp had some survivors.  There are tales of survivors of Auschwitz. There are almost no survivors of the murders over pits at Babi Yar and other pits of slaughter.

Also, on this day, those who sheltered and saved Jews are honored.  They deserve the honor, partly because they are vanishingly rare.  There were thousands of these heroes, but they represent less than one in one thousand of the 400 million people who identified themselves as Christians in the lands conquered or controlled by the Nazis during World War II.

In his book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” Timothy Snyder says, “The Christians who showed mercy to Jews … were exceptions in the moral catastrophe that was Christianity during the Holocaust.” 

The complicity of Churches began in Germany in 1932 when German Christians supported the openly racist Adolph Hitler who was stoking fear of communism.  German Churches followed Nazi racial laws ejecting Jewish Christians from Churches who had converted, sometimes generations before.  Jewish Christians were almost totally wiped out in The Holocaust with the full complicity of German Churches. 

The Holocaust is a story of mass murder of six million Jews, but from the beginning, the story of the Holocaust of a story of government stripping citizens of rights, it is a story of theft of property, betrayal by neighbors, deportation, enslavement and murder.  The Holocaust was not done by machines. The theft and murder was done by millions of men and women who betrayed, robbed and murdered a person right in front of them. 

Corona Movie Five: Kelly's Heroes

Donald Sutherland as "Oddball"

My youngest son and I have been watching movies every other day the past week and a half.

The most recent movie, the fifth, was "Kelly's Heroes" a movie celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  The movie is as funny as I remember it. The movie opens with Clint Eastwood (Kelly) capturing a German intelligence officer in a town with at least a battalion of German troops. Eastwood drives through the town and the all those German soldiers in a Jeep never gets a scratch.  The officer tells Kelly about 14,000 gold bars 30 miles behind enemy lines.

Kelly, along with Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas and Don Rickles drive and walk that 30 miles, capture the town and get the gold.  In a gunfight at the OK Corral sequence, they make a deal with a German tank commander guarding the bank and get away with all the gold.

I first saw it in the theater my senior year in high school.  Five years later, after four years in the Air Force, in 1975, I was in Armor School at Fort Knox and served a decade on active duty and in the reserves as a tank commander.  then in 1999, when I had been a bearded civilian for a decade and a half, I got my last tanker nickname.  The company I worked for acquired a subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Several of a us flew there to meet the staff.  We got picked up at the airport by a company driver who spoke fluent English he learned from movies.

On the slow trip to the office in Sao Paulo traffic, our CEO told the driver, "Neil used to be a tank commander." At a traffic light he turned around and said, "Oddball! You look just like Oddball.  I love Kellys Heroes."

And that nickname stuck till I changed jobs.

The other movies so far:
Midway (2019)
Ford vs Ferrari
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Wild Bunch

Corona Film Festival Movie Four: The Wild Bunch

My son Nigel and I are having a Corona Film Festival. The most recent and fourth film on our list was "The Wild Bunch."  The movie just before this was "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." 

Both movies were made in 1969--the year I got my drivers license.  Both are set at the end of the 19th Century and represent the end of the frontier and "The Old West." They are the farthest extremes of the cowboy movie genre and represent the end of cowboy movies.  Traditional Good Guys and Bad Guys were out of fashion.

In The Wild bunch, three groups are set against each other in this movie.  All of them are bad. All of them end up slaughtered in the final Sam Peckinpah gun fight or shortly after.  There are no good guys.  The group we follow through the movie are bank/train robbers.  They are pursued by a vile, incompetent set of vigilantes led by a former member of the gang, and in Mexico they fight against and ally with a Mexican rebel army led by a bandit general. 

By contrast, in "Butch Cassidy" nobody is bad.  Butch and the kid are robbers, but they are amiable, honorable and kill only when threatened.  The posse that pursues them is relentless, again honorable men upholding the law.  The rest of the Hole in the Wall Gang are decent men. When Butch and Sundance escape to Bolivia, they rob banks and are pursued by Bolivian police and soldiers who are also decent men. No bad guys. 

The final scenes are a stark contrast.  In both the robbers at the center of the drama are killed in a hail of bullets. But Butch and Sundance die off camera.  The gang in the Wild Bunch die on camera surrounded by the bodies of their enemies. At the nearly everyone is dead, except the Mexican villagers oppressed by the rebel general. They come to the scene of the carnage and collect the guns to protect themselves from other bandits.

Neither movie is anywhere close to the white hat hero versus the black hat outlaw of the traditional cowboy genre.  At the end of the 1960s, America was protesting war. There was violence in the streets. The top movies of the following year, 1970, were anti-war war movies.  Nigel and I will be watching these also:  "M*A*S*H,"  "Kelly's Heroes," "Catch-22," "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and "Patton" debuted during the first year of the 1970s.

"Patton" may not seem like an anti-war movie, but the character of General Bradley is a foil to Patton--the General who cares vs. the General who dares--at the expense of his men.

The return of Good Guys and Bad Guys would be the 1977 movie Star Wars--which used every trope of the traditional cowboy movie right down to the bar scene to bring back the Good Guy/Bad Guy Hero/Villain theme to the movies.  The full title of that 1977 movie is "Star Wars--A New Hope" a title more appropriate than ever looking back over almost five decades. 

Movie one of Corona Festival was Midway which I wrote about here. Nigel and I will watch the 1976 version starring Charlton Heston. 

Movie two was Ford vs. Ferrari, which I first saw in Paris in November with the title "LeMans 66." I was so taken with the movie I visited LeMans, France, a few days later and the museum at Circuit de Sarthe where the race is held.