The suffering or the Jews and others during the Holocaust is a horror which weirdly fascinates and repels at the same time. The intense practiced cruel cold-blooded murder and torture inflicted on men women and children over the course of years is difficult to fathom, and so some will say it never happened. They prefer a world in which such evil didn't exist or they would like that the hate they themselves feel were more justifiable and the Holocaust makes that impossible. And some just never seem to get it, to understand that such evil is fundamentally different, yet still a part of man. The desire to expunge the "other" is all too commonplace, even in our "enlightened" modern day.
In the story "The Last Outrage" which perhaps inspired this collection, we are introduced to Dina Babbitt, a survivor of Auschwitz who had made a successful career in animation in the years after the liberation of the camp and the end of the war. She worked on cartoons as varied as Wile Coyote, Daffy Duck and Captain Crunch. But her story begins here with Snow White, which she painted as a mural on a wall in Auschwitz to help lift the veil of suffering from the children trapped there. No less than the "Angel of Death" the sadistic Dr. Joseph Mengele took notice and wished to use her talents to help him record some of his heinous experiments. She painted many portraits of people for the purpose of recording (in Mengele's eyes) their various deficiencies particularly in respect to skin tone. After the camps were freed she left this work and never thought of it more until she learned that a museum in Poland was displaying her works. She wanted them back and the museum shockingly failed to comply. And as a result a long effort, ultimately unsuccessful was waged to get back work produced under such vile circumstances and held with egregious contempt.
"The Last Outrage" was first published in the Marvel comic X-Men: Magneto - Testament. The writer of this story and the essays in this collection Rachel Medoff and the artist of this story Neal Adams worked to help Babbitt, but to no avail and she passed away some years ago. Not only did the Holocaust happen, but thanks to the small-minded greed of people like the museum directors in Poland, the suffering it caused continues.
This wraps up my month-long examination of We Spoke Out. It's an important comic book reprint collection in an era when collections are abundant.
Note: This post originally appeared at Rip Jagger's Other Dojo.
Rip Off
Poland is led by the Law & Justice Party, a vile bunch of far-right nationalists. A few years ago they made it illegal to say that Poles collaborated with the Nazis even though some Poles did so. The behaviour of Poland's government on various issues is so troubling that the European Union has decided to reduce funding to the country.
ReplyDeleteWe have those kinds of fiends here as well, in abundance alas. Currently there is a fad in our state legislatures to make discussion of gay and trans lifestyles illegal in schools, as if sweeping such prominent issues under some imaginary rug changes the world really. It just makes teachers more reluctant to teach and even enter a profession which is increasingly under assault as a profession daily. I can readily see this attitude slithering onto other topics such as the Holocaust and in fact the banning of Maus which triggered this month at the Dojo is just one example. The First Amendment makes it especially hard for these fools to pass their laws but who knows what the future will bring. I tend to believe in the notion that as we move forward in time liberal attitudes with increasingly prevail, though there will be outbursts of such reactionary behavior here and there along the way. I might be wrong, but I prefer that generally hopeful attitude which informed the last century at least.
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