The current climate of intolerance redux- an echo opinion from Illinois Holocaust Museum

An echo denouncing hate and AntiSemitism published in the Chicago Sun Times newspaper. This opinion letter is particularly meaningful today March 15, 2019, when the world learned about a massacre in New Zealand targeting innocent immigrant Muslims.

“In the current climate of intolerance, this footage is especially chilling.”
– New York Times

Letter to the Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times:

On Feb. 20, 1939, 20,000 Americans rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of the American Nazi Party. The event is featured in A Night at The Garden, a short documentary film that just premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. 

In a chilling parallel, on Feb. 17, 2019, 20,000 Americans rallied in Chicago’s United Center as Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam teamed up with a Holocaust denier and anti-Semitic ideologue to attack the Jewish religion and falsely blame numerous ills of modern society on Jews.

Statistics are grim. Anti-Semitic attacks and other hate crimes against minority groups are on the rise in our country and virulent rhetoric is often the precursor to broader expressions of physical harm.

The only way to stem this dangerous tide is for all of us to stand in solidarity. Let your voices be heard by condemning this recent rally and all acts of bigotry.

Recently, prompted by a social media outcry, rallies against anti-Semitism attracted crowds of thousands in Paris and other French cities following a series of aggressive acts with Jewish targets, including the defacing of 80 gravestones.

But in our own city, a deafening silence was the community response to Farrakhan’s resurrection of age-old blood-libel-type canards.

We have seen how social media can sometimes foster hate, but it can also be a powerful tool in combating societal evil.

It is exactly 80 years since the hateful New York rally and days since the Chicago rally. Please be an “upstander” today.

Fritzie Fritzshall, president, Illinois Holocaust Museum,
Auschwitz Survivor

Susan Abrams, CEO, Illinois Holocaust Museum

Ms. Freddie Oversteegen was a Dutch WW2 heroine

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12131326

A tribute found in the New Zealand Herald (NZHerald) newspaper thanks to a Twitter message with a link posted by Mathew Ingram.

Freddie survived the war and later married Jan Dekker, with whom she had three children. Photo / National Hannie Schaft Foundation By Miranda Aldersley

A World War II heroine who used her harmless appearance to gain the trust of Nazis before executing them has died in The Netherlands, aged 92.

Freddie Oversteegen was born in Haarlem, near Amsterdam on September 6, 1925 and raised by her communist mother.

She was just 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance, the Daily Mail reports.

Together with her older sister Truus and their friend Hannie Schaft, she blew up bridges and railway tracks with dynamite, smuggled Jewish children out of concentration camps and executed as many Nazis as she could, using a firearm hidden in the basket of her bike.

The trio had a routine: first approach the Nazi men in bars, and, having successfully seduced them, ask if they wanted to 'go for a stroll' in the forest, where, as Freddie herself put it, they would be 'liquidated'.

"We had to do it," she told one interviewer. "It was a necessary evil, killing those who betrayed the good people." 

When asked how many people she had killed or helped kill, she demurred: "One should not ask a soldier any of that."

Freddie died on September 5, 2018 - one day before her 93rd birthday. She was the last surviving member of the Netherlands' most famous female resistance cell, who dedicated their lives to fighting Nazi occupiers and Dutch "traitors" just outside Amsterdam.

Plaque memorial to the Dutch Resistance fighters who were executed by Nazis.

The female members of the Dutch resistance are often overlooked, and it was and still is often thought of as a man's effort.

However, this kind of thinking proved to be a fatal mistake to many Nazi men, who did not recognize the threat posed by the Oversteegen sisters, as they rode their bikes around Haarlem in North Holland, scouting out targets or acting as lookouts for other executions.

Both Oversteegen sisters survived the war. Truus found work as an artist, and was inspired to write a memoir and based on her experiences in the resistance. She died in 2016.

Freddie told Vice that she coped with the traumas of the war "by getting married and having babies".

She married Jan Dekker and their three children survive her, as do her four grandchildren.

However, their friend Hannie Schaft, a onetime law student with fiery red hair, was captured and executed by the Nazis just weeks before they surrendered.

In her honour, Truus Oversteegen founded the National Hannie Schaft Foundation in 1996. Freddie served as a board member.

"Schaft became the national icon of female resistance," said Jeroen Pliester, the foundation's chairman. Her story was taught to Dutch children and retold in a 1981 film, "The Girl With the Red Hair".

To the sisters, being in the resistance was a source of pride - they would never regret it - but also of pain.

"It was tragic and very difficult and we cried about it afterwards," Truus said, about the feeling of having killed somebody. "We did not feel it suited us — it never suits anybody, unless they are real criminals.

"One loses everything. It poisons the beautiful things in life."

The Dutch newspaper IJmuider Courant, reported that Freddie once told an interviewer: "I've shot a gun myself and I've seen them fall. And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up."

In recent years, Freddie had suffered from several heart attacks at the nursing home in Driehuis where she lived - about five miles outside Haarlem.