Yesterday, I searched in vain for a mainstream media piece about Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today, I found plenty. And here’s what they all say:
Holocaust survivors grow poorer in Israel
Many Israeli Holocaust survivors live in poverty
The first is from AP, the second from Reuters.
Here’s one from Ynet:
Survivors still waiting for compensation
Thousands of Holocaust victims who have yet to receive compensation from Germany are living in Israel. The sums are not large and will not make them wealthy, but they will help Holocaust survivors end their lives with honor.Some of them live beneath the poverty line, and they hope that their legal suit against the Prosecutions Committee – an international organization connecting the Holocaust survivors and the German government – can help them out of their sad situation.
Both the Reuters and AP article put the blame for the survivors’ poverty on Israel. I put the blame for the survivors’ problems right where it belongs: On Europe. The EU should be paying for these people. The European nations are the reason they are ill. The European nations still owe these survivors a debt — a debt that cannot possibly be fully repaid — for what was done to them.
Blame Israel? Why, because she gave these people a haven? Israel has a social safety net that obviously needs improvement — but the money for these old men and women who experienced the greatest horror of the twentieth century should be coming from Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Austria, France, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Slovakia, Greece, Russia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Luxembourg, Italy, and Norway.
Last night, at the name-reading ceremony, I discovered that there is a survivor in my own congregation. She was ten years old when she was put into the camps, and she survived four years there. She cried when she read the names of her family members who didn’t survive.
I don’t recall reading anything at all about the survivors’ stories in these AP and Reuters articles — only the fact that they are poor, and by implication, that that is Israel’s fault.
Some days, I loathe the media more than others. This is one of those days.
“Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Austria, France, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Slovakia, Greece, Russia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Luxembourg, Italy, and Norway.”
Where is Bulgaria on your list? They deported more Jews per cpaita in the areas they occupied than did the Germans?
Why is Yugoslavia on your list? it is now the Serbs. In the Balkans Serbian Christians were killed (400,000- 450,000) in higher numbers in concentration camps then were the Jews of the Balkans!
Greece was a country occupied and destroyed by the fascist Bulgarians, Germans and Italians and destoyed by the Nazis with the Germans still refusing to fully ocmpesnate not just the Jewish Greeks but the Christian Greeks.
In the Balanks the Bulgarians, the Albanians including the Kosovar Albanans, and the Croatians where the big Nazi supporters and ethusiastic supporters of the Holocaust.
Yet you have listed every victim country in the Balkans as the countries that should pay and the perpetrators as those who should not?
Yeah, I am the son of Greek Jewish survivors. That is not a bias — it just means I know the issue inside out. I know exactly how the compensation worked in Greece and studied it at a graduate level.
The way you have written this is Orwellian.
Orwellian? Why, because I didn’t write a complete list?
That’s what the comments are for. Corrections and additions. Feel free to correct and add things. Do not feel free to assign a hidden motive to a post that I wrote pretty much on the fly.