Footsteps

About 20 participants, mainly young people, attended the event in Merklingen on 6.2.2019. After the introductory lecture on "Euthanasia" and afterwards on "What does it mean to learn from history" by Inga Jäger, Rainer Höß showed his multiple award-winning film "Enkel-Grandson", directed by Alexsandar Reljic. The listeners were deeply impressed and the question time to the topics of the evening was quite intense. All together it led to the wish to organize a trip to Auschwitz in March.

December 20, 20188:47 AM ET Written by : Jason Beaubien History unfortunately does repeat itself. Two thousand years ago the Romans laid siege to Carthage, killing more than half of the city's residents and enslaving the rest.Hitler attempted to annihilate the Jews in Europe. In 1994 the Hutus turned on the Tutsis in Rwanda. The Khmer Rouge killed a quarter of Cambodia's population. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbs slaughtered thousands of Bosnians at Srebrenica in July of 1995.Last year when Buddhists attacked Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, many people were shocked to hear that mass killings still occur in the 21st century. But they do – and there's growing evidence that these events follow familiar patterns. And if they do, we should be able to see them coming."Genocides are not spontaneous," says Jill Savitt, acting director of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. "In the lead-up to these types of crimes we do see a consistent set of things happening."Since 2014, the Holocaust Museum and scholars from Dartmouth have mapped the conditions that precede a genocide. They built a database of every mass killing since World War II. Then they went back and looked at the conditions in the countries where the killings occurred just prior to the attacks. And now they use that computer model to analyze which nations currently are at greatest risk.

Education Briey: Rainer Höss, grandson of the commandant of Auschwitz, testifies before high school students.You don’t choose your family. The grandson of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rainer Höss was condemned to suffer his origins. Rather than hide it, he prefers to testify. On Thursday 29 November, he was at Briey’s high school.“What I like about the students is that after the big leap into the first question, there is a certain freedom of speech that takes hold,” Rainer Höss said at the end of the meeting. Photo Fred Lecocq“Go ahead! Go ahead! It’s a discussion. There will be no stupid questions,” says Marylene D’Onofrio, a German teacher at Louis-Bertrand High School in Briey. In front of her, first-class students, all Germanists. Next to her, Rainer Höss is patient, ready to share this heavy past that he inherited. His grandfather Rudolf was the commandant of Auschwitz extermination camp. He discovered this as a teenager. For several years now, he has been travelling throughout Europe to testify. Rainer Höss that he felt invested with the mission of awakening consciences because the present is constantly fed by the past.A very rigid Catholic family…and anti-Semitic“How did you explain your family’s past to your children?” dares a young man. Unlike his own parents, Rainer Höss never let the mystery hang over the evil role of Rudolf, his grandfather. "When I graduated from high school, my son came across this subject. He had, as a result, a lot to say..." Further questions follow. We want to know how his grandfather got into this position of commander. "By lying! He said he received the Iron Cross for his heroic actions in the First World War. But he was laying the rails... He came from a very rigid Catholic family... and anti-Semitic. So he was given this function. Himmler knew he had falsified everything. He used it, when he ordered him to expand the camp, to accelerate the extermination. Even if he had wanted to, Rudolf could no longer say no.”Rainer Höss shares an anecdote about his childhood: "My parents sent me to a boarding school, a place that at the time of the war was reserved for the Nazi elite. This boarding school was always run by a man who had been the leader of the Hitler Youth. He was very happy that the grandson of the Auschwitz commandant was here. I still didn't know anything about my history. It was the'70s and this man was still supervising children..."Rainer Höss then asked Elisabeth, the translator who accompanied him, to read a letter he received last May. It comes from a female doctor in a hospital in Stuttgart. She writes that it was not the gas that killed in Auschwitz, but typhus. Among the students, there is again a lack of understanding. "But how can she deny what happened? There is evidence!", a young lady gets angry. Their teacher explains the negationism. "And it's not just in Germany. In France, people believe in it too.”"With him, history comes to life"Before the meeting, the students had watched the film The Counterfeiters. "We see the camp commander, who is a good father by the way and who then commits these horrors every day. It was an aspect that interested us because Rainer tells the same thing about his grandfather," explains Fanny Baholet, the other German teacher who made the appointment. "First graders study dictatorships in history class. There, they can see that it is not only in books, that real people could have been around Nazis. All this comes to life.”It's 11:05. The bell rings. The first ones have to clear the room, to make way for the seniors who have a test. It's grumbling. "Can't we give them another room? We still have too many questions..."Claire PIERETTI

Yesterday Simon was one of the speakers at Coventry Cathedral.  

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Leader of Islamic Center of Pittsburgh announces Muslim community has raised more than $70,000 for synagogue attack victims and their families. 

This documentary - and the book of the same title - is nearly forty years old. Kitty has dedicated most of her life to Holocaust education. Many Holocaust remembrance organisations are eternally indebted to Kitty. She is a wonderful and impressive woman. Her written words and the documentaries she has made are amongst the most powerful and informative survivor accounts available.

We are pleased to offer congratulations to our good friend Aleksandar Reljic (and of course to Rainer), after the film "Enkel" received the Program Award at the Al Jazeera Balkans Documentary Film Festival in Sarejevo. Well done to everyone involved.

On 7 September Footsteps member Simon (helped by Simone Boersma and Bev Bell) was honoured to speak at an Anglo-Polish event in Shrewsbury, England. His talk focused mainly on the Holocaust and learning the lessons of the past. To help the audience understand the scale of lives lost in the Second World War he employed a ribbon for visual impact. 1cm = 1000 lives. By that scale: 60cm = British civilians killed, 3.8 metres = British military losses, 25 metres = non-Jewish Poles, 30 metres = Polish Jews, 55 metres = total Polish losses attributed to the German occupation, and 60 metres depicted Jews killed during the Holocaust. If more ribbon was available it could have been stretched to over 200 metres for Soviet losses and 600 metres for total lives lost during the war. The visual impact is powerful and may be a useful tool for educators. Thanks to Andrzej Branski for these pictures.

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