I mentioned in my last post that getting married in a plantation would be the perfect form of revenge given marriage and family life was not allowed. Actually, this is a subject for debate, but I don't want to get into it.
I object to any comparison of plantations to concentration camps since I see a lot of ignorance even from historians in the US about this topic.
Number one and most importantly, the only people who wanted to see these destroyed were the people who committed the crimes. Everyone else is aware that the destruction of concentration camps will erase their memory. I used the example of Belzec. It was one of the operation Reinhard camps where between 430,000 and 500,000 Jews (I would say more but cannot prove it) are believed to have been murdered by the SS at Bełżec . It was the third-deadliest extermination camp, exceeded only by Treblinka and Auschwitz. Only seven members of the Sonderkommando Survived.
Not many people have heard about it because it was destroyed. But that is an aside.
The second reason is that like under slavery, Jews were discouraged from getting married in the camps. Marriage was an act of resistance:“They got married in the ghetto and gave birth there. The “Death Machine” didn’t break the main thing – the human spirit and the will to live. After all, they wouldn’t let them die, otherwise, it was the ultimate surrender”, – says Alexander Boroda, the President of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia.After the war, people found themselves in Displaced Persons camps, some of which were on the site of former concentration camps. They got married in those camps.
But to answer the question:
Historic military compound the Seventh Fort in Vilnius, Lithuania has become a popular site for weeding parties and children summer camps, but, according to Israeli press, a Nazi German concentration camp had once stood there.
Belgian new portal New Europe reports citing The Jerusalem Post that the 18-acre red-brick bunker complex built in 1880s was also the site of a concentration camp in 1941. The Israeli newspaper wrote that thousands of Jews were imprisoned, treated inhumanely, killed and buried at the Seventh Fort.
from https://bnn-news.com/weddings-in-vilnius-held-near-wwii-concentration-camp-148244
The weddings are not held on the area where the Holocaust victims are buried, which is only 2% of the camp area.
So, if you are going to use the concentration camp example, then the descendants of formerly enslaved people should be "jumping" at the chance to get married on a plantation since it was something denied to their ancestors.
And descendants of people killed in concentration camps show their defiance and love for life by doing exactly that.

No comments:
Post a Comment