First, Biden is not "Netanyahu's bitch." I understand the impulse to vent, appreciate your apology, and will get over it. But before I do, let me talk a little bit about my family. Admittedly, because my mother is Norwegian, I'm not 'officially' considered Jewish, but my father's side is very much composed of German Jews. My cousin made a list of relatives, first cousins and closer, who died in World War II, either in the camps or otherwise, and it numbered over a hundred.
I found this letter in my great uncle's papers: The letter, or rather three letters in one was 28 pages long, and is among the most harrowing things I've ever read. I apologize for all the typos, I preview-copied this from type-written pages. This is the beginning of it:
We write to you with the blood in which tens of thousands of us are perishing. We are now living through the Epilogue of our terrible tragedy. The Nazis, in the face of their defeat, are murdering off the pitiful remnants of the Jewish population.
They began with the Lublin District which lies in the path of the approaching front. In this district the Germans had concentrated a number of camps where 40,000 Jews barely vegetated - most of them from Warsaw and the District of Lublin.
The largest of these camps are: Travnik (10,000,) Poniatow (15,000) . We were in constant touch with all those camps; we helped them as much as we could; we furnished them with money and arms.
On Wednesday, November 3, 1943 at 6 All. all the men in Tramniki were called out for the alleged purpose of digging air-shelter trenches. After two hours they were encircled with machine-guns and all of them, without exception, were shot down.
In the meantime 50 trucks drove into camp.
All the remaining women and children
mere loaded on them and teken to an extermination point where they were forced to strip of their clothing and were then machine-gunned in the same fashion as the men.
After this massacre, 3,000 Italian Jews were brought to this camp and the same fate awaits them.
A similar massacre took place in Lublin on Fridsy. Severel thousand Jews rere murdered there.
Almost simulteneously a bloody "selection" took blace in the camp
at Poniatow. The greater majority of the camp inhebitants, almost all women and children, were sent to their deaths.
During the first days of November, the Germans began liquidating the Jewish cemps in the Second District, which is near the front, , in Eastern Galicia. In one camp in Lwow, on Janowska Street, where there vere approximetely 7,000 Jews, Germans "selected" 2,000 whom they murdered in bestial fashion at the execution-place at Plaski Place.
We have not the slightest doubt that within the next days and weeks all the remaining Jewish centers, camps and few exiating ghettos will be effaced.
Te are now making desperate efforts to rescue from the camp the most important individuels of our sociel and cultural elements, this 1s, however, a monumental undertaking, involving effort and money. We are convinced that within a very short time there will remain only those few tens of thousands of Jews of the origine] 3,500,000 Jews of Poland who are hiding outside of the ghettos and camps, eithe in the Aryan quarters or in the forests where they live literally like ceve-men.
Last month we estimated that there were only between 250-3001, 000 Jews left In Poland. It 1s our opinion that in a few weeks there will only remain about 50,000.
In order to crush the uprising the Germans did what they had done in Margar they set the ghetto afire. The bitter fight lasted 8 deys. But the Jewish re-sistence did not weaken and lasted for another month, into the middle of September.
The heroic battle in Blalystok will share its place in history with the resistance of Warsaw.
During the last few months, the Jews have engaged in two other uprisings which were of great symbolic importance.
They destroyed two extermination-centers - the
death-camps at Treblinka (near Malkin) and Sobibor (in the District of Chelm-Lublin).
At both camps, the remants of the Jewish victims who were awaiting death organized in fichting "fiveg" and at a pre-arranged moment, launched their attack; throwing themselves fiercely upon the German and Ukrainian guards, they disermed and killed the mafority of then, , burned dom the gas-chembers and the "living-crematoria" and after having accomplished this, escaped to the neighboring forests.
Hers of these heroic deeds flashed over the length and breadth of the country
But the Jews resisted not only in
Bialyatok.
Treblinka and Sobibor:
eimilar organized uprisings took place in
Czestochone
Bend
no, Tranow, and
in a number of small localities.
The final liquidation of the ghetto of Tarnow took place on the Ist, 2nd and 3rd of September, , 1943. One hundred and fifty Jews at a time were loaded into
freight-cars, , the floors of which were covered with a layer of carbite and dry lime...
The letter goes on and on, in crippling details. I am well aware that the world is filled with endless sorrow, and well aware that Jews are not alone in this, not by a long shot. I know enough of the history of Ireland, of American slaves, of Native Americans, of the countless millions of victims of Rome to state this confidently. I include this portion of this letter to you only to provide to you, Mick, specific context of me, David, for better understanding in the course of this conversation. This is my family. I'll go on and say that I have spent a good portion of the last six and a half years in dusty old archives, tracing the rise of industrial-corporate fascism, and that you will be gratified at the universality of the villainousness that has led to it.
You seem amused by the rise of fascism, both in the US and in other places. I don't share this amusement. I don't share your nihilist glee at this. I don't feel as immune to its effects as you seem to.
I get that you like to blurt things out, and I can enjoy a bit of barroom vulgarity as much as the next guy.
You consider me a "humorless Victorian patriarch." I am none of those things, that is yet another of your reductionist, simplistic absurdities. What I am is righteously pissed off at you, and your easy, meaningless, self-pitying nihilism. Try to remember who you are talking to when you're feeling swallowed by the ass cracks, and find yourself compelled to talk like a fart..
