#2 Nope...remember some time back when they picked up 2 pre-teen boys with knives lurking around the edges of that settlement, looking for Israelis to kill? (which one, you ask? I don't know -- geography is not on my skill-set list) Or the mentally retarded lad disarmed at the checkpoint, who'd been told his only chance to get laid would be by the houris in Paradise? Or that poor mother equipped by her lover and driven by her husband to the staging point (or was it equipped by husband, driven by lover...my memory is not what it once was)?
For years all they've had is dregs -- the nice people left for greener, and safer, pastures long since.
As for Hitlerjugend lads, it depends how much they believed at the time. I have a friend who was too young not to join, but he is of an analytic turn of mind and knew that his Jewish schoolmates were not monsters as he'd been taught. After the surrender he found a cache of books that he saved, because he wanted to be able to present concrete witness to contradict the claimed innocence of the adults around him. He gave me one, to be my own concrete piece of shared history.
Others grew up to discriminate against Turkish guestworkers and Gypsies, for lack of Jewish Untermenschen to play with. |