Posted on 06/07/2011 2:41:20 AM PDT by Eleutheria5
We dont have to wonder what J.D Salinger would have thought of the world today even as Israel fights back mobs from Syria and prepares for more bloodlust from its enemies domestic and abroad. Salinger told it plainly and powerfully in his novel The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, and following that, in his 60 years of retreat into silence. He would have called his vow of silence, The fire between the words. ..... .... As part of the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, Salinger was heroic at Utah Beach/D-Day and later at The Battle of the Bulge. After such combat fury, he thought he saw everything.
He was not prepared for Dachau.
What he saw there, as a counterintelligence officer, we cannot imagine. Neither could he. (Kenneth Slawenskis biography of Salinger highly recommended.)
He told his daughter, You never get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely. No matter how long you live. (He died at age 91, Jan.27, 2010.)
Salinger began writing The Catcher in the Rye before the war and completed the work upon his return.....
(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
Many people died in Dachau, but that was not the ostensible purpose of Dachau.
The Nazi camp Auschwitz is too horrific to bear. When I read about Mengele, I can only view him as the Devil incarnate.
Read about what he did to the Ovitzes or even worse what Mengele did to Gypsy children
I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents I remember the mother's name was Stella managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their sufferin
Never forget this monster -- he was not just German, he was a human being. his victims were not just Jews but Gypsies, non-Jewish Poles, etc. etc. -- he was everything horrible that is inside each of us.
If you read "The Pianist" by Władysław Szpilman'
One day, around 5th August, when I had taken a brief rest from work and was walking down Gęsia Street, I happened to see Janusz Korczak and his orphans leaving the ghetto. The evacuation of the Jewish orphanage run by Janusz Korczak had been ordered for that morning. The children were to have been taken away alone. He had the chance to save himself, and it was only with difficulty that he persuaded the Germans to take him too. He had spent long years of his life with children and now, on this last journey, he could not leave them alone. He wanted to ease things for them. He told the orphans they were going out in to the country, so they ought to be cheerful. At last they would be able to exchange the horrible suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to wear their best clothes, and so they came out into the yard, two by two, nicely dressed and in a happy mood. The little column was led by an SS man who loved children, as Germans do, even those he was about to see on their way into the next world. He took a special liking to a boy of twelve, a violinist who had his instrument under his arm. The SS man told him to go to the head of the procession of children and play and so they set off. When I met them in Gęsia Street, the smiling children were singing in chorus, the little violinist was playing for them and Korczak was carrying two of the smallest infants, who were beaming too, and telling them some amusing story. I am sure that even in the gas chamber, as the Zyklon B gas was stifling childish throats and striking terror instead of hope into the orphans' hearts, the Old Doctor must have whispered with one last effort, it's all right, children, it will be all right. So that at least he could spare his little charges the fear of passing from life to death."and if that doesn't make one cry, nothing will
This German officer, when he found out Szpilman was Jewish, hid him, gave him food, water and news of the Soviet advance.
Wilm Hosenfield was put into a Soviet camp (which was probably crueler than Dachau) and the Jew, Szpilman tried to do everything to free the German Hosenfield, but to no avail -- Hosenfield died in the camp in 1952.
This story reminds us that we are not Jews or Germans or Poles or Russians but have the innate choice of being very good or very evil. The devil lies in man's hearts but God can take the devil's place..
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