International Holocaust Remembrance Day

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http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/master-sgt-roddie-edmonds-honored-israel-defending-jews-n504441

TEL AVIV, Israel — Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds did something extraordinary when a Nazi commander pointed a gun at the U.S. POW and demanded Jewish American soldiers with him identify themselves.

As the highest-ranking American non-commissioned officer at the Stalag IX A POW camp, Edmonds instead told all 1,000 U.S. servicemen to step forward and then declared, "We are all Jews here."

While this act of heroism saved the lives of some 200 Jewish American soldiers among the ranks, Edmonds' story remained untold for decades. His son, Rev. Chris Edmonds, only discovered the truth after his father's death in 1985, according to The Associated Press.

Now the Knoxville, Tennessee, native is being designated "Righteous Among the Nations," the highest honor Israel confers on non-Jews who have risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Its most famous recipient is Oskar Schindler, depicted in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."

"It all started with an email I received from Chris [Edmonds] telling me about his father's heroic actions," said Irena Steinfeldt, the director of the Righteous Among the Nations department at Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem.

A 25-year-old Edmonds was captured along thousands of others during the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944. The Germans were singling out Jewish POWs, and while the most infamous Nazi death camps were no longer fully operational, many Jews did die in slave labor camps.

According to an account pieced together from information in Roddie Edmonds' diaries and corroborated by research and interviews by Steinfeldt and her staff, Americans had been warned that Jewish fighters among them would be in danger.

With the camp's inmates defiantly standing in front of their barracks, the German commander turned to Edmonds and said: "They cannot all be Jews."



Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds' diaries helped his son Chris piece together his capture by the Nazis during WWII, and subsequent heroic acts at Stalag IX A POW camp near Ziegenhain, Germany. Courtesy of Yad Vashem

"Then my dad said: 'If you are going to shoot, you are going to have to shoot all of us because we know who you are and you'll be tried for war crimes when we win this war,'" Chris Edmonds told The Associated Press. The German officer withdrew without finding the Jewish POWs.

...

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama will attend a ceremony to posthumously honor four Righteous Among the Nations recipients, including Edmonds.

The ceremony at Israel's Embassy in Washington, D.C., set to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day will honor two Americans and two Polish citizens. Lois Gunden, the other American to be honored, was a teacher in southern France during the war and helped smuggle Jewish children out of nearby Rivesaltes internment camp.

"Honoring Edmonds and others is an attempt to find some hope and recognize that every person is responsible for their deeds," Steinfeldt said. "Every person has a choice between good and evil."

...

Should be "International Remembrance Day"

For all civilians killed in war

We already have one of those, in this country----it's called "Memorial Day".

PC-ness sucks rocks!

Ever read Corrie Ten Boom's books?

I don't understand why Jewish people are still hated so much. In Canada people in general don't have nearly as negative an attitude as other countries, although recently hate crimes have started popping up here and there.

I heard something about them being blamed for the recession or something, but that sounds like nonsense to me.
I read about how back when the plague was rampant in Europe, Christian people blamed them for it. Jewish people rarely got sick with the plague, possibly because they actually bathed and other people thought that was evil.

Nothing has changed at all. Except maybe the bathing thing.

It is somewhat odd how we "never forget" the Holocaust but we forget all other genocides, they are all worthy of being remembered and studied.

The issue of the Zionist state is a separate one, obviously in hindsight I think we can say the resettlement of European Jews and founding of Israel was a mistake that will reverberate for centuries but at this point the cat is out of the bag. I don't believe a two state solution is feasible at this point.

The only individuals I believe about the Holocaust are the survivors who were actually, really in the concentration camps. Why?

In 1986, a friend of mine and I decided to recruit some LGBT college friends and attend the annual Utah Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust commemoration at the Utah Capitol rotunda. We attended decidedly to remember the LGBT victims and survivors among all the victims and survivors. During the commemoration, Jewish leaders, politicians and elected public servants spoke eloquently.

But, they failed to mention the LGBT victims and survivors. It wasn't as if the speakers didn't know about them; we had fliered every one of the 300 attendees and speakers, and we held poster-sized replicas of the infamous Nazi concentration-camp badge-system poster ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_conc ... camp_badge ) translated into English. One speaker, the rabbi of the orthodox congregations in Utah, singled us out, however. He mentioned that the LGBT victims and survivors experienced loss ... but not the same level of loss as the Jewish victims and survivors had. Apparently, he had never learned that LGBT inmates were among the most tortured and most killed of all inmates.

We attended almost every year for the next 11 years. At our last commemoration, I was, once again, offering stick-on pink (or black) triangle badges and fliers for the attendees to wear and read if they chose to do so. Almost all the attendees chose to wear and read them immediately. On one row of chairs, I saw two elderly men with the tell-tale tattooed serial numbers on their arms. The first man glared at me after my offer, and said curtly in a German accent "No!" His friend, however, calmly and, just as loudly, corrected him by saying simply in a German accent "They were there, too!" They both nodded and accepted the badges and fliers. I thanked them and walked away. I noticed that they were wearing the badges when I finished speaking to all the attendees. That year, a couple more Jewish leaders, politicians and elected public servants included LGBT victims and survivors in their comments. We realized that, though it took a decade, our LGBT victims and survivors were finally included in Utah's memory.

So, that is why I don't trust those who talk the talk about the Holocaust. They equivocate, they revise and they exclude for political or even religious gain even while having had family members and friends who were exterminated. No, I trust only those who woke every morning in captivity, and wondered if that day would be "the day." Despite their own accumulation of a lifetime of stereotypes and ignorance, they were, in a single moment, able to find their better angels and welcome others to the collective memory of when hate knew no bounds.

Please Google Isralie coffee shop bombings and learn why the free flow of goods was interupted. This stopped the bombings. See if you can imagine what those bombings were like and how you would have stopped them. This was the most humanitarian choice of actions.