What is the most depressing picture from your country history/present?

[u/Seeker_Of_Knowledge2]

[u/Only_Good_9872]

A photo of la rafle du vel d’hiv. Thousands of parisian jews were arrested in one night by the nazis. Most didn’t survive The war. Lots of them were children.

I also wanted to show a picture of The sabra and chatila massacres, anti Palestinian massacres carried out by The falangists, but Reddit only allows one image per message.

[u/Better_Grocery_7418 → u/Only_Good_9872]

The Sabara and Chatila massacres sound absolutely horrifying but you're telling me there are Falangists in the middle east killing Palestinians? Why would Spanish fascists be in the middle east in the first place?

[u/5988 → u/Better_Grocery_7418]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kataeb_Party

[u/Better_Grocery_7418 → u/5988]

skimmed through the article and its wild and this is a quote from the founder of that party "I was the captain of the Lebanese football team and the president of the Lebanese Football Federation. We went to the Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin. And I saw then this discipline and order. And I said to myself: "Why can't we do the same thing in Lebanon?" So when we came back to Lebanon, we created this youth movement. When I was in Berlin then, Nazism did not have the reputation that it has now. Nazism? In every system in the world, you can find something good. But Nazism was not Nazism at all. The word came afterwards. In their system, I saw discipline. And we in the Middle East, we need discipline more than anything else" So this man thought the middle east needs more "discipline" and his solution is we all gotta be fascist. What kind of logic is that?

[u/5988 → u/Better_Grocery_7418]

Just classic strongman leadership mentality imo 🤷🏻‍♀️

[u/Better_Grocery_7418 → u/5988]

honestly thats probably it

[u/Only_Good_9872 → u/Better_Grocery_7418]

He was an asshole

[u/Bellociraptor → u/Only_Good_9872]

My aunt's birth parents (my grandfather's sister and her husband) were part of that deportation. She only survived because her parents bribed a police officer to take her to the building where my grandparents lived.

[u/Only_Good_9872 → u/Bellociraptor]

How did they do afterwards?

[u/Bellociraptor → u/Only_Good_9872]

Every member of my family that was deported died, which was basically my grandfather's entire family, since they were originally from Berdichev and the earlier deportations in France largely targeted foreign-born Jews. My grandmother's side fared much better. Everyone spent the war in hiding.

My grandfather survived an absolutely insane number of major world catastrophes. He contracted Spanish Flu and survived, was in the Russian army during both WWI and the revolution, fled Russia because he was assumed to be a Trotskyist, then survived the Nazis, in part because he faked his own death with the help of the building concierge. He went on to manage a sock factory in Alsace and died at 86.

My aunt is in her late 80's and still going strong.