A Thanksgiving story to behold

I’ve previously written of my heart transplant recipient friend and his gratitude because his heart donor gave him a second chance at life [1]. I was reminded of him by a story on the Jerusalem Post website in mid November. Titled ‘Canadian Shoah survivor reunites with Polish savior’, it tells of Holocaust survivor Sara Marmurek, 88, who was reunited with Wladyslaw Misiuna, 85, who rescued her from the Nazis [2]. They hadn’t seen each other for 65 years. (Their New York meeting was arranged and funded by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous [3], a New York-based non-profit organization which identifies, honours and financially supports non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.) Misiuna’s reunion with Marmurek (pictured) was timed to coincide with the Thanksgiving holiday. Their joint story’s one of heroic bravery almost beyond belief, coupled with rare humility: When asked why he did what he did, Misiuna said ‘I acted as a human…who was able to help and not only look at [the persecution] and walk away’. Marmurek said ‘I thank God that I have the opportunity to say thank you to him in person for what he did’. What a story. It’s redolent of an earlier meeting between other Holocaust survivors and their saviour [4]. How many people have their lives literally saved by one person, and can thank that person face-to-face? Not many, I reckon. Of course my friend couldn’t personally thank his heart transplant donor. But he’s thanked the donor’s family – which is the next best thing.

Review Tuesday: 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'

Today’s ‘Review Tuesday’. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The 2006 novel by Irish writer John Boyne [1] has sold over 5M copies [2]. I haven’t read it. But last Friday night Sweetheart Vivienne and I watched its 2008 film adaption [3, 4]. Set during WWII, it’s the story of Bruno (an 8-year-old German lad) and Shmuel (an 8-year old Jewish inmate of a concentration camp commanded by Bruno’s father). The film follows the two boys’ growing friendship – contrasting Bruno’s naivete with Shmuel’s resigned knowingness – set against the backdrop of Bruno’s father’s inhuman call to patriotic duty and his mother’s consequent revulsion. Its ending’s simultaneously shocking and poignant. The storyline’s compelling but the screenplay doesn’t nearly do it justice. I couldn’t accept German characters speaking the King’s English, and concentration camp inmates looking rather well fed. But my biggest qualm’s the boys’ meeting place – a quiet corner of the camp perimeter, unmonitored by guards, and with scant fencing diggable beneath with a small spade. The movie’s low budget doesn’t justify its audience’s need to suspend belief. Depicting concentration camps without the requisite deprivation and desperation’s unforgivable. So in summary I can only summon up a 2-star rating for this movie. But I’m heartened that 65-70 years after the Holocaust, it continues to inspire filmmakers – even if, as in this case, the films are low budget, stylised and disappointing adaptions of truly wonderful stories. Pity.

Yom HaShoah

Yesterday was Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laGvura (יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה – literally Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day [1]. It commemorates the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and also the heroic Jewish resistance in that period. In 2008 I wrote of it thus [2]. I feel the same now. Only more so.

Yesterday IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi (pictured) said: ‘…in the name of all the millions who never got to witness the realization of their dream, I stand here today as the commander of the Jewish defending force, the Israel Defense Forces, and pledge on behalf of us all: We shall never again stand defenceless and in the mercy of others. Never again will Jewish children stare in fear begging to be spared. Never again will we let our enemies determine the fate of the Jewish people. We will be able to protect our sons’. [3]

Yesterday over in Foxs Lane, darling Kate wrote of gratitude and she invited her readers to write of their top four reasons to be grateful [4]. Me? I’m grateful my birth in 1947 was in Australia and not Europe. I’m grateful Israel exists. I’m grateful the IDF is strong and brave. And I’m grateful Israel and the IDF will face down Iran when literally the entire rest of the world is too immoral and cowardly to do so.

Never again.

Amen.

farmdoc's blog post number 533

Life here in Mole Creek has its rhythms. Certain things are done on certain days. Even at certain times. So Saturday night’s DVD night. Two nights ago, after I’d set my clocks forward for daylight saving, with cuppa in hand I settled down with The Counterfeiters. This 2007 Austrian-German film’s based on a true World War II story – of Operation Bernhard, a secret Nazi plan to destabilise the UK by flooding its economy with forged currency. Set in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, its main character’s Salomon ‘Sally’ Sorowitsch – a Jew, and the most expert counterfeiter of all. It’s a superb film. In every way. So I’m not surprised it won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the 2008 Academy Awards. Though to my knowledge none of my family was involved in it, as a Jew I can’t help but be affected by the Holocaust. Profoundly so. And I can’t help but wonder how it’d been different had Israel existed then. The Holocaust’s incontrovertible, but its deniers still rant on. Foremost is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who in late September vomited up his latest spew of Holocaust denial bile [1] Until last Sunday I thought the main reason for his Holocaust denial was political – as I doubt he’s psychotic (but you never know). Then this. Aha! The last jigsaw piece clicks into place. Once a Jew, always a Jew, eh Mahmoud. You counterfeit Muslim.

farmdoc's blog post number 509

In 1939, due to the foresight, humanity and sheer bloody-mindedness of Nicholas Winton, then a 29-year-old British stockbroking clerk, 669 Jewish children were saved from the clutches of the Nazis. Between March and August 1939 eight trains carried to Britain the Czech children who otherwise would almost certainly have died in concentration camps [1, 2]. Last Friday, 22 of the 669 were reunited with their 100-year-old saviour – now Sir Nicholas – who’s come to be called the ‘British Schindler’ [3, 4]. To tears and applause, a steam engine that’d brought them on the re-enacted journey from Prague, pulled into the very same platform at London’s Liverpool Street Station where as virtual orphans they’d disembarked 70 years ago. Speaking to the crowd, Sir Nicholas joked: ‘It's wonderful to see you all after so many years – don’t leave it quite so long until we meet here again’. A humble man, he concealed his achievements for decades – even from his wife. And he rejected the comparison with Oskar Schindler, who saved about 1,200 Jews in the war, saying that unlike the German his actions never put him in danger. The 669 Winton Children and their descendants now total over 5,000. What a man. What a story.

farmdoc's blog post number 429

Today, like last Thursday, I write of an inspiring woman with Holocaust connections. Ashamedly I’d never heard of her until I read pages 79-80 of The Brain That Changes Itself. On 22 April 1909 Rita Levi-Montalcini (pictured) was born in Turin to a Sephardic Jewish family. She graduated in medicine from the Turin medical school in 1936. Two years later, when Mussolini barred Jews from practising medicine and doing scientific research, she fled to Brussels. When the Nazis threatened Belgium, she returned to Turin and did neurological research in a secret laboratory in her bedroom. She fashioned surgical probes from sewing needles. In 1940 when the allies bombed Turin she fled to Piedmont where, on a table in a mountain villa, she experimented with eggs from a local farmer. After each experiment she ate the eggs. After the war, she and biochemist Stanley Cohen isolated a protein that promoted nerve growth. They called it nerve growth factor, or NGF. As a result they were awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Almost three months ago, when Levi-Montalcini turned 100-years-old, she became the first, and only, Nobel Laureate to do so. Since 2001, she’s been an Italian Senator with lifetime tenure. On 22 April 2009 – her 100th birthday – she was feted with a birthday party at Rome’s city hall. Though with impaired vision and hearing, this remarkable woman has vowed to remain a force in Italian politics. I salute her.

farmdoc's blog post number 424

The word ‘hero’ is bandied around a fair bit these days. And I’m as guilty as anyone. I’ve mentioned it in 20 of the previous 423 Farmdoc’s Blog posts. Last 22 August I quoted a 3-part dictionary definition of ‘hero’. The first part’s ‘someone distinguished by exceptional courage and nobility and strength’. Today I write about two Holocaust heroes – one very well known, the other regrettably not. Irena Sendler (pictured), born in 1910, was a Polish Catholic social worker, and member of the Polish Underground in Warsaw in World War II. Having anticipated the plight of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews, she got permission to work in the Ghetto as a sanitary inspector. And she saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Ghetto in boxes, suitcases and trolleys, their cries masked by the bark of her dog. Irena was eventually caught, and the Nazis tortured her and broke her arms and legs. She survived. In a glass jar buried under a tree in her backyard she’d kept the names of all the children she’d smuggled out. Most of them had been adopted or placed in foster homes. After the war she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it. Most had perished. Irena was nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. (Al Gore won it.) She died in 2008. She was a true hero. Today’s other Holocaust hero? Anne Frank, whose 80th birthday was six days ago.

farmdoc's blog post number 283

Last 13 December I wrote of anti-semitism. Exactly two weeks later, Operation Cast Lead began. During its 22 days, over 250 anti-semitic incidents were reported world-wide – including Australia – compared with 80 the year before. The Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism said a major factor was comparisons between Israel’s actions in Gaza and Nazi Germany’s during the Holocaust. Perpetrators include the Vatican’s justice and peace minister, and a high-level Norwegian diplomat. On 27 January 1945 – 64 years ago yesterday – Auschwitz, the most infamous of Nazi concentration camps, was liberated. In 2005 the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution (A/RES/60/7) designating 27 January as an annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, and condemning unreservedly all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, whenever they occur. Perhaps someone should tell German-born Pope Benedict XVI who late last week welcomed back into the Roman Catholic Church British bishop Richard Williamson – who was excommunicated in 1988 after being ordained without Vatican permission, and who in an interview broadcast just before the Pope’s announcement, said historical evidence ‘is hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler’. That’s not free speech, Pope. That’s beyond the pale.

farmdoc's blog post number 13

I can hardly grasp the concept of six million people. Over 25% of Australia’s population. Sixty MCGs full. It’s a huge number of people. To be killed. To be murdered in cold blood, actually, for no other reason than they were Jewish. And to be remembered. But remembered they were – every single one – yesterday, which was the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day; in Hebrew Yom Ha'shoah. Yesterday was a day not only to remember and honour the slaughtered millions, but also a day of rededication to the prevention of all future genocide. It is no coincidence that the Holocaust deniers – you and I know who they are, the President of Iran is number one on the list – are the same lunatic racist megalomaniacs who rant on about obliterating Israel from the map. Israel! That tiny nation born a couple of years after the Holocaust, is the new element in the equation, and she is under no illusion that when push comes to shove, as increasingly it looks like doing, her sons and daughters will be responsible for their own destiny. Whereas the yellow stars that the Nazis forced the Jews to wear signified powerlessness, the blue Star of David is a symbol of freedom, democracy, pride and power – which is perhaps the most meaningful way of all to remember and honour the six million.