Daughter had a school project this month. Each student had to pick one non-living person who made an impact on history and do a report on them. A girl after my own heart – she chose my all time hero: General George S. Patton.
She came home today and said she’d finished her report. While I was cooking dinner she started telling me about a book she was reading. We’d ordered several books from the Scholastic’s paper the school sends home. It was a collection of three, all having to do with the Holocaust. One being The Diary of Anne Frank and two others that told the stories of other victims of the Holocaust. She was telling me about the girl having to hide in a trunk and how members of the family hiding her were wanting the Mother to throw her out afraid they’d all be killed for hiding a Jew.
We talked a bit about how frightening it must have been to live through that – and how devastating it had to be to watch your entire family die in a concentration camp with you being the only survivor. We then talked about how Patton had been so disgusted by what he saw when the Third Army liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, he forced the locals to tour the camp so they could see with their own eyes what their complacency had allowed…
Daughter comes by her love of history honestly. My father and I are both big history buffs – but especially military history. I don’t know enough to be dangerous compared to him, but I hope that daughter will continue with her love of history. As I told her this evening, the importance of knowing history is to keep history from repeating itself. If only more people would wake up and see the writing on the wall.
Yesterday, GuyK linked to a story everyone should read. The story concerns a 12 year old girl being beaten in North London while her attackers screamed the question, “ARE YOU JEWISH?!”. Go on, click on the link and read the story – and know that while this happened on a public bus and, despite the screams of her friend, none of the other passengers came to help.
Reminds me of entire towns seeing railway car after railway car of Jews being taken into concentration camps and none leaving -yet NONE of the towns’ people giving it a second thought. As GuyK quotes on his blog and, I’ll quote here: “Wherever anti-Semitism goes unchecked, the persecution of others is not far behind.”
Sadly, the majority in this country are more interested in voting in the person who promises them the most government sanctioned free crap – while ignoring an alarming world-wide problem. And, for the first time, I’m truly frightened about the future of not only our Republic, but our very lives. If we keep ignoring and negotiating with killers, eventually history will repeat itself – only this time, the Greatest Generation will not exist to rescue the world…
