The White Rose


Paulie brought me a white rose today, that he'd gotten down on main campus. Attached to it was a tag outlining the White Rose Society, a project of UT's Hillel group. The card talks about the 10,000 people who died every day at Auschwitz. There's a conference next week about human rights, and specifically about the genocide in Darfur**.

Being the sap that I am, I got emotional. I am absolutely conscious of the fact that, in Europe ~70 years ago, I would have been put on a rail car and shipped off to the gas chambers like everybody else - I would have been one of those 10,000. I studied World War II and the Holocaust in-depth in college, and visited Terezin when I was in the Czech Republic with mom in 1994. There are whole towns in Poland that simply don't exist any more because all of the people were wiped out by the Nazis. That to me is one of the most powerful parts of the Holocaust Museum in DC - you walk down a hallway, and the names of these towns are etched in the glass around you. And they're gone.

I didn't realize the added significance of the white rose until I found this article on wikipedia:
The White Rose: (die Weiße Rose) was a non-violent group in Nazi Germany, consisting of a number of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor. The group became known for an anonymous leaflet campaign, lasting from June 1942 until February 1943, that called for active opposition to German dictator Adolf Hitler's regime.
** You don't hear much about Darfur on the news any more... but the Jewish community is heavily focused on stopping the genocide going on there. We have all pledged "never again" -- no matter who the victims are. If you google "Jews and Darfur", you'll see that while the Jewish community is bringing attention to what's going on in Darfur, the President of the Sudan, and his Defense Minister, are convinced that the Jews are lying about the situation, to raise money for Israel. Oy.
It is a supreme irony that in an age when Muslims repeatedly complain that the West does not care about Muslim lives, one of the most consistent voices raised in defence of these Muslim victims is the Jewish one. - the JC blog

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