Buenos Aires, Brazil - Despite the passage of nearly 70 years, many Jews are still holding onto anger over the attempt by the German Nazi Party to exterminate them as a people group.
"They tried to kill us out of existence, as a people, as a religion. Gone, all of us. They wanted all of us dead. Obviously they failed, but they succeeded at killing millions and millions of Jews. That isn't something easily forgotten. I'm sure you can imagine," said Esther Provakovitch, a Polish-American Jew whose grandparents survived a Nazi concentration camp. Provakovitch's grandparents were liberated by American forces in April 1945 and immigrated to the United States in the fall of that same year.
Adolf Hitler was the German leader who oversaw the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany during the late 1930s. It was his policies that included the attempted genocide of the entire Jewish population. Today, Hitler and his fellow Nazis are still remembered as being bad, and continue to be used as a touchstone of badness. When posed with the question "Was Adolf Hitler good or bad?" nearly everyone sitting at the outside tables of a cafe here in Buenos Aires said "bad." The lone exception was John Smith, a 97 year old man who told us he's lived in Brazil since the summer of 1945, which is when he says he moved here from Canada.
When we posed the same question to Ms. Provakovitch, "Was Adolf Hitler good or bad?", she replied "bad."
Only recently has the name "Adolf" began to gain any sort of renewed popularity in Germany. However, that moustache will never come back into style.
