The ultimate survivor story

creekyguy

“It’s almost like, ‘Here we go again,’” 80-year-old Judah Samet said after narrowly escaping the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.
Judah Samet pulled into the parking lot of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue on Saturday at 9:49 a.m., making him about four minutes late to the service, he told the Forward. As soon as he did, a man dressed in black tapped on his window and advised him to back out because there was an active shooting going on inside the synagogue, Samet said.
When Samet was just 6 years old, the **** forced him and his family to board a train from their home in Debrecen, Hungary, to Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp in **** Germany-occupied Poland. But when the train route was blown up by Slovak resistance fighters, the family was redirected to Austria, where his parents worked in a lumberyard owned by an Austrian ****. Later, the family was relocated to Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The family stayed at that camp for 10 months.
Before the camp was liberated by British forces in 1945, the family boarded a train bound for another concentration camp. The train was liberated by American troops in Berlin before it could reach its destination.

sherb

This is a hard topic to write about. I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around this. Most of the Jewish commentary I've seen online has been resigned and world-weary, as in "this is our lot in life, T'was ever thus."

But not here. I guess America is not exempt from the sins of the world after all. That saddens me. And it saddens me more to learn in the wake of this shooting that schools and synagogues and the like routinely have armed guards and police protection. It's common. JFC.

There's one bright spot: the cops ran into gunfire to protect adherents, instead of being accomplices to their murder. Now that's a change. At least that was good.

fishingcomic

One of the victims was an actual Holocaust survivor. This is impossible to get my head around.

sherb

@fishingcomic said:
One of the victims was an actual Holocaust survivor. This is impossible to get my head around.

It is. It’s beyond comprehension.

MikeA

Hopefully the shooter gets to experience the death penalty soon.

Steven

@sherb said:
This is a hard topic to write about. I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around this. Most of the Jewish commentary I've seen online has been resigned and world-weary, as in "this is our lot in life, T'was ever thus."

There really is nothing else to be said on the matter. Stuff like this can and does happen anywhere. It's why I view an Israel as a Jewish state as being so important.