[Harold Mayo]

For anyone interested in the Holocaust, the movie "The Last Days" by Spielberg's Shoah Foundation is really worthwhile. Although I really didn't learn much new information about the Holocaust (I'm pretty well-read on it, though), hearing death camp survivors talk about it at length was very interesting.

One of the chilling points was near the first of the film. The interviewees, all Hungarian Jews, were talking about rumors of what the German and Austrian Jews were being made to do (wearing the star and being harassed, etc.) and some things that were done TO them (killing them for no reason). The Hungarian Jews said that they thought little of it because it wasn't happening to THEM. The said that they thought it would never happen there.

When it did start happening, it was small things that they let pass. As they said, they felt that the small things were bearable and, after all, such things as happened in Germany and Austria would NEVER happen to them...

They accepted more and more and ended up in the same boat that the German and Austrian Jews had, never thinking that it would happen to them.

Sound familiar?

[Harold Mayo]

One thing that I had never heard and had never really thought about struck me rather hard.

It seems that, if there was some question about whether a person was Jewish or not, that the LE officers (yes, that's exactly what their function was) would have the Jewish men drop their pants wherever they were to see if they were circumcised or not. Talk about humiliating...

Sorry to offend, but it just isn't something that I ever thought about since it is the normal practice now (in this country, anyway) whereas it was, in that time and place, a pretty sure sign of the man's religion.