A BLAZE that broke out at a crematorium north of Brisbane has been brought under control by emergency services.

A Department of Community Safety spokeswoman said no evacuations from the crematorium on Uhlmann Road at Burpengary were necessary.

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Playing For Time – Fania Fenelon

I usually jump into “the Jamboree” with a menorah twisted into the shape of a swastika and take swipes at Survivors for torturing me with memoirs that read like fucking police reports.  So much material, so little talent and so many publishing houses afraid to fact check or edit as if it would be too great an insult.  As if there could be no personality disordered, lying Jews coming out of the camps.   I’ve read memoirs where the Survivor claims to have been tattooed yet was never held at Auschwitz-Birkenau – the only camp to use tattoos.  Not every story is true – and this is in no way an agreement with those inbreds who believe the Holocaust never happened.  I’ve made the mistake of battling these people on Youtube and it’s like debating with a dead baby.  A dead Aryan baby.  But these douchebags are conspicuously absent on video entries of an old Nazi in a fury over the naysayers because he is being denied his due as a good murdering German.  There is footage of these guys.  And they look like regular grandfather-y types.  Imagine sending your kid for a sleepover with that grandfather?   I’d rather my kid hit a piñata with a pedophile.  Yeah, that’s why I don’t have kids.  I probably would make bad choices like that.

So after 30 or 40 memoirs, you know where the story is going:  I was wealthy, the Nazis arrived, Pols took all our belongings, we lived 180 to a room behind a brick wall, we traveled days by cattle car, we were beaten and starved, Americans came and gave us chocolate as we lie dying with typhus and then I found my sister in Israel.  It becomes like that after a while.

But French singer and musician Fania Fenelon’s memoir, Playing For Time, follows none of that.  A Jewish member of the French Resistance (a thing I think the French greatly exaggerate), this well known cabaret singer was imprisoned in the French camp Drancy before being shipped off to Auschwitz -where she played in the camp orchestra.  Auschwitz was a full service concentration camp, doncha know.   Her book is wall to wall character observations not only about the other musicians and the Nazis responsible for their existence as such including that cunt Irma Grese, but about her own self.  And she holds back nothing.  Reading her accounts of incidents with Grese were so frightening I found I wasn’t breathing as I read.  She seemed to document the sadism of this young beauty which rivaled that of the most disgusting of the SS with great shock but without exaggeration or emotionalism.  The believability of it made the tales of this ugly bitch’s cruelty come into focus.   Yeah, Fenelon expresses shock and fear but these, true and believable reactions, were riveting enough.  She didn’t rely on “Survivor tricks”.  Memoirists from Auschwitz will usually make mention of an interaction with Dr. Josef Mengele – which almost always makes me think they are lying because I can’t imagine this guy got around enough to have a meaningful albeit coincidental exchange with every fucking prisoner – but none that I read wrote of Irma Grese, more likely to figure into a woman’s story, at least.  Personally, I can’t see why they called Grese a “beauty”.  She looked like a fat, ugly hausfrau moments after having gorged herself on spaetzle or some other gross starchy German shit.  She is hands down my favorite hanging.  After reading Fenelon’s book, I was even gladder of it.

When I finished Playing For Time, I read it again. Not only was the content staggering but her writing!  It was beautiful.  Years back I fell in love with Gerda Weissmann-Klein’s memoir “All But My Life” and though I still feel a fondness for it, there’s a new bitch in town and she’s French, of all things.  I have now made 2 exceptions to my firm “Fuck The French” policy: Marie-Claude Pietragalla has company.

Eyewitness Auschwitz – Filip Muller

This book should have been written in bullet-point format from first page to last.  Dude worked in the crematoria of Auschwitz for three years and his story reminds me of a Wikipedia entry.  Nothing he says makes me believe he really lived through such an  unimaginable thing.  I gave up one quarter of the way through and felt irritated that he survived.  Walk right by this grade-school report on the Holocaust if you see it anywhere.  It cost me only ninety-nine cents but one should be paid to push through this bore-fest.  Even if you see it free at a yard sale it’s not worth it.

It’s beginning to take a lot to impress me in the way of Holocaust stories.  When will someone have the balls to stage their story as a musical-comedy?  Or as a Woody Allen film?

I bring this topic up for two reasons. First, I haven’t before considered at any depth how my research must undoubtedly be affecting my own spiritual journey. It might seem like an obvious question, but I’ve done pretty well at keeping these two areas of my intellectual life separate. But on reflection, I can’t help but wonder if my desire to overcome my skepticism perhaps has something to do with a search for something transcendently redeeming in the face of overwhelming evidence that the possibility of God’s existence went up in the smoke of the crematoria. And note that crematoria is, in this example, a symbol of the egregious machinery of all mass atrocities, for I am not one to claim that, on the soul-level, victims in other times and places have any less claim to firsthand knowledge of the seeming absence of God. The spiritual vacuum in front of the Rwandan machete is, after all, no less final than God’s silence when the chambers filled with gas.

But I digress. The second reason that I bring this up, at this particular moment, is because my “Catholicism 101″ reading has turned up a mighty interesting excerpt that made me stop short and look at how my professional engagement with the problem of evil might be seeping into the evolution, or not, of my agnosticism. The Catholic theologian Thomas Merton made the top of my reading list because not only was he a Trappist monk and mystic, but his advanced degrees and secular upbringing were characteristics that I could identify with. As I continue to read him and test the possibility of having faith, I keep reminding myself, “Hey, if they (whoever “they” may be) can convince this evidently intelligent and skeptical New Yorker to believe in a Catholic God, maybe he can pass on the good news to me.” So while doing this evening’s “conversion reading,” so to speak, I ran across this excerpt that I’d like to share. It’s not exactly epiphany producing. I certainly don’t read it and feel as if Merton’s solved the problem of understanding how people commit atrocity. He does, however, have a way of illuminating the essential nature of evil, the simplicity of evil thoughts and deeds, all while implying that our interest should be less in interpreting perpetrators than in choosing whether and how to remember them. That mere suggestion may help me begin to reconcile these two areas of my life, the professional and the spiritual, that bleed into and shape one another for better or worse.

There is nothing interesting about sin, or about evil as evil.

Evil is not a positive entity but  the absence of a perfection that ought to be there. Sin as such is essentially boring because it is the lack of something that could appeal to our wills and our minds.

What attracts men to evil acts is not the evil in them but the good that is there, seen under a false aspect and with a distorted perspective. The good seen from that angle is only the bait in a trap. When you reach out  to take it, the trap is sprung and you are left with disgust, boredom–and hatred. Sinners are people who hate everything, because their world is necessarily full of betrayal, full of illusion, full of deception. And the greatest sinners are also the most bored and the ones who find life most tedious.

When they try to cover the tedium of life by noise, excitement, and violence–the inevitable fruits of a life devoted to the love of values that do not exist–they become something more than boring: they are scourges of the world and of society. And being scourged is not merely something dull or tedious.

Yet when it is all over and they are dead, the record of their sins in history becomes exceedingly uninteresting and is inflicted on school children as penance which is all the more bitter because even an eight-year-old can readily see the uselessness of learning about people like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon.

–Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Image: ansellcondoms.com

As they say, “the two certainties in life are taxes and death”. NAB has decided to try and capitalize on “the certainties of life” in it’s most recent advertising campaign. But what if you could take this principle and apply it to investing? Particularly as investors are seeking refuge from volatility, some stocks’ revenue streams are about as certain as death and taxes…

Invocare

InvoCare is one of those companies. They own and operate funeral homes, crematoria and memorial parks all around Australia, and their revenue stream is secure because everyone, at some point, erhm!, has to die.
You can read about the warm and fuzzy topic of the cremation process here on their website, if you like.

But grim topics aside, there are a few other characteristics that make this an interesting defensive play as well. The funeral homes business is a virtual monopoly, although Invocare has only a 26% market share in Australia. Funeral homes are often local monopolies, with families reluctant to move too far away from their home town to have a funeral for their loved ones. This gives Invocare a sustainable ‘economic moat’ as Warren Buffett has coined it, making revenue streams even more certain.

There’s one last characteristic that InvoCare has that is worth consideration. Invocare is also a fund manager. A growing number of their clients are opting for pre-paid funerals, which means that they have access to capital which they use to invest in shares, as an additional revenue stream. One problem with this is it ads more volatility to the company’s earnings.

Woolworths 

Everyone has to eat, and Woolworths has always been well placed to take advantage of this certainty of life. The supermarket chain is the undisputed leader in grocery retail in Australia, but some say that this is about to change considering revitalized competition from Wesfarmers owned Coles and Metcash.

You would think that Woolworths would have to grow in-line with population growth or convince its customers to spend more at the checkouts, but the company is seeking new growth opportunities in new retail categories, such as its forays into hardware and home improvement with Masters Home Improvement (which is a joint venture with US hardware chain, Lowes) and also it’s acquisition of Danks Group and it’s Home Hardware brand.
Again, this expansion could likely add more volatility to the stock, in a sector with already tough competition from the likes of Wesfarmers owned Bunnings. But the company believes there is still room to grow in the home improvement sector in Australia, even with existing competition.

Woolworths also owns a large number of hotels through ALH group, which gives the company exposure to gaming and alcohol, and has recently announced its plans to expand its pet insurance offerings to car and house insurance – another move that puts it in direct competition with Wesfarmers.

But with its stalwart supermarket business, powerful distribution network, and diversification into new complimentary business categories, Woolworths is a stock worth considering for the long term, and should be able to weather any economic downturn fairly well.

And if you can’t decide which conglomerate to own, why not buy both Wesfarmers and Woolworths? Then you can watch the competition knowing that whoever comes out trumps (neither are likely to), you’ll be in a position to benefit. Plus both companies offer exposure to a diverse range of businesses.

Amcor and Ansell

I have to talk about these two companies together here as both share very similar characteristics. Both are considered the most defensive of the defensives, because they are well positioned to profit indirectly from the healthcare sector and, in Amcor’s case (like Woolworths) the food staples sector.

When you make commodity-like products that people use everyday, you have a good recipe for a solid stream of earnings.

Amcor makes cartons, containers, plastic packaging, tobacco packaging – everything that food comes packaged in, but also they serve the healthcare sector by providing packaging and healthcare related glassware (everything from test tubes, to sterile containers). Everyone needs healthcare. Everyone needs food. And Amcor sells $12 billion of this stuff every year, which is why you can expect the company to perform well in tough times. The synergies from and the timing of the acquisition of the Alcan business from Rio Tinto has been a great success for Amcor. On top of  this, their business is split nicely between global markets (see graphs below).

Image: amcor.com

Image: amcor.com

Ansell makes condoms, personal lubricant, gloves and other rubber products and protective gear, which gives it good exposure to healthcare, but also sex. And people ain’t going to stop having sex!

But the issue with companies that produce goods that are of a commodity-like nature is that transferring a brand onto the product can be difficult, considering brand is hardly a point of differentiation for these types of products. But I think the Ansell brand has some value, in terms of associations with quality. Amcor has tried to address this issue as well, with it’s brand revitalization and spiffy new logo. Whether it will be successful is another story.

Both are relatively boring businesses, but should both perform relatively well in a tough market, and are reliant on three human needs: the need for healthcare, the need for food, and the need for sex (okay, maybe the third isn’t necessarily a need, but that doesn’t stop people from doing it anyway!)

*****

DISCLAIMER: This post in no way constitutes financial advice. Readers make financial decisions at their own risk. At the time of writing, the writer owned shares in Woolworths and Amcor.

This is one movie that is just a action-packed like the Star Wars and Star Trek, but of course the plot is different from those two classical movies. I enjoyed watching Vin Diesel and his great fight moves. He always look so good in all his movies.

Vin plays the role of Riddick, a guy from Furya who is fighting the entire Nepromunga people – colonizers for that matter. Their ruler, the Lord Marshall wants Riddick dead because of a prediction saying that he will be killed in the hands of a Furyan. He is also hunted by Toombs for a good price in a prison on Crematoria. He is eventually caught by Toombs but because Toombs hesitated to take 700k, his greed wanting more than that. But unfortunately, his greed led him to his failure, the guards discovering that Riddick was the prisoner of the Nepromunga. Now the Nepromungas are coming to Crematoria to kill the Furyan. Toombs was left in a cage like an animal while Riddick on the other hand, was able to escape this hellish prison and went to Helion Prime to finish off the very person who wants him dead.

As for all movies, it’s always the main character who wins the fight, so I’m guessing that you have a very good idea who won this fight. Not only did he win, but he also inherited the Lord Marshall’s position and power. It’s the Nepromunga saying and faith – You keep what you kill.

This book is full of research over the holocaust in general, but the main subject is Joseph Mengele’s life and his whereabouts in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The writing is engaging and historically accurate; the research includes many eyewitness reports.

Doctor Mengele was responsible for sorting the prisoners after their arrival to Auschwitz, he divided them in two lines, one line to go to the labor camp and the other to the gas chamber and crematoria, among other atrocities he’s well-known for his experiments on dwarves, twins and anyone else with an unique hereditary trait; sadly these experiments generally had no medical value.

The book covered pretty much everything, even his post-war era when he managed to avoid arrest and his final days in South America.

Auschwitz has come to be synonymous with some of the most unbelievable atrocities in history, so do not be surprise; this book does contain some disturbing content that the reader should be aware of, but other than that it moved along well.

I definitely recommend this book to any one interest on World War II and the Holocaust.

Rolled DVD  42

The Chronicles of Riddick

Synopsis according to the official website:

Vin Diesel (XXX, The Fast and the Furious) stars in this electrifying, special-effects-fueled action spectacular! After years of outrunning ruthless bounty hunters, escaped convict Riddick suddenly finds himself caught between opposing forces in a fight for the future of the human race. Now, waging incredible battles on fantastic and deadly worlds, this lone, reluctant hero will emerge as humanity’s champion – and the last hope for a universe on the edge of annihilation. Powered by groundbreaking visual effects and pulse-pounding, thrill-a-minute action!

My personal thoughts:

Meh, I liked the movie, but the first one was better. Riddick is on the run from bounty hunters and he learns the Imam, he saved in the first movie is looking for him. So he decides to pay a visit. Of course this doesn’t end well. The necromongers are invading the planet. Come on, what kind of shitty name is necromonger?

The idea is cool, but the executing is not so well done. The Imam also tells Jack is in prison, thanks to Riddick and now he feels obligated to go save her. But first he has a run in with these necromangers. And goes with them willingly only because a woman in a tight dress leads him away? Weak, very weak.

Anyhow. The necromangers are turning the people and destroying the planet and Riddick escapes them, but lets him get captured by bounty hunters to bring him to the planet… Crematoria. Ok, who was assigned for naming stuff in this movie? Can someone please fire him, now!

He finds Jack, but she has grown up, and calls herself Kyra. And she is pissed at Riddick, apparently he lied to her. Well duh, he is a murderer and stuff. So no shiny eyes for her. Although those strange animals that live in the prison are cool. Good CGI.

Now Riddick has to escape the prison. Only problem, it rotates like crazy and a sun is nearby it, so temperatures are kind of hot every now and then. But thanks to the bounty hunters cutting of their means to escape, they have to run across the surface of the planet, in order to outrun the sun and the bounty hunters, going for the only ship on the planet left. And they almost make it. Riddick and his team of inmates.

Kyra got caught by the necromangers and Riddick is just barely saved by a fellow Furian from burning to an extra crispy piece of bacon. So now he goes after the necromangers, again, and tries to save Kyra, again.

He finally kills the head necromonger but Kyra dies (and the Imam is long dead) but the necromonger way is to keep what you kill, so now he is the leader of the necromangers. And we have to wait till next year what comes of this.

I know this is a rather sarcastic review. I like the movie and the way it’s filmed. But I don’t agree with the choices Riddick makes. The first movie we see him struggle and doing what is in his best interest, combined with a little humanity. And in this movie, he is growing soft. Too bad. Thanks to that I rate it a 6.5 out of 10

Love, your hot cute girly geek, Mendy.

But unfortunately there is a darker side to that area; 50 kilometres away is the home of the infamous concentration camp, Auschwitz.

It is not my intention to write the history of this notorious site, that has already been done, and by much better writers than me. I would just like to share some of my photography with you.

I am sure, had I visited the two sites in the middle of summer, with greenery, flowers and birds singing, the impact may have been different. But with snow on the ground and it being bitter cold, it was much easier to picture in your mind the atrocious conditions experienced by the people incarcerated there.

Auschwitz-Camp I

Gate into the main Auschwitz camp.  Hoess’s infamous ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign, ‘Work will set you free.”

In his autobiography, Hoess points out that the expression meant  ‘work liberates one in a spiritual sense’, not that you will be free. To the Jews, it was later known as the ‘Death Factory”.

Auschwitz main camp, Camp I, the fences say it all.

Some of the main brick built camp buildings, an ex Polish Army Barracks.

Security was paramount.

The roof of the gas chamber at Auschwitz main camp, the crematoria chimney in the background.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, the first view of this bleak concentration camp, Camp II.

Looking into the camp through the barbed wire perimeter fence.

The Iconic picture of the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The view the guards would have had of the camp from the control tower at the top of the archway entrance.

The view the camp prisoners would have got of the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau, as they were ordered off the cattle trucks to a fate they probably didn’t anticipate.

The long railway sidings where the dogs would have been barking, whistles blowing, guards screaming, families separated and children crying.

The reality of it all.

The site of some of the ruins of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

They had latrines, but not quite what we may be used to.

A view of the bunk beds, although I don’t think it depicts the true horror that was experienced within.

A more realistic view.

As indicated at the beginning, my intention was just to share a few photographs with you and not do a write up on the background to the camp and the atrocities linked to it. It was a fascinating, yet horrific, time in our Worlds history and I sometimes wonder if all the lessons from it have been learnt.

HB

Coffins, bespoke

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The first time I learned about the Holocaust in school was in Mrs. Holland’s fifth grade class.  Our assigned reading was the work of fiction Number the Stars by Lois Lowry.  This book tells the story of Annemarie Johansen, living in Copenhagen, Denmark during World War II.  Annemarie and her family become part of the Danish underground, helping to hide Annemarie’s Jewish friend Ellen Rosen.

At that point I began to devour anything I could get my hands on related to the Holocaust.  Mostly I read biographies and autobiographies of survivors.  At that age, I wasn’t interested in reading history books.

By the time I attended college at the University of South Carolina, I was a history major with a goal of earning a Master’s degree in Secondary Education.  I was lucky enough to attend a college that had a very large history department with a wide variety of classes to take.

I was able to take classes from Dr. Ted Rosengarten on the Holocaust, and these opened my eyes even wider. He exposed me to the world’s films on the Holocaust and taught me about so many different aspects of this era.  To this day, I highly recommend everyone watch The Grey Zone, The Shop on Main Street, Paragraph 175, and Shoah, among others.

After I completed graduate school, Ted even invited me to accompany him and some undergrads from USC and the College of Charleston on a trip to Poland and Berlin.

I was able to visit three different death camps:  Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek.

The entrance to Auschwitz I with the infamous sign:  Work Makes You Free

The once-electrified barbed wire fences of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The remains of the barracks at Birkenau, what wasn’t destroyed by the Nazis in their retreat.

Markers showing where the rail line used to be, leading up to the ramp at Treblinka.

The ramp at Treblinka, where prisoners would be forced out of their cattle cars and toward their deaths at the hands of the Nazis.

Treblinka today.  Without the monument you wouldn’t know it had ever been a death camp.

The memorial at Treblinka.

A closeup of some of the stones at the memorial.  These, just to the side of the ramp, are engraved with the countries from which Jews were deported.  Within the camp are stones engraved with the names of cities and towns from which the Jews were deported.

One of the first buildings one sees at Majdanek.  This gas chamber is easily translated to “Bath and Disinfection I”.

The crematoria at Majdanek.

The furnaces within the crematoria.

The interior of the ovens.

It was an experience that I cannot fully describe.  Our group also visited many other Holocaust sites.  We saw the last remaining bits of wall of the Warsaw Ghetto.

We saw the umschlagplatz in Warsaw, where the Nazis forced the Jews to gather and wait to be deported.

The memorial at the umschlagplatz.

On the interior walls of the memorial are engraved the last names of the families that were deported.

We saw the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters’ memorial and the museum dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising.

Marker at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial:  Grave of the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising built from the rubble of Mila Street, one of the liveliest streets of pre-war Jewish Warsaw.  These ruins of the bunker at 18 Mila Street are the place of rest of the commanders and fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization, as well as some civilians.  Amongst them lies Mordechaj Anielewicz, the Commander in Chief.  On May 8, 1943, surrounded by Nazis after three weeks of struggle, many perished or took their own lives, refusing to perish at the hands of their enemies.  There were several hundred bunkers built in the ghetto.  Found and destroyed by the Nazis, they became graves.  They could not save those who sought refuge inside them, yet they remain everlasting symbols of the Warsaw Jews’ will to live.  The bunker at Mila Street was the largest in the ghetto.  It is the place of rest of over one hundred fighters, only some of whom are known by name.  Here they rest, buried where they fell, to remind us that the whole earth is their grave.

The mound of “rubble” that became the memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The memorial to the Warsaw Uprising.

We visited the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, an amazing museum.

Upon returning to the states, I had the opportunity for a long road trip north, and John and I decided that Washington, D.C. was a stop for us.  We spent three days there, and I made sure to dedicate one day to the Holocaust Memorial Museum.  It took the entire day, and afterward, we needed time to decompress and think about what we’d seen.

To me, it was slightly ironic to be there.  I’ll explain.  While in Poland, our group went to Majdanek, a death camp that started out as a backwater near the fighting with the Soviet Army and was used as a POW camp for the captured Soviet Prisoners.  Eventually, mass numbers of prisoners, mostly Jews, were sent there to their death in the gas chambers.

In Majdanek, you have the ability to walk through the crematoria, which was rebuilt from the remains of it being blown up by the Nazis.  You see the ovens.  You see the large wooden carts that were used to carry the dead bodies.  You can touch all of this.  You walk through freely.  There are no ropes blocking you from anything.

In fact, the tour guide we had said that our group was the first American group to come to the camp in eight years.  One of our translators had grown up in Poland and while she’d heard of and been to Auschwitz before, she didn’t even know Majdanek existed!

In Majdanek, there is a bathtub.  It was most likely used by the head of the crematorium.  After all, in a building where fires are constantly roaring is the easiest place to get hot water.  It sickened me to see this, and hear this, from the tour guide.  We all walked right up to it.  We all touched it.  We could smell the smells of the room, empty for the last sixty years, thinking of what had occurred there.

The bathtub inside the crematorium at Majdanek.

Once back in the states, at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, there is a replica of this bathtub.  It sits behind glass.

How ironic.  How odd.  The real thing, the real bathtub where the head of the crematorium relaxed from his long day of killing thousands of innocent people was out and in the open for every visitor to see.  But the replica, the fake, was behind glass.

Don’t get me wrong, USHMM’s exhibits are amazing.  I highly recommend everyone take the opportunity, should it present itself, to go.

So as you can see, I have always been interested in this subject matter.  It is near and dear to my heart, having touched my family, along with millions of other families in this world, and has changed the landscape of our world forever.

Upon moving to Rhode Island and obtaining work at a local college, I decided to meet with the Humanities/Social Sciences Department Chair and pitch my idea of creating a class to teach about the Holocaust.  It was met with hesitation, as I teach at a technical college and it was initially thought that not many people would be interested in taking a traditional history course.

I took the chance, created the course, and it was approved by the Curriculum Committee.  It has run every term since then, going on almost three years now.

I am very proud of my course, and enjoy teaching this delicate material to students who often have little knowledge of what truly happened and how it affects each and every one of us today.

All of this is leading up to discussing what is in my title, The Seamstress by Seren (Sara) Tuvel Bernstein.  Another book I came across in my book-finding frenzy of the past weeks, it was sitting amongst my fiction, waiting its turn to be read.

I hesitated when I picked up the work of non-fiction.  I knew what I was getting myself into.  These biographies and autobiographies are not easy to read.  The subject matter itself is a very difficult topic to continuously immerse oneself in, and given the stressors of my recent weeks, I weighed whether or not I should read it now (as I had reached its spot in the stack) or put it off for another few days when I was ready to emotionally involve myself in the story.

I decided I would not wait.  This was the next book to read, and I was going to.  I pride myself on continually learning, whether its new pedagogical styles for use in my classroom or content material such as Bernstein’s book.

The book was very nondescript, not having the cover it had when originally published.

It matched what I thought would be the tone of the work, as the topic is not one to be taken lightly.  I started reading the introduction, written by Edward M. Bronfman, the man who got the book published, and was immediately interested in Seren Tuvel, the writer of the book.

He, along with others, was fascinated at her story of survival.  Of course, who wouldn’t be?  To survive the Holocaust is always an amazing story.  But he, along with others, were also fascinated at her personality.  At how she never lost her determination, her optimism, and her loyalty to her family.

So I began reading the book.  Seren, a young Romanian girl living in Transylvania with her father, mother, half-brothers and half-sisters, and her other brothers and sisters, easily begins telling the story of her childhood.  Daughter of a manager of a lumber mill, she tells of the beauty of where she lived and the dangers.

While removed from large city life, anti-Semitism still haunts their world, as victims of pogroms from college boys in Transylvania on summer break from school.  When she begins to go to school, headed by a priest, she suffers listening for an hour every day at chapel of how the Jews killed Christ.

(Just for clarification, the Jews did NOT kill Christ.)

She earns a scholarship to a school in Bucharest, the Paris of Romania, and is beyond excited to attend.  On the first day, when her teacher begins an anti-Semitic rant, she throws her inkwell on him and leaves, refusing to attend once more.

The reader can see in an instant the spark and fire this young girl has, even at the age of thirteen.  Refusing to go back to her parents’ home, she stays in Bucharest, this young girl, and becomes an apprentice for a seamstress, learning the trade that would help her for the rest of her life.

The book flows very easily and naturally, as if she were sitting in front of you, telling you this story.  Telling of how she and her father were arrested and beaten.  Of how she was able to get her family into the ghetto safely in Reghinal-Sasesc.  Of how she and her sister are taken into a labor group and how her sister is shot in front of her because she is pregnant.  Of how she and her family and friends are deported, at first to Ravensbrück and eventually to Dachau.  Of how she fought for survival, not just for herself, but for Ellen, Esther, and Lily.

In late August of 1939, I went back to Bucharest with that thought.  Then on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland.  A few days later the streets were full of Polish army officers and their families.  They had run from the advancing Germany army, coming however they could—in cars, trucks, and tanks, on motorbikes and bicycles.  Entire households were stuffed into trunks, tied to the roofs of cars, thrown into the back ends of trucks, balanced precariously on handlebars, heaped into tiny wheelbarrows wobbling over the cobblestones.  One afternoon a tiny girl brushed against me as she stumbled along, clinging to her mother’s coat with one hand and rubbing tears from her eyes with the other.  She looked exhausted from walking.  At least I do not have children, I thought.  I was twenty-one by now and I had no husband or babies to worry about.  If I can continue to take care of myself, I decided, I will be doing well.

That night, however, when I came back to my room, the image of the child who had stumbled into me suddenly appeared in my mind.  A great sense of sorrow overwhelmed me and I fell across my bed.  All night long I cried—for the child, for all children, for mothers and fathers in time of war, for Rachel, for myself.

In the introduction, it is mentioned that the lack of emotion Bernstein has in telling the story sets it apart.  And it does.  It’s not that there is no emotion.  This type of work is so wrapped up with emotional turmoil and upheaval the reader can’t get away from it.  But Bernstein does an amazing job of telling the story so that the reader has the chance to feel instead of relying on her to feel for them.

It creates a unique way to read the story of survival during the Holocaust that I have rarely, if ever, seen.

We climbed into the single cattle car on the other tracks and held out our hands to the small fire burning at one end.  I did not want to stay; a bomb might have been planted in this car as well.  Esther was moaning, becoming almost unconscious.  I desperately wanted someplace where she could lie down.  Then one of the men said, “There’s a small barracks on the other side of the tracks where railroad workers lived.  Why don’t you take her there?  I think another woman is already in it.”

When we opened the door to this barracks a Hungarian girl from our camp, Sonia, greeted us.  “Seren!  Come in!”  she said.  “There are beds here and a stove—and even running water.  I discovered this place just a few minutes ago.”

“But can we stay here?” Ellen asked.  “Will they let us?”

“We will commandeer it,” I answered.  “It’s ours.”

While Sonia made a wood fire in the potbelly stove, Ellen and I put Esther on one of the hard beds.  We unwrapped the strips of cloth from her back, now no more than one massive, swelling wound, pus draining everywhere.  The wound around the bullet fragments still in her head was equally inflamed and sore, her forehead hot and sweaty.  I took off what was left of her clothes and sponged her back with soap and water, washed the clothes and draped them around the stove to dry.  We stayed in the barracks the rest of the day and through the night.

By the next morning Esther was running a high fever.  I knew I would not be able to save her.  We had no medicine, no way to remove the slivers of metal festering inside her.  I could do nothing.

At midmorning, on the first day of May, a white truck drove up to the barracks.  Two men in white coats came to the door and knocked.  As they did not appear to be Germans, we let them in.  They began speaking to us in a language we did not understand, beckoning us to follow them to the truck.

“Absolutely not!” I told them in Yiddish.  “We’re not leaving here with someone we don’t know.”

The men left.  I wonder who they were, I thought as the truck drove away.  They came back in only a few minutes accompanied by a third man.  This new man came immediately to the door and yelled in Yiddish, “Open up, please.  We’re American soldiers.  We’ve come to take you to a hospital.”

I opened the door.  “What took you so long?” I asked.

We rode for about fifty kilometers until we came to a convent, Saint Ottiliem, which had been converted into a hospital.  As soon as the truck stopped in front of a large tent, the back door was opened and nuns in long black gowns and headpieces came rushing toward it.  They held out their arms to us as we crawled out of the truck, and led us to the front of the tent.  Here a nun undressed us, throwing our rags into a burning pile.  When the nun came to Esther and removed her tattered dress she glanced quickly at her back and cried, “Gott in Himmel!” (“God in heaven!”)

Immediately she wrapped a sheet around Esther and ordered two men to bring a stretcher.  In an instant Esther was being carried away. “Esther!” I cried.  I wanted to follow her.  But then I thought, These nuns are very kind.  They will be good to her and give her the care she needs.

Several other nuns took Sonia, Ellen, and me into a tent where there were women from other trains.  We were bathed and disinfected, our heads shaved to rid them of lice, and each given a clean pair of men’s pajamas and straw slippers.  Finally we were put on a scale to be weighed.  I weighed forty-four pounds, including pajamas.

“Now, follow me, please,” an older nun said, and began walking into the convent.

I was exhausted and sat down on the ground.  Was the war over?  It seemed to be, but I was not sure.  I was too tired to care, more tired than I had ever been in my life.  I closed my eyes.

Then I felt myself being lifted up in two arms.  I opened my eyes.  One of the American soldiers was carrying me.  I closed my eyes again.  Drops of water began splashing on my cheeks and running down my neck.  Is it raining again? I thought.  No, we’re inside now where it would not rain.  Then I realized that the soldier carrying me was crying, his tears falling on my face.

In the preface, written by Louise Loots Thornton, a friend of Bernstein’s son and co-writer of the book, mentions her visits to Ravensbrück and Dachau years after the horrors there had ended but not before the wall separating East and West Berlin had been destroyed.  This particular passage about Ravensbrück struck me:

As I began walking around the grounds, I came to a horizontal monument about six feet high with an inscription written by Anna Seghers. “Sie sind unser aller mutter and schwestern,” it began.  (“These are all our mothers and sisters.”)  I stood before it a long time, taking in the meaning of the words.  The young girls and women, the mothers and sisters and daughters who had died there, had been my ancestors in a web including all women, throughout all of time.  The loss was irreparable.

In that one statement, Thornton touched on exactly why this book should be read.

Seren Tuvel Bernstein died before the book was published, but she knew it would be published, and even if it didn’t, she knew her work had been touched by enough hands that her story would be told.  And it has been.

One late afternoon in June 1980, after a long day of work, Sara and I walked along a shaded path through a redwood forest not far from my home.  As we strolled together among the towering trees, reminding her of the dense woods once growing around her father’s mill in Transylvania, she looked up at the light streaming between the trees in great, white swaths.  “The waste is what grieves me the most,” she said quietly, “even before the war.  The waste of human potential was the worst of all.  I would have liked to have been somebody.  To have been somebody!”

Sara was one of the strongest and most courageous individuals I have ever known.  She neither sacrificed her integrity to evil nor closed her heart to the profound love and compassion she felt for all those she loved, all those who suffered and died.

Louise Loots Thornton, June 1998

Of course I recommend this book.  Seren Tuvel Bernstein is an amazing woman with the courage, confidence, and determination that is only matched by other survivors.

This book was published in 1997 by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.

and I’m heading to the crematorium

the chance poetry of any given day.

The flakes aren’t feathers;

they’re sharp, sharper when wet,

the footpath’s a fevered chill and

I’m wearing the flushed face of a new bride.

Not exactly the look for today,

though I’ll still arrive with flowers.

For a moment, we’re not even sure

if this is the right place. There’s another hall.

We have ten minutes.

An uncle deadens the crisp air

with a cigarette, a nephew comes over. Two days after

his grandfather’s death, he became father. Another moment

for a poet to exploit for wisdom, whereas everyone else

sees it as part of the getting on. “How’s the boy?” /

“Sleeping, crying and shitting” /

“How much did he weigh?” /

“About three and a half kilos”

… The grandmother arrives.

I never thought the old could mourn so.

Where’s the resignation? Aren’t funerals another mark

in the calendar box, with the saint names and phases of the moon?

Something else to get the good hat out for. Her tears

rinse away decades, illness, the cultivated family acrimony,

My blush is now on hers. She’s the one getting the kisses.

Are these the right kind of flowers? My shoes are wrong.

We enter the ceremonial hall. It’s the first time

I learn his family name. At get-togethers, we sat,

quiet table ends, me – too conscious of my accent,

too conscious to speak much.

He – recovering from the last stroke.

Not blood.

Not the blood of blood.

The grandmother’s third husband.

Grandchildren long freed of hope and duty,

but it’s still right that I’m here in the grim marble

on unyielding solemn seats listening to M’s Requiem

then “Moon River”, rendered in horns and bass;

the drum brushes scratching from another room.

My throat fills, rises, falls. The curtains meet

we stand. My shoes are still wrong.

Ruins of the undressing room in Krema II

I’ve been reading about the ruins of Krema II and Krema III at Auschwitz-Birkenau on the blog of little grey rabbit here.  The crematoria buildings were blown up, allegedly by the Germans, before the Soviet soldiers arrived on January 27, 1945.  Or were they actually blown up much later? 

When I visited Birkenau in 2005, I took lots of photos of the ruins.  When I got home and started processing my photos, I thought the ruins of the undressing rooms for the gas chambers in Krema II and Krema III looked a bit strange.  I noticed that neither of the entrances to the undressing rooms faced the main camp road and there were no paths leading to the entrances.  Were these actually undressing rooms?  Or were they morgues?  Where were the bodies of the typhus victims stored before they were burned?

Ruins of undressing room in Krema III

Ruins of Krema II with undressing room in the background

Notice in the photo directly above that the part of the building which was above ground was completely blown up, while only the roof of the dressing room, which was five feet underground, was blown up.  Why not blow up the entire undressing room, not just the roof?

Ruins of undressing room in Krema III

The brick walls of the undressing room in Krema III are in pristine condition.  Could the ruins of this undressing room be a reconstruction?

Ruins of Krema IV are a reconstruction

A sign at the ruins of Krema IV tells visitors that this is a reconstruction.  Krema IV was blown up during a prisoners’ revolt in October 1944.

Ruins of Krema V

Both Krema IV and Krema V were completely above ground; the gas chambers were disguised as shower rooms.

Seriously though the stuff he ate…Jesus, it would burn through metal foil. He had some of these chilies from his mate Costas. Costas was always giving the old man chilies from his garden and mussels he caught himself. Dad didn’t care too much for seafood and always saved the mussels to palm off later on to relatives at family get-togethers. The chilies – no-one touched the chilies. This one batch he got from Costas burned black holes in the foil. This didn’t bother Dad. He just went and ate it with his chicken laksa.

When he was eating it looked as if he was diffusing the tangled mess of noodles in his bowl of mee goreng or sorting through the components of a rogan josh. If he didn’t get the food safely in his gut, who would know the consequences?

The chilies would slowly leak out of Dad’s pores, so his sweat was fragrant. Even if he hadn’t just polished off a vindaloo you could always smell him. An aisle of spices trailed behind him. And the sweat ate through the back of his watches, frayed his collars, blackened the couch and pillows. They could make things fireproof, acid proof. Nothing was Dad proof.

For all that concentration he gave his food, he couldn’t prevent the inevitable. The explosion just worked on him slower, muffled in his belly, so no-one noticed until the damage was done.

No matter how hot it is in that furnace I reckon he’s okay. If he could speak, he would say, ‘Call this hot. I’ve eaten hotter. Turn it up just a bit. I can take it.’

Ryan Scott, November 2010

(The story appeared in a somewhat different version at the blog The Drained Long Blacks.)

After three years of prodigious research and effort, I produced an epic work of historical fiction, called Jacob’s Courage: A Holocaust Love Story (2007, Mazo Publishers).  During this time, I discovered that almost two entire generations of my maternal extended family had perished in the Holocaust.  Of seven siblings, only my grandfather survived.  His brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews disappeared under Nazi rule.  This intensified my efforts and I decided to produce the book in their memory. 

The next stage of my life was devoted to learning everything that I could about publishers, book publishing proposals; locating and contacting publishers and then marketing my book.  I also discovered that I required something called an “author platform” and a “video book trailer.”  This was news to me and an eye-opening experience.  I thought that I could address only a few of the publisher’s submission guidelines and swiftly obtain a contract.  I thought that I could throw together a bio and some sections of my book and then publishers would rush to accept it.  Boy was I wrong! 

What follows is a brief description of the finished product, followed by step-by-step instructions for being published.  I follow no publishing guru. I adhere to no system.  If I can impress any single feature upon you, it is the need to give the publisher exactly what they demand in a proposal (or give an agent everything that they demand in a query letter) and then to be very patient and committed.  I had to contact dozens of publishers in order to generate four solid contract offers.  The last offer turned out to be the best one.  Had I selected an earlier contract offer, I would have missed out on the best match for my novel. 

There are some very good reasons to self-publish, especially for non-fiction.  But, if you want a traditional publisher, never accept your first offer; wait for the best offer.  And, feel free to negotiate terms of the contract.  You have every right to make it meet your needs, as well as the publisher’s needs.  

Before we continue, here is some information about my novel:

Jacob’s Courage is a tender coming of age love story of two young adults living in Salzburg at the time when the Nazi war machine enters Austria. This historical novel presents scenes and situations of Jews in ghettos and concentration camps, with particular attention to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. It explores the dazzling beauty of passionate love, powerful faith and enduring bravery in a lurid world where the innocent are brutally murdered. From desperate despair, to unforgettable moments of chaste beauty, Jacob’s Courage examines a constellation of emotions during a time of incomprehensible brutality.

Video Trailer for Jacob’s Courage:

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I guess before man discovered fire,

…  cremations were not a thing of the passed.

note: there are so many different death rituals that have been practiced on this earth over the years, people don’t even agree on death ………….  rituals.

I guess death is disagreeable.

double note: on Planetross, when people die their hair just changes color.

notes to myself #21

You are the last born … but only by a few days.