Ben Fainer inspired me. With his wonderful Irish-Polish accent, he consistently spoke of the need to love and forgive others, despite the horrors he had been through. This included long perilous years during the holocaust, including time at the concentration camp at Buchenwald. I was so glad Ben allowed me to tell his story. He sat patiently in his living room as I asked him lots of questions. I just noticed today that my video interview of Ben has now been viewed by almost 100,000 people.
And now, Ben’s daughter Sharon Berry has a new story. It has been determined that while in captivity, Ben created a metal bracelet that was recently discovered on the grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Apparently my video helped to make this determination. I invite you to “meet” Ben by watching his video, which I filmed in his living room in 2012, a few years before he died. For more about Ben’s bracelet, see also this article from today’s edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Mar velous interview.
My mother was born in 1918 and lived in the upper Midwest until World War II. The local papers ran editorials supporting Hitler’s actions against the Jews. A third of stores had signs saying “No Jews Allowed.”
In 1987 she visited us when we lived in Munich. We took a day trip to Dachau, a suburb, and its concentration camp. My mother walked through the gates, vomited and fell to the ground, crying.
We’re not so different from those we detest. I wish our hate-mongers could realize that.
Bill, I didn’t realize the extent of the hate in the midwest.
We do like tidy stories where the American people are pure and highly moral, but that doesn’t jibe with the facts. Suffolk County, New York was filled with people who supported Hitler leading up to WWII. Back then, one could walk to the intersection of Adolf Hitler Street and Goering Street. https://untappedcities.com/2015/04/02/this-former-nazi-town-on-long-island-with-adolf-hitler-street-still-exists/ There was a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Square_Garden As Jews were being killed by Hitler, “The U.S. Government Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees, Fearing That They Were Nazi Spies.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/ Click here for a photo of a pro-Hitler parade in Yaphank, New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/nyregion/query-for-home-buyers-in-a-long-island-hamlet-are-you-german.html
Erich, History is messy, and evolution occurs in attitudes and ideas as well as species. As with species, survival of the fittest is the general rule, but it’s general, not catholic. But for a black swan event, dinosaurs would still rule the world. So is it with ideas. The “fittest” is classic liberalism, tolerant, seeking to support and defend, welcoming dissent, which was in the ascendant since it first appeared during the Enlightenment. We are entering a new Dark Age, where victimhood trumps all.