Antisemitism

Ever since I personally experienced anti-semitism, I have been especially sensitive to any anti-semitic sign and manifestation. I was told by an Englishman in his twenties "such a shame that Hitler did not finish his job with you lot" simply because I had no spare cigarette which he asked for.

  • There are plenty of swasticas and anti-semitic propaganda around - including the two dozen my daughter had to endure in her class room at the German school in Temuco (Colegio Aleman Temuco) in Chile.
  • In Europe, the medieval statutes of a blindfolded, downtrodden synagoga opposite a beautiful, triumphant ecclesia,  the caricature of a Jew on a church in the Alsace and the stained-glass windows with Jewis wearing the "Judenhut" (Jews were forced to wear such hats similar to yellow batch during the Holocaust) might have been expression of anti-Judaism rather than anti-semitism, but they helped to provide a fertile ground for subsequent antisemitism.
  • I also have been shocked by the "I don´t care"-attitude of a shop-owner in my home town, who displayed a board with an advertisement for women´s underwear directly above a Stumbling Stone, which remembers the murder of a Jewish women, who lived in that house.