letter to Noor Durkee about Amy goodman and her interview of Amira Haas...
watching the show now...you know this is second generation surivor commmenting on their parent's experience in the Holocaust...which I assume will happen to me when I am gone and my kids talk about their experience knowing me and hearing my story of hiding from the Nazis in WWII.
But the idea that Haas brings up about "merchandizing " the Holocaust is a bizarre accusation. You could say this about any fund raising activity, from Polio to Cancer funds....think about this.

It is also an insult to survivors who are not making money out of this...in my case asking me to talk to schools and getting an honorarium. If I was Mother Theresa I would go around free all over Maine, sometimes a 6 hour car ride, to speak to schools. But I am no funded like she was and I am not a saint. It could be that some are using the Holocaust to get money from Germany and elsewhere, or a raison d'etre to exist, like Israel. But be that as it may, the Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews, was a tragedy without compare, the factory setting of camps is unparallel in history, even the murder of 32 million of Russians by Stalin does not compare to this atmosphere with companies involved in construction of the camps, even chemical factories still active today i.e. E.G. Farben.

Suffering does not end when the beating stops. We still fell the pain from the scars, wounds which often open up and we find out they did not heal, as Bishop Tutu once said.
Whenever I tell my stories to kids and adults the wounds open up and sometimes I cannot speak. I do not have to do this but now feel it my duty to make people aware of how low humans can go. As the Germans did in World War II.

It is ironic too that this woman, Haas, who is a second generation survivor, not being there at all, will make money out of this book? She is not giving this book away is she? Who is making profits here? It is a complex issue.
If I were to write a piece of fiction, and therefore not worry about detail (my brother and I argue all the time about detail, even to this day when he does not want to speak with me unless I drop all that I remember. This is another matter, when my brother accuses me of lying, of making things up and making money out of the Holocaust, my own brother who was six years older than I during WW II.
If you remember, Kosinski, author of the Painted Bird was accused of making things up. Of course he was making things up, his book was fiction. How a boy escapes from his enslaving gypsy, he find a bloated pig's stomach and floats on in downriver, as if in a Bosh painting...phantasm and horror, as it was in World War II.
For many of us, the War was a hallucinatory experience.... now the accusations, even the denial, are murdering the Jews all over again, as Elie Wiesel once said.
I bow my head in humiliation, and I will continue telling my story as I remember it vividly, as long as live...hoping...hoping....it will not happen again.
But mass murder is inexplicable. Look at the terrorist blowing himself up with shoppers, people going to look for work, buses with school children, all under the name of their god. How do you explain this? And with the blessing of the high priests.

Can we trust lawyers, politicians and religious leaders anymore?

I will go on, go on I must....

रेफेरेंस: अमी गूद्मन
लैटर तो नूर दुरकी

letter to Noor