'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'What is punishment for a person who is capable to do such horror, such horrible things to living people? I cannot imagine that that person has a soul or conscience or heart. ... He simply wouldn't feel it. ... What kind of punishment could you give to a person like that?'

-- Los Angeles-based, octogenarian artist Elisabeth Mann, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi camps, on why, as CNN reported, "she's uncomfortable with the ongoing attempts to deport to Germany for trial John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old Cleveland, Ohio, man allegedly linked to mass killings at Sobibor, a death camp in Poland." Her son and others quoted disagreed with her, in a story published this week of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

On November 30

On this day in ...

... 1943 (65 years ago today), Etty Hillesum perished at Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Given the name Esther when born 29 years earlier in Middleburg, the Netherlands, Hillesum (right) earned a law degree at the University of Amsterdam and then began studying Slavic languages. In 1941 she began to keep a diary of life in Nazi-occuped Netherlands; a year later, expecting to be sent to Camp Westerbork, she asked to be sent there to do social work as a representative of the Jewish Council. She and her family were ordered transferred to Auschwitz in September 1943.

... 1962, the U.N. General Assembly unanimously elected Burmese diplomat U Thant (left) to become the 3d Secretary-General of the United Nations. He had been acting in that position since his predecessor, Dag Hammarskjöld, died in a plane crash in September 1961, and would go on to serve until December 1971.

On January 27, ...

... 1945, the Soviet Union's Red Army liberated Auschwitz. Located in southwestern Poland, the 5-year-old camp was the largest of the concentration camps run by the Nazis. In the photo at left, child detainees who had survived walk out of their barracks at the time of liberation.
At that time the BBC reported:

According to reports, hundreds of thousands of Polish people, as well as Jews from a number of other European countries, have been held prisoner there in appalling conditions and many have been killed in the gas chambers.

The full horror of the camp would come to be known over time. Among those who died there were citizens of the Soviet Union, Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Italy and Greece. Although the death toll once was estimated as high as 4 million, today the Auschwitz Museum places the number at "between 1 and 1.5 million, including 800,000 Jews." (photo courtesy of U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
... 1416, for the 1st time a European governmental entity, the Republic of Dubrovnik, outlawed slavery.
... 1949, U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.) was born in Greeley, Colorado.