April 18, 2019 Thursday
Bedtime Story
'I Survived Rumbula'
The memoir ‘I survived Rumbula’ today finds
its place in the Museum “Jews in Latvia” that is located in Riga and was
founded by a group of Holocaust survivors.
In this memoir of Frida Michelson there is
this poignant line full of grief that says it all:
“The work is our salvation.
As long as we can keep on working we’ll
stay alive.
I am all for staying alive.”
She was just one of the two survivors of
the Rumbula Massacre.
And yet, all this cruelty and humiliation
imposed upon the poor lot was not sufficient to satisfy the blood lust of the
Nazis and the general population of Europe.
The process of scapegoating needed to be
taken to its logical conclusion on one pretense or the other.
By the early months of the year 1942 the
number of Jews enslaved in such types of Ghettos in Eastern Europe was roughly
around 15,000.
This number betrayed what had taken place
even before the Dünamünde Actions were initiated.
More than 20,000 Jews from the Reich had
been deported to the Riga Ghetto but by the February of 1942 only 15,000
remained alive.
Even those who had been deported to Riga
were unaware that nearly one-fourth of them had been exterminated during
deportation itself.
All this deportation and ghettoization of
the Jews in of Germany and other central European nations happened before the
Wannsee Conference.
It is strange that a conference as
important as this one which would mark the turning point for the European Jews
and settle their destiny for good is very little known to most people.
I myself plead guilty for this crime of
disgraceful ignorance.
Wannsee Conference took place in a locality
known as Wannsee situated in the southwest of Berlin on January 20, 1942.
The single-day conference took place in a
palatial villa known simply as The Wannsee House which has now been converted
into a museum and a Holocaust memorial.
The most fascinating thing about the Nazi
Germany that strikes me each time that I do a bedtime story on them is their
exceptional sophistication and flawless meticulousness in almost all their
actions including a detailed documentation of all their activities.
Keeping with this much desired and I should
add highly commendable tradition the minutes of the conference was recorded in
the form of Protocol which was later circulated to different departments.
One copy of it still survived the war and
was discovered by a Jewish German lawyer by the name of Robert Kempner who had
fled Germany in 1935 and escaped to the United States only to return to Germany
after World War II.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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