are rarely presented, because they implicate the inhabitants of the Nazis' victim countries. Here are just a few.
Contrary to what I thought,
Of the third of a million Jews in France at the start of the war. three-quarters survived, compared to just over half of Jews in Belgium – and only a fifth in the Netherlands.
That striking statistic is due in significant part to the role of convents and other havens provided by the Catholic church, particularly in Vichy (semi-independent, very-fascist part of) France.
Over 90% of Jews survived in Denmark, due to various factors including the general acceptance of (small proportion of) Jews by Danes who helped them escape, mostly to neutral Sweden, easily reachable across the strait from Copenhagen.
Denmark, which had no army to speak of, but was considered to be highly 'Aryan', managed to negotiate a lenient Occupation, and was self-governing until 1943, when the Nazis finally lost patience with Danish reluctance to collaborate, and debilitating resistance.
In Poland (the country with the highest Jewish population), a maximum of 0.3% of Jews (10,000) is estimated to have survived the war, many of whom, of course, fled to Israel...where some of their offspring enthusiastically persecuted Palestinians.
Good people are very few.
3 comments:
I saw recently Czech film ‘Poslední slušní lidé' The last decent people. There was no ‘happy end’
Of course there were the nastinesses after the war, notably the mass-expulsion of 'Sudeten Germans', the ethnic group who provided the excuse for Hitler's annexation of Bohemia.
The film doesn't seem to have been shown outside the Czech Republic (now known as Czechia). Czech Wikipedia offers this:
IDEOLOGIE
nacionalismus
konzervatismus
moravský patriotismus
brněnská komunální politika
antikomunismus
antiliberalismus
radikalismus...
Not, however, nihilismus
Post a Comment