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Fascinating Blog

You should read this: surviving as a Jew in prison

By July 12, 2015December 20th, 2015No Comments
Inmate David Arenberg has reached an accord with the Aryan Brotherhood:  they let him eat at the table “for” white people, but only after everyone else has eaten.  That’s the best deal he can get, and he’ll take it, because eating at a table “for” the other races violates a strict code, and gets you killed.

He’s actually under the Aryan Brotherhood’s protection, because he does legal work for them.  Hey, a Jewish lawyer is hard to come by in prison …

Ironically that’s exactly the deal that Hitler refused to make.  Just prior to World War II one of the most prominent industrialists in Germany, a man partly responsible for the invention of chemical weapons and the re-arming of the Wehrmacht, got his first audience with der Fuhrer.  

Carl Bosch used it to argue for the plight of the Jewish scientists under his control.  “Surely,” he told Hitler, “surely, this whole business about racial purity and kicking out the Jews or sending them to concentration camps, didn’t include the chemists in my factories who are absolutely essential in keeping your war maching going!  Surely you don’t actually mean to send them away, because they’re so useful, right?  Right?”

Bosch never got a second audience, and became an outspoken critic of Hitler’s prior to his death (from natural causes) early in the conflict.  I wrote about all that in a book review here.

But this article from the Southern Poverty Law Center, in which Arenberg discusses his time in prison in his own words, is just fascinating, and the end – where Arenberg discusses how he is ultimately triumphing over racist ideology – is deeply moving.
Read it now.