Last dandelion
#kidsMW A heart-breaking moment from an SS picture of Hungarian Jews at #Auschwitz II-Birkenau in May 1944. A little child found a flower in the grass and is giving or showing it to an older boy. All the people in this picture were gassed moments later #MuseumWeek pic.twitter.com/FkKFORleS9
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) April 27, 2018
Utterly heartbreaking. I have a photograph that I took of one of my grandsons at around the same age as that child, holding a flower out to a cow. Moments later…
…we continued our leisurely amble along the lane, until we were home, and he had a nap. He’s now sixteen. That child should have sixteen-year-old great-grandchildren. All the children in the photograph should have grown up; fallen in love; married; had children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and should be living to a ripe old age. What the Nazis did is unforgivable, and I will fight anyone who thinks that neo-Nazism should be given a pass ‘
‘because free speech’.
It’s what makes looking at all of those photos – of people arriving at Auschwitz, lined up at Auschwitz, being herded toward the train to Auschwitz, ditto for all the other extermination camps – so horrible. You know they all had only minutes left.
Completely horrible, and much more horrific than reconstructions of the last minutes of Pompeii, Herculaneum et al because, tragic as they are, natural disasters aren’t personal. Those mothers and children were killed, totally without reason, by their fellow humans; their fellow citizens.
And they had plenty of time to know it. The Zyklon-B took several minutes. People screamed, struggled, clawed the walls.
The little kids maybe didn’t know what was going to happen? The older kids maybe did. In 1944, the adults probably definitely did. And nothing they could do.
so unfathomably evil.
Which is why I will not use terms like grammar nazi or other things like that – there is absolutely no comparison between someone pointing out a misplaced comma and someone putting 6 million people in gas chambers…
And it can happen again. It’s looking more plausible every day.