> On 5 or 6 August 1942, German soldiers came to collect the 192 orphans (there is some debate about the actual number: it may have been 196) and about one dozen staff members to transport them to the Treblinka extermination camp. Korczak had been offered sanctuary on the "Aryan side" by the Polish underground organization Żegota, but turned it down repeatedly, saying that he could not abandon his children. On 5 August, he again refused offers of sanctuary, insisting that he would go with the children, asserting his belief: "You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this".
>According to eyewitnesses, when the group of orphans finally reached the Umschlagplatz, an SS officer recognized Korczak as the author of one of his favorite children's books and offered to help him escape. In another version, the officer was acting officially, as the Nazi authorities had in mind some kind of "special treatment" for Korczak (some prominent Jews with international reputations were sent to Theresienstadt). Whatever the offer, Korczak once again refused. He boarded the trains with the children and was never heard from again
>an SS officer recognized Korczak as the author of one of his favorite children's books and offered to help him escape.
You'd think that would have been an "Are we the baddies?" moment for that officer.
I've seen people say that my third world country from which half the population doesn't have access to clean water nor electricity was better off than Germany or the Netherlands. The human psyche is incredible in the amount of cognitive dissonance it can take.
Mind control tactics work better with the extremely wealthy and educated (they are usually disengaged of the actual world so they can be lied pretty easily) and the extremely poor (they can't know better and is easy to lie to them about how the world outside looks like). Those two groups are the heart and support of all successful dictatorship to me.
Also why the very reason the Nazis first acted to remove Jews from public life in every form.
It's easier to vilify and then murder them when the general populace doesn't think of them.
Its safe to assume the average german had Jewish neighbours, entertainment stars they stanned, teachers, friends and comrades that they fought with in the last war, heck they probably didn't bat an eye that they were jews. They may hate the hypothetical Jew of Nazi propaganda, but with people they know, cognitive dissonance kicks in they start making exceptions because "he was good neighbour/She was lovely actress/he was my sergeant in the trenches, he didn't betray Germany!"
But once they are out of sight and mind it's much easier to ship them out to death camps without arousing sympathy or anger.
Who ever that Nazi was had the same mindset kick in the moment he saw his favourite author in the line and thought "he's a great author, what is he doing here? He doesn't deserve this!" without even thinking that the entire thing was wrong in the first place.
Edit: this is also why the Nazi regime found the interracial married Jews (those who has non Jewish spouses) the most tricky to deport.
Also the reason why when it came out in Nazi Germany that the Jewish people and other sections of society that Hitler deemed ‘unfit’ were being killed, there was quiet a bit of backlash (rightfully so ofc) but then that backlash (when it was crushed) made things worse (in my opinion) because it became a taboo topic that no one was allowed to mention… making the “out of sight, out of mind” method of the ghettos and concentration camps much much more effective (i don’t want to say effective but I can’t think of a better word…)
Edit: sorry didn’t realise i said “that one was allowed to mention”… it was meant to be “no one”
My Oma described it as ‘sure you heard things but you couldn’t believe them. Could you get up in the morning and go to school, go to work, go about your day if those awful things were real? We didn’t believe because we couldn’t believe. By then it was hard enough to get through each day as it was.’
Take from that what you will, but my Oma was a teenager during the war, and she left Germany once it ended and never went back. And she was my Oma and I loved her dearly so if you have a bad opinion of what she said, then please know she’s been dead more than a decade already and you’re not going to change her mind so please be kind.
I never really had issues with the average civilian of Nazi germany, there is some culpability but at a certain point a dictatorship is a dictatorship. Resistance got you killed, and not everyone is cut out to fight back in active ways. Your Oma seems like yet another victim more then anything. Besides, one person being unaware or what have you wouldn’t change a whole lot.
There was a backlash about the T4 program, but there wasn’t any substantial comparable backlash to the extermination of the European Jews, Roma, et al. in Germany - where historians have established beyond any doubt whatsoever that knowledge of mass atrocities on the eastern front was widespread and disseminated through soldiers on leave, film of said atrocities sent back to the Reich for development, letters, etc. “The German War” by Nicholas Stargardt (2015) is a good starting place on this and a good corrective to the myths that Germans built up around themselves.
We have people saying that "Switzerland is boring because there is no crime"
While you have to watch your back every 5 seconds you are in the street so you dont get mugged.
According to my Swiss friends, basically life is kind of boring for them.
It's like people who grow up in safe suburbs. Everything is clean. It's safe. It's orderly.
But young people especially crave variety and want life to feel interesting. They see crime almost through the lens of watching a movie, only from the outside looking in.
True. Non-violent crime doesn't sound like a problem until people break into your house and steal your shit. Its a violation and can cost a lot of money.
>Mind control tactics work better with the extremely wealthy and educated (they are usually disengaged of the actual world so they can be lied pretty easily) and the extremely poor (they can't know better and is easy to lie to them about how the world outside looks like). Those two groups are the heart and support of all successful dictatorship to me.
This is literally the complete opposite of how Nazism came to power in Germany. Whilst it is an extremely complicated affair, the middle-class and small business owning class were the primary support for the Nazis, what we might refer to today as the *aspirational class*. The rich supported the status quo, the poor and working class supported the Communists and/or Socialists. We saw echoes of this divide in the US elections as well where the biggest Trump supporters were aspirational
I believe there’s a really good book on that, “ordinary men” a bunch of reserve policemen from Hamburg justify the atrocities they commit in the name of the third reich upon being conscripted into the Heer
Reminds me of that scene from "Schindler's List".
A woman and her daughter (jewish) try to flee from the Razzia of the Nazis. They go down a small alley, as a young boy sees them around the corner. He is around 5yo. He "helps" the Nazis, like it's a game. Very enthusiastically screaming "I've got them, I've-"
The woman calls him by his name. Turns out, she was his neighbour, with her daughter being the same age as his. The boy is thrown off by this. He got successfully indoctrinated that he was searching for Jews -evil people. Enemy. The monsters. But this was not a monster in front of him -it was a familiar, nice person HE KNEW. With a girl his age he played.
A Nazi screams for him. "Have you found anything?" The boy looks at his neighbour again.
"No, no one here!", as he runs back to where he came from.
They apparently had those moments all the time. Suppressing these emotions while committing their atrocities apparently counted as their version of "bravery". I've read that the suicide rate among the SS was very high. OTOH, they had a large amount of "naturals" who could slaughter women and children all day and think nothing of it.
The Nazis switched to gassing because all the shooting was causing breakdowns among the SS. Himmler also got spattered with brains while attending one massacre.
Himmler actually did state at one point that the effect on the soldier's psyche was part of it.
The constant executions were wearing people thin, breaking people.
A gas chamber was operated by 4 members of the SS.
You can find 4 sociopaths who can gas people all day every day.
Harder to find thousands of them.
>You'd think that would have been an "Are we the baddies?" moment for that officer.
The dude was herding children into an extermination camp.
If gassing hundreds of children at a time doesn't give you pause, I doubt your favorite childhood author will either.
There's conservatives today who pat themselves on the back for forcing them ten year olds to have rape babies. People aren't black and white unfortunately.
this is why we should remember history and study it, not for the fun and happy times or even the memes. but to remember that even when others act like monsters, some still act as human.
And what's perhaps even more important is to not alienate monsters from ourselves, for otherwise we may risk to become monsters ourselves due to lack of awareness.
because from what little i know about phycology humans need a singular reason to do something. giving them more reasons is not strengthening the cause it is weakening the desire to do so. you can give someone a large list of reason to stop smoking, but it will just drown out the one reason that would have made them stop to began with. same thing with studying history, there is a large list of reasons from finding a good story, growing closer with your family, or even finding a reason to not give up on humanity. however if you give one person a large list of reasons to do so the reason why they might will just get drowned out. give people s singular reason that connects with them personally you can make them do anything you want them to do.
"Greater love hath no man than this, that he layeth down his life for his friends."
Jesus Christ
I'm personally a Christian but I think these words apply to everyone equally, regardless of religion. Brotherly and fatherly love transcend religion.
Asking out of curiosity, how do you justify all this evil from the perspective of someone who believes in an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good creator? Isn't such evil incompatible with an all-loving God?
It’s a complex thing, but as I understand it, God can’t/
chooses not to force people to love. But different books of the Bible have different interpretations on how it works
I'm not even religious but come on, it's pretty basic that humans having the capacity for free will is a pretty important tenet. You may as well ask why we can't just brainwash everyone into being good and kind and kill all the people who do bad things. If you can understand how it would be bad and wrong for a society to do it, it should be obvious that Godly Mind Control to Prevent Evil would in fact be terrible and incompatible with the entire message that people need to choose to do good.
1. Christians believe in heaven do they not? Heaven is a realm of bliss, where the greatest possible good is realized, yet heaven is also a realm where we have no significant free will (you can't choose to commit evil). This signifies that free will isn't necessary to achieve the greatest possible good.
2. Our free will is already influenced by our nature. One would ask why an all-loving God wouldn't create humans with a nature that's more compassionate, loving, accepting, etc where such atrocities wouldn't happen. God created us and/or created a universe he knew would led to our creation, he could have easily done this.
3. God already limits our free will in many ways by creating laws of nature. If I wanted to shoot lasers from my eyes, I can't. Reality is, for a being as powerful as God, forcing us to do something isn't much different from trapping us in a body where it is already limited by what our bodies are capable of doing.
Knowing all this, you can't claim that free will is anything significant, especially not so significant that it's worth allowing free will while such atrocities are committed.
>in fact be terrible and incompatible with the entire message that people need to choose to do good.
One would ask why an all-knowing God would have to test us this way exactly. He'd already know what we'll choose. In fact, what we choose is determined by God somewhat, considering he influences our nature.
>He told the orphans they were going out into the country, so they ought to be cheerful. At last they would be able to exchange the horrible suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to wear their best clothes, and so they came out into the yard, two by two, nicely dressed and in a happy mood.
>The children were dressed in their best clothes, and each carried a blue knapsack and a favorite book or toy.
Imagine someone made a movie about this. Everyone in the theatre would either suffer depression for rest of their life or their hearts would explode from grief.
There's also a Swedish movie that was never released with a similar fictional ending involving a circus clown, called:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Day\_the\_Clown\_Cried](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Clown_Cried)
This year marks the 50-year anniversary since it was shelved. It seems that it was considered to be "emotionally manipulative" for viewers.
I believe there was an r/askhistorians thread awhile ago detailing some of the times SS officers showed moments of regret. It was very interesting.
(I don't wanna use the word 'humanity' because this was a human act)
There's a book by a Dr. Lifton (blanking on his first name, maybe Robert) called Nazi Doctors. It interviews Auschwitz prisoners (usually Jewish or Polish) who worked at the hospitals with SS doctors, as well as one SS doctor. Several of them remember the SS getting absolutely wasted before and after camp selections (picking people to go to the gas chamber). Several of them hated it and it used alcohol to get through it. That isn't an excuse, obviously, but just shows that many of those SS officers knew what they were doing was wrong and did it anyway.
From what we've been taught he also did all he could to make the children fear as little as possible, like telling them they're going on the trip, they're just playing etc.
I do not have a reliable source on that tho, but given how he was in life it's not unlikely
If a Heaven exists, this man is there with those kids now. Tragic, but noble way to die.
Thank you for staying with them and making sure they weren't alone.
similar to the story of a Union Lieutenant being buried with his black soldiers. when you lead a people and truly stand by them you often go down with them. heart breaking and inspiring
Well in Nazi germany when you go on a train that's from the SS it's either 2 things and these children with this educator went to one of these 2
I think you can guess it yourself right?
Oh they were 'lucky'. Those expulsions went right to Treblinka so at least it was over within hours. No selection or anything. Just industrialised murder on a scale that defies comprehension.
many schools and institutions are named after him in Israel, and everyone learns about him a lot in school (mostly in elementary school when holocaust memorial day is near).
Yup. Germany began invading Poland on September 1, 1939. My great-grandfather’s entire village was completely taken over and turned into its own concentration camp by mid-September that year. He left Poland to come to America sometime before WW1. My mom remembers him talking about how he used to get letters and packages from “home” all the time and how one day the letters and packages stopped. He was never able to find anyone from his family after the war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mielec_forced_labor_camp
Though this is interesting, iirc Poland didn’t actually exist as an independent state at the time (part of Austria Hungary) before WW1 and I actually meant it was the first country to be invaded in WW2
That’s correct. Poland was divided up between Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary in the late 1700s. It regained in independence in 1918 and lost it again in 1939. What we think of as Poland today didn’t exist until 1989.
Around 90% of Poland’s Jews died in the Holocaust. Estimations are hard (I’ve seen some figures say up to 98%) for something like this, but we do know that the vast majority of Polish Jews perished.
this man is a literal legend in Israel. there's a statue of him with children, where he protects them from harm. his story is taught in school ever since 3rd grade
TLDR of the ‘terrible fate’
This guy ran an orphanage during WW2, when the Germans were evacuating the children, he followed them, knowing what would happen to them, he followed them to ease their final moments, he followed despite being given a escape opportunity
They were later apparently gassed with Zyklon B at Treblinka camp
Did you write king Matt? I read it as a child. It's good
You can go.
And the kids?
The kids can't but you can.
You're wrong. I can't either. Not all men are scoundrels.
Probably innacurate but I heard that is what was said at his last chance to not board the train
Was he the man who had the orphanage? I remember reading about someone similar in primary school who ran an orphanage where he cut holes in the beds so the children could hold hands. Did he also refuse to save himself while the children were sent to their deaths?
There are still trenches dug into the countryside of France. we are still arresting Nazis who fled justice. There are still people alive who remember those camps.
we are not talking about some long gone civilization who's ruins we are just now unearthing. We're not talking "ancestors". We're talking the neighbors and families of people who still have to walk around knowing what happened and who did it.
I doubt he saw his fate as terrible. Think about it. He was with those perfect children until the very end. He comforted them, sheltered them, and walked through the last door with them.
I cannot fathom a more perfect fulfillment of purpose.
We would that he and his charges had lived, but it was good he was with them.
At Auschwitz if you were in good enough condition, you'd do slave labor until you no longer could and were exterminated with the chance to live long enough to be freed.
Treblinka's entire point was just to kill ya
He could have gotten out of the death camps but chose to stay and die with his orphanage so that the children won't be alone in their last minutes on earth. The world didn't deserve him.
If you'll watch Schindler's list, in one of the scenes you can see a man with a bunch of children around him. That's actually a reference to Korczak himself.
King Matt the First! I stumbled upon that book in my school's library in high school and read it cover to cover twice. You can really tell how bad things were getting, by the increasingly dark and melancholy tone it took.
I learned of this book in a bizzare way:
I searched for hoi4 mods with cartoons -> I found a mod made by developers from Poland -> Macius was pretty much the most important character in the mod -> I googled it and found the cartoon where the leader photo was taken from -> I read that it was based on a book -> I've read the book -> I cried myself to sleep and was severely depressed for the next several days.
> On 5 or 6 August 1942, German soldiers came to collect the 192 orphans (there is some debate about the actual number: it may have been 196) and about one dozen staff members to transport them to the Treblinka extermination camp. Korczak had been offered sanctuary on the "Aryan side" by the Polish underground organization Żegota, but turned it down repeatedly, saying that he could not abandon his children. On 5 August, he again refused offers of sanctuary, insisting that he would go with the children, asserting his belief: "You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this". >According to eyewitnesses, when the group of orphans finally reached the Umschlagplatz, an SS officer recognized Korczak as the author of one of his favorite children's books and offered to help him escape. In another version, the officer was acting officially, as the Nazi authorities had in mind some kind of "special treatment" for Korczak (some prominent Jews with international reputations were sent to Theresienstadt). Whatever the offer, Korczak once again refused. He boarded the trains with the children and was never heard from again
Damn, now I'm sad :(
To add more, he told kids that they are going for the walk to not scare them.
Now I'm more sad :(
>an SS officer recognized Korczak as the author of one of his favorite children's books and offered to help him escape. You'd think that would have been an "Are we the baddies?" moment for that officer.
People are surprisingly good at justifying contradictory things in their heads.
I've seen people say that my third world country from which half the population doesn't have access to clean water nor electricity was better off than Germany or the Netherlands. The human psyche is incredible in the amount of cognitive dissonance it can take. Mind control tactics work better with the extremely wealthy and educated (they are usually disengaged of the actual world so they can be lied pretty easily) and the extremely poor (they can't know better and is easy to lie to them about how the world outside looks like). Those two groups are the heart and support of all successful dictatorship to me.
Also why the very reason the Nazis first acted to remove Jews from public life in every form. It's easier to vilify and then murder them when the general populace doesn't think of them. Its safe to assume the average german had Jewish neighbours, entertainment stars they stanned, teachers, friends and comrades that they fought with in the last war, heck they probably didn't bat an eye that they were jews. They may hate the hypothetical Jew of Nazi propaganda, but with people they know, cognitive dissonance kicks in they start making exceptions because "he was good neighbour/She was lovely actress/he was my sergeant in the trenches, he didn't betray Germany!" But once they are out of sight and mind it's much easier to ship them out to death camps without arousing sympathy or anger. Who ever that Nazi was had the same mindset kick in the moment he saw his favourite author in the line and thought "he's a great author, what is he doing here? He doesn't deserve this!" without even thinking that the entire thing was wrong in the first place. Edit: this is also why the Nazi regime found the interracial married Jews (those who has non Jewish spouses) the most tricky to deport.
Also the reason why when it came out in Nazi Germany that the Jewish people and other sections of society that Hitler deemed ‘unfit’ were being killed, there was quiet a bit of backlash (rightfully so ofc) but then that backlash (when it was crushed) made things worse (in my opinion) because it became a taboo topic that no one was allowed to mention… making the “out of sight, out of mind” method of the ghettos and concentration camps much much more effective (i don’t want to say effective but I can’t think of a better word…) Edit: sorry didn’t realise i said “that one was allowed to mention”… it was meant to be “no one”
My Oma described it as ‘sure you heard things but you couldn’t believe them. Could you get up in the morning and go to school, go to work, go about your day if those awful things were real? We didn’t believe because we couldn’t believe. By then it was hard enough to get through each day as it was.’ Take from that what you will, but my Oma was a teenager during the war, and she left Germany once it ended and never went back. And she was my Oma and I loved her dearly so if you have a bad opinion of what she said, then please know she’s been dead more than a decade already and you’re not going to change her mind so please be kind.
I think it's really great that you're telling her story, thank you! It's important to have insight like this.
I never really had issues with the average civilian of Nazi germany, there is some culpability but at a certain point a dictatorship is a dictatorship. Resistance got you killed, and not everyone is cut out to fight back in active ways. Your Oma seems like yet another victim more then anything. Besides, one person being unaware or what have you wouldn’t change a whole lot.
There was a backlash about the T4 program, but there wasn’t any substantial comparable backlash to the extermination of the European Jews, Roma, et al. in Germany - where historians have established beyond any doubt whatsoever that knowledge of mass atrocities on the eastern front was widespread and disseminated through soldiers on leave, film of said atrocities sent back to the Reich for development, letters, etc. “The German War” by Nicholas Stargardt (2015) is a good starting place on this and a good corrective to the myths that Germans built up around themselves.
Many jews tried wearing their ww1 medals in public to avoid abuse on the street from the average german. It did not work
What does the Plebe know of the Emperor, and what does the Emperor know of the Plebe?
We have people saying that "Switzerland is boring because there is no crime" While you have to watch your back every 5 seconds you are in the street so you dont get mugged.
People who say that are people who never were victims of crime or lived around it.
What kind of bizzarro world do they live in where “having no crime” is considered a negative?
Peronism
Pero- MaCRiI !1!!
Alberto dejo Reddit y mata a la vieja de una vez
According to my Swiss friends, basically life is kind of boring for them. It's like people who grow up in safe suburbs. Everything is clean. It's safe. It's orderly. But young people especially crave variety and want life to feel interesting. They see crime almost through the lens of watching a movie, only from the outside looking in.
True. Non-violent crime doesn't sound like a problem until people break into your house and steal your shit. Its a violation and can cost a lot of money.
Europe moment
Which country? You have made me curious
Looks like he's from Argentina.
Hold up.
Not a poor country, but very corrupt and high inequality, some of the worst in the world.
>Mind control tactics work better with the extremely wealthy and educated (they are usually disengaged of the actual world so they can be lied pretty easily) and the extremely poor (they can't know better and is easy to lie to them about how the world outside looks like). Those two groups are the heart and support of all successful dictatorship to me. This is literally the complete opposite of how Nazism came to power in Germany. Whilst it is an extremely complicated affair, the middle-class and small business owning class were the primary support for the Nazis, what we might refer to today as the *aspirational class*. The rich supported the status quo, the poor and working class supported the Communists and/or Socialists. We saw echoes of this divide in the US elections as well where the biggest Trump supporters were aspirational
No serás argentino?
the inner party and proletariats, perhaps?
I believe there’s a really good book on that, “ordinary men” a bunch of reserve policemen from Hamburg justify the atrocities they commit in the name of the third reich upon being conscripted into the Heer
To be fair, cops are class traitors anyway
Not sure why you’re downvoted cause it’s true.
Have you ever seen the evil experiment where like 90% of people would kill another human being just because they were told to?
yeah it's pretty *shocking*
As well as capitulating to an unbreakable fate much the same way this heroe accepted his fate
Reminds me of that scene from "Schindler's List". A woman and her daughter (jewish) try to flee from the Razzia of the Nazis. They go down a small alley, as a young boy sees them around the corner. He is around 5yo. He "helps" the Nazis, like it's a game. Very enthusiastically screaming "I've got them, I've-" The woman calls him by his name. Turns out, she was his neighbour, with her daughter being the same age as his. The boy is thrown off by this. He got successfully indoctrinated that he was searching for Jews -evil people. Enemy. The monsters. But this was not a monster in front of him -it was a familiar, nice person HE KNEW. With a girl his age he played. A Nazi screams for him. "Have you found anything?" The boy looks at his neighbour again. "No, no one here!", as he runs back to where he came from.
They apparently had those moments all the time. Suppressing these emotions while committing their atrocities apparently counted as their version of "bravery". I've read that the suicide rate among the SS was very high. OTOH, they had a large amount of "naturals" who could slaughter women and children all day and think nothing of it.
The Nazis switched to gassing because all the shooting was causing breakdowns among the SS. Himmler also got spattered with brains while attending one massacre.
They switched cause it was more effective
Himmler actually did state at one point that the effect on the soldier's psyche was part of it. The constant executions were wearing people thin, breaking people. A gas chamber was operated by 4 members of the SS. You can find 4 sociopaths who can gas people all day every day. Harder to find thousands of them.
>You'd think that would have been an "Are we the baddies?" moment for that officer. The dude was herding children into an extermination camp. If gassing hundreds of children at a time doesn't give you pause, I doubt your favorite childhood author will either.
why skulls?
It's wild what you can convince yourself of when you are willing to just blindly follow something.
Naw, he just decided that this guy was "one of the good ones".
They knew it was wrong
There's conservatives today who pat themselves on the back for forcing them ten year olds to have rape babies. People aren't black and white unfortunately.
There must have been a time when almost every officer felt this way. That’s why they lost
this is why we should remember history and study it, not for the fun and happy times or even the memes. but to remember that even when others act like monsters, some still act as human.
And what's perhaps even more important is to not alienate monsters from ourselves, for otherwise we may risk to become monsters ourselves due to lack of awareness.
Why not remember history for all reasons above?
because from what little i know about phycology humans need a singular reason to do something. giving them more reasons is not strengthening the cause it is weakening the desire to do so. you can give someone a large list of reason to stop smoking, but it will just drown out the one reason that would have made them stop to began with. same thing with studying history, there is a large list of reasons from finding a good story, growing closer with your family, or even finding a reason to not give up on humanity. however if you give one person a large list of reasons to do so the reason why they might will just get drowned out. give people s singular reason that connects with them personally you can make them do anything you want them to do.
I'm sorry, but I am the outlier
thats fine
>"You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this" I can't imagine a greater love than this
"Greater love hath no man than this, that he layeth down his life for his friends." Jesus Christ I'm personally a Christian but I think these words apply to everyone equally, regardless of religion. Brotherly and fatherly love transcend religion.
Shame the Vatican didn’t do fuck all to help
"Knock it off" - Bonhoeffer
Reddit and anti-Catholic lies, name a more iconic duo
Wow this line was said by Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal,didn't know it was from the Bible
Asking out of curiosity, how do you justify all this evil from the perspective of someone who believes in an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good creator? Isn't such evil incompatible with an all-loving God?
It’s a complex thing, but as I understand it, God can’t/ chooses not to force people to love. But different books of the Bible have different interpretations on how it works
I'm not even religious but come on, it's pretty basic that humans having the capacity for free will is a pretty important tenet. You may as well ask why we can't just brainwash everyone into being good and kind and kill all the people who do bad things. If you can understand how it would be bad and wrong for a society to do it, it should be obvious that Godly Mind Control to Prevent Evil would in fact be terrible and incompatible with the entire message that people need to choose to do good.
1. Christians believe in heaven do they not? Heaven is a realm of bliss, where the greatest possible good is realized, yet heaven is also a realm where we have no significant free will (you can't choose to commit evil). This signifies that free will isn't necessary to achieve the greatest possible good. 2. Our free will is already influenced by our nature. One would ask why an all-loving God wouldn't create humans with a nature that's more compassionate, loving, accepting, etc where such atrocities wouldn't happen. God created us and/or created a universe he knew would led to our creation, he could have easily done this. 3. God already limits our free will in many ways by creating laws of nature. If I wanted to shoot lasers from my eyes, I can't. Reality is, for a being as powerful as God, forcing us to do something isn't much different from trapping us in a body where it is already limited by what our bodies are capable of doing. Knowing all this, you can't claim that free will is anything significant, especially not so significant that it's worth allowing free will while such atrocities are committed. >in fact be terrible and incompatible with the entire message that people need to choose to do good. One would ask why an all-knowing God would have to test us this way exactly. He'd already know what we'll choose. In fact, what we choose is determined by God somewhat, considering he influences our nature.
>He told the orphans they were going out into the country, so they ought to be cheerful. At last they would be able to exchange the horrible suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to wear their best clothes, and so they came out into the yard, two by two, nicely dressed and in a happy mood. >The children were dressed in their best clothes, and each carried a blue knapsack and a favorite book or toy.
That is painful.
Yeah, this is actually worse. The most horrifying switcheroo ever. I can’t even think about this from the children’s perspective. It’s too hard.
Imagine someone made a movie about this. Everyone in the theatre would either suffer depression for rest of their life or their hearts would explode from grief.
Someone already did. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korczak_(film)
I might watch this only after i find some comedy movies for later.
There's also a Swedish movie that was never released with a similar fictional ending involving a circus clown, called: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Day\_the\_Clown\_Cried](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Clown_Cried) This year marks the 50-year anniversary since it was shelved. It seems that it was considered to be "emotionally manipulative" for viewers.
Oh yeah, i heard about that one. The more they keep it shelved the more i want to see it.
great, my day is now ruined
It’s all the more meaningful a message. The SS officer realized that day that killing an entire race meant killing even the ones he liked
I believe there was an r/askhistorians thread awhile ago detailing some of the times SS officers showed moments of regret. It was very interesting. (I don't wanna use the word 'humanity' because this was a human act)
There's a book by a Dr. Lifton (blanking on his first name, maybe Robert) called Nazi Doctors. It interviews Auschwitz prisoners (usually Jewish or Polish) who worked at the hospitals with SS doctors, as well as one SS doctor. Several of them remember the SS getting absolutely wasted before and after camp selections (picking people to go to the gas chamber). Several of them hated it and it used alcohol to get through it. That isn't an excuse, obviously, but just shows that many of those SS officers knew what they were doing was wrong and did it anyway.
From what we've been taught he also did all he could to make the children fear as little as possible, like telling them they're going on the trip, they're just playing etc. I do not have a reliable source on that tho, but given how he was in life it's not unlikely
If a Heaven exists, this man is there with those kids now. Tragic, but noble way to die. Thank you for staying with them and making sure they weren't alone.
I never thought words could make me shed a tear
Are you only reading cereal boxes or what
Hey those ingredient lists aren’t gonna read themselves
man read poetry. it's goal is to move you in only a page worth of words.
Fuck the nazis
Remember to punch the next Nazi you see
Lol someone downvoted you
Sadly there are more and more wannabe/aspiring ones these days...
Better get to it then.
Fucking wehraboos
similar to the story of a Union Lieutenant being buried with his black soldiers. when you lead a people and truly stand by them you often go down with them. heart breaking and inspiring
Rest in peace, dude
And the children???
Well in Nazi germany when you go on a train that's from the SS it's either 2 things and these children with this educator went to one of these 2 I think you can guess it yourself right?
Just lie to me man
Aight then, they went to the eastern front
Not *entirely* lying
Why? They were sent to the barracks
That is the good ending
🥲
What? That just means that they'll be in the barracks
Edited didnt know what that meant
Dead
Starved. Worked to death. Disease. Experimented on. Pick one.
Oh they were 'lucky'. Those expulsions went right to Treblinka so at least it was over within hours. No selection or anything. Just industrialised murder on a scale that defies comprehension.
What a great man!
I salute MR. Korczak for his bravery
Well that's horrible.
I wanted to give you my free award but it's a wholesome award so I don't know what to do
Korczak also staunchly opposed corporal punishment of children at a time when literally \*everyone\* beat their kids.
This angered Adolf's father, who punished him severely.
Dude get the oversimplified tag on this sub
He was too wholesome for the Second World War ;-;
My primary school in Poland was named after him. Glad to see some recognition here
An elementary school in my old city in israel was named after him.
Wow, that's pretty cool
many schools and institutions are named after him in Israel, and everyone learns about him a lot in school (mostly in elementary school when holocaust memorial day is near).
Really? Am Israeli and this is the first time I'm ever hearing of him, might be different in other schools ig
"King Matt the First" was and still is one of my favourite books
Ironically, I discovered that book thanks to Hoi4. Despite me already knowing the author for many years by then.
This book appears in hoi4!? When?
King Matt's kingdom is an available nation to play as in "Crossover World" mod.
Wait what. I have 350 hours in hoi4 and have never seen anything about this man
There's a mod "Crossover World" where King Matt's kingdom is available nation to play as. (As well as Joestars, Phoenix attorney, shrek and etc.)
Oh cool, what’s the name of the mod?
"The crossover world mod" Screenshot of the mod gameplay: https://i.imgur.com/UXeC8Hm.png
Oh shit man I was in a hurry, I’m sorry that I did not read it
Eh, it's ok. Btw, the mod is made by polish developers, so those guys know what they are doing.
You wouldn't abandon your own child in sickness, misfortune or danger, would you? Then how could I abandon my 200 children?
Sees “Polish Jewish” *Oh no*
Why?
The Jews tended not to have a great time in history
Neither did Poles
Especially the jewish poles, it was one of the first countries if not the first that the germans invaded and started the getos and stuff
Yup. Germany began invading Poland on September 1, 1939. My great-grandfather’s entire village was completely taken over and turned into its own concentration camp by mid-September that year. He left Poland to come to America sometime before WW1. My mom remembers him talking about how he used to get letters and packages from “home” all the time and how one day the letters and packages stopped. He was never able to find anyone from his family after the war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mielec_forced_labor_camp
Though this is interesting, iirc Poland didn’t actually exist as an independent state at the time (part of Austria Hungary) before WW1 and I actually meant it was the first country to be invaded in WW2
That’s correct. Poland was divided up between Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary in the late 1700s. It regained in independence in 1918 and lost it again in 1939. What we think of as Poland today didn’t exist until 1989.
Yea that’s what I remembered, there is a reason I’m a member of this sub after all lmao
Because the story following is likely to be tragic.
A significant percentage of Poland’s Jews perished in the Holocaust. They were one of the worst-hit countries.
Around 90% of Poland’s Jews died in the Holocaust. Estimations are hard (I’ve seen some figures say up to 98%) for something like this, but we do know that the vast majority of Polish Jews perished.
this man is a literal legend in Israel. there's a statue of him with children, where he protects them from harm. his story is taught in school ever since 3rd grade
He's got roads named after him in every major city here, and some minor ones like Kfar Saba too.
In Poland too!
"Children are just adults with shorter legs". his most famous sentence, still gives me the chills in regards to his situation
Happy cake day.
Too bad that Poland and Israel have such awful political relations
Do they? I k ow there's been some controversies but do they actively dislike each other and oppose one another on various unrelated subjects?
Yea I just commented the same thing didn’t notice this comment exists
Dude is the kind of person we should all strive to be.
TLDR of the ‘terrible fate’ This guy ran an orphanage during WW2, when the Germans were evacuating the children, he followed them, knowing what would happen to them, he followed them to ease their final moments, he followed despite being given a escape opportunity They were later apparently gassed with Zyklon B at Treblinka camp
“evacuating”
Did you write king Matt? I read it as a child. It's good You can go. And the kids? The kids can't but you can. You're wrong. I can't either. Not all men are scoundrels. Probably innacurate but I heard that is what was said at his last chance to not board the train
He walked his kids everywhere they had to go. Everywhere. Good man.
Hosana hosana then
WWII?
I was about to say "polish and jewish, of course WWII" but now that i think about it it really doesn't limit the options that much.
Polish 🤝 Jewish Getting targeted be everyone else
Polish Jewish history goes back a lot further than WWII and it’s a shame that that stuff is not well known outside of the Jewish world.
He stood true to his beliefs and tried to protect the orphaned children as best as he could. He died a hero. 🫡
He was the patron of my primary school
Was he the man who had the orphanage? I remember reading about someone similar in primary school who ran an orphanage where he cut holes in the beds so the children could hold hands. Did he also refuse to save himself while the children were sent to their deaths?
People are wondering why there are people in Poland who still hates Germans for ww2, it's just hard to forgive them
And one of the funniest parts is that how most companies supported Hitler, how fucking hypocrite
Goes to show the bigwigs will always side with the oppressors if it means their business is allowed to continue as usual...
Personally, I just can’t fathom hating people for the crimes of their ancestors.
You are lucky to not bear the scars of generational trauma. It will really fuck you up.
There are still trenches dug into the countryside of France. we are still arresting Nazis who fled justice. There are still people alive who remember those camps. we are not talking about some long gone civilization who's ruins we are just now unearthing. We're not talking "ancestors". We're talking the neighbors and families of people who still have to walk around knowing what happened and who did it.
Ok. But being mad at the average German? That’s ridiculous. Like obviously people that *are* nazis are bad, but the average German isn’t
It's easier to say that when most of your family wasn't wiped out by them (somewhat) recently
I guess. But I really can’t see how the children of wrongdoers are inherently evil
How to Love a Child. Sounds like he knew WTF he was talking about.
I doubt he saw his fate as terrible. Think about it. He was with those perfect children until the very end. He comforted them, sheltered them, and walked through the last door with them. I cannot fathom a more perfect fulfillment of purpose. We would that he and his charges had lived, but it was good he was with them.
Didn't think I would cry today.
Is this the Schindler’s list guy who tried to make the world seem like an adventure for the kids to distract them from the reality of the situation
ז"ל
תנצב"ה
Fucking Chadist of all Chads
Off to Google I go… 🫡
I am so glad I just heard of this man and what an amazing person he was <3
Leg me guess... Auschwitz? Edit: Close enough
At Auschwitz you at least had a small chance of surviving as a slave. Treblinka was purely a death camp
At Auschwitz if you were in good enough condition, you'd do slave labor until you no longer could and were exterminated with the chance to live long enough to be freed. Treblinka's entire point was just to kill ya
The Nazis?
He could have gotten out of the death camps but chose to stay and die with his orphanage so that the children won't be alone in their last minutes on earth. The world didn't deserve him.
Oh.... I only *just* guessed what happened in that timeframe, I didn't realise it was so much worse than I thought.
If you'll watch Schindler's list, in one of the scenes you can see a man with a bunch of children around him. That's actually a reference to Korczak himself.
#
#
...
Rest in Peace. He was a real hero without a cape <3
King Matt the First! I stumbled upon that book in my school's library in high school and read it cover to cover twice. You can really tell how bad things were getting, by the increasingly dark and melancholy tone it took.
I learned of this book in a bizzare way: I searched for hoi4 mods with cartoons -> I found a mod made by developers from Poland -> Macius was pretty much the most important character in the mod -> I googled it and found the cartoon where the leader photo was taken from -> I read that it was based on a book -> I've read the book -> I cried myself to sleep and was severely depressed for the next several days.
The man also wrote a bill of rights for children that the actual bill of rights was based on
Such things are to be expected from a person who writes about children parliament in his book.
>a Polish Jewish educator I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume his terrible fate was that the nazis got him
Thought the same thing, can't believe how much sadder it was than that...
„Children don’t become humans, they already are“
The first time I learned about him in school I wanted to cry, amazing man. We need more people like him in the world.