✨️🧻✨️ I normally love synchronisity ✨️🧻✨️
Today...it was a pretty shitty one though and I'm going to share it with you to get it out of my head.
This morning I listened to Antony Loewenstein talk about something horrific that happened to family members of his friend.
They live in G♡za. And as we know there are no toilets in G♡za. Something I think about EVERY TIME I flush the toilet.
So this family member was digging a hole to use...and fell in!! And people that came to help him fell in as well.
So that graphic and stomach turning story stayed with me all day.
And then I had a catch up with someone I "met" through substack this afternoon. And he mentioned a memoir from a Holocaust survivor who lived here in Melbourne. And out of allllll the snippets he could have shared, he said that the image that stood out the most was her describing the hole that was used as a "toilet" in the concentration camp. And how slippery it was. And how she was 14 years old and terrified of falling in, knowing that she would d!e if she did.
And having those two personal stories shared on the same day really hit home, once again, that NEVER AGAIN IS FOR EVERYONE 💔
How is it that most of us of Jewish descent choose to look away at the horrors that are being committed by the country our identity has been shackled to?
I've said it so many times, but I'll say it again:
IF ANYONE SHOULD BE SPEAKING UP FOR PEOPLE BEING SLAUGHTERED...IT'S THE ONES WHO HAVE GROWN UP IN THE SHADOW OF A GEN0CIDE.
I don't care what you want to call it, personally I believe it's a gen0cide taking place in G♡za, but even if you choose to not use that word....SURELY you can see the horrors and do whatever you can to make it stop???
Thank you for keeping the lights on in dark moments. Your courage is bright.
In her book “The Testimony” (Hardie Grant 2012), Helena Wagorska (Strnad) says on p.54: “The latrine was an open hole in the ground outside with slippery edges, making its use fraught with the danger of falling in….Earlier arrivals to Stutthof called it ‘the bottom of hell.’” Before she died in 2022, Halina said to me “it’s terrible what Israel is doing to the Palestinians” and would be shocked to hear that 90 years afterwards Israel is repeating the Holocaust. She was a delightful person with Humanist and social justice values, loved by many in Melbourne where she came in 1948. She was still testifying in 2020 by Zoom to the Hamburg trial of one of the Stutthof guards, despite bullets thrown in her Box Hill driveway and threats by phone. Look her up or read this great book about a memorable human being.