The museum of Lochamei Haghettaot – Ghetto Fighters Museum –

I haven’t been there for ages and was surprised at its expansion.  Look at its site https://www.gfh.org.il/eng to see how it has widened and deepened our understanding of the partisans and the reasons for the resistance to Nazi mass murder.

I went there to find out why my aunt wasn’t in their archives since she was a fighting partisan.  In the end, I didn’t get any information about my aunt, but I promised to send them the information I had – for their archives, and then agreed to help translate information from Yiddish for them.  

a pretty common settlement for me.  I  give what I can and get nothing…

But the museum was full of teenagers listening – attentively – to elderly guides lecturing about statistics of torture, murder, resistance and compliance.  “Say you’re in a cattle car full of your neighbors,”  I heard an elderly woman tell the children, “and you can jump off.  But if you jump off, the rest of the people in the car will be killed.  What do you do?… And if you are a Jew or a German,  you’re put in a similar situation.  If you’re a German child and you don’t tell the Nazis that your father is in the underground, your entire family will be killed, what do you do?”

I’d never heard collective punishment explained like that.