i wasn't gonna mention this, but kind of feel like i have to.
after reading some of the remarks on these posts, i put a check in the mail today.... to a christian/jewish relief organization.
best thing i have done all week.
thought a few would enjoy the notion that their drivel got me to get off my butt and contribute some money.
the money is used for medical/food, etc for the old people left alone with no support network in the former soviet union.
Reagan even endorsed this program.
in the 90's i got a letter from my mother's cousin, last seen by my mother in 1914. An old lady, she needed money to buy a tombstone for her, husband, and children in present day croatia. Her husband, children had been killed during WWII. Not an uncommon story. they were in the Bosnia area at the time of the then war.
Lots of older people in central europe, no children, no family after the war, an indifferent government or governments.
it's a different world than in the U.S., in the rural villages. I can remember my grandparents eating congealed grease in a roasting pan with a ham in it, on black bread. My grandfather talked of the starvation in his village every winter in the old country.
There are still holed soviet tanks sitting in the fields surrounding my grandmother's village.
Not everybody faces this, in the cities much has changed, but in the rural countryside, being old, with no family, can be pretty tuff.
As to why jews didn't fight back, some did. but as a very good friend of mine, now deceased, said in a conversation we had at one time, it just didn't seem real that your neighbors you had lived peacefully with for many years would turn on you the way it happened. He lost most of his family in poland during those years.
I am not jewish, but my half sisters grandfather was a russian/polish jew. My eyeopener came this last summer researching their family name.
they all became dead in the summer of 1944, at a place called auschwitz, about 60miles from my grandmother's village.
And seeing a picture of a group of people after coming off the train at auschwitz, being separated left and right. In that picture was lucy.
My sister died a few months ago, but she remembers a distant cousin in calif named lucy, probably named after this woman.
I made a promise to my now deceased friend, it will never be honored now because he is dead. but if those conditions in europe were to come here, we would die together in my house, i would never forsake him or his family.
Then there was buddy, another deceased friend/coworker. He was a little guy, a jew, he spent wwII in iran working for the O.S.S. His widow, also my friend, ended up in a jewish retirement home. Those tattoo's on her arm were what they were.
One part of my family is slovak/croatian. The other is north german. And about 75 members of that side were members of the national socialist party in germany prior to WWII. And a number were high up in the german military and/or government.
quite a contrast having that background isn't it? And contributing to a jewish relief organization.
jews are just people, some are bad, many are good. it is not right to condemn whole groups of people for the actions of a few.
