Hunka described the period between 1941 and 1943 as the happiest of his life. The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS - also known as the 1st Galician - was mostly made up of Ukrainian volunteers.

In his address to them, Himmler said: 'Your homeland has become more beautiful since you have lost – on our initiative, I must say – the residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia's good name – namely the Jews, I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles, I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.'

On the 78th anniversary of the division's formation in 2021, hundreds of Ukrainians took part in a parade in Kyiv.

>>19607097

>>19607124

A river city, Cairo has the lowest elevation of any location in Illinois and is the only Illinois city to be surrounded by levees. It is in the river-crossed area of Southern Illinois known as "Little Egypt", for which the city is named, after Egypt's capital on the Nile.

In 1858, debating in northern Illinois, Douglas had threatened Lincoln by asserting that he would 'trot him down to Egypt' and there challenge him to repeat his antislavery views before a hostile crowd. The audience understood Douglas: overwhelming proslavery sentiment and Democratic unanimity in Egypt had led to the nickname.

look what vanished

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/09/22/zelensky-asks-marina-abramovic-ambassador-ukraine/

>>19607153

https://web.archive.org/web/20230922141641/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/09/22/zelensky-asks-marina-abramovic-ambassador-ukraine/

Zelensky asks Marina Abramovic to be ambassador for Ukraine

Artist will lend her voice to help rebuild schools in the country

Volodymyr Zelensky has asked Marina Abramović, the performance artist, to be an ambassador for Ukraine.

‌Ms Abramović, a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion, said the Ukrainian president had asked for her help in rebuilding schools.

‌The 76-year-old Serbian is holding her first solo exhibition in the UK and is the first female artist to have a major show in the Main Galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

‌Visitors to the exhibition must squeeze between two nude models to enter the show, or opt to bypass what one journalist dubbed the “naked gates”.

‌“I was the first artist to support the Ukraine war against Russia and to give my voice. It is definitely a repetition of history,” she said in an interview with the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai.

‌“I have been invited by Zelensky to be an ambassador of Ukraine, to help the children affected by rebuilding schools and such.”

‌She added: “I have also been invited to be a board member of the Babyn Yar organisation to continue to protect the memorial.”

‌The Holocaust memorial centre to Jews murdered by Nazis in Ukraine was damaged by Russian missile attacks in March last year.

‌Ms Abramović installed her work Crystal Wall of Crying at the memorial centre in Kyiv four months before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

‌The wall, 40 metres long and three metres high, is made of coal and has large quartz crystals sticking out of it. Visitors can touch the installation, which mirrors the western wall in Jerusalem.

‌It was not damaged in the missile strike, which killed five people and damaged a building.

‌“Making the Crystal Wall of Crying was just the first step in dealing with new history and figuring out how to help heal our increasingly divided world,” Ms Abramović said.

The artist posted a video online days after Putin launched his unprovoked war. In it she spoke about being born in the former Yugoslavia, which was once invaded by the Soviet Union, and called Ukrainians “proud, strong and dignified”.

“I have full solidarity with [the Ukrainian people] on this impossible day,” she said in the video. An attack on Ukraine is an attack on all of us. It’s an attack on humanity and has to be stopped.”

Shortly after the invasion, Ms Abramović restaged one of her most famous performances, The Artist is Present, to raise money for Ukraine.

She was asked how she reconciled the transcendent nature of her work with the cruel realities of the modern world.

“I think true change only comes by changing yourself. By changing yourself you can change thousands and you can change the world,” she said.

“Gandhi was one example in history who made a revolution without dropping a single drop of blood.”

Ms Abramović is just one of several celebrities to be recruited to help Kyiv’s public relations battle to ensure continued support for its struggle.

Mark Hamill, the actor who played Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars films, has raised funds to buy reconnaissance drones for front-line Ukrainian troops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)

>>19607141

>>19607142

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/artist-marina-abramovics-crystal-wall-crying-commemorates-jews-killed-babyn-yar-2021-10-06/

Artist Marina Abramovic's 'Crystal Wall of Crying' commemorates Jews killed in Babyn Yar massacre

A group of people walks slowly in silence past a stand-alone thick wall made of coal with large quartz crystals sticking out of it. People pause to touch the crystals and stand close to the 40-meter-long structure, some with eyes closed.

"The Crystal Wall of Crying", an interactive installation by world-renowned performance artist Marina Abramovic, was erected in Ukraine's capital to commemorate Jews killed in one of the biggest massacres of the Holocaust during World War Two.

It will be officially unveiled on Wednesday evening as part of a series of events to mark the 80th anniversary since Nazi troops gunned down nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women and children at the wooded ravine of Babyn Yar on Sept. 29-30, 1941.

A symbolic extension of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the artwork is a "wall for healing," Abramovic told Reuters in an interview ahead of the ceremony.

"You come here and you look that this is a park. There are so many trees, so much nature, it is so much life. You know, people come here to sit in the sun, little children are playing, but all of this, you know, is one part of reality," said the 74-year-old Serbian artist, speaking in English.

"But another part of reality - you know that something terrible, terrible happened at the same time. And that kind of memory can't leave you. So you have this mix of feeling beauty and heaviness and past which is there all the time."

The wall is one of several new installations in a memorial project for Babyn Yar. A synagogue built of wood and designed to unfold like a pop-up book opened in May.

Abramovic, known for her work with crystals, chose anthracite from Ukrainian mines and rock quartz crystals from Brazil.

"I want to create the image that is transcendental about any war at any time at any place," she said.

"Whatever we are doing, there is always violence, there is always a war somewhere, there is always something that we should not do as people. And I love to create images that teach us: 'stop that'".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe

>>19607200

>The wall is one of several new installations in a memorial project for Babyn Yar. A synagogue built of wood and designed to unfold like a pop-up book opened in May.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-unveils-folding-pop-up-book-synagogue-site-babyn-yar-massacre-2021-05-14/

Ukraine unveils folding 'pop-up book' synagogue at site of Babyn Yar massacre

Ukraine unveiled on Friday a synagogue built of wood and designed to unfold like a pop-up book at a site commemorating the victims of one of the single biggest massacres of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust.

The colourful new synagogue is part of a memorial project for the victims of the Babyn Yar massacre that marked the start of the Holocaust in occupied Soviet Ukraine, in which a pre-war Jewish population of about 1.5 million was virtually wiped out.

Nazi German forces shot dead an estimated 34,000 Jewish men, women and children on Sept. 29-30, 1941, in a large ravine called Babyn Yar on the edge of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. The ravine is also known as Babi Yar.

The opening of the synagogue coincided with Ukraine marking on Friday its first Day of Remembrance for Ukrainians who saved Jews during World War Two.

"Their feat is an example of humanity and self-sacrifice," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Twitter.

The structure of the Swiss-designed synagogue can be collapsed using a hand winch. In its expanded form, it has a retractable roof, balcony and benches, and its walls are decorated with prayers and blessings.

Its creators wanted to remind visitors of a prayer book, a Bible, or the magic of a pop-up book where "new worlds unfold, that we could not imagine before. In a sense, the pop-up book can act as a metaphor for the Synagogue," they said in a statement on their website.

Ilya Khrzhanovsky, artistic director of the Babyn Yar complex, told Reuters that only old oak was used to build the synagogue, collected from all regions of Ukraine.

"It should be a tree that remembers the world before the Holocaust," Khrzhanovsky said in an earlier interview.

>>19607155

>>19607197

The first public monument to the Holodomor was erected and dedicated in 1983 outside City Hall in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to mark the 50th anniversary of the famine-genocide.

The sculpture of a large broken circle of cold grey metal emblazoned with skeletal hands memorializes the anonymous victims of the Soviet engineered genocide. ​“The twisted and fractured circle represents the life cycle being torn apart by an unnatural force: emaciated hands resist, grasp and then beg for an end to their inhuman condition,” states the inscription.

Termerty’s sculpture symbolizes the scar on humanity left by authoritarian political regimes, and more specifically on the Ukrainian people by Josef Stalin. It was commissioned by the Canadian Ukrainian Committee to commemorate the lives lost and acknowledge a little known and poorly understood event in world history.

The genocidal famine was enacted to punish farmers for resisting the collectivization of agricultural production. The death of the greatest number of civilians during peacetime occurred when food, livestock and seed grain was removed from the country and the borders were sealed. Following the forced famine of millions of people, the russification of Ukraine saw the extermination of religious, academic, and cultural leaders. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, any record of the genocide was suppressed and those who spoke of it were silenced by the Soviet government.

The public unveiling in 1983 by then Mayor Laurence Decore boldly proclaimed the existence of the event and spoke of the connection to the Ukrainian community in Edmonton. Beginning in the 1890s, successive waves of Ukrainian settlers came to the Edmonton area to build homesteads, representing a large portion of the population.

The sculpture invites examination of the histories constructed by Soviet Russia and allows members of the larger community to show solidarity against injustices committed against humankind. On the base of the artwork is inscribed, ​“Let us all stand on guard against tyranny, violence and inhumanity”.

Nonetheless, the sculpture later became a target for contention between cultures. Twice the monument was defaced by graffiti that cried ​“lies” and ​“nazi lies”.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/19/marina-abramovic-royal-academy-nude-naked-performers/

Visitors to London’s Royal Academy need to squeeze between a pair of nude performers to see new show

Marina Abramović’s ‘naked doorway’ to be restaged for RA’s first major show by a female artist

Visitors to an upcoming Royal Academy of Arts exhibition will find their way blocked by two nude performance artists, a man and a woman.

>>19607248

>a man and a woman

The envoy noted that he “has no illusions” that this protest will have any effect, arguing that “the current Trudeau cabinet is essentially the epitome of neo-liberal fascism you can’t do any business with.”

>>19607251

We have the issue of symbolism here, the optics of serving in a military unit whose logo is that of arguably the greatest criminal organization in the 20th century. So obviously the optics are not good.

In 1985, then-prime minister Brian Mulroney called for a royal commission to examine whether Canada had become a haven for war criminals. The Deschênes Commission found there were about 600 former members of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division living in Canada at the time. But Justice Jules Deschênes said membership in the division did not itself constitute a war crime.