Word: nazi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...village, with the unfortunate name of Nazi, was dusty and poor. Burmese villages, generally, are dusty and poor, but this place felt more downtrodden than most. The sour smell of anxiety pervaded the air. Eventually, O Lam Myit, the 75-year-old village patriarch, shuffled up, his eyes milky, his longyi (or sarong) frayed, a ragged prayer cap on his head. Like his father and grandfather, he was born in Arakan state. O Lam Myit laughed when I told him that many Burmese thought this village was populated only by recent economic migrants from Bangladesh. In 1978, he was returning...
...villagers of Nazi spoke of a regime that conscripted them as forced labor and made them pay prohibitive taxes or buy expensive business licenses that robbed them of any chance at economic mobility. Because they are not considered citizens of Burma, they cannot work in the public sector as teachers or soldiers or doctors. Nor can they attend university in Arakan's capital, Sittwe, where communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims flared eight years ago. The villagers' tone when describing their plight was matter-of-fact, as if they were complaining of a rainstorm or a bad case of influenza...
...Toward the end of my visit to Nazi, I sat in the privacy of a bamboo-floored stilted house, where locals felt more comfortable talking. I asked the villagers if they considered themselves Rohingya. The room full of around 20 people erupted into argument. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but it was clear that there was significant disagreement. Finally, one man spoke. "Some people call us Rohingya," he said cautiously. I realized they were afraid to be identified as Rohingya because the very word carried with it the likelihood of so much discrimination. The man's name...
After studying private family archives and public documents, Gregor Schöllgen, professor of contemporary history at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, concluded that Wilhelm Schaeffler, Maria-Elisabeth's brother-in-law, cooperated with the Nazis as necessary for personal gain, but that in this way he was not unlike many small entrepreneurs during the Nazi period. He says there is no evidence that Schaeffler was an enthusiastic Nazi or a supporter of Hitler's plans to annihilate Europe's Jews. What does Schöllgen think there is to the story about the Auschwitz hair? "Based on what we know...
Still, the history that Schöllgen uncovered is a reminder of the pervasiveness of Nazi policies. In 1940 Wilhelm Schaeffler acquired a company called Davistan AG in the town of Kietrz. Davistan was a former Jewish-owned manufacturer of upholstery and carpets that had gone bankrupt. In an interview with Schöllgen in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on March 2, Davistan is described as the "cornerstone of the current Schaeffler Group." The company belonged to a Jewish family named Frank that ran into trouble during the Great Depression and left Germany in 1933 as anti-Semitism began to spread...