Her relatives were arrested in the early morning hours of February 27, 1943: scene from Margarethe von Trotta’s film “Rosenstraße”.
Image: Interphoto
The Rosenstrasse protest was the largest demonstration during the Nazi dictatorship. What these courageous women dared leads right into the heart of contemporary debates. A guest post.
When we remember that brave act eighty years after the women’s protests in Rosenstrasse, we must not forget that she is but a tiny light in a sea of darkness. There is nothing comforting in the history of the Nazi tyranny, nothing that can counteract the overall picture of human cruelty and murder by the millions. In addition, there is followerism and a collective apathy towards the fate of fellow citizens and neighbors.
The women in Rosenstrasse; the manufacturer Oskar Schindler, who saved 1,200 Jewish forced laborers from death; the diplomat Varian Fry, who smuggled well over two thousand people out of the country; or the unknown peasant woman who, like so many others, did not lock her door to a survivor of the massacre near Palmnicken in 1945 – they are the exception. Normality was annihilation, was a story like that of Anne Frank, who was betrayed and murdered in a concentration camp, like a million other Jewish children.
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