shekinahcancook

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

@stevesilberman

I'm guessing the how many hundreds of pounds per square inch of pressure he got to experience for a split second before he died was rather stifling as well.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

@atomicpoet

A lot of us don't have the technical know how to do hosting services like this. All I can do is ditch Universeodon, since this was strike 2 already. No need to wait for strike 3, which is the whole point of this debate - we KNOW what Zuck is going to do.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

@atomicpoet

Obviously not.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

@juergen_hubert @poland @folklore

So, a dude has an allergic reaction to some plant in the woods and therefore is a mage? I must be the most amazing mage of all time, then, because LOTS of things give me hives that can last for weeks. Especially a pile of gluten.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

@juergen_hubert @poland @folklore

Hmmmm, gluten myself and hope for wealth? Seems sketchy...

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

45/??

"In retrospect is that really so surprising [that people cling to their class distinctions in hardship], since every individual carries deep in his inner being the trend, the part of society, the cultural level he represents? But what always strikes one anew is that even t a time of shared distress, these distinctions are maintained. ...Everyone views his own case [emphasis hers] as an unfortunate accident. We have not yet gained a common sense of history."

Just like the leader of the MAGAts recently intoned, why should a rich person have to put up with all this? The idea that the wealthier classes should not & could not be subjected to this sort of treatment was deeply ingrained - just like the comfortable classes in America think today.

Just like the republican collaborators think right now, that they themselves would not possibly be affected by the rhetoric being spewed by the far right. It's just campaign nonsense to appeal to the rubes, right?

Right?

Useful idiots.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

46/??

"Matters of hygiene I shall not mention in this modest account. lest I cause you some unappetizing moments."

This, I think, is why we don't hear about conditions in the immigrant internment camps on our southern border (and ICE facilities elsewhere). If we saw it for real, and heard about it every day, we'd have to do something about it. We'd have to at least speak out, name and shame our politicians.

But no. Out of sight, out of mind. The filth, the stench, the lice, the fleas - can't happen here, you say?

Can't happen to you?

"Leading lights from the cultural and political circles in the big cities have also been stranded [here]... Their armor of position, esteem, and property has collapsed, and now they stand in the last shreds of their humanity. They exist as an empty space...which they must fill with whatever they can find within them. There is nothing else."

At least a famous person might make the news when they're dragged off. Will anyone care if you are? Really?

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

47/??

"One suddenly realizes that it is not enough to be an able politician or a talented artist. In the most extreme distress, life demands quite other things. Yes, it is true, our ultimate human values are being put to the test."

And a lot of today's vapid celebrities are failing that test miserably.

"Rebellion born only when distress begins to affect one personally is no real rebellion and can never bear fruit."

It will be too late when middle and upper America figures out they're in danger. They're in danger right now. They're just blind to it, actually or willfully.

"...Why [do] we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way?"

The sunk cost fallacy - I can't leave behind everything I've built up! Fear - what if I can't find a good job in a new place? Aggrandizement - I can take on these a$$hats! False sense of security - I can weather this storm. Misplaced faith - they won't let this really happen.

Who are "they," and why do you think they care about you?

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

48/??

January 1943. Etty doesn't know it yet, of course, but her life ends this year.

She has returned to Amsterdam for a while to rest from her "illness," which we can see is really depression and psycho-somatic symptoms, but she seems to think her state of mind is the normal one, and everyone else is strange.

"My realities may be different from what most people call reality, but still they are realities."

But are they? Is it not rather a fantasy she has concocted for herself, to protect herself from the real realities?

And are we ourselves doing that now?

"We should look to nature for restoration." Sure, just as soon as they let us out of this squalid camp, we will.

May 1943, she writes: "On the morning of April 24th my call-up came. I was to report on the 25th. I started getting my rucksack ready right away, but was told in the afternoon my call-up had been an "error." That seems a curious expression, as if it wasn't an "error" for everyone else."

Strings are pulled.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

49/??

"Today I heard that 15 colleagues from the Jewish Council...will get leave and 15 volunteers will be needed as replacements."

So, the Council is still enjoying the privilege of coming & going at will, not having to face actual internment. Etty decides to volunteer to return to the camp.

"But I think we shall soon see each other in any case now that the 'liquidation' of 'Jewish Remnants' has taken on a faster tempo."

She says this as if she's reading it in a screenplay from her theater days. She is totally disassociated from the reality of the situation, even as her volunteer hours start:

"First we underwent a Lysol treatment [for lice]. From four until nine I dragged screaming children around & carried luggage for exhausted women. It was hard going & heart rending. Women with small children, 1600 - and tonight another 1600 will arrive. The men had been deliberately kept back. The morning transport is ready. ...Large empty cattle cars."

"Morning transport" - like delivering mail?

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

50/??

June 1943.

"The people have already been loaded onto the freight cars. The doors are closed. There are many...police who sang in the morning as they marched by the side of the train."

Imagine in Florida, a bunch of christian nutjobs shouting prayers and slurs at the train as you're being loaded - pro-lifers celebrating your death.

"The quota of people who must go is not yet filled. Just now I met the matron of the orphanage, carrying a small child...who also has to go, alone. And a number of people have been taken out of the hospital barracks. ...The engine gives a piercing shriek. The whole camp holds its breath, another 3000 Jews are about to leave. There are babies with pneumonia lying in the freight cars."

What would you do?

"Sometimes what goes on here seems totally unreal."

I'm sure it does. A nightmare from which you can't escape, where opening every door leads you back to the monster.

The only real solution was to defang the monster before the nightmare began.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

51/??

Now Etty must come to real life personal terms with what's happening, because her brother and parents arrive at the transit camp from their hometown.

"The jam packed freight train drew into the camp this morning. I stood beside it in the rain. The cars were shut tight, but there were a few small openings here and there high up, where the planks had been broken. Through one of these I suddenly spotted Mother's hat and Father's glasses and Mischa's peaky face."

But she doesn't cast aside her forced optimism for her family's fate just yet.

"The Jewish Council thinks it imperative that you [the friend in Amsterdam she's writing to] pursue the Barneveld option strenuously with the Zentralstelle on behalf of Mischa and the family..."

Barneveld was a relatively comfortable place for "cultural treasures," like musicians, authors, artists, and of course rich people, politicians, etc, to go instead of transit camps right away. Her brother was a famous musician, so it was plausible.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

52/??

"They are so indescribably efficient in this utter hell. In the early morning a line of freight cars pulled into the muddy camp. ...What we have now is a complete catastrophe. During the last 24 hours the camp has been engulfed by successive tidal waves of Jews. ...They are in a big barracks now, a jam packed human warehouse, people sleeping 3 to a bed on narrow iron bunks, no mattresses for the men, nowhere at all to store anything, children terrified & screaming, the greatest possible wretchedness.

I shall try to get through it as best I can. I even feel quite strong & brave, although sometimes I can see nothing but blackness and nothing makes any sense at all."

As a Jewish Council employee, of course, her personal quarters are a bit better. And she pulls strings to keep her parents & her brother out of the worst of the barracks.

She also mentions at this point people can still receive packages of food & medicine from rich relatives or friends on the outside, if any.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

53/??

"Four hundred people from the hospital will apparently have to go on the next transport. Walking through the barracks, particularly the one with most of the old women, is an act of despair. ...In the face of something like that, I feel like running away."

She still can, of course. She has not yet been interred herself, and could in theory go into hiding on her next leave to Amsterdam. So in the back of her mind she is thinking it's possible to get out of this.

"We are expecting a transport from Hollandsche Schouwburg any day now. Everyone thinks that it will be sent straight through to Poland [to the concentration camps]."

She writes to her friend that she knows another of their friends lives there & says she'll keep an eye out for him and try to "hold on to him here, but there's no way of forcing things to happen. Everyone just has to accept the fate allotted to him. There is nothing else for it."

I think it's not accidental that the translator put "him" and not "one" here.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

54/??

As the war goes badly, the Germans continue to step up their exterminations, and the Jewish Councils are becoming unneeded. She writes:

"Oh, yes, there is something else, something the whole Jewish Council here is so full of that I put it completely out of my mind." No, really?

"The latest news [is that] 60 of us may stay [at the camp]. The other 60 must go back to Amsterdam [and apply for] special exemptions. Because my parents are here, naturally I am one of those who want to stay on, come what may. Most of us do, actually, since almost everyone has family here who he can still protect a little by his presence. So you have a paradoxical situation: while each of us would give anything to get away from Westerbrok, many of us would have to be thrown out before we'd go. People are terribly wound up - debates, computations, laws of probability are the order of the day...nothing comes of it in the end."

There's a whole universe in this one paragraph: The collaborators dilemma.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

55/??

Etty writes to friends that parcels they mentioned sending never arrived.

"In front of us, people with yellow stars are digging a moat to stop us from running away, beyond that stretches the barbed wire."

Her brother Mischa declares that he will stay with his parents, if he alone gets a pass as a "cultural treasure."

"Everything here is mad and incredible and desperate and comical, all at the same time...but that's the way things are.

Oh, yes, it's quite possible that I will shortly be stripped of my privileged position, because the Jewish Council here is about to be dissolved."

The next several letters detail close calls with keeping her parents and Mischa off the cattle cars to Poland.

"I myself would ten times rather go to Poland or wherever if only I am able to get my dear ones away from this place first."

She devises a "code" that she sends to her friends, to be used on short postcards since regular sized writing paper is now very scarce & censorship is common.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

56/??

"We are all beginning to feel the pinch badly now that the outside world, which used to send supplies regularly, has shrunk so much. For all the families & acquaintances of most Jews are here now."

We know, of course, that the German soldiers were stealing any packages of supplies the workers (or the interred people) were being sent, as well.

"The hygiene problem is really the most desperate of all." She asks her friend, "Can you still get [women's] sanitary napkins? And ordinary rolls of bandages? An obstinate eczema that I once had for a few years...has flared up again, and I keep it bandaged because of the dust."

She mentions her father may write a letter, but that it has to "pass a special censor."

The Germans made every effort to hide the conditions at the camps from the outside world. Republicans here will do the same, you know.

"...The misery here is really indescribable. People live in those big barracks like so many rats in a sewer. There are many dying children."

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

57/??

"We keep meeting lots of relatives whom we haven't seen for years - lawyers, a librarian, and so on - pushing wheelbarrows full...and in untidy ill fitting overalls, and we just look at each other and don't say much."

If you were a collaborator, and your family saw you, what exactly could you say to them? Will they be happy at least someone might make it? Will they be furious at you?

How will red state people feel when their lgbtq friends disappear?

I wonder what the token lgbtq republicans and token right wing POC will say to their friends and relatives? Of course, in real life, none of them would volunteer to work in the camps, now would they? They will be hauled in kicking and screaming, and being tazed. You just know it.

Many will suicide & kill their children with them - and then the white nationalist christo-fascists will say: See, these people are not fit to be parents. It's just temporary, a course of treatment to cure them. No reason to over-react.

We know.

shekinahcancook, 11 months ago

58/??

"You speak about suicide [the person she is writing to], and about mothers and children. Yes, I know what you mean, but I find it a morbid subject. There is a limit to suffering. ...People are dying here of a broken spirit, because they can no long find any meaning in life, young people. The old ones are rooted in firmer soil and accept their fate with dignity and calm."

Maybe. Perhaps they remember the pogroms which were not so long ago, and are resigned.

But today's Americans have no such experience to draw upon.

And as more and more laws are passed against lgbtq families, and laws taking medical care away, certainly suicides will go up dramatically. And people always use that fact in arguments with republicans and right wing politicians, trying to appeal to a sense of humanity and mercy they do not in fact possess.

To them, the only good lgbtq person is a dead one. And many feel the same way about unmarried women and people of color.

Make no mistake. This is real.