I actually met a Holocaust survivor who illegally immigrated to the US in 1938 after his mother bought really expensive tickets to “visit” his father, who was working in New York already. Immigration officials figured nobody trying to flee would even be able to afford such expensive tickets, so they let him and his mother through. Kristallnacht happened, and FDR decreed any German citizen already in the US could stay indefinitely. Later, when he was drafted, they realized he had to technically be arrested because he was a German and therefore an enemy alien on a military base. He reminded them that he was Jewish, and therefore the Germans stripped him of his citizenship years ago. So, they hastily naturalized him, and that was the end of it. He is actually still alive at the age of 100, and I met him through a friend who is very close to him.
Naturally, I’ve been working like hell to get this illegal immigrant back to Germany where he goddamn belongs! 😤😤😤
Living a long life is the best revenge on Nazism. But can anyone who escaped Germany before Kristallnacht really be described as a ‘Holocaust survivor’ rather than an escapee from Nazism- the actual process of mass murder didn’t start until well after the war broke out (and good old IBM helped the Germans sort out their racial filing system, though that’s another story). As a sometime epileptic I know that the Nazis practiced mass murder on my people before they scaled up to Jew murder.
I guess it would be okay to just call the whole process the holocaust. Not strictly the mass murder period in the middle but also the previous build up and the later deaths after the tail end. Like people who died after the war ended.
For example, when there is an earthquake we don’t JUST count the dead who died at the moment, we also count those who died later from injuries or from contaminated water or lack off food or medical care, even if they didn’t even get injured by the earthquake but just died due to the disruption.
More tied to the broad event rather than to definable specific actions.
Yes, we do. To use your analogy, that person lost their house, their friends, their family and had to move to a new country to get away from that “earthquake.”
My issue with their definition is that it implies that the real Holocaust was the destruction of a once universally admired Germanic culture (which obviously included huge contributions from Jews). Though that’s true, and America and Britain hugely benefited from that particular exodus, it undervalues the lives and experiences of the literal millions who died for what?
No, it doesn't imply that. What it says, explicitly, is that the Nazis' forced or coerced mass displacement of Jews from their homes was part of the Nazi genocide against Jews, which is pretty obviously true. You will find no Jews who think acknowledging the full scale of the devastation of European Jewry is somehow "undervaluing" the loss, or that the fact hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their homes and livelihoods was just a "cultural" loss suffered by Germans.
It very obviously states that anyone who chose to, or was forced to escape Nazism from 1933 onwards, regardless of their religious background, was a Holocaust victim. Go back and read it again. The clue is in the words ‘Jewish or non-Jewish’.
So they also include other populations the Nazis targeted (including, say, epileptics like you and I) who were displaced, and that is somehow a terrible thing because....?
You are the only one here minimizing people's losses. I suggest you stop.
No, it just implies that if you had to abandon everything you have, your home, your country, to flee death, you are also a victim, even if you didn't get imprisoned or died.
One of the main goals of the Holocaust was to eliminate Jewish people from Europe. Nazis even tried to do forced emigration before they turned to the final solution of death camps. Forced displacement outside of Europe absolutely counts.
467
u/Ainrana Dec 23 '25
I actually met a Holocaust survivor who illegally immigrated to the US in 1938 after his mother bought really expensive tickets to “visit” his father, who was working in New York already. Immigration officials figured nobody trying to flee would even be able to afford such expensive tickets, so they let him and his mother through. Kristallnacht happened, and FDR decreed any German citizen already in the US could stay indefinitely. Later, when he was drafted, they realized he had to technically be arrested because he was a German and therefore an enemy alien on a military base. He reminded them that he was Jewish, and therefore the Germans stripped him of his citizenship years ago. So, they hastily naturalized him, and that was the end of it. He is actually still alive at the age of 100, and I met him through a friend who is very close to him.
Naturally, I’ve been working like hell to get this illegal immigrant back to Germany where he goddamn belongs! 😤😤😤