My Love of Books, Knowledge & Learning – Prerequisites for a Holocaust – The Book Burning Already Upon Us – Our Response and Responsibility Now – Book Burning & Children Carted Off

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My Love of Books, Knowledge & Learning

I remember when I was about three and a half, when I discovered to my delight my first books, years before I could read. This was during the time when my father, a WWII veteran, was out of work.

My dad worked at a sand and gravel plant in the Valley – when the freeways were then being built throughout Los Angeles – and the Teamsters – who trucked away all the sand and gravel – were on strike, so that my father, who belonged to a different union, was out of work but not on strike, so that, as my mom explained to me years later, we were not even receiving strike benefit payments. And so, for the multiple weeks my dad did not receive a paycheck, to provide for us – my very pregnant mom, myself, and my older sister – he sought out and found temporary work wherever he could.

Then a few days before Thanksgiving, two men who identified themselves as coming from a church, came to our house carrying a box and two bags of food.  When my mom opened the screen door and let them into the house, they placed the food on our small dining room table, and I heard them tell my mom that someone at their church told them that my father was out of work and that we needed food for Thanksgiving. 

I remember just stopping and standing still when I heard their words to my mom, for I had never heard of something like this, and no thoughts came to me for … it was like something else put on the table that was just there, without me … having anything to do with it other than just knowing it was there.  But over my life, when I was young, then as an adult, and even now, this event and their words return to me again to ponder and stop in thought.

And this moment of inner stillness must have been just a few seconds though it seemed longer, because as the men continued to talk to my mom for a few more minutes, me, being a curious boy, got right to the box and bags, and standing on a chair, I went through the box, pulling cans of food out looking at the pictures on the outside of the cans – I remember a can of pumpkin – and then all of a sudden, I found two books.

The books were Little Golden books of Bible stories, and I was overjoyed because I did not have any books of my own. But when I opened them, I found crayon scribbles on many of the pages and the initial wonderment of finding the two books evaporated. Because for me, the scribbles were making dirty a treasure, for even at three and a half without books of my own, I somehow knew that this was not good, that no one should take a crayon and scribble on the pages of a book. Even then I already knew that books were special and needed to be taken care of and protected. And this was what I came to understand when I found the two Little Golden books and touched books for the first time, an understanding which still deeply remains within me to this day

And then when I was five, my very happy and excited father came up to me as I played in the back patio under the shade of the grape arbor he had built and asked me if I wanted to go to school.  I looked at him and thought that was such a strange question to ask and I said yes, but within me my immediate indignant response was, “Of course I want to go to school,” even though at that time I no real knowledge or understanding of what school was. And as I watched my dad  go away just as happy and excited as he had come to me, at that point there seemed implanted within me a deep and lifelong desire and love for school and learning.

It was only later in life, probably as a teenager, that I understood why my father was so excited about me going to school. For because of the social and economic status of his family – Mexican farm and ranch workers – and the depression, and necessity of working to help the family at an early age, he was only able to finish eighth grade.

And because my dad looked Mexican and had a Hispanic last name, when I was out with him, we were treated and spoken to differently than when I was with my mom, a very white, pretty woman with a British accent.  It was the ethnicity, the accent, and the last name that made a difference which I picked up on very early in life, once when I was probably about two, and another time when I was probably almost four.  This was in the 50’s in California when it was not so good being Mexican or speaking Spanish

And yet with all of this, my father, an intelligent and gentle man who always read the newspaper at home and the National Geographic Magazines we always seemed to receive – his lips silently moving when he read – he greatly valued learning.  He was proud I went to college – the first within my large extended California family – but more, he knew it was something good for me that he was never able to have, and he told me more than once that an education was something that no one could take away from me.  My father’s life and words are still with me.

When I was in grammar school, during the summer especially, my mom, a diligent reader, would take us to the public library every other week where I was able to take out ten books each visit if I wanted.  I grew up not having friends who would seek me out to be with me during the summer – out of sight, out of mind – and we lived relatively far from most to begin with, so during the summer, books became my close companions – many still are – and the happiest memory I have of my summer vacations was having unlimited time to read. 

As with my father, it was only later in my life, and probably after college, that I began to understand the place of reading in my mom’s life.  It was a way of relaxing in the evening, especially when us six children were a little older and not needing constant attention, but it was also a way of dealing with loneliness, especially in the evenings during the month that my dad worked the swing shift. 

Then much later in life, when we began to transcribe my mom’s diaries for 1944 and 1945, I realized that my mom also seemed to struggle with having friends, for my mom would record going over to visit various friends, but she never recorded being invited over or having them at her home. When she arrived in California, none of those friends seemed to continue their friendship with my mom, for I never found letters from them to my mom, and my mom saved all of her letters it seemed.

And then also perhaps contributing to some of the uncertainties of her life during the war, was the fact that her father was Italian and that during WWII the entire family was classified as enemy aliens. And though as a family they only had a few restrictions placed on them, my mom stated that because of her Italian last name she was made fun of and perhaps harassed and bullied a bit in school when war with Germany and Italy became more of a reality. I have the impression that this harassment from other children stopped when at thirteen she and her best friend, Lucienne, and her entire school were evacuated from London to the countryside on the day England declared war on Germany.

So also, for my mother, it was her ethnicity and last name that caused problems for her, the same as with my father’s ethnicity and last name.

During my summer vacations, the only thing I really looked forward to was when school would start again in September after Labor Day. For school and learning became a treasured essential component of my life with that essentialness deepening progressively every year and of course with each new school year, within my heart, there was always the possibility that I would finally find a real friend. 

And multiple decades later in my life, I do have very close friends, but in my mind and heart, I still essentially keep track of the year, and my life, according to the school year.

And now, from the working together of all these and many other external events and inner gifts and understandings throughout my life, the Lord has used them to make me into the person, the man, I now am.  Through them He has also formed within my soul the internal realities and worldview of my life, my understanding of God and His relationship to me, and my relationship to Him through an ever-deepening understanding of the two great commandments.  And this life-long work of God within my life and heart, is the foundation from which I view and now write to warn of the unfolding holocaust and book burning which are already upon us.

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Featured Photo & the One Below.

The featured photo is of a huge public book burning in Berlin in 1934, one year after Hitler was named chancellor of Germany. No one was forced to participate. University students played a  prominent role in gathering the books and publications to gleefully throw onto the fires.

The public at large participated in these multiple national and almost religious events. The photos illustrate official Nazi ideology in action – mindless, enthusiastic loyalty to Hitler, and unquestioning adherence and obedience to his vision of building a new more glorious Germany – the Thousand Year Reich.  

These book burnings, a sanctioned, encouraged, and official opportunity to demonstrate loyal individual and group support for Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party, were planned and promoted by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, and the official Nazi apparatus. Thousands upon thousands in Germany nationwide took part in these book burning rituals staged about five years before Germany invaded Poland and WWII began in September 1939. 

The murder of Jews and others began immediately on the first day of the war, everything then building towards January 1942 when the “Final Solution” – the plan, mandate, and resource allocation for the mass industrial scale destruction and extermination of all Jews in the German occupied areas – became official policy.

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Prerequisites for a Holocaust – Permission, Opportunity, & Just a Little Encouragement

I have read many books on the Holocaust, probably over 60 so far, starting with The Diary of Anne Frank when I was in high school. I have read books on many aspects of the Holocaust from lengthy tomes of history encompassing the entire scope of its history, to books focusing mainly on the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the extensive and meticulous planning that eventually resulted in the  “Final Solution.”  I have also read multiple individual accounts of survival, and witness accounts of the destruction of family members and the entire Jewish populations within villages, towns and cities.

These books have also encompassed the narratives of individual and organized resistance, brutal reprisals, and great heroism, many times at severe cost. And I have read multiple personal accounts of unimaginable hellish savagery mixed with testimonies of simple human goodness and risky, unselfish courage of many surrounded and engulfed within the systematic murder and extermination of millions of Jews and others.

And the books on the Holocaust resting upon my shelves, now lifelong companions, to name just a few, possess titles such as:

• Into the Arms of Strangers-Stories of the Kindertransport – Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer,

• The Chronicle of the Lódź Ghetto 1941-1944 – Edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki, 

• Witness – Voices from the Holocaust – Edited by Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar,    

• Children in the Holocaust and World War II – their secret diaries – Laurel Holliday, 

• Words to Outlive Us – Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto – Michal Grynberg

• Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust – Yaffa Eliach,

• Witness to the Holocaust – An Illustrated Documentary History of the Holocaust in the Words of its Victims, Perpetrators and Bystanders – Michael Berebaum,

• Final Letters from Victims of the Holocaust – From the Yad Vashem Archive – Selected by Reuven Dafni & Yehudit Kleinman.

Reading multiple books that explain and witness to the horrors of the Holocaust and viewing hundreds of photos visually recording the greatest evil ever perpetrated within our long human history of hate, fear, and violence, imparts a multifaceted and multilayered understanding of the Holocaust and the Final Solution, and one’s knowledge and understanding of this demonically evil event is increased and deepened.

With the Holocaust, I have come to understand that there is not just one simple way to understand this deep and scarring evil, for that would entail understanding every nuanced facet of the human  experience and soul. But with enough knowledge and a deep inner experience with the history of the Holocaust, one can begin to understand the landscape of its reality stretching in all directions to where the horizon of human life meets the open sky of meaning and eternity.

And this landscape in which the history of the Holocaust was seeded, took deep root, sprouted, adapted and changed and spread, is always waiting to be watered by ignorance and violence and wakened again by the dark sunlight of human evil and hate, for these forces have always resided within us individually and in community form like a crouching lion waiting to bounce.

But even so, with all my reading and study, what eventually became my primary focus, was the experience and witness of the individual person which, within me, came to involve my entire being.  For the individual human is not the smaller or less important historical issue of the Holocaust, but rather the individual person – the perpetrators, the onlookers, but especially the victims and survivors – the named and the nameless to us – are for me, the entire focus of the Holocaust.

For with those individuals we can know as persons – the slaughtered and the surviving –  their personhood elevates, for our good, the Holocaust from mere numbers and statistics and reports to the knowledge and understanding that those caught up in this deepest of evils were like us – loving life, wanting to live, many if not most within loving and caring families and communities, who were parents and grandparents, spouses, lovers, brothers and sisters, cousins, friends from school, synagogue, churches and neighborhoods, and farmers and teachers and doctors, and shop keepers, of all ages from infants to the aged.

For I believe this personal knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust and Final Solution in terms of the experiences of others, can deeply teach us empathy and compassion, and how to deal with horror and despair by focusing on the good and survival of others, and an understanding that the men, women and children of the Holocaust were persons just like us.  And this identification with others can build within us a caution and fear of ever harboring within our hearts and expressing upon our lips those thoughts and speech that prepared the path leading to the hate-filled and murderous explosion that we now label as the Holocaust.

And now, within our own day, I believe there is an organized attempt to poison the soil of many nations, including our own, with various local/national versions of an induced and promoted fear, resentment, angry intolerance, and rooted distrust of certain officially targeted socially and legally helpless neighbors.  And with these rising attitudes, eventually oppressions, civil rights violations, blame shifting, injustice and cruelty emerge, directed towards the now demonized individuals and groups.  Then after a time, all that is needed within people and a nation so poisoned to spark a holocaust– an attack upon the human spirit and the educational, cultural, economic, and physically prosperous existence of those targeted – are in my mind just three things:

Permission – This has already tacitly been granted.  For within segments of our varied population, there are plenty of carefully crafted and subtle but widely understood code words and sayings to communicate racist views, street level intimidation, and sanctioned violence.  And these words and slogans, alongside some incredibly bold “suggestions” and falsehoods, are designed to help, when needed, inspire “spontaneous” actions supporting the policies and goals of dangerous political ideologies through intimidation and violence, such as with the attack upon the Capitol on January 6.

And all of the above is fed to large portions of the American public by segments of the media repeating and promoting many official pronouncements and executive decisions by enlarging and explaining government justifications with “expert” advice and comments. One does not need to know or understand very much or anything at all, or engage in critical thinking, because certain media sources are designed to bypass their viewers’ thought process by providing news sources that are essentially stripped of any need to think. Thus, permission to blame, resent, and hate is served in comfort.

Opportunity – Many of the media actions mentioned above are taken many times without a regard for truth, honesty, and integrity, or any responsibility for the consequences of their broadcasts, podcasts, and written communications.  These actions, attempting to project a sense of normalcy and rightness for whatever is being promoted, are fed hourly into minds and souls many times already lulled into agreement, helping to create an environment and the opportunities in which hate and violent ideology may take local flight.  An example of this are the events in Springfield, Ohio, where the Haitian immigrant community were accused of eating dogs and cats.

Encouragement – And then with permission and opportunity in place, all that is needed to spark action, eventually violent or not, is just a little encouragement and promised immunity from those somehow with the acquired power or influence necessary to activate devoted followers to personally respond to magnified offenses or crimes or imagined disturbing cultural norms within a targeted community.  A basis of truth concerning the accusations is not required.

These three factors are flourishing and will continue to flourish within our nation, unless there is a conscious and determined return to justice, righteousness, and kindness within the heart of the individual and the collective heart of our nation.  For without this return and renewal, then any agreement, embrace, or deep harboring of the hateful evil thoughts and ideologies of our present time, which have led to oppression, violence, and mindlessness within our nation, will just more deeply root these evils within us and produce a continuing destruction of the human soul, individually and nationally.

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The Book Burning Already Upon Us

In our modern times, book burning in all its multiple forms, always precedes human enslavement and essential destruction. And book burning – the attack upon knowledge and education, the dismissal of and mocking of truth in all discussions and disciplines, the promotion of official political, social, and religious ideologies and lies, and the attempt to suppress independent critical thinking and thought – has already descended upon us.

Book burning can take many forms, but its essential nature is blaming specific persons or particular categories of people and their social, political, or religious views and practices for every national ill and problem – real, imagined or manufactured – coupled with a leading away from any and all sources of truth. Everything coordinated to point to and portray corrupt and evil political or religious leaders as saviors – and away from the corruption and evil they themselves have manufactured – and then elevating their movements and ideologies as light, promising an individual and national greatness to come. 

And this leading can also take many forms – an instilled and growing disrespect, disdain, and suspicion towards the nature and variety of human thought and ideas, and a turning from the truth in history and science. Another very important form is a determined attempt to appropriate and control all free expressions of human creativity in the visual arts, in literature, films, theater productions, and music, through aggressive attempts to control, censor, and even ban certain creative acts and thoughts within all arts and creative communication. And also central to modern book burning is the attack and diminishment of the distribution and access to ideas and thought considered antithetic and dangerous to the proclaimed leaders and their political ideology. 

Now in our country, this has also included the censoring, purging, and closing of libraries, the denial of access to specific writings and publications and films and research materials to specific targeted groups – such as children, high school students, and active duty military. Additionally there has been the elimination of designated topics such as US racial history and the writings of certain minority authors from the curriculum of public education and public libraries .  And all of this is right now all around us and growing.  It’s a noose slowly but surely being tightened around our minds and soul!

Also growing is the suppression and attack on the freedom of expression of the press and news media. This attack is coupled with the promotion of certain news sources as the only official sources of truth with all other news outlets subject to a coordinated attack with the goal of their control and silence, or elimination and destruction. Included in this attack and suppression is any idea, philosophy, or ideology deemed dangerous to the prevailing or promoted interpretation of government and religion – or to the wisdom and supposed glory of the top rulers. 

An additional sobering thought is that book burning – this overt attack upon history, science, literature, and all philosophical and religious thought that does not align with, or bless the powers that be, or which contradicts and refutes whatever the ascending political powers and their specific ideological and political foundations are built upon – is expanding and accelerating.

Essentially any thought, ideological or religious principle, or organization, that questions or refutes the validity of anything spoken, written, or media disseminated by the present government, or which opposes the current oppression and power plays and ploys of our growing authoritarian leader and his compromised and corrupted administration, is always immediately and intensely attacked.

For all this is the great evil enterprise that must succeed before the subversion and replacement of the current system can fully unfold. For everything that is burned or destroyed or lessened in some fashion in our country, is all done for the honor, and even worship, or our president and the promotion of his political agenda.

For this administration’s official predominant thought is that all “glory” must be attributed to the president alone to build him up into something good that he will never be. And anything not publicly perceived as glorious should be as quickly as possible blamed on one or several of the already identified and handy targeted scapegoats which are primarily the poor and vulnerable – immigrants, poor disadvantaged families and children and individuals needing food assistance and medical insurance, disadvantaged children in need of early education programs such as Head Start, foreign students with valid visas, and school-age children born in our country to undocumented immigrants. Other identified and targeted scapegoats include late night TV show hosts, previous presidents, universities, Democrats, the “stubbornness and unthankful” attitude of the president of Ukraine, and now the homeless living on the streets of D.C. 

And all of the above is from a man whose ever present claim is that he wants to “Make America Great Again”. But what he has said, and what he has done, has for the greater part produced the exact opposite of what he has said he was going to do. For nothing he has done or said displays, equates to, or even approximates, an honoring within his life of the two great commandments of loving God with our whole heart and soul and loving our neighbor as ourself.

There is nothing great, or holy, or good in anything he has done, for his thoughts and schemes are solely centered only upon himself. Pursuing the good of our nation does not reside within his soul.

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Our Individual & Collective Responsibility

Not only must we now make ourselves aware of the evil of the multiple forms of book burning around us, but also of those among us now already targeted for suppression, enslavement, and injustice.

And we must also personally react and take responsibility for keeping ourselves and others, to the extent we are able, back from the black hole of laziness of thought, cultural numbness, ignorance, and the lulling call and inducement to blissful and carefree mindlessness through immoderate intake of entertainment and sports and other electronic opiates. As a God-given imperative within our lives, we must stive to always have a thinking mind and one sensitively attuned to the needs and struggles of others, our neighbors, lest we succumb to the lies of evil leaders and their evil supporters and complacently become like them in thinking and life.

And just as the books on the Holocaust that I listed above, witness to the planned and implemented industrial scale destruction of humans – persons created in the image and likeness of God – so also what we do and say, or do not do and do not speak, witnesses to others of truly who and what we are within the crisis and chaos of these times.  

For how we respond to the ever-growing assault upon knowledge, education, art, and the free expression of the human spirit and soul, and to others – our biblical neighbors – will also in fact be the witness of ourselves, to family and friends and others, within history, and before God.  It is in truth far past time to think critically and take action, but we must do this, or begin to do this, and do it intelligently and with courage, doing whatever we can to protect and purify our hearts and lives from the evil that seeks to constantly touch and defile our minds and soul to seduce and draw us away from loving God with our whole being and our neighbor as ourself.

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September 1942, Wagons Begin the Deportation of the Older Children from the Lodź Ghetto in Poland to the Killing Center at Chelmo Where They will be Exterminated and Burned Within a Few Days at Most.

September 1942, Younger Children from the Orphanages or After Being Forcibly Separated from Their Parents Being Paraded to the Deportation Trucks to Begin Their Journey from the Lodź Ghetto in Poland to the Killing Center at Chelmo Where They will be Exterminated and Burned Within a Few Days at Most.

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Book Burning & Children Carted Off and Reduced to Ashes

Book burning – the attack upon knowledge, and truth, and human experience and thought – is one of the key actions and corruptions leading to the planned destruction of those human lives so targeted. For the carting away of books to be burned in public celebrations and ritual adherence to evil men and their ideologies, has and will lead again to attacks upon the health, education, and food for others, of children, created in the image and likeness of God.  And those Jewish children who were labeled and viewed as “useless eaters” in the 1940’s, less than a century ago, were literally carted off to death, to a planned industrial scale extinction and burning process, the children reduced to ash, as were books before them. This happened.

And now a form of this is happening right now in our country to other groups of children in making them disappear – such as taking a group of rounded up immigrant children separated from their parents and further traumatizing them by taking them from their “care” facility late at night and putting them on planes to deport them without due process.

Poof and ashes, fog and mirrors, can and do take many forms in planning and facilitating the disappearance of those unwelcomed and unwanted, including cruel and traumatizing “official” proceedings. Hiding the actions from view is now the national game, children quietly disappearing is the whole intended gain!

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Below are Sources of Further Information on the Burning of Books in Nazi Germany

Articles

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center | Yad Vashem

Nazi Book Burnings | Holocaust Encyclopedia

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Videos

Burning the Books – Germany 1933 – British Pathé – English

Burning The Books – Germany 1933 (1933)

Burning Books:1933 and today – How the Nazi First Burned Books and Then People – DW (Deutsche Welle) History and Culture

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=videos+-+book+burning+in+berlin+in+1930s+berlin&&mid=36C4339D6B5B63E2A16C36C4339D6B5B63E2A16C&&FORM=VRDGAR

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