When the death camps of Nazi Germany were liberated, among those rescued from impending death through disease, starvation, general privation and deliberate murder were children. Boys between the ages of 12 and 20 who had managed against all odds to survive the brutalization of existence. There were far fewer girls who survived the rigours of the work and death camps.
Benevolent societies comprised of Jews who had escaped the Holocaust because they were living in countries other than the occupied European nations of the Third Reich, exerted themselves to bring these Jewish refugee children to places where the German hordes had not overrun countries that were too weak militarily and overwhelmed by the Nazi juggernaut to defend themselves.
There were Jewish teens numbering in the high hundreds that had been assembled in refugee camps, mostly boys, whom not government agencies abroad, but Jewish philanthropists and social groups vowed to give a second chance at life. They arranged to transport hundreds of those boys, mostly around fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of age who had managed to survive, many of them having seen their parents for the last time when they were assigned different 'line-ups' at arrival by cattle transport at the work camps and death camps. Some had seen their mothers and fathers die of starvation or morbid diseases. Others had seen their parents marched toward the gas chambers.
The boys were worked at factories producing munitions for the German war effort, at mines and other hard-labour places where many were worked to death and those that could, struggled to prolong their existence. When they finally arrived, after liberation, at their destinations of Britain, the United States, Canada and Palestine, their rehabilitation into life began, a slow and arduous journey from disease and privation toward what would henceforth for them represent normalcy, but one with the spectre of loss and mourning, brutality and fear always hovering in their relentless nightmares.
Very few of these children, after years of absorbing their new realities and pushing the old realities behind them, failed to make a new life for themselves where they could be self-sufficient, assume a normal life, find marriage partners, have children and become respected members of any society they joined. A vanishing few-to-none turned to exacting any manner or version of revenge. Even when one man, Meir Kahane, the political activist who founded the Jewish Defence League in an attempt to aggressively pursue an agenda of self-defence became militant, it did not reflect mainstream Jewish reaction to having been singled out by a powerfully malevolent aggressor for annihilation.
Very few survivors were unable to support themselves, ending up on welfare rolls. And far fewer had been so psychologically stricken by their experiences that they failed to respond eventually to the kindness and opportunities that opened before them to became institutionalized wards of the state. Many survivors distinguished themselves in their later careers pursued after immersing themselves in opportunities to achieve academic educations, as scientists, musicians, doctors, architects, artists, businessmen and manufacturers.
Never did human beings of the tribes of Judaism irrespective of their social backgrounds, their geographic experience, their immersion in orthodoxy or secularism, ever become a violent threat to the world around them. Yet their anecdotal reputations as threats to society never ceased, as waves of anti-Semitic tropes assailed them time and again. Never did the world assemble the power of brotherhood, compassion and regret beyond the general agreement in the United Nations to support the declaration of statehood for a Jewish nation, Israel, and then once, only.
The Jewish state stands as a beacon of liberty and security for the world's Jews. Yet the Jewish embrace of democracy and its instinctive respect for human rights and equality led it to absorb within itself the welfare of non-Jews, even those who had no love for anything Jewish, in a geography where the vast majority of its inhabitants express a viral deadly hatred for Jews and all things Jewish.
And the result is a Jewish state where Jews, though threatened by outside forces surrounding that state, can feel they are protected and valued. While all around them the nations that had mounted one violent military campaign after another in efforts to dislodge the nation from its heritage perch in the Middle East oppressed their own people, in corrupt reigns where malicious power and hostile threats toward others expressed what was normal for them. The stability and peace that engulfs Israel stops at its borders outside of which a vicious chaotic maelstrom of historical tribal and sectarian animosities gather strength resulting in wholesale slaughter causing millions of people to flee in terror from their tyrants and co-religionists.
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