History – Eastern Europe – education and deconstruction.com

Ivan’s War

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The Book of the Week is “Ivan’s War, Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945” by Catherine Merridale, published in 2006.

As is well known, by the mid-1920’s, Stalin had taken over Russia, in which there had been a revolution to turn the country Communist. Beginning in 1929, Stalin forced peasant-farmers to merge their land into collectives and adopt wrong-headed agricultural methods, resulting in millions and millions of deaths from famine. Elite schools in the cities were training the upper class (and a few poor boys) for leadership.

In spring 1937, Stalin ordered many top leaders in his government and military to be fired or tortured or killed, or a combination thereof. The younger soldiers had been brainwashed from birth to be anti-Fascist and therefore to hate the Germans, so they were confused when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939. Nevertheless, when WWII came, the Russian military incited the educated young men to lead the fight to protect mother Russia. Back home, their families were still starving.

In June 1940, the Soviet military was unpleasantly surprised by an attack on their Slavic lands by the German Luftwaffe. The now-enemy had knocked out a lot of military resources and Soviet troops had been disorganized and poorly equipped previously. Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man, used the occasion to inspire patriotism and incite additional hatred against the Germans.

Propaganda literally flew back and forth hot and heavy. German planes flying over Ukraine dropped leaflets that said Moscow had fallen and Stalin was dead. Turnover in the Red Army was extremely high due to: desertions, deaths from NKVD executions for desertions, and deaths from disease and enemy fire and bombardments.

In spring 1944, Soviet soldiers invaded Romania. They began to see peasants there and in Germany, Poland, France, Holland, Belgium and other capitalist places, who were living way better than they themselves had been, in their civilian lives. The young Soviet military men began to question how Communism was so great if they had been so economically poor.

Instead of setting fire to Romanian villages as they and the Germans had done to so many other battlegrounds as they were leaving, they looted corpses and appropriated farm animals, alcohol and material possessions for themselves. Black markets flourished.

When they finally marched into East Prussia and Budapest, the Soviets’ frenzy of hatred involved raping females, too. Peer pressure caused otherwise ethical men to become barbarians, and drunkenness made it easier to misbehave the way they did.

The Russian propaganda outlet “Pravda” portrayed the Soviets as victims of the Nazis, and called for revenge and reparations. It conveniently neglected to mention the atrocities they committed.

Stalin deflected blame from himself for millions and millions of Soviet deaths through the decades of his rule, by claiming he was suffering along with his people. He believed that Western capitalist cultures were a bad influence, so he demobilized the Russian Army from Germany in 1945– making them sign nondisclosure agreements. He also appeased them with a monetary bonus and (low quality) consumer goods. However, they were spied on by his intelligence service 24/7.

Stalin cast aspersions on the Jews during and after the war. One of numerous myths spread was that during the war, Jews held office jobs instead of fighting on the front lines. In 1945, Ukrainians in Kiev launched a pogrom.

The ravages of the war gave rise to adrenaline junkies with PTSD. After the war, they didn’t know what to do with themselves, and they continued to lead violent, empty lives. “Instead of aspiring to freedom, patriots would henceforth– wittingly or not– become complicit in the repression of the minorities, large-scale arrests, and a bleak and deadly dogma that had almost nothing in common with the libertarian promises that had drawn such crowds to Palace Square in the revolutionary months of 1917.”

After official histories of the war were published, Soviet censors prohibited the publishing of any additional war-related information. No one was allowed to see the archives. They were classified. Top secret.

Read the book to learn much more on the history of the Soviets’ experiences before, during and after WWII.

ENDNOTE: Speaking of non-disclosure and keeping up appearances, here’s a little ditty that describes Trump’s latest marital status.

FIRST LADY MELANIA

sung to the tune of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” with apologies to The Beatles, their estates and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Donald had a victory in the political race.

Melania is, standing by her man.

Donald said to Melania,

“You’ll help me save face. We’ll sign an agreement to maintain the Trump brand.”

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

Donald has a radical agenda in store.

Melania, must obey her king.

She’s stiff and aloof and doesn’t care anymore.

She knows she’s not allowed to say a thing.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For all of their years, their marriage is a BUS-iness act.

With previous kids, their family’re reality show stars…

of Donald’s and Melania’s contracts.

Donald’s the big winner in the transactional race.

Donald lets the children lend a hand.

Melania stays at home and does her pretty face,

and at events she’s loyally standing by her man.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For all of their years, their marriage is a BUS-iness act.

With previous kids, their family’re reality show stars…

of Donald’s and Melania’s contracts.

Donald’s the big winner in the transactional race.

Donald lets the children lend a hand.

Melania stays at home and does her pretty face,

and at events she’s loyally standing by her man.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For Donald it’s FUN.

But for Melania, it’s NOT!

the (sic) Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl

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The Book of the Week is “the [sic] Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl, How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis” by Arthur Allen, published in 2014. This disorganized story presented horribly confusing time frames, alternating between scenes of the main characters, with a large amount of historical context thrown in– which made the book’s title misleading, besides. But it provided information on a lesser-known aspect of WWII: the evolution of the typhus vaccine that saved countless lives.

Anyway, in 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire drafted the two doctors described in the story, as medics for the Kaiser’s army. Dr. Rudolf Weigl was born in 1883 in what is currently Czech Republic. Dr. Ludwik Fleck was born in 1896, and was Czech, Austrian and Polish. They both lived in the city of Lviv (aka Lwow or Lemberg) for a significant period in their lives. Weigl studied typhus there at the Polish National Health Institute of Hygiene (PZH).

Fleck opined that the contradictory medical journals of the 1930’s weren’t particularly useful, so doctors needed to use their personal smarts when diagnosing patients. Patients could be carriers of an illness, but not have symptoms themselves. For decades, Weigl was experimenting nonstop by breeding body lice (rather than head lice) as the spreaders of typhus– that fed on human blood. The guts of those lice were then injected with typhus-contaminated blood solution. He developed a vaccine that worked better than the competition’s.

Later on, during WWII, the German military ordered Weigl to refine the vaccine (because different strains of typhus appeared) to protect its soldiers. Fleck’s immediate boss was a spy for the SS (Security Service) who ordered him to do medical research that minimized the possibility that Aryans would contract a disease such as typhus, in the name of creating a master race. His ultimate boss was Heinrich Himmler.

Beginning in autumn 1939, new Soviet bosses imposed their will on Fleck and Weigl. Fleck previously had a private medical lab, but he was named head of the microbiology department of the new Ukrainian Medical Institute, led Lviv’s Sanitation and Bacteriological Laboratory, and conducted research at the new Mother and Child Hospital.

Weigl received and took the savvy advice that he should avoid joining the Communist Party, because inevitably, eventually, Stalin would turn against him and he would be thrown in the gulag, or worse. He also heeded the warning that he should engage in corruption only insofar as it helped him survive. Excessive corruption would get him in trouble. Different armies took over certain territories in Eastern Europe during the war years.

Beginning in summer 1941, fearing for his and his family’s life, Weigl cooperated with the Nazis rather than the SS and local German leaders in Lviv. His reasoning for insisting on keeping his private lab was that, if the Nazis killed him, he’d be viewed as a martyr. He let a German VIP help him supervise the research, though. He saved hundreds to thousands of lives of Jews of Polish origin. Their false identity papers allowed them to be hired as medical guinea pigs by having body lice feed on their blood.

Starting in the early 1940’s, the Nazis needed medical doctors who happened to be Jewish, so they spared them, but they compelled them to commit atrocities doing research. During wartime typhus epidemics, deaths of Polish and Soviet Jews were significantly higher than those of people of other ethnicities due to anti-Semitism. For, the Nazis ordered medical doctors to refrain from treating Jews in their quarantined ghettos. The SS needed the Jews’ slave labor in factories to further the war effort, so the Jews weren’t confined to the ghettos. They therefore spread typhus, anyway.

Through the years, the constantly-improved vaccines developed by Weigl were used (and spread far and wide in black markets) in Ethiopia, Manchuria, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. Britain, however, decided to take steps to kill the lice rather than muck about with a typhus vaccine.

Read the book to learn how American soldiers fared during times of typhus epidemics; plus much more about vaccines other than Weigl’s, about the Soviets on the Eastern Front, the history of Buchenwald, the adventures of Fleck and his family at Auschwitz, the fates of the people associated with different vaccines, and other ways various peoples combated typhus.

Shadows and Whispers

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“When I analyzed what passed for his domestic initiatives, it became clear that all of them were rehashings of earlier schemes and none addressed the fundamental problems of the country.”

-the author’s take on Konstantin Chernenko’s rule in 1984

The Book of the Week is “Shadows and Whispers, Power Politics Inside the Kremlin From Brezhnev to Gorbachev” by Dusko Doder, published in 1986 (prior to the historical revisionism and 20/20 hindsight of the collapse of Communism).

As is well known, Soviet leadership in the 1970’s consisted of sick, old men desperately clinging to power. Leonid Brezhnev turned 75 in December 1981. He ordered that school textbooks on twentieth-century Soviet history be rewritten to omit mentions of Stalin and Khrushchev. His own name was featured prominently. He passed away in November 1982. Two possible successors competed to take the vacant top spot. Konstantin Chernenko (a powerful figure in the Communist Party) and Yuri Andropov.

Prior to becoming the Soviet Union’s leader by the end of 1982, Andropov headed the KGB. The KGB’s tentacles consisted of about a half a million James-Bond wannabes– er, uh– operatives, worldwide. They purported to be journalists, diplomats or bureaucrats. Andropov was a reformer who purged the Soviet government of Brezhnev’s corrupt clique. However, he was ill too, and died in February 1984. Then Chernenko got his chance to exercise ultimate power, beating out Mikhail Gorbachev. The latter represented the younger generation, but had to bide his time, as he hadn’t paid his dues.

It wasn’t long– 1985, to be exact– before Gorbachev put his ambitious plans into effect, going further than Andropov to eliminate the “dead wood” from the ranks of Soviet leadership. The Old Guard was incensed at his radical plans.

Read the book to learn much more about the power struggles and personalities that shaped the Soviet Union from the mid-1970’s up until the book’s writing.

From Ghetto to Guerrilla

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The Book of the Week is “From Ghetto to Guerrilla, Memoir of A Jewish Resistance Fighter” by Samuel Lato, published in 2006.

The Jewish author was born in February 1925 in the town of Baranowicze in eastern Poland, near Belarus. In September 1941, the Germans encircled his community with barbed wire and formed a ghetto. About ten Jewish families were crammed together (with about a nine feet of space per person) in each house previously owned by gentiles– who had fled or were evicted.

Living conditions were unsanitary and repugnant. The Nazi-imposed curfew meant that people risked getting summarily shot if they visited the outhouse after dark. So a pail was placed in the middle of the floor of the people-stuffed house. The author wrote, “The Nazi hatred permeated the entire town in the same way that the [latrine] pail stank up our whole house.”

The victims suffered many hardships, with only rationed bread, potatoes and flour for food. The able-bodied were forced to do hard manual labor to help the German war effort. Through the war years, the Germans committed atrocities against the Jews on their major holidays– herding a few thousand Jews into the woods, forcing the victims to: strip naked and dig their own graves; after which, the soldiers would shoot them dead.

In March 1942, the author left his parents and much younger brother to join the Resistance movement. A group of “partisans” hid in the woods of Poland, planning and carrying out life-saving operations of their fellow Jews, and secret acts of sabotage against the German war machine. The author began smuggling bullets, medicine and guns to his fellow Resistance members, risking his life with the help of his mission-teammates, traveling on foot long distances.

In spring 1943, the author was chosen to fight for a KGB-sponsored special-forces militia to help defeat the Germans. The Russians hated the Germans as much as the Jews did. In the following war-years, he and his fellow fighters destroyed by fire: a post office / telegraph and telephone station, bridges, a lumberyard, a bakery and a German-war-supply warehouse. The Polish military offered to recruit the author, but he declined because he knew that Polish people in general tended to be anti-Semitic.

Toward the end of the war, the author ended up in Gutstadt in East Prussia. The Russian militia occupied a bank building where they emptied out the vaults. They used some of the then-worthless paper currency to start fires in the pot-bellied stoves to heat the building. For, the winter of 1945 was extremely cold.

The aforesaid Baranowicze had a population of approximately 13,000 when it was turned into a Jewish ghetto. Read the book to learn how many Jews were left alive after its 1944 liberation by the Russians, plus much more about the author’s near-death, and life-affirming experiences during the war.

Dobryd

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The Book of the Week is “Dobryd” by Ann Charney, published in 1996. Prior to WWII, the author’s Jewish family owned a house in Dobryd in the country of Poland. This suspenseful personal account described how the author and her immediate family survived and recovered from the traumas and deprivations of the war. Hint: they were not sent to a concentration camp. The book appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, Bibliography and an index.

In the late summer of 1945, when they were informed the war was over, the author, her family, and fellow survivors were still starving to death. They savored the luxury of finding firewood in order to make a sauna of sorts, and “Occasionally someone would bring a few sugar cubes and then the evening would become a true party.” They entertained themselves by playing a harmonica and telling each other stories.

The author wrote about the ravages of the war: “I scarcely noticed the landscape of ruins we passed. It was simply the place where I lived, to be taken for granted.”

The author recounted an anecdote in which the Jewish survivors who moved into abandoned houses in Bylau (which has since been renamed; also in Poland) were distressed by a cultural misunderstanding. The Jewish relief agency had marked their houses with a red cross with the good intention of indicating they should receive food parcels. The emotionally-spent survivors assumed (wrongly this time) that yet again, “… the Poles were about to practice their traditional rite, the terrorizing and murder of Jews.”

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s experiences during and after the war, and how her family decided to start a new life in a place other than their homeland. For decades, occupying imperialist powers (Soviets and Germans especially) had repeatedly made them feel numbness, self-pity, rage and hatred. They knew that wasn’t going to change anytime soon.

Speaking of numbness, self-pity, rage and hatred, here is a song about the current emotional climate in the United States in connection with the spying going on. Hint: It is worse than ever.

Under presidents LBJ and Nixon, American males of military age were under constant threat their lives would be disrupted or prematurely ended due to a war.

Currently, the U.S. government is data-mining in a way that tracks where all Americans (innocent as well as guilty) are, what they are doing, and a lot of what they are saying– which makes every man, woman and child vulnerable to: defamation from the lies and smears of political vengeance, cancel culture, victimization with regard to financial and other crimes; not to mention, makes them subjected to feelings of violation– when the vast majority are truly innocent (never mind the small percentage of cases in which truly guilty sociopaths have hubris syndrome.)

I THINK I’LL PROBE YOU

sung to the tune of “I Think I Love You” with apologies to the Partridge Family, and to whoever owns the song’s intellectual property rights.

I’m reading, that public figures, have-no-privacy.

Like all at once, we’re naked,

from their desire to get even, make us pay.

Big Brother’s here to stay.

The Fourth Amendment is in shreds,

and HAS me seeing red.

The Patriot-ACT provisions said:

I think I’ll probe you! (I think I’ll probe you)

Our nosy, government gathers-our-data.

There’s too much to deal with.

They say we have an enemy within.

Without spies, the criminals win.

But political DONors profit more.

Against their-foes, leaders-SETtle scores.

Hey, there’s a Chinese balloon…

I think I’ll probe you! (I think I’ll probe you)

I think I’ll probe you!

So what are they so afraid of?
Their what-about-ism is tiresome.
Politics, there is no cure for.
I’ll acCUSE you, before you accuse me.
It’s a new McCarthy-Era today.
We’re all guinea pigs this way.

We can’t fight what we’re up against.

But we do know what it’s all about.

We’ve got so much to worry about.

Hey! I think I’ll probe you!

Really, there IS cause for worry.

Current alpha-MALES will never be happy.

And if you say “Hey, go away,” they won’t.

Reform this nation, they don’t.

We’d better elect NEW blood and MOVE on.

They’ve worn OUT their case.

They will probe you to your face.

And you don’t deserve that.

I think I’ll probe you! (I think I’ll probe you)

I think I’ll probe you! (I think I’ll probe you)…

Sunflower in the Snow

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The Book of the Week is “Sunflower in the Snow, Tales From A Wartime Childhood” by Rachel Patron, published in 2020.

The author was born in January 1936 in Bialystock (in Poland). Her family’s textile-dyeing factory was requisitioned by the Soviets when they occupied their portion of Poland in autumn 1939. The family moved in with extended relatives elsewhere in Poland. In spring 1940, they moved back to Bialystock to their prewar house. But the NKVD requisitioned that, too.

Good news: The family wasn’t sent to a concentration camp. Bad news: The family was sent to Siberia in summer 1941, where they almost froze and starved to death, anyway. Their way of life was turned upside-down, due to all kinds of political, economic, religious and linguistic changes wrought by the War; to name just a few:

After the Germans broke up with the Soviets, the former sought to arrest all Communists and Socialists. The author’s father and much older brother were taken away by the Commissar’s thugs to serve as slave labor, and in the Red Army, respectively.
There was bartering in black markets.
The atheist Soviets canceled Christmas.
The author’s family spoke Yiddish among themselves because the Soviets did not speak it, but they spoke Russian to local officials.

When she was an adolescent, after various long interruptions of her formal education due to the government’s closing of schools for ideological reasons, the author was told she was a Socialist Zionist. This entailed:

atheism, which meant the author didn’t have to observe a kosher diet; and
the Law of Return– automatic citizenship for all Jews around the world after Israel declared its independence in May 1948.

Read the book to learn: more details of the author’s experiences, traumas specific to her family, and what became of them.

Eastward to Tartary

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The Book of the Week is “Eastward to Tartary, Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus” by Robert D. Kaplan, published in 2000. JUST A FEW YEARS PRIOR TO 9/11, the author experienced life in unstable regions of the world. This was an important volume because all the propaganda– er, uh– literature that was penned thereafter, reflects a post-major-historical-event bias of 20/20 hindsight, revisionism, and conspiracy theories (which include all manner of repulsive, libelous fabrications). Not that Kaplan could predict specific historical trajectories for his destinations. For, he noted that individuals (and of course, unexpected natural disasters) can be a disruptive force, and that is why history is not entirely predictable.

The author started his journey in early 1998, and finished in 1999. As is well known, there were lots of ethnic hatreds to go around in the subjects of his itinerary– hatreds that were perpetuated by propaganda. Still are.

Syria had always been a politically unstable territory. It experienced coups in 1949, 1954, 1961, 1966 and 1970. It felt threatened when Israel allied with Turkey in the early 1990’s. After Lebanon’s civil war ended in 1990, Syria controlled Lebanon militarily and financially: to protect itself from Israel, and reap $6 billion annually from Lebanon’s economy. In a small country of three million people, with limited employment opportunities, the Lebanese poor have to look for work outside their country.

After peace was more or less restored, the Lebanese moneyed class and foreign investors gentrified Beirut through construction bonds and bank secrecy. Syrians held the low-paying construction jobs in Beirut. At the end of the 1990’s, Lebanon thus had a $16 billion debt and a bad credit rating.

Another sign that regression was a possibility for Lebanon in the years after the book’s writing, is that it was erecting no war memorials at all. Russia has an excessive number of them and dwells on them too much. As can currently be seen, factors other than remembering-the-past in-order-not-to-repeat-it, must be at work in Russia. “Rather than reform or soul-searching, Lebanon had sunk into collective amnesia and rampant consumerism.” Poor, decadent Lebanon. Although Lebanon suffered from too much ideology, the country of Jordan (which also doesn’t have oil) didn’t fall victim to it because its royal family depended on Bedouins and traders. The latter’s location is a key income-producer from transportation of goods, tourism and pilgrimages.

During and after the USSR breakup, organized crime flourished in Romania and Bulgaria. The latter applied for NATO membership in March 1997. But Russia, which held the purse-strings on Bulgaria’s natural gas pipeline, threatened to terminate its energy supply unless it allowed Russia to take over its organized crime networks.

The author bribed a police officer to board a cargo ship with primitive accommodations, to travel from Baku to Turkmenistan. It took sixteen hours. The common people residing in the latter had a low standard of living and led simple, unhappy lives due to Soviet domination since the Russian Revolution around 1918. In the same region, despite the discovery of oil, the people of Azerbaijan actually saw their standard of living fall, because their Soviet overlords no longer guaranteed them a decent pension. The author’s interviewees favored the NATO bombing of Serbia and social safety nets, as their idea of politics consisted of “might makes right” and feed everyone.

A history professor told the author that the only way Syria and Iraq could develop in a civil manner was if a capitalistic, middle-class military regime was to restore order. Good luck with that.

Read the book to learn much more about various countries’ combinations of political, economic, religious and geographic traits that have largely influenced their progress or regression in history. Along these lines, an American pop song that was released in late 1998 contained timely commentary on the United States. Little has changed since then, but here’s a bit of an update on that song.

IT IS WHAT IT IS
sung to the tune of “You Get What You Give” (the Official Music Video) with apologies to the New Radicals.

One, two, one, two, three, ow!

Gauge the winds.
We got the Dreamers’ crises.
Age of green, back and forth of hist’ry.
So low down, some are still spewing sleaze.

Secrecy, which of course never ends.
Every time, whistleblow’rs buck-the-trend.
The accused-balk, then-they-deny-till-they-die.

But when the axe is falling,
THEY test all their friends, friends.
The means are justified, by the ends.

We’ve got some debts coming due.
There’s no doubt, we’ve got some debts coming due.
Right or Left, this nation’s gonna pull through.
Politics, is a DAMN dirty biz.
Can’t forget, that it is what it is.

ChickENS comin’ home, oh yeah.
Never stops, we’re IN for it now.

2023, we’ll begin our prez-race.
They’re so mean, but we’ll watch a court case.
The-usual-sus-PECTS, will attempt to save face.

But when the axe is falling,
we enGAGE in hostile debate, debate.
We feel our democracy’s dying. Just wait.

America, won’t fall apart.
We’ve got free-dom, and we’ve got art.
We’ll find our way. We always do. Enjoy the view.

There’s no doubt, we’ve got some debts coming due. Aah-aah. Aah-aah.
The truth, will out.
Well, it is what it is.

Health insurance IS improving.
Actions AGainst Trump are moving.
Acts-of-obstruction are easy-proving.
Big LAWS are passed with GOP GROO-ving.

Profiteers pu-shing injections.
More celebs running-in elections. Cringeworthy. You’ll see voter-de-FECtions.
STAY around. There’ll be more insPECtions.

Don’t be alarmed, Right or Left…

Fighting Back – BONUS POST

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The Bonus Book of the Week is “Fighting Back, a Memoir of Jewish Resistance in WWII” by Harold Werner, published in 1992. This slim volume contained a detailed, suspenseful account of one man’s survival story.

Born the oldest of six siblings in 1918 in eastern Poland, the author was a Jew typical for his generation. He spoke Yiddish and Polish. He spent his childhood in Gorzkow, a small farming village where his fellow religionists at an early age took up a trade such as tailoring, blacksmithing, shoemaking, or carpentering. They bartered with the non-Jews, who were farmers. The villagers spent their leisure time playing soccer or ping-pong, attending movies, or opera, or boating.

Poland declared independence in 1918, after the Americans and French helped them defeat the Bolsheviks. As is well known, after the death of the dictator Joseph Pildsudski in May 1935, the reigning right-wing National Democratic party, also known as Endecia or Endek, especially scapegoated and violently oppressed Poland’s Jews.

When the Germans attacked Poland in September 1939, they indiscriminately bombed residential buildings in Warsaw; in one of which was the author’s knitting machines– with which he had previously more or less, made a living, making winter sweaters. The following month, he, some of his family, and other people he knew, fled Warsaw on foot eastward to then-Russian-occupied territory.

The author thus began a years-long ordeal, suffering extreme physical hardship– alternately hiding from and, with his fellow Resistance fighters– sabotaging the war efforts of the Nazis in Poland and eastern Ukraine. He joined a group of partisans called Army Ludowa.

Even when the Polish Jews who had survived the war by evacuating or hiding thought their lives were no longer threatened, they still had nothing to live for. The author lamented, “…Jews had no homes to return to and no families to go back to … our mission was to fight, take revenge, destroy the enemy.” The ones who had stayed at the war’s beginning were killed in bombings or shootings in their expropriated homes, or in deportations to the death camp called Sobibor or killed in the Wlodawa ghetto.

All through history, Poles had always had a reputation for anti-Semitism. But the war had stirred up a frenzy of hatred that the Jews of the Polish Resistance felt against the sociopathic, sadistic Nazis and their collaborators– which included German and Polish security and law officers and tattling villagers.

Read the book to learn of how the author lived before his life was turned upside-down, the acts of kindness certain people displayed, the hatreds of others, and the numerous times he cheated death during his wartime experiences.

Speaking of a frenzy of hatred, here’s a question for the 2024 presidential candidates. As is well known, the campaign forecast is: extremely cloudy with 100% chance of shock and outrage.

DO YOU REALLY WANT TO RULE THE WORLD?

sung to the tune of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” (the studio version) with apologies to Tears For Fears.

Welcome to some strife.
Your party’s got your back.
Even while you Tweet, morons and nut-cases track your every action, you won’t get no satisfaction.
Do you really want to rule the world?

It’s your time to shine,
but you must STAY the course,
feeding the grapeVINE.

If you CAN, preserve our freedoms and our pleasures,
without bullying or extreme measures,
we will LET you rule the world.

There’s no place where the SMEARS
won’t find you.
Dodging scandals while the media comes sniffing around.
When they do, your lawyers will be right behind you.

So sad that money rules you.
Social-media approval fools you.
Do you really want to rule the world?

We can’t stand this national division.
Charisma will gain you White House admission.
Do you really want to rule the world?

ACTUALLY dispense with the lies and the greed, please.
We’re fed up with the hypocrisy and sleaze.
Do you really want to rule the world?

We need freedoms and our pleasures,
without bullying or extreme measures.
Do you really want to rule the world?

Free – BONUS POST

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The Bonus Book of the Week is “Free: A Child and A Country at the End of History” by Lea Ypi, published in 2021.

According to the book (which appears to be credible although it lacks Notes, Sources, References, or Bibliography and an index), Albania’s monarchist government and business leaders threw in with their Italian invaders in 1939. In 1944, the Italians retreated and Albania’s occupation by the Soviets resulted in one-Party rule. The practice of organized, monotheistic religions was banned, but Albanians worshiped a real person– a founding-father and WWII military hero named “Uncle Enver.” He severed Albania’s diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia after the war.

The Albanian author, born in September 1979, was indoctrinated to believe that her country was one of the freest on earth. Never mind that the common people had to stand in line for hours and hours daily or sometimes longer (they were allowed placeholders) to obtain such basic necessities as milk, cheese, kerosene, etc. through a voucher system. In addition, her childhood was fraught with lies about her great-grandfather and others in her family’s social circles.

Ironically, just as pedigree among the wealthy in the United States denotes social status, so the “biography” among ordinary Albanians determined whether one would be allowed to join the socialist (political) Party, and determined one’s reputation, and thus one’s work and social activities in daily life. It was guilt by association; one was guilty just by having politically unpopular ancestors, as had the author. Albanians were required, however, to attend meetings at their local civic associations.

In December 1990, there occurred a major political turning point in Albania’s history: free and fair multi-party elections; a turning point in its economics too, as its government heeded bad financial advice it received from Western powers, that invited corruption similar to that of Bolivia’s (See this blog’s post, “Jeffrey Sachs”). In the early 1990’s, for the first time (!), the author found out about or experienced: air conditioning, bananas, traffic lights, jeans, chewing gum, Mickey Mouse, AIDS, anorexia and plenty of other cultural givens the democratic peoples of the world took for granted.

Read the book to learn of the trials and tribulations specific to Albania’s people when they saw how the other half lived (hint: World Bank meddling, a civil war, education shenanigans and more).

Irena’s Children

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The Book of the Week is “Irena’s Children, The Extraordinary Woman Who Saved Thousands of Children From the Warsaw Ghetto” by Tilar J. Mazzeo, adapted by Mary Cronk Farrell, published in 2016.

At the start of WWII, Irena worked as a senior administrator in a Warsaw social welfare office that oversaw soup kitchens. A socialist, she was politically active. Less than two weeks after invading Poland in the first week of September of 1939, the Germans surrounded Warsaw. Nazis imposed martial law and abducted professionals they feared might influence Poles to fight back– teachers, priests, landowners, politicians, etc.

Irena became a member of the Polish Resistance, a secret social network who helped save the lives of Jews. She and her staff fabricated statistics, interviews and compiled lists of (fictional) non-Jewish names of social-program recipients in order to funnel necessities to the Jews.

In autumn 1940, Hitler assembled a committee of Jews to impose anti-Semitic laws to strip Jews of their assets and dignity. Eventually, the victims were banned from, or had draconian restrictions placed on them at work, school, in the streets and practically everywhere else, and the German authorities brainwashed all non-Jews into socially ostracizing Jews.

In October 1940, Nazis herded Jews into a ghetto– forced Jews to move into and live in a small geographic sector of Warsaw. The sector was sealed off via a wall. Germans claimed they were segregating the Jews to stem the spread of typhus. Profiteers had a field day, via the usual price-gouging, bribery, protection-money, etc. Profiteers included but were hardly limited to landlords, government officials, sellers of work-permits, and food smugglers. The ghettoizing didn’t make sense, of course, because the crowded conditions increased the spread of disease! In November 1940, a smear campaign sealed the deal that the Jews spread diseases.

These days, propaganda campaigns reach the masses at the speed of light, and whoever can spread their messages more convincingly and prolifically, wins the game. More specifically in the United States, politicians do this through their own communications, and through the media, driven by money. They give stuff away for free (via their donors) only insofar as they think doing so will benefit them in the long-term. For the last few decades, the American government has brainwashed the people into socially ostracizing each other for their political views. It is better for the majority of the population to be divided (as long as violence does not reach the point of civil war), than for it to devolve into the chaos of a cult of personality under a Hitler or Stalin.

Anyway, Irena, a Catholic, risked her life (!) to save the lives of as many Jewish children as she could. She sewed vials of typhus vaccine, toys and money into her clothing to hide them from the Nazis when she entered the ghetto with fake papers saying she was a disease-control worker.

Garbage, vermin and sewage began to accumulate in the yards of the ghetto, as the neighborhoods lacked indoor plumbing and modern sanitation services. “Each morning, the dead lined the streets, piled naked and covered with old newsprint and stones.” People stole the clothing of, and rats gnawed at, the corpses. Luckily, the Nazis were germophobes, so they usually allowed Irena to pass through their checkpoints with minimal harassment.

All identity papers stated one’s religion, and food-ration cards allotted the Jews 184 calories a day. Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were forced to wear a blue star (rather than a yellow one) on their clothing. Winter 1941 was especially freezing. To add injury to injury, bombs rained down on Warsaw, bringing more deaths and destruction.

In January 1942, after a few Gestapo officers died of disease, a senior official ordered the roundup of street urchins who were, or were perceived to be Jewish (those not checked for circumcision were judged only on facial features– like the victims of genocide in Rwanda). Many urchins were orphans. Irena and others smuggled necessities to them, and helped them sneak out of or into the ghetto (whatever the circumstances dictated), when they couldn’t be placed in orphanages via fake papers.

Read the book to learn of the ways the Polish Resistance creatively outsmarted the Nazis’ control and dominance over the Polish people, and a wealth of details about Irena’s selfless, clever activities to save lives (hint: one of her friends remarked, “The Germans… were such an orderly, rule-following people, that they couldn’t imagine anyone would do something so outrageously brazen as have fifty Jewish people coming and going in front of them.”), and learn the population estimates of Jews and non-Jews before and after the war.