@bkcunningham I’m not Jewish. But Hitler would have considered me Jewish. That’s why he killed most of the people he killed. I am very surprised that people didn’t get that.
In any case, Hitler’s definition of Jew was based on your maternal grandmother. If your mother’s mother was Jewish, then he considered you to be Jewish. It didn’t matter whether you had no idea of this and knew nothing about Judaism. You were a Jew if your mother’s mother was Jewish, which is the case with me. I
didn’t find that out until I was 20.
Hitler killed 8 million Jews for being Jewish. He killed others—gays and the disabled and the mentally ill, I guess, but Jews were far and away the ones he killed the most of. It is really strange to me that I would have been on his hit list since it would have come as a shock to find out I was Jewish at the moment I was told to head off to the camps.
Of course, that was already history by the time I found out. Now, it seems that Hitler and what he did to the Jews is even more ancient history. They don’t seem to teach this is schools any more. A friend of mine told me that a worker at her house had a swastika tattoo. She somehow intuited that he didn’t know what it mean. She took him aside and told him about the history of Hitler and the Jews and offered to pay to have it removed.
He said he wouldn’t take her money. But the next time she saw him, he had more added to the tattoo and turned it into a flower. He thanked her for telling him the story, and told her that so many things made sense to him now. He could understand where all the dirty looks he’d been getting from random older people were coming from. He understood now why he’d had trouble getting some jobs.
For someone who grew up in a time when every movie was about WWII and Hitler was such a nemesis, it’s hard to believe that people could grow up without knowing these things, but I guess it will be happening more and more, the farther away it is in history.
People talk about never forgetting, but of course, holocausts continue to happen: Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Somalia, and on and on. I guess it doesn’t help to act shocked when people are ignorant. Instead, we need to tell our stories so people can learn or remember or both.
The times when people are killed just for being Jewish, or Hutu or Tutsi or Croatian, or gay or mentally ill or black are still not over. They are not laughing matters, either, I don’t think. I hope people can learn to put themselves in other people’s shoes. Imagine if someone wanted to kill you just because of your parents? Or perhaps because of some preference you have, such as merely preferring tea to coffee. Absurd? God, I hope so. But I fear not. I’ve never before been made fun of because I could be killed for who I am in some countries or times. It’s not something I feel inclined to take lightly. I guess this is more shocking than it was the first time around.
