The government caught up with a woman in the dusk of her life who expected perhaps soon to quietly join her husband in the Eternal Home Cemetery in Colma, south of the city. The double gravestone was already there, with the Star of David above their names.
Instead, she will be remembered as the only woman to be caught and deported in more than 100 completed cases of Nazi persecutors who lied their way into the United States. Matching Ravensbruck guard rosters with U.S. immigration documents — about 70,000 names have been studied since the Office of Special Investigations opened in 1979 — they hit on Elfriede Huth, her maiden name.
'Nice, Sweet Lady,' 83, Deported for Nazi Past - Los Angeles Times
The Nazis had to be stopped, no doubt. But this woman worked at a camp 60 years ago, for one year, as a guard walking the perimeter. She married a Jewish man, and lived out her life giving to Jewish charities in America. The US kicked her out when they discovered her past only recently, and she willingly went back to Germany with sorrow.
This is why people hate the US. Where is the room for grace in our system?
3 comments:
louis- this is me leaving a comment so that you can do whatever you need to do to make it so i can post a blog on this thing. thank you and good night.
This story is at first glance sad and seemingly heartless. I however suggest that it is unlikely that we know the full details of her case that the Office of Special Investigations knows, or ever can fully know all the details it that even they don't know. I don't have a problem with this woman's deportation.
"...Ravensbruck, it was a slave labor prison for women, and during the year she worked there with a trained attack dog more than 10,000 women died."
"She admitted being assigned to the camp, explaining that she had a less desirable job as a factory worker and volunteered to be a dog handler at the camp for better wages.
But she insisted she never used her dog as a weapon against the prisoners, never forced them into marches every morning to work or to die. She said she never joined the Nazi Party, just did its bidding."
-LA Times
It's possible what she says is true. Maybe over the course of a year as a guard at a Nazi slave labour camp she never had occasion to use her dog to keep the prisoners in line, never once escorted prisoners to the forced work station or to the death chambers or worse, to the "medical experiments". On the other hand maybe she's lying, both to us and to herself. Over the intervening years she may have blocked the memories of the faces the victims. May she doesn't want to believe she was capable of doing such despicable things and has convinced her self that she had an uneventful career at Ravensbruck. I'd bet most suviving camp guards would say the same thing.
"She said she never joined the Nazi Party, just did its bidding."
She volunteered to work at the camp because it paid better than her former job. She couldn't have been unaware of what went on there when she applied for the job. She apparently didn't pathologically hate Jews as her marriage testafies, but she didn't respect them as human beings enough to put up with a lower paying job that didn't so directly and knowingly involve enslaving and butchering them.
Would her husband have stood by her had he known? Since she didn't trust his love for her or respect him enough to tell him something that he undoubtedly cared about we'll never know.
If she wanted to make up for participating in a crime against humanity a little honesty to the person you'd think mattered most to would be a good start. What she wanted was an easier, better life. If that means working for the Nazis, so be it. Misleading a Jewish man into marrying you so it'll be easier to get into the United States, fine. Lying on official State and Federal documents about what was considered a matter of national security, no problem.
This is not why people hate America. Assuming you're talking about people from other countries, those that hate us typically do because of our governments acting without regard for the repercussions on the rest of the world or our shameful environmental policy or because we espouse freedom of religion or even because we simply have so much more than they do.
(Btw, how are you using 'grace' here? Secularly, religiously, some otherly...?)
Assume for the moment OJ Simpson is in fact guilty. If he spends his life giving to charity and then when he's 83 conclusive proof is uncovered of his guilt, do we give him a pass?
"And oddly, Rosenbaum (Justice Department Agency Director) said, there were no tears from the woman sitting in front of him inside the little apartment. "No statement of remorse was volunteered to me," he said."
Yeah it seems reasonable to expect a different attitude from her at this point, and the voluntary crimes she committed are certainly nothing to overlook (nor are her lies). If even the majority of the citizens in nazi Germany had refused to do the bidding of those they knew were in the wrong, things would have been much different. On this one, I'm easy. You've convinced me that her deportation was likely just.
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