Posts tagged Nansen

April 9, 1940: Norway Invaded

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Eighty years ago today German Armed Forces showed up in Norway—uninvited, unannounced, and unwelcome.  Despite holding out for longer than most other European countries overrun by the Nazis, Norway finally capitulated on June 10, 1940.  It would remain occupied for over five years—longer than any other European country, excepting only Czechoslovakia and Poland.

German troops in Norway

Germans employed almost 400,000 troops during their occupation of Norway, or approximately 1 soldier for every 7.5 civilians.  On a per capita basis, that would be the equivalent of America being occupied today by a foreign army totaling over 44 million soldiers—more than the combined populations of Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and New Jersey.

Notwithstanding this overwhelmingly heavy German presence, many people, of all ages, joined the Resistance—including 38-year-old Odd Nansen—activities that he would later describe in his diary as “wanton playing with fire” [July 14, 1942].  No less an authority than preeminent British military historian John Keegan once observed that the Norwegians “provided the SOE with its most dependable and spirited supporters in Western Europe.” The SOE, or Special Operations Executive, was a British World War II organization formed to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe.  [I’ve previously written about resistance heroes here, here, and here.]

H7: The symbol for King Håkon VII, and widely used as a symbol of defiance to Nazi rule.

Many people are familiar with the unusual events in Norway preceding the invasion.  How, just days prior to their invasion, the German Embassy in Oslo invited many prominent Norwegian officials, and others, including America’s Ambassador to Norway, Florence Harriman, to a lavish reception and film screening of a “peace film.”  Rather than a pleasant nighttime social event, the guests were shown a shocking film of Germany’s recent blitzkrieg attack on Poland, together with a warning that this is what would happen to a country if it resisted the Nazis.  As a bit of psychological warfare it may have missed its mark.  As Harriman wrote in her diary: “The audience was shocked and—this seems strange now—still puzzled, as to why the film had been shown to them, to Norwegians.”

Clare Boothe Luce (whom I’ve written about here) also relates, in her highly readable memoir, Europe in the Spring, about another equally bizarre event which, in retrospect, explains much about the mindset of Europe at the dawn of World War II, and what can occur without collective security agreements between nations facing a common enemy.  Luce (an American ambassador to Italy and Brazil after the war, and the wife of publisher Henry Luce) found herself in Holland on May 7, just three days before it would be overrun by German forces.  That night she dined with Herr Snouck Hurgronje, Holland’s Permanent Secretary General for Foreign Affairs.  Naturally, Luce writes, she asked him about the impending crisis.  Here is their exchange:

“’The Germans are making troop movements,” said Mr. Snouck placidly, ‘which strongly suggests an invasion [of Holland].’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Are you sure.’

Ja,’ he answered cheerfully.  ‘The same sources have informed our government so which informed it five days before the German invasion of Norway.’

I said, aghast: ‘You knew five days before that the Germans were going to invade Norway?’

Ja!’ he affirmed proudly. ‘Our sources of information are excellent.  You see, a good Dutchman often can pass as a real German.’ (I thought: ‘And vice versa.’)

I asked: ‘You knew five days before? Did you—tell the English and the French about it?’

‘Certainly not,’ he said indignantly.  ‘Why should we? They are not our allies.’” 

Holland was technically neutral before the war.  Parts of the country were liberated by Allied forces in the second half of 1944; the remainder of the country was finally liberated on May 5, 1945.  As Luce mordantly records later in her book: “(Mr. Snouck ten days later was in London, a member of her exiled Majesty’s belligerent government.)”

Schlachthof Fünf and the Bombing of Dresden

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On this day, 75 years ago, the firebombing of Dresden began.

Dresden was Germany’s seventh largest city, and until the raid, the largest city to escape any serious Allied bombing.  All that changed in a series of raids which began on the evening of the 13th and lasted for two days.  Over 1,000 British and American bombers, escorted by another 700+ American fighters, attacked the city, destroying over 1,600 acres in the city center, and killing an estimated 25,000 people.

Dresden post bombing

At least one American POW in Dresden that night survived the attack, and witnessed firsthand the aftermath.

Infantry scout Kurt Vonnegut, age 22, of the 106th Infantry Division,* was captured, along with another 6,000 Americans in the division, in mid-December 1944, during the height of the Battle of the Bulge.  He was taken to Dresden and housed in a Schlachthof [slaughterhouse].  Vonnegut survived the attack by hiding in a meat locker three levels between the street.

Vonnegut not only survived the attack, he was eventually liberated and repatriated to the United States.  He married, started a family, and began a conventional career with GE.  But we wanted to write—he had been the editor of his high school and college newspapers, and felt writing came easy to him.  His first magazine article appeared in February 1950, and less than a year later he quit his day job and took up writing full time. Despite publishing a number of novels, and many magazine articles, in the ensuing years, Vonnegut met with neither commercial nor critical success; his writing income barely kept the family afloat.

What haunted Vonnegut was his war experience.  He tried and tried—by his own admission he had written five thousand pages about Dresden—and thrown them all away.  He seemed unable to find an appropriate means to express himself.

Finally, in 1969, Vonnegut published his sixth novel: Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children’s Crusade.  The book skyrocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, turning Vonnegut into an icon overnight, a status that he never lost for the rest of his life.  The book has remained on numerous “100 best books” lists ever since.  Vonnegut died in 2007, age 84.

Slaughterhouse Five tells the story of a hapless GI named Billy Pilgrim, who likewise ends up in Dresden and survives the bombing.  Portions of the novel are clearly autobiographical (although it is doubtful that Vonnegut could time-travel, or that he currently resides on the planet Tralfamadore in the company of Hollywood starlet Montana Wildhack, as Billy does).

Vonnegut’s book is unusual in many respects, including his fascination with Tralfamadore.  For example, he describes quite early (p. 5) an actual wartime event which he plans to write about: “I think the climax of the book will be the execution of Edgar Derby. . . .  The irony is so great.  A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed.  And then this one American footsoldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. . . .   [A]nd then he’s shot by a firing squad.”

It is not known whether Odd Nansen, who died in 1973, ever had the chance to read Slaughterhouse Five in the remaining four years of his life.  It is unlikely, but not impossible: the number of literary and biblical allusions that pepper Nansen’s WWII diary attest to a broad and well-read mind.

If Odd Nansen had read Vonnegut’s work, he might well have identified with Vonnegut’s experience—he witnessed an event much like the fate of Billy Pilgrim’s friend, Edgar Derby, himself.

Writing on March 23, 1944, almost a full year before Dresden, Nansen describes the ever-increasing Allied bombing campaign against Germany.  Oranienburg, the city where Sachsenhausen was located, was also an administrative headquarters of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and the site of many its workshops, and thus the camp was hardly immune from stray Allied bombs landing in its midst.

Here’s what Nansen writes, continuing an earlier entry that describes the results of one such bombing:

“Bombs also fell on the prison camp.  Half of one hut was burned down, otherwise only minor damage.  They say that one man was killed and four taken to the Revier [infirmary] with serious injuries.  What is certain is that a prisoner was shot for stealing from the ruins.  He was caught in the act and shot then and there.  No one sees anything strange in that.  Served him right, is all they say, with a shrug of the shoulders.  The SS and the prisoners appear to be of one mind on this form of justice.  I think however that most Norwegians still react against such things.  The man shot was a wretched, starving Ukrainian, who saw a loaf that would have burnt up in any case.”

Yes, Odd Nansen would have been right at home with Slaughterhouse Five.

*I have previously written about another important member of the 106th Infantry Division who was captured around the same time as Vonnegut—Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds (here).

April: Anniversaries and a Reckoning

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The revised hardcover edition of From Day to Day was re-published exactly three years ago this week.  I don’t think I ever realized the significance of this week in any of my previous reflections.  Monday, April 22, represented the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Sachsenhausen, and with it, freedom after almost six years for Thomas Buergenthal.  Similarly, April 27-28, 1945 represents the final entry in Nansen’s diary.  Nansen’s agonized, brutally honest words from that entry, when he is on the cusp of freedom, are worth repeating:

“What on earth am I to write?  It’s as impossible today as on all the other days that have passed in one long whirl of unreality and fairy tale. . ..   The day before yesterday I was to scribble a message to Kari, only a hurried greeting, a few words on a scrap of paper, with the mudguard of a truck to write on. . .. But no, it seemed to me impossible, insuperable! . . .   I felt like crying with despair and rage. . ..  Dear, darling Kari! .. . .  I don’t know what more I got down.  I had to write something, couldn’t say I found it impossible.  Only a little message—I’ll be soon be home!  Surely I could write that much! And so I wrote that. . ..   And here I am, as bankrupt, as confused, and as stupefied as ever, out of contact with reality, because it is in fact unbelievable.”

Anniversaries are also a time for stock-taking.  Here are some of the highlights of my three-year journey (cumulative through 12/31/18):

Miles traveled: 51,807

Website visitors: 7,301

Presentation audiences: 5,000+

Presentations made: 137

Blogs written:  105

Speaking of blogs, several friends have wondered at the recent dearth of blogs from me.  I can only plead a busy travel schedule, which has prevented me from collecting all my thoughts.  But the travels have certainly been worthwhile.  The following represents just a few of the highlights in the first quarter of 2019, (but which nevertheless are emblematic of the entire experience with this book since the start):

  • Before speaking at the Providence Athenaeum in February I was shown the library’s rare book collection, which is rare indeed: a first edition, signed copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a first edition Moby Dick, and a library charge-out book signed by library patron “E.A. Poe.”

 

  • In Barrington, RI, an audience member that his own grandfather had spent time in Grini, the Norwegian camp where Nansen spent almost 18 months.

 

  • In Baltimore, I met a 92 year-old patron named Joel. Joel returned to the room where I had spoken just as I was packing up to leave.  He told me that my recitation of Nansen’s dairy entry for August 27, 1944, wherein he relates that his love for Kari is of eternity, and will never die “even though we should never meet again,” had struck a nerve with him.  Joel explained that he fought in the Italian campaign during WWII, and had lost a brother in the Battle of the Bulge, and had another brother injured in the same battle.  With tears in his eyes, he confessed that while fighting in Italy he never thought he would make it home alive himself.  Joel then confessed that, until that very day, he had never mentioned this crippling fear to anyone else in his entire life.

 

  • In York, PA, I learned about the famed “Four Chaplains,” sometimes also known as the “Dorchester Chaplains.” Four chaplains (Alexander Goode, a rabbi; John Washington, a Catholic priest; George Fox, a Methodist minister; and Clark Poling, a Reformed Church minister) were sailing with the troop transport SS Dorchester when it was torpedoed on February 3, 1943. When the supply of life jackets ran out, each of the chaplains gave his away, and remained with those unable to escape the sinking ship.  The Dorchester sank in 27 minutes, with 672 men still on board.  The four chaplains were last seen on deck, arms linked, praying together.  The town of York, where Alexander Goode once served as a rabbi and scout leader, commemorates the memory of the Four Chaplains with a prayer breakfast annually around mid-May, close to Rabbi Goode’s birthday of May 10.

 

  • In Milwaukee, a guest brought with her a framed photo from Life Magazine showing the liberation of Dachau [which incidentally occurred April 29, 1945–another April anniversary]. The photo shows four GIs at Dachau’s gate.  The one with the cigarette in his mouth was her brother.

Dachau liberated

 

  • In Lincolnwood, IL, I met a relative of Michael Bornstein, probably the youngest survivor of Auschwitz, and I learned about his moving memoir, Survivor’s Club—I highly recommend it.

 

  • Finally, in Lisle, IL, I met Margaret Roth, a survivor of a different sort. She was born in Germany in 1938 and grew up in the shadow of the war, emigrating to the U.S. in 1968.  She inscribed her family memoir, An Ordinary Family in Extraordinary Times, to me as follows: “To Timothy Boyce/For a wonderful talk that showed that human love and compassion can overcome the greatest evil.”

On that positive note, I am excited to begin the fourth year of From Day to Day’s new lease on life, and see what fresh developments and experiences the next 12 months will bring.

Date Set For Raoul Wallenberg Address

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I have the honor and privilege of being chosen to give the keynote address at the 23rd annual Raoul Wallenberg memorial dinner at the Nordic Museum of Seattle on June 7 at 5:30 pm.

Nordic Museum

The Nordic Museum, which celebrated its grand opening in its new, $40 million facility this past weekend, is an internationally recognized museum and cultural center dedicated to collecting, preserving and educating since its founding in 1980.  It is the largest museum in the United States honoring the legacy of immigrants from all five Nordic countries.

Raoul Wallenberg

Raoul Wallenberg was born into a prominent Swedish family in 1912.  Like Odd Nansen, he studied to be an architect, graduating from the University of Michigan in 1935.  The following year he took a job with an export-import company owned by Kalman Lauer, a Hungarian Jew.  Wallenberg was himself one-sixteenth Jewish (through one of his great-great-grandfathers), a fact of which he was very proud.

As a result of anti-Semitic decrees in Hungary beginning in the mid-1930s, and later with the onset of World War II, Wallenberg, now a co-owner of the trading company, undertook numerous business trips to Hungary, Germany and German-occupied France in his partner’s place.  Along the way he learned to speak Hungarian and observed German bureaucratic methods.

By early 1944 it was apparent to all that Germany would lose the war, and Hungary, an Axis power, began secret discussions with the Allies, hoping to secure a separate peace.  When an enraged Hitler learned of these negotiations he ordered the occupation of Hungary, which occurred on March 19, 1944.

Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious organizers of the Holocaust, was soon dispatched to Budapest, and the Jewish population, which had not previously felt the full brunt of the Holocaust, now began to be deported in massive numbers. [Eichmann was later hanged in Israel in 1962 for his role in the Final Solution.]

In less than three months (May-July 1944), approximately 430,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz; somewhere between 70 and 90 percent were killed upon arrival.

As reports of these actions filtered back to the Allies, President Roosevelt sent Treasury official Iver Olsen to Sweden to locate someone willing to travel to Hungary under diplomatic cover (Sweden then being a neutral nation) to organize a rescue program for the Jews.  Olsen approached a relief committee of prominent Jewish leaders in Sweden for assistance.  Kalman Lauer, Wallenberg’s business partner, was a member of this committee.

The committee’s first choice was actually Count Folke Bernadotte, Vice-Chair of the Swedish Red Cross.  [Folke Bernadotte, a friend of Odd Nansen’s, would later organize the relief program for Scandinavian inmates in all Nazi concentration camps, known as the White Buses operation.  While on an inspection visit to Neuengamme, Bernadotte met up with prisoner Nansen.  “When [Nansen] was brought before me and I saw him snatch off his cap and stand to attention as all prisoners were required to do when in the presence of a German of rank . . . I boiled with anger,” Bernadotte would later write.]

When Bernadotte was rejected by the Hungarian authorities, Lauer suggested Wallenberg.  Despite some U.S. misgivings about Wallenberg’s reliability, given existing ties between Wallenberg family businesses and Germany, he was assigned as a special envoy to the Swedish legation in Budapest in July 1944.

Those concerns proved misplaced.  Immediately upon his arrival Wallenberg began issuing “protective passports” to Jews, thus preventing their deportation.  In all, approximately 9,000 passes were issued.  He also rented numerous buildings in Budapest, thereby converting them to Swedish “territory” subject to diplomatic immunity.  Eventually these buildings housed almost 10,000 people.

Wallenberg’s actions came at significant personal risk.  He was forced to sleep in a different location each night to avoid capture or execution by Hungarian fascists (Arrow Cross Party) or Eichmann’s SS members.

Having successfully eluded the Nazis, Wallenberg ultimately fell victim to the approaching Soviets.  During the siege of Budapest in early 1945, Wallenberg was summoned to the headquarters of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Front.  His last recorded words were “I’m going to Malinovsky’s . . . whether as a guest or prisoner I do not know yet.”  He was never seen again, and is presumed to have died in Soviet captivity in 1947, although the exact circumstances of his death remain subject to much speculation.

Wallenberg has been recognized as one of the Righteous Among Nations by Yad Vashem, and posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress.  In 1981 he was designated an Honorary Citizen of the United States, the second person to ever receive the honor (after Winston Churchill).  The sponsor of the bill was U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos (D. CA), one of the thousands whose life was saved by Wallenberg’s efforts in Hungary.

It will indeed be an honor and a privilege to discuss one great Scandinavian humanitarian, Odd Nansen, while commemorating the life of another great Scandinavian humanitarian, Raoul Wallenberg.

More information about the event can be found here.  Tickets are $70 for non-museum members; $60 for museum members.

 

 

 

An Anniversary, and a Road Trip

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Last week marked the second anniversary of the re-publication of the deluxe, fully edited and annotated World War II concentration camp diary of Odd Nansen, From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps.

For those of you keeping tabs (and who isn’t), here’s a brief scorecard:

  • 24,692 Miles traveled
  • 5,448 Website visitors
  • 5,206 Dollars donated
  • 75 Presentations
  • 64 Blog posts (this is #65)

I celebrated this important anniversary doing what I like to do best—talking about Nansen and his remarkable diary.  On April 18, I embarked on a ten-day, six-city tour, which ended in New York City, with stops along the way in several cities in New Jersey.  2,036 miles later, I can say it was all very worthwhile.

Virtually every stop along the way featured some fascinating encounter:

  • In Caldwell, NJ, an elderly audience member at the Public Library introduced herself to me after the talk, and explained that she had come to America decades ago by virtue of the Nansen Passport, a unique document pioneered by Fridtjof Nansen that allowed many stateless Europeans, particularly White Russians, to travel freely in the interwar period. [It so happens that I have written an article on the Nansen Passport which should be published later this year—stay tuned.]
  • In Upper Saddle River, NY, I was feted by the Sons of Norway Norrona Lodge. The members generously took up a collection for me, to help support the “cause,” and all such proceeds will go to the same recipients as the book’s royalties: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC and the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo.  On top of that, the Lodge presented me with a gift basket filled with Norwegian goodies.  While my wife and I have been thoroughly enjoying the chocolates (with exotic names like Firkløver, Melkesjokolade and Gullbrød), it may take a bit longer to work up the courage to open the tinned mackerel (a good source of Omega-3 it boasts!).  All I can say is: “Takk for maten!”
  • At Bernards Township Public Library I discovered that the Library Director, Ruth Lufkin, had a son who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy the same year as my son Owen. Go Navy, Beat Army!
  • A surprise visitor to the Summit Public Library was my brother-in-law, John McGowan and his son Nicholas. (A great steak dinner followed the talk, courtesy of John.)
  • A speech to the Old Guard of Princeton held the biggest surprise of all. Afterward I met a gentleman (whose privacy I will protect) who produced one of the actual breadboards used to smuggle parts of Nansen’s diary out of the camps at the close of the war.  It belonged to the grandfather of this man’s wife.  Talk about a real treasure!  That revelation will be hard to beat for quite some time, if ever.

Thomas Edison National Historical Park

The trip was not all work. In between appearances I spent a day at the site of Thomas Edison’s research labs in West Orange, NJ (now a National Historical Park). There, Edison, an autodidact, perfected the incandescent light bulb, the gramophone, and the movie camera, along with many other inventions (he ultimately held over 1,000 patents). The site also boasts the first movie production studio, and the first movie theater (in Edison’s library).  If you ever visit, ask for Harry, a volunteer with his own long career at Bell Labs and a passion for discussing all things Edison.

Edison’s Movie Production Studio

A day later, courtesy of my hosts Kathy Aleš and her husband Richard, I was able to attend a guest lecture by Lech Walesa, 1983 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, at Princeton University.  Although Walesa used an interpreter, his body language was at least as expressive as the actual speech.  He reminded the young audience that the Solidarity Movement had exactly zero chance of succeeding when it started, and yet it ultimately brought about the end of communist domination of Poland, and the end of communism altogether.  In other words any change, no matter how hopeless seeming, is possible.

Finally, I was able to spend time with an old friend, Samuel Hynes, the Woodrow Wilson Professor emeritus of Literature at Princeton University.  Sam has published extensively during his career (Flights of Passage, A Soldier’s Tale, A War Imagined, The Insubstantial Air, The Growing Seasons, among others), and, at age 93, isn’t slowing down much: he just published a new collection of essays and writings entitled On War and Writing (University of Chicago Press), which was recently reviewed in the New York Review of Books (by Max Hastings, one of my favorite historians).

During World War II Sam flew as a young Marine aviator in the South Pacific, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.   Afterwards he taught Literature at Swarthmore, Northwestern and Princeton.   [In the Introduction to his new book, entitled “Two Vocations,” Sam writes: “From then on they [the Professor and the Pilot] worked together—the Pilot writing and the Professor looking over his shoulder, watching for split infinitives.”] You may remember Sam as the first talking head to appear on Ken Burns’ miniseries “The War.”  When our conversation turned to favorite poets, Sam started reciting Yeats by heart—an amazing display—and altogether an amazing afternoon.  [I plan to use some of Sam’s writings in a future blog—stay tuned as well.]

Samuel Hynes

So, all in all, it was a trip to be remembered.  Thanks to all my friends along the way who provided hospitality and support.  You know who you are.

As I turned my 2,036th mile pulling into my driveway, late last Friday night, I was greeted by a welcoming sound:  the Eastern Whippoorwill had finally returned from his long sojourn in Mexico, and was busily singing out his mating/territorial call.  Music to my ears!

As I brought my bags into the house, I was reminded of those immortal words of Sam Gamgee on the final page of The Lord of the Rings: “He drew a deep breath.  ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.”

The Holocaust and Historical Truth

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Today, one day following International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Washington Post published a news story about the Polish government’s passage of a law “making it a criminal offense to mention Polish complicity in crimes committed during the Holocaust.”  According to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, the law is intended, not to “whitewash history, but to safeguard it and safeguard the truth about the Holocaust and prevent its distortion.”  Poles particularly object to the use of the term “Polish death camps,” which are Polish only insofar as the Nazis established the so-called Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełźec), and Auschwitz-Birkenau, on Polish soil.  The full text of the article is here.

The law still needs final approval from Poland’s Senate and president to become effective, which is expected.

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Center, said the law was “liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust.”

History, unfortunately, is never completely black and white.  Poland, as the epicenter of the Holocaust in many ways, has the largest number of individuals (6,706) recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”  This honor is bestowed only on those who, after rigorous investigation, are proven to have taken “great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust.”

These 6,706 represent fully over 25% of all individuals recognized by Yad Vashem.  By comparison, the second highest is the Netherlands, with 5,595 (including Jan and Miep Gies—mentioned here and here—who helped Anne Frank).  Norway has 67, including Sigrid Hellisen-Lund, a friend of Odd Nansen’s who worked closely with him in Nansenhjelpen, the organization he established to help refugees during the interwar period.  The United States has 5.

On the other hand, as Laurence Rees points out in his latest work, The Holocaust: A New History (PublicAffairs 2017):

“Poland, Hungary and Romania all enacted anti-Semitic legislation during the 1930s. . . .   In August 1936, for example, all Polish shops were required to display the name of the owner on their signs.  As a consequence it was obvious which shops belonged to Jews.  The following year Jews were forbidden from entering the medical profession, and restrictions were placed on their ability to practise [sic] law. . ..

The Polish government was also contemplating removing Jews from Poland altogether.  In early 1937 the Poles opened discussions with the French about the possibility of sending large numbers of Polish Jews to the island of Madagascar off the south-east coast of Africa . . ..

The Polish Madagascar initiative acted as a powerful reminder . . . that anti-Semitic initiatives were not just the preserve of the government of the Third Reich.  The desire of other European countries in the 1930s to persecute and even remove their Jews has largely been forgotten in the public consciousness today—dwarfed by the scale and ferocity of the subsequent Nazi Holocaust.”

The final word goes to my old Georgetown professor, Jan Karski (mentioned here), who is described in the article as a “famed resistance fighter” and who nevertheless acknowledged that the Poles’ attitude toward fellow Polish Jews was “ruthless, often without pity.”

While references to “Polish death camps” should more accurately refer instead to “death camps located by the Nazis in Poland,” to outlaw any mention of Polish complicity in the Holocaust is indeed to “whitewash history.”

Churchill’s Darkest Hour

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Gary Oldman as Churchill

On this day in 1965, Winston Churchill died, age 90.  So perhaps it is only fitting that yesterday the 90th Oscar nominations were announced, and among the leading contenders was “Darkest Hour,” a film that could easily have been titled “Churchill’s Darkest Hour.”  The film received a total of six nominations, ranging from obscure categories like Best Picture and Best Actor, to some highly contested categories (the ones you have to stay up till 11:55 pm to find out the winner), such as Best Makeup and Hairstyling.  I guess making Gary Oldman look convincingly as bald as Churchill is quite a skill. I enjoyed watching the movie thoroughly and highly recommend it.

Winston Spencer Churchill was a very complex man, one whose life spanned the reign of Queen Victoria to the space age, and included important roles in both World War I and World War II.  As with any complex, larger-than-life personality, he has, and will continue to have, his share of supporters and detractors.  But it is hard to conceive that anyone else could have carried Great Britain through when, alone, the country faced the Nazi juggernaut.  Churchill assumed the prime ministership on May 10, 1940.  By then Germany had crushed Poland in thirty days, occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia and Denmark, and overwhelmed Belgium in eighteen days.  France, which had fought for over four years during WWI, and helped defeat Germany, was invaded the same day and capitulated a mere forty-six days later.  (The country which held out the longest was Norway, a nation of less than four million, which took over two months to subdue.)

Churchill and England fought on, alone, with the United States officially neutral and its Congress still deeply isolationist, and with the Soviet Union bound by a nonaggression treaty with Germany itself.  It was not until Hitler committed the twin disasters, within a six-month period, of invading Russia and declaring war on the U.S., that the tide unexpectedly began to turn.

When Churchill assumed this arduous task, one that he would shoulder until the very closing days of the war, he was 65 years old, the age when most of us want nothing more than to retire.  I am 63 and am content to walk my dogs, write a few blogs (like this), make an occasional presentation about Odd Nansen’s fabulous diary, From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps, and tend my garden, and I consider that a pretty full life.  Whatever the source of Churchill’s energy was, it sustained him through many a dark hour, day, week, month and year before the outcome of World War II was assured.

In sustaining England, Churchill also sustained those who were prisoners of the Nazis.  Odd Nansen mentions Churchill in no less than eight of his diary entries, the first six weeks after his arrest.  By then Churchill had been Prime Minister for almost two years.  Here’s what Nansen writes on Friday, February 20, 1942:

“Churchill made his speech a week ago, explaining the why and how [of the fall of Singapore].  It was plain that all who had heard him were eminently optimistic, though we haven’t got hold of what he actually said.  In all probability he didn’t gild the situation, but no doubt gave expression as usual to his unshaken faith in the future and the final victory.  The certainty he gives our whole world!  The victory of which our whole world is as sure as he is!”

I certainly am going to watch the Oscars this year, and will even stay up to 11:55 pm if I have to.  And in a small way, I hope that the man who said “Never, never, never give up!” will get his due.

PS: The movie “Dunkirk” (which I’ve written about here) received eight Oscar nominations.  Yet another reason to watch the proceedings!

A Gulag Diary Surfaces

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From the New York Times

The New York Times ran a fascinating article yesterday about a palm-sized diary, written in the Soviet Gulag, which “slumbered in obscurity” for “nearly 70 years.”  Here’s the link.

Written by Olga M. Ranitskaya, who was arrested in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Purge, the 115-page diary uses a stick figure, “Little Weather Devil,” as an alter-ego to describe Ranitskaya’s experience working in the weather station at a labor camp in Kazakhstan.  In 2009 it arrived in the desk of Zoya Eroshok, a newspaper editor in Moscow.  It had been sent by the daughter of a Gulag survivor, but with no clue as to its original author other than a first name: Olga.

Reading the article, I was struck by the number of parallels between Ranitskaya’s work and Nansen’s diary.

Nansen was born in 1901; Ranitskaya in 1905.  She began writing in 1941; he in 1942.  Ranitskaya’s diary is believed to be the only one written in the Gulag to have survived; getting caught was sufficient grounds for execution.  Nansen’s diary is one of only a very small number of concentration camp diaries to have survived, of which only a handful have ever been translated into English.  As Nansen noted on February 25, 1944: “A Dutchman has been found out keeping a diary, and that may lead to disaster.”  I have previously written about the fragility of diaries (here).

Ranitskaya titled her diary “Work and Days” from an epic poem by Hesiod, a Greek poet.  As I have written (here), Nansen’s title might well have come from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.   Ranitskaya’s writing “reveals a very good knowledge of the language and literature.”  Nansen’s diary is undeniably eloquent, and replete with Biblical, classical and literary references.

According to Eroshok, Ranitskaya responded to evil “with something of quality, the quality of the drawings, the quality of the language and the quality of strong and positive feelings: her love for her son, her love of life, her love for people.”  The quality of Nansen’s sketches bespeaks a formidable artistic talent, and, as I discuss in my Introduction to Nansen’s diary, the entire work can be “viewed as one long love letter to Kari,” his wife, as well as his children, to say nothing of Nansen’s love for young Tommy Buergenthal (which I’ve written about here).  Eroshok also views the diary as a form of revenge against Stalin for all his victims.  As I also write in my Introduction, “In the final analysis, it is Nansen’s diary itself that may constitute his ultimate act of resistance,” quoting Primo Levi to the effect that “’testimony was an act of war against fascism.’”

It took eight years for Eroshok and Moscow’s Gulag History Museum to track down the identity of the diarist and publish “a small, handsome volume” which includes the record of Ranitskaya’s interrogation as well as other poems she wrote.  My journey from re-discovery of Nansen’s 60+ year-old diary to re-publication in a deluxe, annotated version with Vanderbilt University Press, took six years.

Finally, it is telling that the director of the Gulag History Museum, Roman V. Romanov, feels Russia must “get past the arguments over how many millions Stalin killed and focus instead on the fate of ordinary people.”  He writes: “’What’s important is to return to people’s fate and allow the viewers to be part of someone’s life.’”

Ironically, the first blog post I ever wrote, on September 3, 2015 (here), begins with a quote from none other than Stalin that one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic, and contains this observation: “Nansen’s diary is many things, but at one level it is an attempt to give a face, and personal story, or at least some recognition, to each individual he encountered, to bestow some dignity on them, notwithstanding their condition.”

A special shout-out to my friend Frank Schaberg who alerted me to this article.

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