Oh Damn, People

People Without History Are Dust

Queerness remains one of the most stigmatized and overlooked aspects of Holocaust history, often erased due to the lingering homophobia of survivors. People Without History Are Dust challenges this silence, weaving together compelling stories of German, Dutch, Czech, and Polish Jewish Holocaust victims and survivors - including Anne Frank, Molly Applebaum, Margot Heuman, and Gad Beck - whose experiences help illuminate the hidden history of queerness in a time of genocide.

Drawing on extensive archival research, this groundbreaking book uncovers the lives of those who were doubly marginalized, not only persecuted as Jews but also as queer individuals. In doing so, it confronts the ways in which history has excluded or minimized their experiences, urging us to question normative accounts of the Holocaust.

By shedding light on these long-overlooked stories, People Without History Are Dust deepens our understanding of identity, survival, and memory, reminding us why an inclusive and complex approach to history is essential - not just for the sake of the past, but in service to the present and the future as well.

Imagine ID: #no but fr wtf is those tags in that screenshot

The tags in question are "#gee I wonder why Jewish victims didn't talk about being persecuted for being queer #maybe because being Jewish was the more pressing issue"

I am going to start assuming you're asking in good faith and not writing off Jews talking about the Holocaust.

Being Jewish was the more pressing issue. The Nazis were going after Jews and Roma. The reason gay people were targeted was because the Nazis believed Jews wanted to destroy the nuclear family and had created queers to destabilize families. Does that make a lick of sense? No, but nothing about Nazism does. Queer people died because of antisemitism.

Furthermore, queer people could hide. Hiding isn't a privilege, but it did allow people to survive the Holocaust without being put in a camp. There were plenty of closeted German men who never saw a death camp because they never dated a man. Hiding being Jewish, though, was a different matter.

It does not matter how observant you were. Your ethnicity, which was Jewish, was written on your birth certificate. You were listed as Jewish in census records. That's how Nazis knew who to round up. It's why the resistance blew up records offices. There were people who converted out of Judaism who were still marked because they had Jewish blood. They still lost rights. Your best bet to avoid this was to shed your identity and move to a different town but a) it's hard to leave your family behind, b) it looked suspicious if you move suddenly, and c) no one knew how bad it would get for Jews. So people didn't shed their birth identity, and they died. It doesn't matter if they were Orthodox or fully assimilated; they were murdered for having Jewish genes.

Being Jewish was seen as a genetic disease. The Nazis wiped out whole families because everyone has Jewish DNA. Meanwhile, being queer was a moral failing. If you were caught with another man, your wife and children weren't going to the camps. Just you.

I've spoken about the difference in how queer people and Jews were treated during the Holocaust here.

Ultimately, the deaths of queers was a side project. It was a fun little detour, rounding up people who might destabilize Germany, but it wasn't the goal. And to make that point, please consult this graph:

I don't know how to do an image ID for graphs. But the graph shows the Jewish death toll at 6 million, non-Jewish Polish death toll at 3 million, disabled and Romani deaths at least than a million each, and gay arrests are barely visible. There are no exact numbers given.

Please note that the other columns are deaths. That tiny orange blip? That's ARRESTS.

Anne Frank was not persecuted for being Queer. She was persecuted - and murdered - for being Jewish

Anne Frank, by today's standards, may well be considered Queer, to the delight of everyone who thinks discussions of the Holocaust are a matter of representation, but she never got to determine that, because

Anne Frank was murdered for being Jewish

You could, if you don't think a child being murdered for being Jewish is tragic enough, argue that it's a tragedy that she never got to fully explore that part of herself, but that's about as far as you can go.

And this is in fact exactly what the tags in the screenshot seem to be talking about - Anne Frank did not talk about being persecuted for being Queer because being Jewish was the more pressing issue.