[ SECRET POST #4329 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4329 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 44 secrets from Secret Submission Post #620.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

But you're looking back with the benefit of hindsight, of knowing what happened. You know, you could say the same thing about people in real life. A lot of people could have left if they had known what was going to happen. But they mostly didn't, because how could they have known? How could they have expected something so unprecedented, so evil?

[(Anonymous)]

The scale of it, perhaps no-one could have predicted. But government-backed violence against Jews? Uhh, only someone with any knowledge of European history?

[(Anonymous)]

But that - the scale and scope of it - is one of the big distinct things that differentiated it from previous violence against European Jews, and precisely what it would have been necessary to foresee.

[(Anonymous)]

By that same token though, a lot of people who had the means to leave didn't because, based on historical precedence, they thought they could ride it out.

[(Anonymous)]

This. People don't want to be refugees. People don't want to leave their homes and everything they know behind. And then of course no government (except the Dominican Republic and Bolivia!) would take Jewish people in any numbers and it was too late.

[philstar22]

This is so true and so applicable today with immigration in the US. People don't seem to understand that people are coming here because they are terrified and desperate and much of the time/most of the time, they don't have any choice.

[(Anonymous)]

I thought a lot of countries wouldn't take Jews from Germany when they DID try to leave.

[(Anonymous)]

Especially since there actually were a lot of non-German people who were very much on board with the whole "let's get them dirty Jews" thing. Plenty of support for that, really. Was only after it got to all out war that those people suddenly thought "whoops maybe it's not that great after all".

OP

[(Anonymous)]

I've been taught from early on that you should never get too comfortable in any country if you're a Jew. In doing the research on our family tree (the little we could), we actually found a letter from one of my great great (possibly more) uncles that he wrote in the early 30s to a friend in Palestine. He was from a country that was annexed in the first days of the war, and before it started the family was extremely prosperous and comfortable, having lived there for all living memory. In the letter he talks about how they'd started banning Jews from entering University, that the atmosphere of the country was getting more toxic than ever, and basically saying "We need to get the fuck out of here".

That uncle never did get out and he and his family were murdered in the ghetto. His niece, my grandmother, survived the war because her mother took one look at the Nazis, grabbed the kids and refugeed East for the rest of the war. They lost everything they had.

Forty years later my parents refugeed to the US, giving up everything they had, because they could not take being Jewish in Soviet Russia. On my mother's side alone, my family lost everything they'd ever built five times in one century, including well before the war. No one in our family ever thought, "we've finally found a place where it's safe to be a Jew." Need I mention what happened last week on American Soil?

That being said, I do understand that a lot of people didn't think it would ever come to what it did, and they tried to stick it out. My only objection in relation to the secret is the assumption that EVERYONE thought they could stick it out.

I'll admit that it's very unlikely Herr Schultz survived, but it's still possible. Fraulein Schneider's entire Thing is that she's lived through everything and I don't doubt she made it through WW2 as well. As for Sally -- come on, she goes where the party is. I can't see her staying in Germany once *everything* turns swastikas and Nationalist rallies.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

But the thing is, OP - you were raised with that BECAUSE of what happened in Germany and other European countries. Of course it's easy for you, with that hindsight, to say, "Well, I was taught this so why would they believe any different?"

A lot of people could get out but didn't. A lot of people couldn't get out in spite of trying. It's disingenuous to act like your modern knowledge was universal eighty years ago.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

Did you miss the part where pre-WW2 my uncle was thinking in the exact same way?

To say that WW2 caused Jews to worry about their safety is preposterous. We've been hated for 2000+ years. The Spanish Inquisition, Pogroms, Blood Libel -- these are all things that happened before the 20th century. It's why we're known as a nomadic people even when we've settled somewhere for a couple of hundred years.

No, of course no one saw the exact horror that was coming, and no one can be blamed for not believing it would get so bad. But at the same time, there were people who smelled the kind of trouble coming that called for getting the fuck out of dodge. I'm not saying the people that got away are better than the people that didn't, I'm just saying that there were people who had the right instincts in this situation. When my great-grandma was evacuating with her daughters, she had friends and neighbors who remembered the Germans from WW1 and figured it would be better than communist rule, ad they stayed behind to ride it out. I don't know how my grandmother knew it was different this time; I don't think anyone does to this day. I don't think she ever knew why she made the decision to leave everything and run. All I know is that she was right.