A Post from My Friend, Dan Bodine

One of the pleasures of having a web site is the opportunity to bring other works to the my readers. Here is a post from Dan Bodine. He always has interesting things to say, and this one is very good indeed, a very reflective piece. Have a read!

James Pilant

Celebrating Life thru a garden, works of Holocaust witness

But what prompted this post also was some inner reflections of another kind, upon reading in Sunday’s El Paso Times of the death of Albert Schwartz, 94, of El Paso Friday.

He was a well respected businessman here for many decades. But what hit me the most was his small role in helping to turn back two of history’s most evil culture tides. Can we carry reform even further?

Foremost, in our gloom over the economy and a row of increasingly serious world events though, the two coming together as they did (he and Noemi’s birthday) were reminders.

Not only of not just how lucky we are at times, but of the enormous stride we as a people have made in bringing peace and reconciliation to a fragmented world also.

Lift your chin up a bit, was the message.

As a veteran of World War II, Schwartz witnessed first-hand some of the atrocities of Hitler’s Holocaust. And after the war, he urged passage in El Paso of a landmark law forbidding racial segregation.

All in just one lifetime!

http://desertmountaintimes.com/2014/03/celebrating-life-thru-a-garden-works-of-holocaust-witness/

Bodine, D. (2014, March 25). Celebrating life thru a garden, works of holocaust witness. Desert Mountain Times, Retrieved from http://desertmountaintimes.com/2014/03/celebrating-life-thru-a-garden-works-of-holocaust-witness/

From around the web.

From the web site, Nazi Holocaust by Thomas Frick. (This is a student paper and as a college instructor, it is always a pleasure to advertise good work.)

http://naziholocaust.wordpress.com/how-the-holocaust-was-organised/

To begin with, Hitler sent out his S.S. (soldiers) to European towns and villages and told them to herd up Jews and shoot them. After a while he found that this method was both inefficient and was having a large mental effect on the S.S. with many of them committing suicide for the atrocities they had committed. So instead, he developed Concentration Camps.

From all over Europe – including Germany, Russia, Poland and Holland – Jews were rounded up by Hitler’s S.S. and were sent to concentration camps such as at Auschwitz and Dachau. There were camps near every major German city.

Once at these camps, people were inspected and either told to go left or right. One way and they would be forced into slave labour, the other way they were taken to gas chambers were they were killed instantly.