Right wing extremism and mass murders: What is an "incel"?

Allen Mall Texas Shooting - Another massacre: "Just the thought of living a few houses down from someone who can do this can be a little scary and give you more caution,” said Moises Carreon, 52. “I don’t know why people want to shoot innocent people for any reason.”

Allen Texas vigil for victims of a mass shooting an an outlet shopping mall.

ALLEN MALL SHOOTING

“Right wing death squad”: What to know about the Allen shooter’s neo-Nazi views.

The shooter’s “RWDS” patch offers troubling clues about his ideology — and how it connects to views that are common among white supremacists.

Echo report published in the Texas Tribune by Robert Downen.

The Texas Tribune is the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

The man who killed eight people at a Dallas-area mall wore extremist insignia, posted racist and misogynistic screeds and praised Nazis online. 

Allen Texas gun massacre

Here’s what you need to know about the shooter and his ties to ongoing right-wing mass violence.

On Tuesday, the Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed that Mauricio Garcia, who was killed by police during Saturday’s attack at Allen Premium Outlets, had neo-Nazi tattoos and beliefs. Garcia also wore a patch during the killing spree that said "RWDS" — an acronym for "right wing death squad" — and while police have yet to announce a motive for the attack, journalists have uncovered a trove of social media posts in which the gunman fantasized about violence and glorified the Third Reich.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is an idiot.  

The Tuesday announcement contradicts days of claims by prominent conservatives — including U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia — who pointed to Garcia’s name and presumed Hispanic ethnicity to discount his potential ties to white supremacist movements.

“This is a very complicated aspect of right-wing extremism," Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, told CNN on Monday. "We would assume that everyone is white in a caucasian sense. But Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race, and so a lot of Hispanics might identify as being white.”

Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust-denying antisemite who recently had dinner with former President Donald Trump, has a half-Mexican father. Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys chair who was found guilty last week of seditious conspiracy for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, is Afro-Cuban. 

Seeing a recruitment opportunity, the Daily Stormer — arguably the most influential Nazi propaganda outlet in the world — began publishing in Spanish in 2017. And there is ample evidence that extremist views are on the rise among communities of color, despite often being couched in ideologies that perpetuate false notions of racial or ethnic hierarchy.

It is “part of the mutation that takes place as the racist fringe tries to become more mainstream,” Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State University, told Axios last year.

Moreover, the patch Garcia was reportedly wearing also offers troubling clues about his ideology — and how it connects to views that are common among white supremacist groups.

“This ‘Right Wing Death Squad’ patch strongly suggests ties to far-right extremist elements in America,” said Andy Campbell, a Huffington Post editor and author of the recent book “We Are Proud Boys,” which traces the violent group’s origins and white supremacist goals. “Today, the RWDS patch is prevalent at events that feature neo-Nazis, Proud Boys or other far-right extremist groups, and you don’t often see it anywhere else.”

Often shortened to RWDS, “right wing death squad” has for years been a popular slogan among neo-Nazis and other extremist groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center traces its spread to The Right Stuff, a white nationalist hate group, and it has frequently been donned by members of extremist groups, including leaders of the Proud Boys. In 2021, members of a “right wing death squad” Facebook group were arrested after plotting to “McVeigh” the Democratic National Committee — a reference to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in 1995.

And the slogan has a direct connection to political violence — specifically Augusto Pinochet, the CIA-backed dictator who murdered and tortured countless Chileans in the 16 years he led the country. Pinochet was infamous for his brutal campaigns against communists, socialists and other perceived enemies who were frequently dropped into the ocean from helicopters.

Today’s far-right movements adore him. One shirt, the front of which says “Pinochet did nothing wrong,” is particularly popular. The back reads, “Make communists afraid of rotary aircraft again,” with a cartoon of people being dropped from a helicopter. The sleeve has “RWDS” on it.

The Proud Boys, who Campbell said “fight under an explicit banner of white supremacy” and demand members agree “that white men created Western culture,” have sold Pinochet merchandise, and some of the group’s leaders have been photographed wearing “RWDS” patches and pro-Pinochet garb.

Pinochet “is celebrated by modern extremist groups for the extrajudicial murders of political opponents he oversaw — in particular, his regime’s habit of tossing leftists out of helicopters,” Campbell added.

The shooting in Allen was the latest in a wave of mass killings committed by right-wing extremists. A February report from the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism found that, in the past 10 years, white supremacists have been responsible for 73% of all extremist murders in the country. Last year, 93% of those killed by extremists were shot, and 60% died in mass shootings.

Texas is home to at least 52 hate groups, many of them active in the Allen area, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. And white supremacist propaganda incidents in Texas increased by 61% last year, fueled by what experts say is an increasing normalization of political polarization, hate speech and violence.

“The data is clear year after year: right-wing extremists present an urgent and continuous violent threat in the United States,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblat said in February.

Many of those groups and attackers have been animated by conspiracy theories that claim there is an intentional, often Jewish-driven effort to dilute white blood through immigration, LGBTQ rights and interracial marriage. Other attacks were fueled by rhetoric that depicts immigrants as “invaders” — a common trope among Republican Party leaders such as Gov. Greg Abbott, who has continued to use such language despite routine warnings of its danger. The gunman who killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in August 2019 said he wanted to stop the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

In November, five people were murdered at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ club by a man who reportedly ran a neo-Nazi website. Six months earlier, a white supremacist targeted Black shoppers at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, killing 10. Using 2020’s racial justice protests as cover and hoping to kickstart a second civil war, a U.S. Air Force sergeant attacked law enforcement in California, killing two. Two months earlier, a white supremacist opened fire at a Poway, California, synagogue, killing one. A month before that, a white supremacist killed 51 people at New Zealand mosques in a livestreamed attack that has inspired numerous mass shooters in America. In 2018, a white supremacist murdered 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.

Several school shooters — including the perpetrators of mass killings in Santa Fe, Texas, and Parkland, Florida — have also espoused white supremacist views.

❓❗Other mass shooters — including Garcia — reportedly held beliefs that are common among so-called “incels.” The term is shorthand for people who are “involuntarily celibate” and who frequently blame their lack of romantic success on feminism. The ideology is replete with misogyny, racism and antisemitism, and online “incel” communities have for years been targeted for recruitment by white supremacists and other extremist movements.

“Incel” ideology also has significant overlap with the broader “men’s rights” movement, which claims that men are losing power in society because of feminism. Such ideology was foundational to the spread of today’s far-right movements, particularly among disaffected young men in online gaming communities nearly a decade ago.

And it has its own, growing body count: In 2021, eight people were killed during a shooting spree at various Atlanta spas by a man who blamed women for his sexual addictions.

In 2020, a self-described “anti-feminist” lawyer, motivated by a belief that “manhood is in serious jeopardy,” killed a federal judge’s son.

Deon J. Hampton reported from Dallas. Jonathan Dienst and Corky Siemaszko reported from New York, and Ken Dilanian reported from Washington.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2023 - Survivor story

Holocaust Survivor Shares Mom's Art, Family's Story On Remembrance Day. Echo report published in Dundalk Patch, in Maryland, by Jacob Baumgart.

HMD 2023 THEME
Ordinary People is the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2023.

Nazis burned every Vienna synagogue

An Annapolis man survived the Holocaust. On Remembrance Day, he is sharing his mother's artwork and his family's story.

Annapolis, Maryland — Paul Schatzberg watched rioters destroy synagogues. He saw Nazis confiscate his father’s business. And he felt the pain of stones hurled his way, all because he was a Jewish boy during the Holocaust.

“We could hear the guns on a calm day,” Paul told Patch in an exclusive interview, pointing to the war fronts in Western Europe.

The Nazis killed about 6 million Jewish people during the Holocaust, which was Germany’s state-sponsored genocide during World War II. Paul and his family outran Nazi rule and fled to the United States. Still scarred by the atrocities that he weathered in Europe, Paul was afraid to show his Jewish faith.

Now 93 years old, the longtime Annapolis resident is proud of his heritage. It’s that Jewish community that taught his late mother, Cecilia Schatzberg, how to paint.

Cecilia's artwork is on display at the Michael E. Busch Annapolis Library, at 1410 West St.  Her gallery showcases the family’s life in the land of the free.

The exhibit coincides with this week’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, also called Yom HaShoah. The reflection started Wednesday at sundown and will end Thursday at dusk. There’s also an International Holocaust Remembrance Day every January 27.  This week’s observance, however, follows the Hebrew calendar and is an internal mourning day for the Jewish community.

Born in 1928, Paul was 9 years old when his native Austria surrendered to Germany. He remembers a parade held for Adolf Hitler when his soldiers rolled into town in March 1938.
Paul wanted to watch out of curiosity, but he was too scared. He stayed in a nearby park instead.

Holocaust survivor Paul Schatzberg is displaying his late mother's artwork at the Michael E. Busch Annapolis Library. (Jacob Baumgart/Patch)

A sustained roar welcomed the Nazi leader as he passed by. The noisy supporters were not violent at the moment, but that was about to change.

Paul always felt different at his predominantly Christian school in Vienna. He had seven Jewish classmates, compared with roughly 23 Catholic peers.

The Catholic students had weekly religion lessons. The school occasionally sent a representative from the synagogue, but the Jewish children were usually excused to play outside during the religious block.

Hitler’s takeover deepened that isolation and brought outright antisemitism to the forefront.

The family had to flee their homeland when the Nazis arrived. Cecilia's passport is pictured above with its swastika and red J. (Courtesy of Paul Schatzberg)

About a week after Germany annexed Austria, Paul’s teacher announced that the Jewish students had to switch schools. The Catholic classmates erupted in cheer, and the ashamed educator struggled to regain control of the kids.

“As I child, I was very much aware of antisemitism,” Paul said, noting that he would not wear a kippah on his head. “As a result, I would subdue my Jewishness.”

It was even worse at Paul’s new school. Christian boys sometimes waited outside to throw stones at him after dismissal. The assaulters spared Paul’s younger brother, Walter Schatzberg.

The violence reached a tipping point during the Night of Broken Glass on Nov. 9-10, 1938. Paul said the Nazis burned every Vienna synagogue but one during that coordinated rampage, which is also known as Kristallnacht or Crystal Night.

The only remaining synagogue was not burned because it was too close to neighboring houses, Paul said.

Paul returned to that surviving holy site in 1972. He was excited to find that the synagogue still had records of his parents getting married there in 1926.

Cecilia Schatzberg (pictured above), learned to paint in Baltimore.

Paul's father, Adolph Schatzberg, owned a successful shoe shop in the city’s fashion district. The store once sold footwear to American actress Paulette Goddard, an accomplishment that Paul is still proud of today.

A German law, however, forced Jewish Austrians to register their wealth with the Nazi government. That put the family business at risk, and the government then stole the store outright.

The Schatzbergs were left without income in a country where hostilities were boiling over. Their passports even had swastika symbols to mark the Nazi reign and red J’s to signify their Jewish faith. They had to flee before it got any worse.

“We couldn’t have stayed there and survived,” Paul said.

The family boarded a locomotive at Vienna West Train Station and rode to Antwerp, Belgium. They moved into a small apartment until Cecilia and Adolph found a permanent home.

Cecilia landed work doing alterations, assuring the family always had enough money for food.

The children went to school, where the classes were taught in Flemish. Paul had trouble learning in the foreign language, but pictures and context clues taught him enough to get by.

The family finally got approval to immigrate to the U.S., but there was one problem: Paul’s father was not allowed to join them immediately.

An American law capped the number of immigrants from certain countries. Austria had not reached its limit, so Paul, his brother and his mother were all clear.

Adolph was born in nearby Poland, which had already maxed out its immigration. He would have to wait two years to see his family again.

Paul, Walter and Cecilia traveled to London, where they boarded the RMS Lancastria* in December 1939.

The ship sailed a slow northern Atlantic route to avoid German forces. Crewmen practiced on the gun deck, but the ocean liner was no match for the Nazi submarines that could have been lurking below.

As the ship pulled into the harbor, Paul could not hide his excitement for a fresh start. It had been nearly two years since Hitler ruined his peaceful homeland.

Now, Paul was quite literally staring Lady Liberty in the face.

“I pushed my way through the adults to get to the railing so I could see the Statue of Liberty,” Paul said. “And she was there.”

A relative who was already in New York greeted the family and drove them to Baltimore, where they settled down.

Paul’s father was still in Antwerp. Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940, putting Adolph at risk once again.

Adolph was sent to Saint-Cyprien, an internment camp in southern France. Paul said his father eventually escaped the coastal prison by digging underneath the barbed wire.

Adolph moved in with some distant family members in France, but the country’s wartime rations meant the hosts didn’t have enough food for him.

Desperate for food and money, Adolph mailed his wife a letter asking for help. The note was written in pencil on a piece of toilet paper. Cecilia happily obliged and sent him $5, which is worth just over $100 today.

With Adolph struggling, it became clear that he had to find a way to the states. Paul said they worked with local officials to streamline his father’s approval.

Finally, the American government accepted Adolph, and he journeyed to the U.S. to reunite with his family in northwestern Baltimore.

Cecilia started to paint during her retirement. She took weekly classes at the Jewish Community Center near Pimlico Race Course.

Jacob Glushakow, an acclaimed Baltimore artist, taught Cecilia the fundamentals. The instructor was patient with his student, grooming her over several years.

Cecilia developed arthritis, but she didn’t notice the pain while painting. She later found joy reflecting on how she overcame the unique obstacles of each project.

The new artist crafted masterpieces that captured landscapes, stills and portraits. Her style fell at the intersection of realism and impressionism, combining crisp scenes with free-flowing brush strokes.

“She produced a number of wonderful paintings,” Paul said. “It’s a projection of her personality.”

Cecilia’s exhibit at the Annapolis library features 19 pieces that are not for sale. Paul organized the display, which opened earlier this month and will run until an undetermined date in late May.

The collection includes a re-creation of “Sunflowers,” a famous oil painting by Vincent van Gogh. Other highlights depict hungry children as well as “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

Travel inspired Cecilia. She immortalized a family vacation to Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park with a waterfall scene, and she later painted a deer from memory. A trip to Monterey, California, led to other paintings of solo trees perched atop dramatic cliffs.

Paul’s favorite work shows hunters and their dogs trudging through the snow after a winter trek. Their hanging heads and lagging legs reveal how grueling the hunt was. Paul appreciates his mother’s attention to detail.

“If a torpedo had hit us, we would have been finished,” Paul said.

The ship safely arrived about four weeks later for a layover in Nova Scotia, Canada. The journey quickly picked back up and continued on to New York City.

Cecilia started to paint during her retirement. She took weekly classes at the Jewish Community Center near Pimlico Race Course.

Jacob Glushakow, an acclaimed Baltimore artist, taught Cecilia the fundamentals. The instructor was patient with his student, grooming her over several years.

Cecilia developed arthritis, but she didn’t notice the pain while painting. She later found joy reflecting on how she overcame the unique obstacles of each project.

The new artist crafted masterpieces that captured landscapes, stills and portraits. Her style fell at the intersection of realism and impressionism, combining crisp scenes with free-flowing brush strokes.

A few pieces allude to Paul himself. One depicts him beneath soaring redwood trees. Another spotlights sunflowers that Paul planted.

Paul stays busy in his garden, making marmalade from three fig trees that are more than a decade old. As a lifelong chemist, whipping up this spread makes Paul feel as if he’s still in the lab.

Paul met his future wife, Tobalee Schatzberg, while studying chemistry at Western Maryland College. He graduated from the school, now named McDaniel College, in 1951.

The couple married in December 1952, and went to Duke University for their master’s programs. Paul completed more chemistry courses while Tobalee studied mathematics. Other learning experiences took Paul to Baltimore Hebrew University and St. John’s College, where he completed a bachelor’s in liberal education.

This scientific background sent Paul to the Army Chemical Corps in Arkansas when he was drafted during the Korean war.

Paul returned to Annapolis with Tobalee after the war. He became a part-time instructor at Anne Arundel Community College decades later, teaching classes on Israeli history and the aging brain.

These activities keep Paul motivated, which he thinks is the key to a long and healthy life.

“Remain physically and mentally active,” Paul said. “Keep doing stuff that you like.”

Paul and Tobalee, now 90, had three children. Sharon was born in 1955, Eric in 1956 and Janet in 1958. Sharon lived until her 60s, when Paul said she was killed by a drunken driver. Eric is 66, and Janet is 63. Sharon, Eric and Janet all had two kids.

Born in 1930, Walter is now 91 years old. He went on to become a German professor at Clark University in Massachusetts.

Adolph died in 1965, at age 72 after suffering from a brain bacterial infection. Cecilia lived to be 89, dying in 1985.

“She produced a number of wonderful paintings,” Paul said. “It’s a projection of her personality.”

Cecilia’s exhibit at the Annapolis library features 19 pieces that are not for sale. Paul organized the display, which opened earlier this month and will run until an undetermined date in late May.

The collection includes a re-creation of “Sunflowers,” a famous oil painting by Vincent van Gogh. Other highlights depict hungry children as well as “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

Travel inspired Cecilia. She immortalized a family vacation to Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park with a waterfall scene, and she later painted a deer from memory. A trip to Monterey, California, led to other paintings of solo trees perched atop dramatic cliffs.

Paul’s favorite work shows hunters and their dogs trudging through the snow after a winter trek. Their hanging heads and lagging legs reveal how grueling the hunt was. Paul appreciates his mother’s attention to detail.

*RMS Lancastria was a British ocean liner requisitioned by the UK Government during the Second World War. She was sunk on 17 June 1940, during Operation Aerial. Having received an emergency order to evacuate British nationals and troops from France the ship was loaded well in excess of its capacity of 1,300 passengers. Modern estimates suggest that between 4,000 and 7,000 people died during the sinking — the largest single-ship loss of life in British maritime history

International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th

A Ten Year Old's Witness to the Liberation of Auschwitz,
by Bernice Lerner:  Echo essay published in the History News Netword (HNN)

Bernice Lerner, Ed.D., is the author of All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen and The Triumph of Wounded Souls: Seven Holocaust Survivors’ Lives.

Jerzy (George) Ogurek, c. 1943-1944. This photo shows the boy's hair dyed blond to disguise his Jewishness as his family fled from Poland to Budapest (he would be known later in life as George Zimmerman) Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of George Zimmerman

By the time Red Army soldiers entered Auschwitz, on January 27, 1945, ten-year-old Jerzy (George) Ogurek had survived three months in the death camp. He defied odds—almost all of the 230,000 children deported there were murdered immediately. 

Suffering from hunger and effects of scarlet fever, wearing oversized pants and shoes—stuffed with whatever he could find to keep himself warm—he witnessed the momentous event. Following a loud explosion, two Russian soldiers, dressed in white to camouflage themselves against the snow, appeared—each with a rifle on one arm and a huge sausage on the other.

By that point, George was adept at playing by new rules. In 1943, during an aktion in Sosnowiec’s ghetto, he had hidden in a storage room between sheets of leather. When escaping with his parents and grandparents from the ghetto, he had crouched quietly beneath hay that had been piled atop a wagon’s floor.

George’s parents had decided when and to where they must run. Bribing guards and guides, and with help from various networks, they traveled from Poland to Slovakia to Hungary—then back to Slovakia—evading Nazi collaborators and murderers. George, with bleached blond hair, pretending to be Catholic, could recite the Hail Mary in German, Polish, Hungarian, or Slovak.

In October 1944, smugglers hired to help them cross the border from Slovakia to Hungary betrayed the family. At Sered, a labor and transit camp, they were identified as Jews and sent to Auschwitz II (Birkenau).

Before their arrival, a transport of two thousand men, women, and children from Sered had been gassed. Directed to shower, George’s parents were sure they would be killed. They emerged with shaven heads and prisoners’ clothes. When it was George’s turn to have a number tattooed on his arm, his father implored the engraver to make the digits small.

The Nazis clubbed to death several people from George’s transport group. Kapos randomly pulled several individuals from the rows of inmates and beat them without the slightest pretense or justification. This place had no rules.

Child survivors at Auschwitz photographed by the Red Army, 1945

The Nazi SS directed the men and women into two separate groups. George went with the men, then to a barracks for children, where eight shared a small cubicle. During Zehl Appel (roll call), everyone had to stand for hours in the bitter cold. After working all day, George’s father and grandfather visited him in the evening. Once, his father brought him lard—it was stolen from George within hours.

Falling ill, George was transferred to the medical block. Every day, he counted the corpses in front of the barracks. He watched people eat potato peels. He never saw his father and grandfather again.

In early January, the Russians bombarded area targets. In mid-January, the SS evacuated 58,000 inmates by foot or on freight trains. George foraged through storehouses of clothing and food. Periodically, SS officers returned to the camp and shot people.

On January 20, the Nazis blew up two crematoria. Further destruction of incriminating evidence followed. SS units ordered the thousands of remaining inmates—the weak and sick, including children and Russian prisoners of war, out of the barracks. Officers asked, “Who thinks they will not be able to walk ten kilometers tonight?” Those who stepped out of line were taken behind a barrack and shot.

At that moment George imagined what it would feel like to die. He decided that he was prepared to meet his fate, be it life or death. Death was worse than pain and fear, but he was reconciled to even that possibility.

At that point, George was not alone. His father’s brother, whom he had never met, had recognized him when they were both in the medical block. Together, among one thousand inmates, they trudged out of Birkenau. The columns of war weary had not gone far when their guards stopped them. They waited in the snow for an hour, after which the guards got into trucks and disappeared. The leaderless group headed back to Auschwitz I, which had brick buildings as opposed to Birkenau’s wood barracks. As they walked, they ducked their heads to avoid shells and bullets.

After the liberation, George and his uncle did not wait for the arrival of more Russian troops to come and take charge of the situation. With cigarettes—a wartime currency—George’s uncle paid a driver to take them to Krakow. On the truck’s flatbed, George felt the weight of a large Russian soldier’s head resting upon his legs. He chose to tolerate the pain and discomfort rather than wake the sleeping giant.

Fifty years later, I met with George Zimmerman, who over a 35-year career served as a professor, researcher, and administrator of Boston University’s physics department. No one with whom he worked knew what George had experienced as a child.

Comment:  David Baker
A tragic reminder about the inhumanity found in ideological extremism and the fanatical pursuit of racial superiority. In a world besotted with me-ism, a call to share with others lessons that can improve all our lives through reconnecting with the humanity that does lie within most of us, however dormant.

Holocaust history continues to be revealed and archived- the last generation must tell their stories

Echo Opinion - Holocaust Stories that we still are not hearing published in The New York Times by By Rebecca Frankel

On an unseasonably cold night in August 1942, Miriam Rabinowitz pushed her way past a wooden fence topped with barbed wire and broke out of the ghetto in Zdzięciol, Poland. She wasn’t alone. The 34-year-old woman led her two young daughters, her sister, a cousin, and a handful of others away from the underground bunker where they had hidden for three days while SS squads rounded up some 2,500 other Jewish men, women and children, marched them to the edge of town, forced them to strip naked and shot them into waiting pits.

One of the most famous images of the holocaust is of Rabbi Moshe Hagerman the Dayan - Jewish municipal chief judge, dressed in his Talit and Teffilin and being abused by German soldiers. This image was later identified by people who survived the war and the incident, as an image from the 'Bloody Wednesday of Olkusz', taken on July 31, 1940

Having narrowly escaped, Miriam’s group set off for the only place that offered real hope to the Jews interned in ghettos in the former Soviet-occupied territories of Poland and Belorussia: the forest.

It was in the Lipiczany Forest that Miriam was reunited with her husband, Morris. For two years, they eked out a meager existence there with two dozen other Jews. Together, this collective found a sort of sanctuary, even as they endured deadly typhus outbreaks, winter temperatures as low as 30 degrees below zero, constant hunger, and the threat of raids by Nazis and local gangs who were hunting Jews and Soviet partisans.

More than 75 years after the end of World War II, we are familiar with a number of well-established accounts of what happened to Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust. They mounted ghetto uprisings; they hid in the homes of their Christian neighbors; and, of course, they were sent to Nazi concentration camps and perished in the gas chambers. Only recently, we’ve begun to hear more about the roughly 25,000 Jews who survived the war in the woods of Eastern Europe. Even so, that narrative has focused on the 15,000 or so who took up arms and joined the partisan fighters, like the Bielski brothers, who were made famous in the 2008 film “Defiance.” Overlooked even now are stories like those of the Rabinowitz family, who lived — and died — in those same woods in small family camps: the forgotten Jews of the forest.

These camps were populated by splintered families, some held together by friendship, many more by necessity. Most people begged for food, some bartered, others foraged or stole. They moved frequently to avoid Nazi raids or discovery by unsympathetic locals. There was community, but limited charity, with some exceptions: A Polish fruit seller named Herz Kaminsky, for example, welcomed so many orphans and widows — seen by most groups as undesirable additions — into his family camp that he was known as “the father of all children.”

The deportation of children from Lodz Ghetto in Poland to the Chelmno extermination camp, September 1942. (Photo by Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images) -

They dug underground shelters, bolstered the walls with wood and camouflaged the roofs to blend into the forest floor. Young boys carved playing cards out of tree bark, while men rolled dried leaves into makeshift cigarettes in search of a palatable tobacco substitute. Women without male protection were at risk of rape, and unions that would have never been considered possible in their former lives were accepted as “forest marriages.”

In the vast canon of Holocaust history, there are relatively few records of stories like these: They exist as asides in anthologies, in small-press and out-of-print memoirs, and in some firsthand testimonials, many recorded in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and Hebrew, and scattered throughout multiple archives. We catch glimpses of them in SS memos detailing raids on the forests in pursuit of partisan battalions: Here, they are listed as unaffiliated civilians or bandits who were either killed or captured and sent to labor camps.

There were not many of these families. Yitzhak Arad, the Israeli historian and longtime chairman of Yad Vashem, who, at 16, escaped his ghetto and joined the partisan Markov Brigade in the forest, estimated, primarily based on testimony in the early decades after the war, that the number of Jews who found refuge in forest family camps “did not exceed 10,000.” But their stories illustrate another means by which Jews sought to survive their darkest time in modern history — by relying on grit and determination, oftentimes on each other, and in rarer instances on local farmers and landowners.

Why are there so few authoritative historical records detailing the number of these Jews and what they survived? In part, it’s a simple matter of what got written down.

Many Jews who survived World War II in the woods joined the partisans, a vast network of Soviet fighters who remained behind the front lines after Germany broke its accord with Russia and launched Operation Barbarossa. They regrouped into guerrilla forces that grew to more than 350,000 strong. The Soviet military kept records of their operations in the woods, which eventually included members of the Jewish resistance. It was a tense and often violent alliance. Other forest Jews didn’t become partisans themselves, but relied on these battalions for protection and supplies. Those like Morris Rabinowitz, however, who avoided the partisans in the hope of keeping outside the fighting fray, remained largely hidden in historical terms.

The Jews of the family camps also did not offer much opportunity for the Soviets to secure a reputation as fighters for freedom and justice. When Maidanek, the first of the Nazi concentration camps liberated by the Soviets, was taken over in July 1944, Lieutenant General Nikolai Bulganin insisted that journalists be brought in. War correspondents from The Associated Press; Reuters; and newspapers from the United States, Britain and Switzerland were given access to the site to report on the atrocities discovered there. By contrast, when the Soviet Army came through the woods and liberated the Jews hiding there in the summer of 1944, the soldiers didn’t stop their pursuit of the retreating Germans to note what they found; families were simply free to leave the forest. They did, in disconnected drifts, traveling back to the ruins of their hometowns on foot.

And while many survivors of the Holocaust feel a reluctance to relive the past, for those who fled to the forest, facing what they went through comes with additionally complicated feelings. It was a grueling struggle to survive: Of the roughly 800 Jews who escaped from the ghetto in Zdzięciol, only 200 are believed to have come out of the forest alive. Still, many who made it carry an awareness of how their Holocaust experiences compares with those of others. “It was horrific,” Toby Langerman, the Rabinowitzes’ younger daughter, says of her family’s experience in the forest. “But not as horrific as the concentration camps.”

What Mr. Arad said about the families in the forest in the 1970s remains true today: “There will never be ‘accurate’ numbers because in no place do such lists exist.” Their experience will never be realized through records — solely through the study of their testimonies.

Peter Duffy, author of the 2003, book “The Bielski Brothers,” lamented the lack of a unified collection of these testimonies in a conversation with me recently. “There’s this sense that we’ve done enough on this history. People say, ‘Oh, another Holocaust book, or another memorial,’” he told me. But Mr. Duffy believes that when it comes to what transpired in these forests, “we’ve barely scratched the surface of the story that is there, and probably most of it is lost.” The history is so elusive, in fact, that scholars at The Polish Center for Holocaust Research have called these less-understood stories of Jews who escaped their ghettos and attempted to hide “the margins of the Holocaust.”

That these stories exist at the margins, however, does not make them less important.

The narrative of the Holocaust has been growing and deepening since the war. Much of the world heard the Jewish experience voiced for the first time in 1961, with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, during which more than 100 survivors were called to the stand to testify about what they’d gone through. These testimonies, in turn, inspired other survivors to share their stories, spurring a wave of memoirs, novels and movies about the Holocaust. The emergence of stories about Jewish resistance — ghetto uprisings and partisan fighters — did much to combat the prevalent belief that many Jews had gone passively to their end.

For me, the stories of the forgotten Jews of the forest inform how we define resistance: The Rabinowitzes and others like them did not need to wield weapons to be a part of it. But what their story teaches me is less important than the larger point: It’s the stories of individuals — however seemingly exceptional their experiences — that have, over time, shaped the broader narrative of Holocaust history, and we must continue to uncover as many as we can.

This narrative remains very much in flux. Right-wing governments in Eastern Europe — where much of this history took place — are working not just to undermine, but to rewrite, the story of how the Holocaust unfolded there. In Poland, for example, it is now illegal for anyone to accuse the Polish nation of complicity; the government has cultivated a climate in which it is impossible to freely study the Shoah in all its complexity.

At the same time, we are at the precipice of losing the last generation of Holocaust survivors, and with them our living memory of that time. What writing the story of the Rabinowitz family revealed to me is how much remains unexplored in the testimony we’ve already gathered, and what can still be enriched through that living memory before it’s gone.

We are at a moment of particular urgency. The Holocaust should be understood in its entirety, and the so-called margins have something meaningful to teach us. If the arc of Holocaust history has proved anything, it’s that understanding the small pieces is how we see the big picture. When it comes to what happened in the woods, these narratives are the only way for us to know this history. The opportunity to collect them is vanishing. 

The moment to contextualize what we know already, and discover what we don’t, is now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/opinion/holocaust-jews-forest.html#:~:text=In%20the%20vast,got%20written%20down.

Concentration camp echoes - Buchenwald and Southern Border Camps

Dear Vice President Mike Pence: 

There is no difference in these two pictures except the children in Buchenwald Concentration Camp were imprisoned by Nazis and the children in Southern Border Camps are being imprisoned by Trumpzis.  Evil. (Where are the Evangelicals? Matthew 5:3-12)

Children in cages imprisoned by Donald Trump

Children in Buchenwald Concentration Camp imprisoned by Nazis

This letter to the editor was published in the LaCrosse Tribune, a Wisconsin newspaper.  

The prisons holding undocumented immigrants and refugees in the United States are, by the very definition of the word, concentration camps.

Check Miriam-Webster if you don't believe me. It is a disservice to the people being wrongfully held there to not call them as such.

The abhorrent treatment of these refugees is a dangerous first step on a road to genocide. In World War II, the Nazi extermination of the Jewish population known as the final solution was called the final solution because it came after their other tactics.

First, they stripped Jews and other minorities of their rights, like the undocumented people who are not being given fair trials. They took their property and wealth, and expelled many from the country. Then, they forced them into overcrowded ghettos with terrible living conditions, which turned into work and concentration camps. As war continued, they started the mass killings.

To pretend that these camps are significantly different than the Nazis' first steps is counterfactual to history, a terrible precedent to set, and a refusal to have compassion with the people being mistreated right now by our government with our tax dollars.

The horrors of the WWII concentration camps were unknown to many until it was far too late, It is clear that the acts that ICE is committing are causing trauma that will take generations to heal, and I know we haven't heard it all.

Do not pretend that this can't happen here.

From:  Peter Gorski, La Crosse, Wisconsin

Florida echo - Donald Trump is far worse than we feared

https://www.bradenton.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article230903129.html

Waste of money campaign! An echo opinion letter published in the Florida Brandenton Herald.

Donald Trump is a dangerous and failed person

Donald Trump is campaigning hard with big money and endless lies to win Florida in 2020. We can’t let that happen. 

We need to make sure he fails.

In 2016, many of us voted for him, hoping the signs of racism, dishonesty, abuse and fraud were not true. 

But he is far worse than we feared.

His hatred and abuse of non-whites is criminal, caging those seeking help, calling them ugly names. He turns his back on our Puerto Rican citizens, treating them like dirt and refusing the help we give others suffering disasters. He calls hate-chanting Nazis “very good people”. He supports suppressing the votes of poor blacks. He denies equal rights for women and wants to force them to give birth against their will.

His pathological lying is an established fact, with thousands of lies documented over and over, while he boldly denies to our faces what we see and hear. His desire for dictatorship is confirmed as he ignores the Constitution and issues unlawful orders. He is replacing our system of justice with his own henchmen to make America a police state. He engages in cover-ups of his wrong-doing as well as his partners’, even Russians, convicted felons and murderers.
Trump is a psychopath who got other Floridians to sell us down the river. Those who stand for the values the Founders cherished have been scammed and betrayed. Now, he attempts to win Florida again with big money, bribes and another campaign of lies.

Let’s make sure Floridians don’t get conned again with his lies and his army of Trump stooges. We need to make sure Floridians wake up, realize how much is at stake, and defeat this psychopathic dictator.

William Anderson  Bradenton, Florida

Iraqi government is useless the Middle East is deteriorating at every turn

When George Bush 43 launched his illegal American led invasion of Iraq, he sincerely believed his order for the assault was in response to a higher calling. President Bush believed he was destined to eliminate a cruel President Saddam Hussein from his tyrannical control over his Iraqi nation. So, Saddam Hussein was eliminated, but the dictator's "weapons of mass destruction" did not exist. America invaded a sovereign nation without cause and killed the leader Saddam Hussein, labeled as evil, because we said so. 

Oh, and by the way, Americans also protected the Iraqi oil fields from being destroyed and burned down.

Now, in the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the real evil in Iraq has erupted in the presence of a group named ISIS (whatever that means). What I know of ISIS is that it's a dark euphemism for unbelievable evil, perpetrated on innocent people who are not them. In other words, ISIS is taking over anything and everything in their relentless path towards annihilation of whatever they want to destroy. ISIS is the weapon of mass destruction George Bush never found, only more unbelievably destructive and evil. These ISIS evildoers take no prisoners. Rather, they kill indiscriminately.

Evil is consuming the Middle East as I write this blog, while the Iraqi government cowers in the American taxpayer paid for "Green Zone", inside the nation's capital of Baghdad.

What all this evil and accompanying destruction boils down to is that the US invasion of Iraq, where thousands were killed and tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered, was a  colossal failure. Moreover, the war was a total waste of human lives and obscene waste of tax payer money, ie, like 2 trillion dollars of waste. 

Meanwhile, the American government has been unable to claim any victory whatsoever in Iraq, except for the day when Saddam Hussein was toppled during a symbolic gesture of tearing down his statue.  

Tonight, August 8th, President Obama announced the launching of American military air attacks to defend our nation's interests against an implosion of the Iraqi government. Also, we want to help protect an innocent and ancient religious cult, who are being slaughtered by ISIS. 

In other words, America is at war again in Iraq. This carnage will not end until a coalition of Middle East leaders determine how to live in peace. It's a huge challenge because ISIS is just like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Nazis in Germany. They must be eradicated, once and for all.  Unfortunately, as Americans enter these heinous conflicts, the local people sit back and watch the outcomes. Therefore, at some point, Americans must either eradicate our enemies or leave them to their own destruction. In other words, "fish or cut bait".  

After too many years engaged in a failed Iraqi War, it's time for Americans to figure out what it is we want to do. Sadly, I submit we just don't have an answer.