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Birthday, Thirty Years Earlier — today’s entry from Anne Frank’s diary:
Wednesday, January 13, 1943
Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone. The Christians in Holland are also living in fear because their sons are being sent to Germany. Everyone is scared. Every night hundreds of planes pass over Holland on their way to German cities, to sow their bombs on German soil. Every hour hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of people are being killed in Russia and Africa. No one can keep out of the conflict, the entire world is at war, and even though the Allies are doing better, the end is nowhere in sight.
As for us, we’re quite fortunate. Luckier than millions of people. It’s quiet and safe here, and we’re using our money to buy food. We’re so selfish that we talk about “after the war” and look forward to new clothes and shoes, when actually we should be saving every penny to help others when the war is over, to salvage whatever we can.
The children in this neighborhood run around in thin shirts and wooden shoes. They have no coats, no caps, no stockings and no one to help them. Gnawing on a carrot to still their hunger pangs, they walk from their cold houses through cold streets to an even colder classroom. Things have gotten so bad in Holland that hordes of children stop passersby in the streets to beg for a piece of bread.
My Amelia Earhart Report
Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas July 24, 1897. She was a hero to many people because she flew long distances like fly across the Atlantic Ocean.
When Amelia Earhart was a child she was the first to try new things. After the World’s Fair she and her friends tried to build a roller coaster. She was the first to try it and she got hurt. She liked to go fast and was very brave. Once in the winter it snowed. Amelia and her friends went sledding. She had to duck under a horse not to get hurt.
When she was an adult, she flew long distances alone. She was a woman and the first woman to fly across the USA and the Atlantic Ocean.
She wanted to be an independent woman. She didn’t want to marry just any man. First Sam Chapman asked to marry her and then later he asked again. Amelia said “no” twice. Then George Putnam asked to marry her. Amelia took the risk and said “yes.”
Amelia Earhart’s plane disappeared when she was trying to fly across the world on July 2, 1937. Fred Noonan was one of Amelia’s helpers. He was trying to navigate to Howland. It was a tiny strip of sand, and they couldn’t spot it. The fuel ran out, and they crashed. No one ever found her.
If I could ask Amelia Earhart a question I would ask her this “Why did you risk marrying George Putnam?”
The First Battle of the Marne
They don’t know what awaits they, but by now, they realize it’s not what they thought it would be.
Joyeux Noel: The Christmas Miracle of 1914
When I was in college, I was not a Deadhead — I never even saw the Grateful Dead in concert — but I was something of a McCutcheon-head, if there be such a thing. John McCutcheon is a multi-instrumentalist folk singer who is equally at home singing his renditions of spirituals and his own songs for children. In college, I saw him in concert a number of times, and there was always one song that left me truly enchanted. He introduced it most times in a similar way, telling of a concert he’d given in the early eighties when an elderly man approached him and, speaking of his song “Christmas in the Trenches,” said, “Young man, I was there.”
This was pre-internet days. One couldn’t simply Google “Christmas miracle 1914,” and it wasn’t a story I heard in history class. And that’s really too bad.
After hearing that story, I thought, “This is a fantastic story — why hasn’t anyone made a film of it.”
Tonight, K and I watched Joyeux Noel, and as I read the Netflix disc-cover summary, I thought, “Is this about that thing John McCutcheon sang about?” Indeed, it is. Well worth viewing.
Side Note
John McCutcheon is best known for his mastery of the hammered dulcimer. I once saw him in concert in Asheville, North Carolina when the power went out in the middle of a hammered dulcimer song. McCutcheon literally never missed a note though it was pitch black for at least thirty or forty seconds.
Future in the Past
Some of the names are unfamiliar; some are vaguely familiar, but we don’t necessarily know off the top of our heads what the person did. And some are infamous.
Nazi leadership in 1930 in Bad Elster. Front row l. to r.; Wilhelm Frick, Adolf Hitler, Fritz von Epp, Hermann Goering. Back row; Heinrich Himmler, Martin Mutschmann, Otto Strasser, Joseph Goebbels, Julius Schaub
Wilhelm Frick was responsible for many of the laws that consolidated the Nazi regime. Shortly after the passage of the Enabling Act, Frick helped create a law taking power from individual state governments in Germany, thus federalizing power under Hitler. This accomplished, Frick played an important role in the racial policy of Nazi Germany, helping to create laws against German Jewish. For all this, he was determined enormously responsible for the existence of concentration camps and was hung.
Fritz von Epp abolished the government of Bavaria on Hitler’s and Frick’s orders and set up a Nazi government. He died of natural causes while in Allied custody.
Martin Mutschmann was the Nazi governor of Saxon and was shot by the Russians in Moscow in 1947.
Julius Schaub was chief aide and adjutant and was responsible for destroying all of Hitler’s personal belongings and papers. He died in Munich in 1967.
Otto Strasser is something of an anomaly in this picture. He considered himself a leftist Nazi, and lacked the virulent anti-Semitism of the rest of the group. Hitler expelled him from the Nazi Party, and he helped form the Black Front, an attempt to split the Nazi Party. He spent the war outside of German, eventually settling in Canada. Goebbels declared that Strasser was the Nazis’ “Public Enemy Number One” and put a price of $500,000 on his head. He returned to Germany in the fifties and died in Munich in 1974, all the while calling for a renewed Nazi party.
Those are the men we don’t know. The other four are arguably among the most evilly influential men of the twentieth century, responsible for the deaths of millions upon millions upon millions. Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels constituted the very upper echelon of the Nazi party, and as such, are responsible for the Second World War, the Holocaust, and in a very real way, the Cold War. And not a single one of them faced justice of any kind. All four committed suicide, Hitler and Goebbels killing themselves (and their wives, and in Goebbels’s case, children) before the fall of Berlin, and Goering and Himmler committing suicide after their capture.
Yet the past threatens to become our future as well. Gudrun Burwitz, daughter of Himmler, is an unrepentant neo-Nazi and works hard for years to help the remaining war criminals escape justice. It’s people like that who feel that Hitler didn’t go far enough, mourn the fact that Jews still exist, and cheer at the thought of Iran following through with its threat against Israel. “Have we learned nothing?” is the only thing that comes to mind in situations like that.
Warsaw Winter
Hungary had its 1956 uprising, when it appeared that the Soviet satellite might gain its independence. The USSR moved in and reasserted control by force.
Prague had its Spring: reforms and liberalizations in 1968 by the puppet Communist regime that eventually warranted a full scale invasion by the Soviets to settle things down.
Poland never experienced such a “corrective” invasion, though there was always the thought that the Soviets might have invaded had Jaruzelski not imposed martial law on December 13, 1981. Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity party was gaining too much influence and there was concern that unrest might spread throughout the nation.
The conventional Polish wisdom (as I understood it) has been that Jaruzelski imposed martial law in a bid to preempt a Soviet invasion. Antoni Dudek, a Polish history professor, has published on his blog contents of a note Jaruzelski said to Viktor Kulikov, a Soviet general,
Będzie gorzej, jeżli wyjdÄ… z zakładów pracy i zacznÄ… dewastować komitety partyjne, organizować demonstracje uliczne itd. Gdyby to miało ogarnąć cały kraj, to wy (ZSRR) bÄ™dziecie nam musieli pomóc. Sami nie damy sobie rady”.
It will be worse if [the protests] spread from the workshops begin devastating the party committee, organizing street protests, etc. If it were to spread throughout the country, you (the USSR) would have to help us. We couldn’t manage it alone.
And so the possibility for a Polish Winter to match the Prague Spring was very real.
WałÄ™sa, in the meantime, has suggested that Jaruzelski might be brought up on charges of treason. Dudek admitted that while WałÄ™sa usually likes “strong words,” these words might indeed be “adequate.”
Jaruzelski of course denies all of this. Words were taken out of context. Shades of meaning have been applied that were not intended. It seems to be just the beginning, and given the generally closed nature of the Polish archives (compared to the open archives of the former East German government), it seems a resolution is distant, if not impossible.
Dudek’s blog is available here. The Onet story includes information about WałÄ™sa’s reaction. Hat tip to the beatroot.
Shock and Disbelief
In preparing to read the dramatization of Anne Frank’s diary, I spent some time going over the Holocaust with students. I was taken aback at how little they seemed to know about it. “A bunch of people — I think they were Jews — got killed” seemed to be the general view. They do know something about it now, but their questions revealed both how complicated and unfathomable such an act is.
Most common was, “Why did they hate Jews?” Why indeed? Many answers, none of them short and simple. I offered a few: notions of Jewish conspiracies; Jews as “Christ killers” and the old blood libel; the fact that there are a substantial number of Jews in banking (which is directly traceable to early Christians’ reluctance to engage in usury) as proof of some international Jewish conspiracy. All those explanations in turn (which is why I was silent about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion).
As I spoke, though, and showed pictures and short clips of survivors, it was almost eerie how closely they paid attention. Any noise brought immediate shushing, and the look of shock on everyone’s face told me that there is at least one thing they’ll remember from their time with me.
On the Ground
I’m left wondering how much the average German soldier knew about the plans for the inhabitants of the land they were invading. Did they realize that, ultimately, all Poles were to be made slaves or exterminated? That all Jews were considered subhuman, and the “logical” consequences of that?
I’m reading Blitzkrieg in their Own Words: First-Hand Accounts from German Soldiers 1939-1940.
The jacket description explains that the book was written during World War II.
Written in the naive, fresh style of young men new to combat, the texts recounts the ruthless destruction of the Polish and French armies in language that shocks in its brutal enthusiasm.
One writes about the “criminal insanity of the Poles.”
Also striking is the awful irony of some of the descriptions. One soldier writes about being ambushed in a Polish village. “Civilians and soldiers out of uniform are engaging in nasty, criminal warfare.” It doesn’t require perfect hindsight shows us the hypocritical irony of the soldier’s statement: it was true even as he wrote the words.
Lions, Poles, and Japs! Oh My!
Several of my Polish friends spoke of having to re-learn some elements of history after the fall of Communism in the late 1980s. History (as well as art, music, the social sciences, and even the physical sciences) was dominated by ideology. Because Communism represented the pinnacle of human achievement, something “the masses” for centuries had been working for, it could not be wrong. It had become a religion, in that sense. And so the mistakes and crimes of the Soviet government were recast as wise planning that had been necessary; the achievements of capitalist countries (read: America and Western Europe) were due solely to capitalists’ deviousness, usually stealing the ideas from the honorable Socialists.
With the fall of the Soviet empire, it seemed that such nonsense would never happen again. Yes, well, it has. As Putin seeks to rebuild Russian strength, he’s turning to nationalism, stoking a pride in the achievements of Soviet Russia. This means recasting a few, unpleasant episodes in Soviet history. No worries, though: “We’ve done it before,” Russian media services must be thinking. “We can do it again.” And so youngsters in Russia will be learning “history” that’s a little different from, well, reality.
A few highlights:
- The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was not an agreement with Nazi Germany to split Poland between the two of them. It was a defensive move, for Poland and Japan were planning a two-pronged attack on the Soviet Union. (Source)
- World War II began when Germany attacked Russia in June 1941. The rape of Poland that began almost two years earlier was a defensive move, remember? (Source)
- Stalin’s purges and mass murders were entirely rational and logical — for the good of the country. (Source)
The bottom line: Stalin is a hero who was defending the country from malicious outside influence and outright Polish/German aggression.
The temptation is to mutter something about this never happening in America, but of course it does. The whole premise behind Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (Amazon) is just that. It’s a play on the maxim, “history is written by the winners,” which means the losers are misrepresented and underrepresented.
A few highlights:
- America was founded as a Christian nation.
- The rise of American power has always been a benign influence on the world.
- American foreign policy has always been a beacon of reason and justice; America respects democracy worldwide.
Not all of these myths are taught or were taught in school, but they are spread evenly enough in our collective conscious (and conscience, possibly) that they might as well have been. And, to be fair to America, the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is not all that morally repulsive (it only becomes so when one sees that believe in action); the notion that Stalin’s purges were ethically justifiable is completely morally repulsive.
But there is a level playing field now: thank God for the Internet, that beacon of tried and true information. It will surely save Russians and Americans alike from the national myths.
Source: the beatroot