However, this very memory of the Holocaust museum experience was almost drowned from my consciousness as one fanatical tour guide made the astounding claim, “No one raised a hand--not a bullet was shot--to save the Jews.”
I thought to myself, is that Jewish tour guide with the American accent serious? Is she believing the words (or lies) coming from her mouth?
Of course, that female guide might quite likely just have been trying to hit these two points home: (1) Jews were locked out of areas of safety at the end of the 1930s when most European and North American countries refused Jewish immigrants assistance, i.e. in their hours of greatest need, and (2) later in the middle of WWII the Allies never agreed to bomb Auschwitz, a death factory of total infamy—even when Jewish groups were demanded that the Nazi-killing be stopped. (The British, for example, appeared to have had enough bombs lying about to “bomb the hell out of Dresden”, but not to have anything on hand to fling at Auschwitz a couple of hundred miles away. )
Despite such a rationalization of the Jewish guide’s blatant falsehoods, I left the Museum feeling that the female guide’s claim that “Not a shot was fired to help the Jews” was (a) a misleading attempt to build and support the ongoing official narration of Israel to use as (b) an excuse to build and support a messed-up walled-nation-state of Israel that one observes before visitors in the world today.
HOLOCAUST SUBTERFUGE REFLECTED IN ISRAEL TODAY
One of the points that Yad Vashem tries to demonstrate in a great series of displays and in the tours offered at the museum is how the Jews were tricked and mislead (by their own blind hopefulness at times) into demeaning themselves and agreeing to get into cattle cars which would ultimately lead to their own deaths.
In the main exposition, for example, it was noted that the Jewish peoples on trains arrived at their destinations with toothbrushes, photo albums, and other items--as though these victims-to-be fully expected “not-to-be-gassed” upon their arrival but either (1) be put to work and/or (2) be place in some sort of new ghetto or nicer quality place of living.
Terezin ghetto and concentration camp in Czechoslovakia was an example of this sort of Nazi subterfuge.
The Terezin ghetto was originally advertised around the German Reich as a retirement home or old-folks home for aging Jews. In Yad Vashem Museum Nazi-propaganda photos and newsreels from Theresianstadt were shared with visitors. These pieces of propaganda implied that life was ideal on the Nazi compound’s grounds in Terezin.
This sort of successful propaganda was further discussed in other parts of the exhibition.
http://www1.yadvashem.org/new_museum/Galleries/gal4.html
For example, the arrival at Auschwitz for many was set up similar to the confusing border crossings (once-prominent in Western Europe and) still prevalent on Israel’s borders with neighboring Jordan and Israel. On such borders, confused peoples speaking all kinds of strange languages come together and try to find direction through a series of ever-changing procedures to the other side of the border (going or coming).
Upon their arrival in Auschwitz, many Jewish victims were told that the location they were at was simply a transfer station, i.e. for passengers to get out and prepare to board other trains once papers were processed and passengers passed through various hygienic procedures, including delousing.
Amidst the confusion of the newness of the confusing location and long lines going in various directions, passengers could easily be separated quickly from their families—the old from the young, etc.
In short, illusion, propaganda, false-hope by victims, and other means of misleading passengers in camps & in train yards in a new world filled with speakers of nearly a hundred different languages and dialects made the Holocaust possible by those who controlled the process.
Tragically, Israel carries out its own form of manipulation of peoples, cultures, and hopes in the Middle East today.
