Holocaust - Blog Posts
I'm remembering my great grandfather and his little sister, who survived but also lost their whole family, and my family still deals with that trauma today.
Please take 60 seconds for the victims. They were people too, and deserve to be remembered.
hey um. If y’all see this post. Take a minute. Yes, a full sixty seconds. If that’s too hard, thirty. Today is international shoah/holocaust Memorial Day. Take a moment for the victims. It is needed more than ever.
I’m remembering my great grandmother and grandfather, who lost everyone but survived. And lived to make my grandmother, my mother, and me.
every holocaust memorial day, i always ask people to keep romani people in their thoughts, but this year i’d like to clear up some misconceptions that i see every year w/ a psa
romani people are not white. we’re south asian (from northern india), and each subgroup has a unique racial makeup of asian/white/etc, in different amounts. this is also why we vary wildly in physical appearance/skintone
we still face oppression. what we face, especially in europe, can still be constituted as attempted genocide, as we’re forced to live in hazardous conditions or to give away our children, be sterilized, etc just for the crime of being roma
the ‘g slur’ isn’t just an american issue. the reason some european roma prefer the slur is because, in many countries, there is no term for roma that isn’t a slur, and it’s either the g slur or the literal translation of the n word. i’m romanian, and if you used the slur in my hometown, you’d get slapped, since we just use ‘roma’.
we live in every continent across the world. some of the largest romani populations exist in south america, predominantly in brazil. they are no more and no less roma than their european counterparts, and they, like romani in asia, africa, etc all face unique challenges and oppression.
we’re the largest ethnic minority in europe, and yet have almost no political power, no land ownership power (in some places, we’re forbidden from owning land entirely), etc. with very few reputable charities- a lot of us reject charity by principle, as well as there being a general lack of education about us- the best thing you can do to help romani people is to just spread information, and help individuals when you can.
calling what is happening to trans people in the south an attempt at genocide: correct and ok. it's going to get worse if we don't fight back now
comparing it to the holocaust: not ok and also i'm fucking blocking you.
no genocide is the same. not every genocide mirrors the holocaust. using the deaths of jews, lgbt people, disabled people, and poc during the holocaust as your "gotcha" card every time our rights are in danger today proves you know nothing about the history you're talking about.
Kinda just got gut-stabbed by shit from a corner I wouldn’t have expected, but I suppose I shouldn’t actually be surprised at the willingness to forget about the universal comfort with removing the right of the disabled to actually connect with the history that connects us or …. anything.
In 1933 the ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ was passed, allowing for the forced sterilisation of those regarded as ‘unfit’. This included people with conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia and alcoholism. Prisons, nursing homes, asylums, care homes for the elderly and special schools were targeted to select people for sterilisation. It has been estimated that between 1933 and 1939, 360,000 individuals were subjected to forced sterilisation.
In 1939 the killing of disabled children and adults began. All children under the age of three who had illnesses or a disability, such as Down’s syndrome, or cerebral palsy were targeted under the T4 programme. A panel of medical experts were required to give their approval for the ‘euthanasia’, or supposed ‘mercy-killing’, of each child.
Many parents were unaware of the fate of their children, instead being told that they were being sent for improved care. After a period of time parents were told their children had died of pneumonia and their bodies cremated to stop the spread of disease.
Following the outbreak of war in September 1939 the programme was expanded. Adults with disabilities, chronic illnesses, mental health problems and criminals who were not of German origin were included in the programme. Six killing centres were established to speed up the process – the previous methods of killing people by lethal injection or starvation were deemed too slow to cope with large numbers of adults. The first experimental gassings took place at the killing centre in Brandenberg and thousands of disabled patients were killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
The model used for killing disabled people was later applied to the industrialised murder within Nazi concentration and death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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