On Memorial Day, remember this secret troop of Jewish commandos from World War II, CNN:

[Stuart G]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/30/opinions/memorial-day-x-troop-wwii-fighting-anti-semitism-garrett/index.html
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Opinion by Leah Garrett,..Updated 7:27 AM ET, Sun May 30, 2021


(CNN) — This year marks the 80th anniversary of America's entry into World War II. As one of our most studied conflicts, it often feels as if all the stories about it have now been told. This is not the case.

As America marks a Memorial Day in transition — a de-escalating pandemic alongside rising anti-Semitism, political division and racism — an untold story from this long-ago war not only sheds a light on a crucial chapter in the Allies' success, but also offers insights about the upsurge in hatred and xenophobia in the United States and abroad, along with the crisis at the southern border.

For the least three years I have been working on excavating the unknown story of a remarkable secret Jewish commando unit, who former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill named X Troop. Made up of German and Austrian Jewish refugees, all the X troopers had suffered violence and hatred in their birth countries. Arriving alone as teenagers in the UK on Kindertransport in the late 1930s, they understood profoundly that the Nazi scourge of murderous hatred had to be stopped.

I wrote my book while working as a professor and director of Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York. Hunter is one of the most diverse universities in the country, and our president, Jennifer Raab, is a tireless advocate for our many Dreamer students. Most of my students have no Jewish background, and yet they were completely fascinated by X Troop. Like the X troopers, many of my students came to a different nation because their parents felt they were in profound danger in their home countries. And for both the Jewish refugees in the UK and migrants at America's southern border, the government distrusted them so much that they were initially locked away.
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(rest of article is continued at link above)

[lapucelle]

1. Faye Schulman, partisan photographer of the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, dies at 101

Washington Post
May 8,2021

Faye Schulman, partisan photographer who captured Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, dies at 101

Faye Schulman operated for nearly two years as a partisan resistance fighter in the forests of Eastern Europe during World War II, sabotaging Nazis, tending to wounded comrades and foraging for food. Throughout the ordeal, she was armed with two weapons.

One was her rifle, a possession so dear that it became her pillow during those nights, she later recalled, when she had no roof but the sky and only grass for her bed. While the rifle served for the battle at hand, her other weapon — a Photo-Porst Nurnberg camera — would serve in the battle to come: the battle against time, against forgetting.

Mrs. Schulman, who died April 24 in Toronto at 101, was one of 20,000 to 30,000 Jews who joined the resistance during World War II and one of only hundreds still alive today, according to Mitch Braff, the founding director of the San Francisco-based Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. Her photographs, many of which are reproduced in her book “A Partisan’s Memoir,” survive her, revealing in shot after shot one woman’s experience of an often overlooked history of wartime heroism.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, a widespread myth em­erged that the 6 million murdered Jews of Europe had gone “like sheep to the slaughter,” in one common formulation of the idea. The notion persisted for decades, despite the documentation of courageous acts of resistance, such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 and the actions of outgunned, outnumbered partisans who risked their lives to help bring about the liberation from the Nazis...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/faye-schulman-dead/2021/05/08/6f89b6b6-adc7-11eb-acd3-24b44a57093a_story.html

[Hortensis]

4. Remarkable. Since she lived to see the alarming rise of authortarianism

and fascism in this century, I hope she was aware the last Canadian and U.S. elections before her death were victories for those fighting it today. If she was able, she was no doubt still in the battle herself.

[appalachiablue]

2. Interesting, I didn't realize how much

Jewish refugees and other Europeans in Britain contibuted to the Allied war effort against the Nazis. Mark Felton has produced a couple videos on Jewish resistance in concentration camps that I'll try to post in the 'World History' group.

While working in NY my sister took classes at Hunter post-grad and enjoyed it.



- X-troop during training at Aberdovey, Wales, in 1943. (Photo from CNN article).

[Hortensis]

3. "and rescued his own parents from the Theresienstadt concentration camp."

"And after being central to a whole string of Allied successes in France and the Netherlands, Lt. Manfred Gans drove across Germany as the war was ending and, incredibly, rescued his own parents from the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Imagine him finding them still there and alive! Germany's concentration camps weren't the same as the death camps, but many, many people died in them of starvation, disease, abuse, murder; and as the war wore on, many inmates who'd managed to survive that long were shipped east to the death camps.