“Jews did not join the partisans as a normal act of choice. We were forced to fight the Nazis to save ourselves from extermination. We took the gun in our hands in a desperate situation, when our parents, brothers and sisters were murdered, when children were grabbed from their mothers and sent to their gruesome death. We fought in order to survive; we fought against fascism, which was our enemy, the enemy of all democratic forces and the enemy of Lithuania.

The activity of the Jewish partisans was self-defense — in the face of the most overwhelming instance of genocide in human history. In contrast to Lithuanian collaborators, who volunteered to put to death their unarmed civilian Jewish neighbors, and Soviet collaborators, who also volunteered to kill and oppress the Lithuanians, the Jewish partisans’ aim was not to kill anyone, not to ‘inherit’ the property of a murdered people, but to fight our common enemy.”

–Sara Ginaite, a native of Kaunas, was incarcerated in the Kovno (Kaunas) Ghetto and lost almost her entire family in the Holocaust. She escaped into the forests and joined the anti-Nazi partisans. After the war, she was a professor of political economy at Vilnius University for almost twenty-five years before emigrating to Canada in 1983. She published ten books in Vilnius and another two in Toronto,where she taught social science at York University. She was instrumental in arranging for Yad Vashem to honor a Lithuanian family that saved a Jewish child during the Holocaust and has recently negotiated exchange student agreements between Vilnius and Toronto Universities. Her best-known work on the Holocaust is Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community of Kaunas, 1941-1944 (2005).

It’s almost Yom HaShoah

animatedamerican:

hodlensblahg:

cardozzza:

hodlensblahg:

And I just want to remind everyone that it’s a day that antisemites will be coming out of the woodwork to harass us

Nazis will send us threats and abuse

Leftist goyim will remind everyone that we weren’t the ONLY ones killed

Goyim of color will call it a white peoples genocide

Black goyim will compare it to slavery

Everyone will agree that we bring it up too often, and everyone will find a reason to bring up Israel

These things happen all The time already, but you can bet it’s going to increase dramatically on Yom HaShoah. If you dont think you Can handle it, i highly recommend staying offline on the 15th

Take care!

I would really love for my non-Jewish followers to read through this and make sure they don’t contribute to it, please. This is already a very painful day for us, please don’t make it any harder.

Yes please! Non Jewish followers, I urge you to please read this carefully and reblog it

Just a quick scheduling correction here: Yom HaShoah starts the evening of the 15th and goes through to sunset on the 16th, to correspond with the Hebrew date of the 27th of Nisan. Please be careful both days.

it’s international romani day

hermanngottliebs:

today is technically a day to celebrate our heritage and our culture, but i want to use this as an opportunity to raise awareness of just how bad the situation is when it comes to us.

the oppression of romani people in europe is nothing new. it goes back to the middle ages. romani people have been the victims of ethnic cleansing, slavery, forced labour, child
abduction, forced assimilation and eviction from their homes for
centuries, with the last genocide happening only 70 years ago during the
holocaust in which we were targeted alongside jews as the primary enemy of racial purity.

romani were legislated against in the same way, branded in the same way, deported in the same way, tortured and abused in the same way and killed en masse in the same way, and yet this is continually erased from the history books or barely worth a footnote. all that despite the fact that more than half of europe’s romani population is estimated to have died in the porajmos.

it took until 1982 for the porajmos to be acknowledged at all and even then it was only in west germany. the entire 40 years
before that people told romani our holocaust was “legitimate official
measures against persons committing criminal acts, not the result of
policy driven by racial prejudice”. the crime was exisiting and the
legitimate official measures were genocide. even after it was officially acknowledged we got no reperations and it is still continually swept under the carpet.

some of the legislations against us only became illegal in 2003, forced sterilisation of romani women being one. not that this stops that issue from still being a problem.

nowadays discrimination against romani people is still completely legal
in the majority of european countries and even countries in which it’s
not legal participate in it either way. this doesn’t extend to only
european countries either, the usa and canada are just as guilty of it.

romani
people are denied education, health care, housing and service based on
our ethnicity and are disproportionate targets of violence and crime.
in many countries in europe we are the number one group targeted by
hate crimes. often we are not allowed to attend schools or have to go
to a special segregated school that is basically useless.

we are 90% more likely than any other citizen in our countries to live in extreme poverty in living conditions which are considered to be
violating basic human rights. many romani people have to live without
electricity, running water or food. we are consistently illegally evicted in countries we have the right to be in and we face violence and persecution from both the civil public and the police.

there are
frequent anti-roma protests in countless countries calling for violence
against us and urging the government to deny us asylum and shelter. people burn our camps down after chasing us out of them. frequently romani children
are being taken away from their parents for not looking romani enough
because of the stereotype that we steal children.

(sources: 1, 2, 3, 4)

the situation is dire and we need help. please spread as much awareness of these things as you can and if you even have five bucks to spare, consider donating to errc.org to help them fight for romani rights in europe. (or another trustworthy romani charity/rights organisation.) one of the many reasons why this is still going on is because so little people are aware of what’s happening to us. you can change that.

najis tuke for reading so far and for your support and help.

maxximoffed:

I feel like there’s something ironic about Marvel starting out as anti-nazi propaganda and ending up not only tiptoeing around hydra’s nazi affiliation in the movies but erasing the jewish-romani background of two character’s that now work with them, as well as getting half the fandom to fanboy over nazi and nazi affiliated characters

and by ironic i mean fucking terrible

adhdtommyshepherd:

if u are white and u hold up the holocaust as “proof” that white people can be discriminated against

the holocaust uniquely targeted Jewish and Rromani populations

we’re not one of you

if you had been in europe you would have survived but we would not have

stop using the genocide of our people for your racist white supremacist bullshit

go fuck yourself

anti-faschismus:

Faye Lazebnik Schulman: Pictures of Resistance

“A partisan came in and said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said to myself, ‘My family was murdered. I am in the partisans. I’m alone. I won’t be living here anymore. The Nazis occupied my father’s house that he built himself.’ And I said to the partisan, ‘Burn it!”

photographs:

1. Burial of partisans in forests near Pinsk, 1944. Formal burials of partisans were rare. Faye took this photograph to show the first time her detachment’s casualties were buried in caskets…. “These are two Jews and two gentiles, all four buried in one grave together…. They fought together against the same enemy, so they are buried together.”

2. Shish Detachment Field Operating Table, forests around Pinsk, 1943

3. Partisans in the Forest, forest near Lenin, 1943

4. Faye with Old Friends, forest near Lenin, Winter, 1944 “These boys escaped the Nazi-occupied half of Poland and came to Lenin in 1939, when we first met…. I was happy to meet three Jewish boys together. In my brigade, I couldn’t even say I was Jewish…. So, when I saw boys I knew, I was very happy not to hide anything.”

5. Partisans standing in front of the ashes of the former Lazebnik family home, Lenin, Poland (now Belarus), mid 1943. The graves of German soldiers are in the foreground.

6. Faye practicing her aim, end of winter 1943, Pinsk. “This photo is really part of my history as a partisan. This is my ‘new’ automatic rifle…. I really had to practice how to shoot this one.”

7. Faye Schulman and Soviet partisans in the forest.

8. Faye Schulman and fellow armed partisans.

9. August 14, 1942 – The massacred Jewish community of Lenin, Poland. Including Faye’s parents and siblings.

10. Faye with her detachment. Forests near Lenin, Fall, 1942. Faye is lying down in the front row, second to last.

sources:

Oregon Jewish Museum

Pictures of Resistance

Yad Vashem Photo Archive