I’m going to tell two long stories, and anyone with an aversion to the following should look away: Genocide, torture, rape, paedophilia, mass graves, murder, etc.

/u/Zachariah, I think you should read.

Quickly, this is not the story of Freddie Oversteegen, Truus Oversteegen, and Hannie Schaft, though they are absolutely incredible badasses with even more insane stories of just the incredible amount of heart and fight that young girls the world over keep managing to summon.

My Grandmother was born in 's-Hertogenbosch, and she never spoke directly to me about this, this is all from my father. I don’t give a fuck who beleives or does not believe any of this, it all happened and you can read more online if you like trauma.and when the Nazi’s invaded in 1940, she immediately joined the Dutch resistance (which was run by the Communist party, which she joined as well).

Her family helped Jewish people, Romani, Communists, etc escape the country (With the Romani, it is estimated that almost every single one never fully made it out.) As things got worse and worse, she got more involved in direct resistance. My grandmother worked as ‘bait’ to lure Nazi soldiers into alleyways at night. She had killed ‘at least five of the fucks’ including when she slit a pedophile Nazi’s throat in an alleyway.

She was born in 1925, and killed that Nazi pedophile before her 16th birthday.

She continued to fight against them, getting as many people out of the country as she could. In 1942 she was captured by the Germans, and sent to where we believe (she wasn’t exactly keen to speak on it) was Ravensbruck. To give you an idea of how fucking awful things were, because it’s always worse than you think:

There were children in the camp as well. At first, they arrived with mothers who were Romani or Jews incarcerated in the camp or were born to imprisoned women.[11] There were few children early on, including a few Czech children from Lidice in July 1942. Later the children in the camp represented almost all nations of Europe occupied by Germany. Between April and October 1944, their number increased considerably, consisting of two groups. One group was composed of Romani children brought into the camp with their mothers or sisters after the Romani camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau was closed. The other group included mostly children who were brought with Polish mothers sent to Ravensbrück after the collapse of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Most of these children died of starvation.

In January 1945, the SS also transformed a hut near the crematorium into a gas chamber, where they murdered several thousand prisoners before the camp’s liberation in April 1945; in particular, they executed some 3,600 prisoners from the Uckermark police camp for “deviant” girls and women, which was taken under the control of the Ravensbrück SS at the start of 1945.

The only story she ever told from the camp was the following. Just a note this is her speaking in Dutch to my father, who then translated it into English for me much later:

We were always hungry, and most people starved to death. You would work to death, or be raped to death, or tortured (medical experiment possible, my father was unsure.)

I was standing in line for food, when the woman in front of me died on her feet. She collapsed against me, so I walked with her up to the counter, and got food for us both. I carried her and lay her down beside a tent, and took her food to her daughter, who had been killed an hour earlier. So I ate both bowls of food. Maybe that’s why I made it.

At this point she silently sobbed and refused to every speak of it again.

She was released from the camp before 1945, however, though we never found out how. There’s a suspicion that her father collaborated for her release, as he committed suicide before the war ended.

My grandfather (other side of the family) wanted to join the war the minute Canada called for volunteers. He failed the entrance exams, as his vision (and hearing) were both terrible. Undeterred by this, he cheated his way through by memorizing the eye-chart, and would only wink at me and make a money symbol (rubbing thumb and index finger together). So I guess he bribed his way in? That does sound like something he would do.

He was a dispatch rider, and he drove a motorcycle with a side car. He went with the Canadian army all across Europe, and even spent time in North Africa. He refused to ever tell me (or any other children) any negative stories about the war, it was always about how they found a bunch of chickens, and (claims) “…I drove through half of Sicily with a live chicken in the sidecar - I wanted him to have a good view, and finally get to fly!”

What he didn’t tell me, that he did tell my father, were the bad stories, in particular:

"I was heading into Germany itself, I don’t remember where, with a huge convoy, mile after mile of vehicles going maybe 5 miles/hour. It was night so we had blackout lights on, which for me meant I couldn’t really see anything. Everything smelled awful in war, and everywhere the Nazi’s had been smelled like rot. I had to get a message to the front of the convoy, but on one side of it was a cliff upward with a small ditch, and on the other side was another tiny ditch and a massive fall down a few hundred feet. I went on the wall side, and had to drive in the ditch.

There was about a foot between me and the convoy trucks on the left, bumper-to-bumper, slowly creeping along. A couple feet to the right is a wall (The cliff). The ditch is so bumpy I’m having trouble driving over it, and there’s suddenly some moonlight and I look down to see what is happening.

For mile, after mile, after mile, are corpses of women and children from the surrounding villages. I couldn’t go left, I’d collide with a truck, I couldn’t stop because I was so scared, and to my right was a wall. It would take longer to drive back than forward, and I couldn’t turn around. The bumps I was feeling wasn’t just from going over the corpses, it was them crushing under the wheels. I vomited sideways for as long as I drove, barely able to stay seated, but I couldn’t speed up because the corpses would pulp and cause me to skid and fall. By the time I made it out I had to stop and fainted. "

My grandfather was 24 when the war ended. He did not sleep through a single entire night for the rest of his life, until he passed at 95. He spent every night not just in a different bed from my grandmother, but a different room. He would wake, even from naps, screaming and clawing and flailing. I only ever once heard him sobbing and begging forgiveness.

I asked him if he’d had to shoot someone, myself a curious 10 year old. He told me never fired a shot in anger, when ambushed he fired his gun into the air, telling me “I didn’t want to hit anyone, tomorrow they could be my friend.”

So when you tell me: "Those people in the photo are just LARPing down the street. They should probably be investigated to see if they’re planning violence. "

I refuse to wait until there’s another fucking Ravensbruck, another fucking DITCH FULL OF MILES OF DEAD CHILDREN, I say FUCK YOU, FUCK YOUR FUCKING COMPLACENCY.

I’m going to go die holding these people back from your kids, at least have the decency to not look away when they start doing it.