Latest news with #WarsawUprising
NBC News
21 hours ago
- Politics
- NBC News
NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani draws criticism for ‘intifada' remarks
Zohran Mamdani, a candidate in the Democratic primary for the New York City mayoral election, drew pushback from Jewish organizations and political leaders this week after he appeared to defend the slogan 'globalize the intifada.' In an interview with The Bulwark posted Tuesday, Mamdani was asked whether the expression made him uncomfortable. In response, Mamdani said the slogan captured 'a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.' He said the U.S. Holocaust Museum had used the word 'intifada' in Arabic-language descriptions of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against Nazi Germany. Mamdani, a progressive New York State Assemblyman who has forcefully criticized the Israeli government, also addressed the rise in antisemitism since the Oct. 7 terror attack and the war in Gaza, saying anti-Jewish prejudice was 'a real issue in our city' and one that the next mayor should focus on 'tackling.' He added that he believes the city's community safety offices should increase funding for anti-hate crime measures. In a post on X on Wednesday, the Washington-based U.S. Holocaust Museum sharply condemned Mamdani's remarks: 'Exploiting the Museum and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to sanitize 'globalize the intifada' is outrageous and especially offensive to survivors. Since 1987 Jews have been attacked and murdered under its banner. All leaders must condemn its use and the abuse of history.' The U.S. Holocaust Museum did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how it had translated the Warsaw Uprising into Arabic. Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, decried the phrase on X as an 'explicit incitement to violence.' Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who is Jewish, said in a statement that the term 'intifada' is 'well understood to refer to the violence terror attacks against innocent Israeli civilians that occurred during the First and Second Intifadas.' 'If Mr. Mamdani is unwilling to heed the request of major Jewish organizations to condemn this unquestionably antisemitic phrase,' Goldman added, 'then he is unfit to lead a city with 1.3 million Jews — the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.' Mamdani has also faced criticism from some of the other candidates in the crowded Democratic primary field — including the frontrunner, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo's polling advantage has narrowed in recent weeks as Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, built momentum and nabbed a key endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. In a statement, Cuomo called on all the contenders in the race to 'denounce' Mamdani's comments and invoked recent violent attacks on Jewish people nationwide. 'At a time when we are seeing antisemitism on the rise and in fact witnessing once again violence against Jews resulting in their deaths in Washington, D.C. or their burning in Denver — we know all too well that words matter,' Cuomo said in part, referring to the killings of two Israeli Embassy employees and an attack on Israeli hostage advocates in Boulder. 'They fuel hate. They fuel murder.' The war in Gaza and the spike in antisemitism have loomed large over New York City's mayoral primary. Cuomo, 67, casts himself as a fierce defender of Israel and pitches himself to Jewish residents and ideological moderates as the obvious choice in the race. Mamdani, who has characterized Israel's conduct in Gaza as 'genocide,' gained traction partly thanks to enthusiastic support from the city's progressives. Mamdani, speaking to reporters at a press event in Harlem on Wednesday, addressed the outcry over his interview with The Bulwark and the ensuing pushback, saying in part that 'it pains me to be called an antisemite.' 'I've said at every opportunity that there is no room for antisemitism in this city, in this country. I've said that because that is something I personally believe,' Mamdani said. He broke down crying as he described the vitriol he has received as he seeks to become the first Muslim mayor of New York City. 'I get messages that say: 'The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.' I get threats on my life, on the people that I love,' Mamdani said, eyes welling up with tears. New York City's Democratic mayoral primary is on June 24. The scandal-plagued incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, won election as a Democrat in 2021, but he is not participating in the party's nominating contest. He is reportedly petitioning to run on two independent ballot lines: 'EndAntiSemitism' and 'Safe&Affordable.'
Local Germany
15-04-2025
- General
- Local Germany
The babies who survived the German concentration camp at Ravensbruck
Guy Poirot -- who was born there on March 11, 1945 -- said they owe their lives to "the collective will of the women" who risked their lives to hide and feed them when they had almost nothing for themselves. "We are the children of all those women," the 80-year-old French survivor told AFP. German Ingelore Prochnow, who was born in Ravensbruck nearly a year before him, calls them "my camp mothers", who saved them from extermination and hunger in the second biggest Nazi camp after Auschwitz-Birkenau. Until 1943, most newborns were smothered, drowned or burned and women up to eight months pregnant were mostly given lethal injections to abort their babies. So women hid their bumps for fear of being sent to the "Revier", the camp infirmary notorious for medical experiments and for selections for execution. Like the other 130,000 inmates of the Nazi's biggest camp for women and children, they worked 12 to 14 hours a day transporting bricks, pushing wagons, resewing uniforms or working in a Siemens factory. "The guards beat and kicked me numerous times," wrote Polish prisoner Waleria Peitsch despite "my advanced state" after arriving on the biggest convoys carrying pregnant women after the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. Still, she survived the violence and the epidemics sweeping the camp to give birth to her son Mikolaj on March 25, 1945. Advertisement 'Kinderzimmer' After a new medical officer arrived in the autumn of 1943 births were tolerated if they happened out of sight. French resistance member Madeleine Aylmer-Roubenne brought her daughter Sylvie into the world on March 21, 1945, in "a sort of corridor, no water, no toilet nearby or electricity, just a candle on the floor." Barracks are seen at a former concentration camp in Germany in 2025. (Photo by FOCKE STRANGMANN / AFP) Her German midwife, a common criminal, risked her life to get the forceps and chloroform from the infirmary which had a state-of-the-art birthing room with "all the obstetric instruments" you could imagine, Aylmer-Roubenne wrote in her memoirs of the camp. The same solidarity saw women stealing food and rags for new mothers so they could make nappies and medical gloves to make teats for bottles. "The women washed the babies with the lukewarm drink they got in the morning, warmed them and protected them from the guards," said Prochnow. "Alone my mother could never have kept me alive." The newborns were gathered together in the "Kinderzimmer" or children's room from September 1944 where their life expectancy was no more than three months, wrote Marie-Jose Chombart de Lauwe, a medical student and French resistance fighter who tried to keep them alive. Rats bit at their fingers at night. Almost all were taken by hunger, dysentery, typhus and the terrible cold, with temperatures dropping to minus 15 degrees Centigrade. Advertisement With the mothers being worked to exhaustion, most had no milk. There was little milk powder to put into the two bottles that were shared by between 20 and 40 babies. "Mummy had no milk," French survivor Jean-Claude Passerat-Palmbach recalled. "So a Romanian Roma woman and a Russian, who had lost their babies, breastfed me." Born in November 1944, he only survived because of the generosity of the other prisoners in the farm where his mother was sent afterwards. Babies like 'little old people' The babies looked like "little old people", Chombart de Lauwe said, with wrinkled skin, bloated tummies and triangular faces. They suffered from abscesses and green diarrhoea. The situation got even worse in 1945. Around 6,000 prisoners were gassed and thousands of women and children sent to other camps as the Russians advanced. In total, between 20,000 and 30,000 people perished in Ravensbruck. Sylvie Aylmer and her camp "brother" Guy Poirot were saved by being hidden under the skirts of some of the 7,500 prisoners evacuated by the Swedish Red Cross between April 23 and 25 after SS chief Heinrich Himmler agreed to free them in the hope of saving his own skin. Ingelore Prochnow and her mother, however, were forced into a "death march" of 60 kilometres towards the Malchow sub-camp when advancing Soviet troops liberated them. The babies that survived Ravensbruck were for the most part born just before its liberation by the Red Army during the night of April 29 to 30. The Nazis burned their records, but a register kept by a Czech escapee noted 522 births in the camp between September 1944 and April 1945. Only 30 of those names were not marked as dead. Some were transferred to Bergen-Belsen where "only a few newborns survived", according to Valentine Devulder, who is writing a thesis on pregnant women in the camps. Transgenerational trauma Growing up, many of the little survivors like Sylvie Aylmer were not told they had been born in a concentration camp. For her, Ravensbruck had been "a French village". "I discovered when I was 13 when my sister and I went to an exhibition on Ravensbruck and the former prisoners who were there took us in their arms. It was a shock," she remembered. She has still never gone back. That place "gives me the creeps", she said. Her father, who was also a resistance member, died in the camps. Advertisement The Pole Mikolaj Sklodowski, now a priest, says Mass there and often takes young people on visits. "Talking about the suffering in the concentration camps is a duty to those who remain there forever," he said. The camps have marked all of them in one way or another. Guy Poirot, who talks about his experiences to young people "so this will not happen again", said he is still "very marked psychologically" by what happened. The former civil servant, who has a son, said his "health has been fragile" all his life. Sylvie Aylmer suffered from anorexia when she was small and spent several years in therapy. "Things were not easy with my mother. When she saw me, she saw the camp," she said. Ingelore Prochnow was abandoned by her mother in a refugee camp when she was three having survived the camps. She only learned about her past when she was 42. She said she is "resilient and rarely sick" but her youngest daughter was anorexic. "She weighed only 30 kilos (66 pounds, four stones and 10 pounds) when she died. She looked like a concentration camp prisoner and felt she was carrying my weight on her shoulders," said the mother of two. "She died in 2019 aged 50. The final diagnosis was that she was suffering from 'transgenerational trauma'."
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The miracle babies who survived Ravensbruck
They were born in a hell on Earth and were never supposed to survive. But by some miracle a handful of babies born in Ravensbruck concentration camp in northern Germany made it out alive. Guy Poirot -- who was born there on March 11, 1945 -- said they owe their lives to "the collective will of the women" who risked their lives to hide and feed them when they had almost nothing for themselves. "We are the children of all those women," the 80-year-old French survivor told AFP. German Ingelore Prochnow, who was born in Ravensbruck nearly a year before him, calls them "my camp mothers", who saved them from extermination and hunger in the second biggest Nazi camp after Auschwitz-Birkenau. Until 1943, most newborns were smothered, drowned or burned and women up to eight months pregnant were mostly given lethal injections to abort their babies. So women hid their bumps for fear of being sent to the "Revier", the camp infirmary notorious for medical experiments and for selections for execution. Like the other 130,000 inmates of the Nazi's biggest camp for women and children, they worked 12 to 14 hours a day transporting bricks, pushing wagons, resewing uniforms or working in a Siemens factory. "The guards beat and kicked me numerous times," wrote Polish prisoner Waleria Peitsch despite "my advanced state" after arriving on the biggest convoys carrying pregnant women after the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. Still, she survived the violence and the epidemics sweeping the camp to give birth to her son Mikolaj on March 25, 1945. - 'Kinderzimmer' - After a new medical officer arrived in the autumn of 1943 births were tolerated if they happened out of sight. French resistance member Madeleine Aylmer-Roubenne brought her daughter Sylvie into the world on March 21, 1945, in "a sort of corridor, no water, no toilet nearby or electricity, just a candle on the floor." Her German midwife, a common criminal, risked her life to get the forceps and chloroform from the infirmary which had a state-of-the-art birthing room with "all the obstetric instruments" you could imagine, Aylmer-Roubenne wrote in her memoirs of the camp. The same solidarity saw women stealing food and rags for new mothers so they could make nappies and medical gloves to make teats for bottles. "The women washed the babies with the lukewarm drink they got in the morning, warmed them and protected them from the guards," said Prochnow. "Alone my mother could never have kept me alive." The newborns were gathered together in the "Kinderzimmer" or children's room from September 1944 where their life expectancy was no more than three months, wrote Marie-Jose Chombart de Lauwe, a medical student and French resistance fighter who tried to keep them alive. Rats bit at their fingers at night. Almost all were taken by hunger, dysentery, typhus and the terrible cold, with temperatures dropping to minus 15 degrees Centigrade (five degrees Fahrenheit). With the mothers being worked to exhaustion, most had no milk. There was little milk powder to put into the two bottles that were shared by between 20 and 40 babies. "Mummy had no milk," French survivor Jean-Claude Passerat-Palmbach recalled. "So a Romanian Roma woman and a Russian, who had lost their babies, breastfed me." Born in November 1944, he only survived because of the generosity of the other prisoners in the farm where his mother was sent afterwards. - Babies like 'little old people' - The babies looked like "little old people", Chombart de Lauwe said, with wrinkled skin, bloated tummies and triangular faces. They suffered from abscesses and green diarrhoea. The situation got even worse in 1945. Around 6,000 prisoners were gassed and thousands of women and children sent to other camps as the Russians advanced. In total, between 20,000 and 30,000 people perished in Ravensbruck. Sylvie Aylmer and her camp "brother" Guy Poirot were saved by being hidden under the skirts of some of the 7,500 prisoners evacuated by the Swedish Red Cross between April 23 and 25 after SS chief Heinrich Himmler agreed to free them in the hope of saving his own skin. Ingelore Prochnow and her mother, however, were forced into a "death march" of 60 kilometres towards the Malchow sub-camp when advancing Soviet troops liberated them. The babies that survived Ravensbruck were for the most part born just before its liberation by the Red Army during the night of April 29 to 30. The Nazis burned their records, but a register kept by a Czech escapee noted 522 births in the camp between September 1944 and April 1945. Only 30 of those names were not marked as dead. Some were transferred to Bergen-Belsen where "only a few newborns survived", according to Valentine Devulder, who is writing a thesis on pregnant women in the camps. - Transgenerational trauma - Growing up, many of the little survivors like Sylvie Aylmer were not told they had been born in a concentration camp. For her, Ravensbruck had been "a French village". "I discovered when I was 13 when my sister and I went to an exhibition on Ravensbruck and the former prisoners who were there took us in their arms. It was a shock," she remembered. She has still never gone back. That place "gives me the creeps", she said. Her father, who was also a resistance member, died in the camps. The Pole Mikolaj Sklodowski, now a priest, says Mass there and often takes young people on visits. "Talking about the suffering in the concentration camps is a duty to those who remain there forever," he said. The camps have marked all of them in one way or another. Guy Poirot, who talks about his experiences to young people "so this will not happen again", said he is still "very marked psychologically" by what happened. The former civil servant, who has a son, said his "health has been fragile" all his life. Sylvie Aylmer suffered from anorexia when she was small and spent several years in therapy. "Things were not easy with my mother. When she saw me, she saw the camp," she said. Ingelore Prochnow was abandoned by her mother in a refugee camp when she was three having survived the camps. She only learned about her past when she was 42. She said she is "resilient and rarely sick" but her youngest daughter was anorexic. "She weighed only 30 kilos (66 pounds, four stones and 10 pounds) when she died. She looked like a concentration camp prisoner and felt she was carrying my weight on her shoulders," said the mother of two. "She died in 2019 aged 50. The final diagnosis was that she was suffering from 'transgenerational trauma'." al/dp/fg
NBC News
07-03-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Poland to require all adult men to take military training and consider nuclear weapons as Trump shifts on Russia
The Polish prime minister announced Friday that his government is preparing to require every adult male to undergo "large-scale military training" to more than double the size of the army in the event of a war with Russia. Donald Tusk added that Poland would also drastically expand its arsenal, saying the country 'must pursue the most advanced capabilities, including nuclear and modern unconventional weapons." Tusk unveiled t he plans in a speech to the Polish Parliament on the same day that President Donald Trump, after weeks of weakening U.S. support for Ukraine and traditional European allies, threatened to impose expanded 'large scale' sanctions and tariffs on Russia until it reaches a peace agreement with Ukraine. 'We will try to have a model ready by the end of this year so that every adult male in Poland is trained in the event of war, so that this reserve is comparable and adequate to the potential threats," Tusk said. Many of Poland's leaders were shocked when Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago. Once behind the so-called Iron Curtain under Communism and controlled by the Soviet Union, Poland is a longtime enemy of Russia. Tusk told lawmakers he also wants to increase the size of the Polish army to 500,000, from its current level of around 200,000. 'We're talking about the need to have an army of half-a-million in Poland, including the reservists,' he said. Polish women may also be required to undergo military training, Tusk said, but 'war is still to a greater extent the domain of men." That said, there are more than 7,000 women currently on active duty in the Polish army, according to government figures. And there is a long history of Polish women fighting for their country on the front lines, including as guerrilla fighters during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Germans. Currently, the Ukrainian army has 800,000 soldiers and is fighting a Russian force that numbers around 1.3 million, Tusk said. As a member of NATO, which was set up after World War II to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union, Poland has been one of the most dependable U.S. allies as well as a stalwart supporter of Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022. But the Polish government has become increasingly worried about the country's security since Trump made the false claim that the Ukrainians had started the war with Russia and then halted U.S. military aid and intelligence help to Ukraine. Trump also has a history of questioning the U.S.'s traditional responsibilities as a member of the U.S.-led alliance. Even as Trump was threatening Moscow with sanctions Friday, he complained that he was 'finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine.'
