“Oh no!” you’re saying. “How could anybody not know about the numbers!”
I shouldn’t say YOU’re saying — most of my readers know we all live in our own little worlds and heads and don’t get outside much. The Jews with numbers were locked up in camps or companies and it was quite possible to go through the war — especially in distant theaters — and never see one of these things. Like everything else, a concentration camp is a comicon. With its own horrible fan-boys and unwilling attendees. They never get outside, and after awhile neither they nor anybody out on the street know there’s any cross-over, except for a a few costumers at the door area.
Whoa. This comicon metaphor fits EVERYTHING. Go ahead, apply it to anything, anybody or any world. We’re all at our own comicons.
Well, you’re hitting it on the head – the people that saw either were too afraid and kept their traps shut, or when they talked, they weren’t believed. The whole culture of MYOB in the Reich was enforced. I’ve talked to people who were children, teenagers during that time period, or had fathers that were in the Wehrmacht or the SS – they were, as we all know by now, told BS stories of where they were taking the “undesirables”.
I had a neighbor back in Syracuse, NY that was in her late 80s early 90s, Polish last name. We spent a lot of time together. We talked a lot about the Holocaust and life during that era. She wasn’t Jewish, but Catholic and a protestor, hence she spent some time in a KZ. She had the numbers on her arm. I asked her why she didn’t have them removed, as they reminded her of the bad times – she told me that if she had had them removed, then she would not have had the opportunity to tell people what had happened, and hopefully, it wouldn’t happen again because she had had that opportunity.
I miss her a lot – she died not long before I moved out of the city; I still remember sitting in her backyard with the stray cats we used to take care of, discussing everything from home remedies, to recipes to gardening tips. Towards the end of her life, I spent a lot of time over there taking care of her, as her family lived far away.
What a treasure to have known in your life. Of COURSE she took care of cats — she’s One Of Us (the think-aheads, not the kill-to-cures).
It’s even more important because she wasn’t Jewish — we have to realize that Pariah Creep applies to EVERYBODY. When the kill-to-cures start their work, anybody can end up in the net. In America, we have a group that has refused to be made into helpless pariahs, and stopped the creep into the rest of us: If you see a gay person, thank them for your freedom.