Liberation Day
May 5th, 2007 | 8 responses
Today the Dutch, that’s me (among others=, celebrate our liberation. For five years we were ruled and oppressed by the Nazis. Many Dutch, Jews and non-Jews alike, were murdered by the Germans; those who dared to resist were often tortured until they ratted out other members of the resistance and, after that, they were killed, executed. In 1945 the suffering ended: the allied forces, especially the Canadians, the Brits and the Americans liberated the Netherlands, they came in with tanks, they flew over with airplanes, they handed out candy, especially chocolate, they were welcomed with flowers and joy by a population almost starved. The last couple of months before the liberation were the most difficult months of the occupation: the Germans deliberately let the Dutch starve. There was virtually no food; many Dutch walked for days, literally days, to find enough food to survive for a couple of days more. Women walked for a week, falling down, getting up again, begging to farmers to give some food, anything, after that they would go home again where their husbands (if not taken away by the Nazis) were waiting with their children. The way home was perhaps even more difficult: the Germans could just take away the food the women had so much difficulty to find. Quite often they did and, in such cases, time and especially important energy we wasted making it more difficult if not impossible to survive.
While my people were starving, the brave American, Canadian and British forces were fighting and dying in Europe, mostly France of course, in an attempt to stop before-mentioned suffering as soon as possible. They died en masse but kept on fighting, to liberate people they never saw before. For this they, the generation of normal men who became heroes, deserve our eternal gratitude. To them, and to their sons and daughters I say, for the entire Dutch people, ‘thank you. We can never repay what you did for us, we can never do what you did for us; what you did, what you were willing to do for us is beyond words. All of you are heroes. May God bless you.’
Cross posted at my own blog.
opinions powered by SendLove.to
8 Responses to “Liberation Day”
H/T to the Dutch people, I did a quick Wiki check before I wrote something stupid. Holland suffered a very high casualty rate for Western Europe, my rspect to your country. Lets not forget the toll of Poland, the USSR and other Eastern European countries (even Yugo’s). This is not to deminish the brave effort of the Dutch(not French or Croat), the Poles and Latvians were slaughtered at a higher rate.
Eastern Europe had two barbarians fighting over them, neither of them with any interest in liberating anyone. It made it a very different place indeed. In addition if I remember correctly Hitler had a disdain for Eastern Europe he did not have for Western Europe.
JS Maybe the Eastern Europeans didn’t fit the Aryian image. But statistically the casualties were SIGNIFICANTLY higher in the east, why? The Baltics, Romanians and Hungary were slaughtered, some of them fit into the blond blue eyed image.
Michael: I thank you on behalf of my father’s step-brother, Lt. Kenny Robinson, whose grave is somewhere in Belgium. Kenny was a bombardier on a B17 that was shot down in the Schweinfurth Raid on Aug. 17, 1943 – I am partially named after him.
Rudi,
There are a couple of possibilities. First, remember that the war started in the East. It was Hitler’s first use of blitzkrieg and the indiscriminate force used was overwhelming. It not only took out military resistence quickly but was also possibly meant to be an intimidating warning to the Western European countries as to what could happen to them if they chose to try to interfere. High casualty counts would add to the hoped for intimidation effects. In addition Eastern Europe had a larger population of Jews to be exterminated as well as Gypsies (If my memories are correct.), another favorite target of the Reich. If the casualty counts include what happened in the camps, that would certainly be part of it.
Thanks to the brave Netherlanders for doing their best to protect their Jews and fighting the Nazis instead of collaborating like the Vichy French. My favorite book when I was growing up was “The Diary of Anne Frank”, which was my first exposure to the Dutch who lived through the Holocaust.
I wish we had been able to intervene earlier, but I do believe that many in the US at the time were antisemitic, and there was great resistance to getting involved in foreign wars. Still, I wish FDR had managed to act sooner.
The East is mostly Slavic people with the West is mostly Romance/Germanic. Other than the Holland, the highest casualties were amongst the Eastern Slavic people(Jews and non Jews). Another factor was religious, the Romantic/Germanic religions of Western Christians versus the Slavic religions (Orthodox Christians and Jews). Orthodox Greece lost 4.15% compared to 0.68% Catholic Luxemborg.
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/101165.html
JTA: Ambassador wants more study of Greek Jewry
Greece’s ambassador to Washington called for expanded study of his nation’s Jewish community, all but wiped out in the Holocaust.
Alexandros Mallias said Holocaust deniers pose a danger not just to Jews, but to the nations where they lived before the Holocaust.
“I consider them to question an important part of my own history,” Mallias said of Holocaust deniers Friday at a B’nai B’rith International luncheon launching a series of BBI programs on Greek Jewry.
Six out of seven Greek Jews died during the Holocaust. More information on the community is available at http://www.ushmm.org/greece/ .
Mallias said Greek-Israel relations were never better.