The Perils of Indifference

At the White House lecture, Wiesel was introduced by Hillary Clinton who stated, "It was more than a year ago that I asked Elie if he would be willing to participate in these Millennium Lectures...I never could have imagined that when the time finally came for him to stand in this spot and to reflect on the past century and the future to come, that we would be seeing children in Kosovo crowded into trains, separated from families, separated from their homes, robbed of their childhoods, their memories, their humanity."
The entire speech on audio is attached to this link:
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/wiesel.htm

Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary -- or Mrs. Clinton -- for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.

This is the speech Wiesel gave at the Clinton White house, the Millenium lectures
and he defines indifference with peculiar appropriateness:

We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations -- Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin -- bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.

What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means "no difference." A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.

Among harrowing upheavals, indifference can be seductive to turn away one's face from the immensity of an evil world. Indifference reduces us all to abstractions in our own minds. The indifferent person leads a meaningless life . Behind the black gates of Auschwitz Wiesel describes the Muselmanner lying on the ground with a vacant stare. Eliot wrote of creatures called the Hollow Men, reminiscent of this image that I conjure up into my own mind of the living dead who do not even know they are dead.

Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God -- not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.

Abandonment worse than punishment? The turning away of God's face from the suffering of this world yet suffering with Jewry in the exile of their abominations . He went with them in exile.

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.

I must comment on the depth of his words. This is the worst part of our revolting inhumanity to our fellow man our indifference born of a gulf, an insentivity and dvirocement from the pain of our fellow man and his creatures and world. We are all of us guilty of degrees of this inhumanity as it were.

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.

I like the way Wiesel equates indifference benefiting the aggressor and aggrieves the victim in feeling more forgotten. Not to respond to their pathos and grief by acting upon their grief is a betrayal of our own humanity .To exile them from human memory is the worst abomination one human can perform. By failing to act, each man has acted in abominattion.

And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler's armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.

If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.

And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader -- and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.

I must comment with an anger unspeakable that Auschwitz and Treblinka were not closely guarded secrets and that our government leaders knew of the blackest hour of those camps and never bombed the railways leading to Birkenau. Are we to believe that this darkness at the depth of our soul is not present and can recur again and again? We,too many of us knew these horrors and could not use the excuse,"I did not know" as too many of us did know and turned our faces away in most cases.

He makes the further comment that FDR's image in Jewish history is flawed because this indifference, insensitivity to the suffering of others endangering us all, is so glaringly obvious.

The depressing tale of the St Louis-Indifference at the highest level note the quote
below:

The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo -- maybe 1,000 Jews -- was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.

I don't understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn't he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people -- in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don't understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?

Why were the righteous gentiles so few ? Why did America's largest corporations do business with Hitler's Germany til l942?
The good things that happened in the wake of the war,its aftermath were paltry and pale and anemic side by side the horrific horrors of the War, and will not stop the future landslide of the evil that continues in the wake of the war. The good just is not concerted enough . The good just isn't good enough and the innocent pay for the indifference of the large numbers time and again. Mankind at large does not want to listen and learn from these lessons.

Transcript of the millenium talk given by Elie Wiesel at the Clinton White House:
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/wiesel-transcript.htm
Voices on antisemitism
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/antisemitism/voices/transcript/index.php?content=20070524

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/643360/Elie-Wiesel

The Forgotten

From Publishers Weekly
Nobel Peace Prize winner Wiesel ( Sages and Dreamers ) reprises the themes of memory and forgetting in this almost unbearably moving novel. Elhanan Rosenbaum, one of the few Jews in his Romanian village to have survived WW II, is a widower whose adored wife died giving birth to their only child. Decades later, he is losing his memory to an unspecified illness. Horrified at the possibility that all he has witnessed will be surrendered to oblivion, he entrusts his life's story--and the stories of the people he alone remembers--to his son, Malkiel, a reporter for the New York Times . At Elhanan's request, Malkiel travels to the Carpathian mountains to explore the mysteries that still confound his father. There he pores over the tombstones in the Jewish cemetery, the legacy of a once-thriving community, and meets the gravedigger. In one of the most poignant passages in an already tender novel, the gravedigger tells the story of the Great Reunion: as the Nazis deport the last Jews, the ghosts of the village's rabbinical judges convene to avenge the fate of their now-extinct congregation. Malkiel begins to comprehend the relations between memory and grace, courage and forgiveness. Here and there a sentence sinks into sentimentality ("Twenty years of sun, laughter, a free and savage joy, were inscribed on her fine and angular Oriental face"), but the integrity of Wiesel's respect for history and his recognition of its fragility give this novel an impact simple in its strength and complex in its dimensions.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
This novel of the memories of a Holocaust survivor adds substantially to Wiesel's collection of more than 30 works--including essays, plays, cantatas, and novels--in some way related to the destruction of European Jewry. Wiesel's concise, haunting, stark imagery has earned him the title of literary laureate of the Holocaust. Here, survivor Elhanan Rosenbaum, now living in New York and a distinguished professor with a psychiatric practice, is tragically losing his prodigious memory. While he can still remember, he creates a "backup" by bequeathing to his son, Malkiel, his stories of the martyred death of his father in his Carpathian village (for whom his son is named); his teenage stint in the army and his return to a ghetto empty of Jews; his adventures in the underground partisan movement; and his love of Talia, the extraordinary woman who rescued him and who died giving birth to his only son. These searing tales, which spur Malkiel on a search of collective past, succesfully link generations together. Wiesel's substantial readership will appreciate the introspection and search for truth in this new work. Recommended for all libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/91.
The above review from Amazon is on Wiesel's book The Forgotten
Here's the link http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Elie-Wiesel/dp/0805210199/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233467885&sr=1-7

Mormon youth a hero of WWII

This is the story of a Mormon youth and hero who defied the NAzi Regime. The wikpedia article is accurate.to my knowledge. His name was Helmuth Hubener.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_H%C3%BCbener
I give you his story

Helmuth Hübener was once a Boy Scout, but after the organization was suppressed by the Nazis, he belonged to the Hitler Youth, although he was not always comfortable with its drilling, nor did he find Kristallnacht to his liking. When the church congregation to which he belonged undertook to bar Jews from its religious services, Hübener found himself repelled by the new policy.


Helmuth Hübener, flanked by Rudolf Wobbe (left) and Karl-Heinz SchnibbeAfter Hübener finished middle school in 1941, he began an apprenticeship in administration at the Hamburg Social Authority (Sozialbehörde). He met other apprentices there, some of them with a communist family background, and they got him listening to enemy radio broadcasts, which was strictly forbidden in Nazi Germany, being considered a form of treason. In the summer of that same year, Hübener began listening to the BBC by himself, and used what he had heard to compose various anti-fascist texts and anti-war leaflets, of which he also made many copies. The leaflets were designed to bring to people's attention how skewed the official reports about World War II from Berlin were, and also to point out Adolf Hitler's, Joseph Goebbels's, and other leading Nazis' criminal behaviour. Other themes covered by Hübener's writings were the war's futility, and Germany's looming defeat. He also mentioned the mistreatment sometimes meted out in the Hitler Youth.

In the autumn of 1941, he managed to involve three of his friends in his unlawful listening, Karl-Heinz Schnibbe and Rudolf Wobbe, who were later also co-workers, and later Gerhard Düwer as well. Hübener also had them help him distribute about 60 different pamphlets, all containing material from the British broadcasts, and all consisting of typewritten copies. They distributed them all over Hamburg, using such methods as surreptitiously pinning them on bulletin boards, sticking them through letterboxes, and stuffing them in coat pockets.[1]

On February 5, 1942, Helmuth Hübener was arrested by the Gestapo at his workplace at the Hamburger Bieberhaus. While trying to translate the pamphlets into French, and trying to have them distributed among prisoners of war, he had been noticed by a Nazi Party member, Heinrich Mohn, who had denounced him. (Mohn was jailed after the war, but freed by the Bundesgerichtshof by the early 1950s).

On 11 August 1942, Hübener's case was tried at the Volksgerichtshof in Berlin, and on 27 October, at the age of 17, he was beheaded by guillotine at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.[1] His two friends, Schnibbe and Wobbe, who had also been arrested, were given lengthy prison sentences of five and ten years respectively.


Volksgerichtshof's proclamation from 27 October 1942 announcing Hübener's executionAs it says in the proclamation (at right), Hübener was found guilty of conspiracy to commit high treason and treasonous furthering of the enemy's cause. He was sentenced not only to death, but also to permanent loss of his civil rights.

It was highly unusual, even for the Nazis, to try an underaged defendant, much less sentence him to death, but the court stated that Hübener had shown more than average intelligence for a boy his age. This, along with his general and political knowledge, and his behaviour before the court, made Hübener, in the court's eyes, a boy with a far more developed mind than was usually to be found in someone of his age. For this reason, the court stated, Hübener was to be punished as an adult.

Hübener's lawyers and his mother appealed for clemency in his case, hoping to have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The Berlin Gestapo did as well. In their eyes, the fact that Hübener had confessed fully and shown himself to be still morally uncorrupted were points in Hübener's favour. The Reich Youth Leadership (Reichsjugendführung) would have none of it, however. They said that the danger posed by Hübener's activities to the German people's war effort made the death penalty necessary. On 27 October 1942, the Nazi Ministry of Justice upheld the Volksgerichtshof's verdict. Hübener was only told of the Ministry's decision at 1:05 p.m. on the scheduled day of execution and beheaded at 8:13 p.m.

A youth centre and a pathway in Hamburg are nowadays named for Helmuth Hübener. The latter runs between Greifswalder Straße and Kirchenweg in Sankt Georg. At the former Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, an exhibit about young Helmuth Hübener's resistance, trial, and execution is located in the former guillotine chamber, where floral tributes are often placed in memory of Hübener and others put to death by the Nazis there.

Hübener was arrested by German authorities and two days later was excommunicated by local authorities of the LDS Church. When the Church leadership in the U.S. were informed of the excommunication, they revoked it. Hübener was posthumously reinstated in the LDS Church in 1946, with the note "excommunicated by mistake,"[2] because the specific process required for excommunication from the LDS Church was not followed by Hübener's local church leaders at the time.

His arrest was in connection to his political and anti-Nazi activities. Because of some of the local church leaders' political actions at the time of his excommunication it is most often seen as the reason why he was excommunicated. Some branch leaders allowed political broadcasts during some church meetings and refused to allow Jews to attend meetings. This was done to show that members were good German citizens. One of Hübener's local church leaders, Otto Berndt, was sympathetic to Hübener, and was suspected of having assisted and encouraged the boy. Berndt was questioned and released with an ominous warning: "after Jews, Mormons will be next."

Hübener's story has been the subject of various literary, dramatic, and cinematic works. In 1969, German author Günter Grass wrote the book Örtlich betäubt ("Local anesthetic"), later translated into English, about the Hübener group.[4]

Brigham Young University professor Thomas Rogers wrote a play titled "Hübener," which has had several runs in various venues. Schnibbe attended some of the performances on the BYU campus.

Hübener's story was also documented in the 2003 movie, Truth & Conviction, written and directed by Rick McFarland and Matt Whitaker. The movie, later released on DVD, was sponsored by the BYU College of Humanities.[5]

The book Hübener vs. Hitler; A Biography of Helmuth Hübener, Mormon Teenage Resistance Leader, by Richard Lloyd Dewey, was published by Stratford Books, Provo, UT/Arlington, VA in December 2003, Revised 2nd edition published October 2004. It is a biography written in a popular-historical style, and includes interviews with friends and relatives of Hübener, and utilizes primary documents from the Nazi regime that investigated his case.

When Truth Was Treason is a first-hand account by Karl Schnibbe (Hübener's co-resistance fighter), with editing by Blair R. Holmes, a professional historian, and Alan F. Keele, a German-language specialist. This monograph was published in 1995 by University of Illinois Press, with new publishing rights, theatrical rights, and copyright transferred 2003 to Academic Research Foundation.

The Boy Who Dared, by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, a historical biography for middle school readers that is based on Hübener's life, was published in February 2008. Bartoletti's earlier Newbery Honor book, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow (2005), covers Hübener's story as well.[6]

Truth & Treason is a major motion picture based on the Hübener Group. Filming begins in Budapest, Hungary Spring / Summer 2009. Haley Joel Osment has been cast as Helmuth Hübener. The script is by Ethan Vincent and Matt Whitaker who is also the director. The film is being produced by Russ Kendall & Micah Merrill of Kaleidoscope Pictures along with Whitaker.

Heroes of WWII

Faces of Courage:Young Heroes of WWII was an excellent book by Sally Rogow. It mentions the little known heroes of that era:

A young blind leader of the French Resistance Jacques Lusseyran-
Louise -Germany- A Jewish girl hides in Berlin-
The Edelweiss Pirates who defied Hitler-
Kirsten in Denmark who rescues Jewish children-
Yojo the Gypsy in France who escorts British pilots across the pyrenees-
Anneliese in Germany -an orphan girl flees from the German Maidens-
Andre,the deaf teenager in France who saves an American pilot-
Jacob in Poland a Polish Jewish boy's true story
Noni's escape from Hadamar in Germany-
Three heroic young Mormons, the Helmuth Huebener Group-
Karl a disabled boy in Germany escapes imprisonment and finds refuge-
Maria In Greece a Resistance Fighter-

Other books I want to mention
And there was Light Parabola Books 1998 : When Truth Was Treason U of Illinois 1995: Jacob's story from the archives of Yad Vashem

http://www.amazon.com/Faces-Courage-Young-Heroes-World/dp/1894694678/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233392629&sr=8-1

Pyramids how to explain them?

I have heard many different views of how the pyramids came to be but most assert its being built by slave labor,as I recall. Some say by the action of extraterrestrials using special energy to lift the massive blocks. Each view is possible considering their massive weight and perfect placement in that not even a thin paper can slide between their cracks. How can you explain it?

Janusz Korczak hero of the Holocaust

This hero did not live in the past in that he is alive today as memory and as a reality in a sense we do not fully understand. I know and sense the presence of heroes in this twilight as I have not sensed them before.
He operated an orphanage of 250+ orphans in the Warsaw ghetto at the height of its misery during the Nazi occupation.He could have escaped and live in comfort but chose not to. He refused to desert his children,refused to leave them comfortless on the cattlecar to their death and went on the same train as they, to his glory.I am looking to put up a video to this hero on my site arranged for such videos. It is referenced in one of my posts. www.myspace.com/edwardsGallery.

Our patchwork Heritage

http://mousemedicine.blogspot.com/2009/01/at-last.html On this site is a video of the recent inauguration from one attending.The following quote is from President Obama's inauguration speech. Worthy and good and pure comments in the hope for an era of peace,

...our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness...We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth. And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
President Barack Obama (b. 4 august 1961)
excerpt from inaugural address 20 january 2009

I pray that these words be made alive . Yet here was my comment on this blog where the post was made:
Edward Yablonsky said...
The speech of the President was awe inspiring and I pray the old hatreds will someday pass. I am not however boundlessly optimistic that they will. I can but say that I am the son of a holocaust survivor (my mother) and she told me all the horrors she witnessed as a girl of 5 years old, then came to Ellis Island originally from Brisk in Poland. I would like to believe in an era of light forthcoming but the past repeats because of our inaction born of insensitivity to the hurting of others.

January 25, 2009 11:52 PM

After the Darkness

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0805241825/ref=sib_dp_ptu#reader-link
Elie Wiesel reflects on the Holocaust with these valid observations:
-Recurrent pogroms and hateful myths were stirred up about the Jews. These had a long thread back to the Middle Ages and before . In an educated twentieth century society among the world's most cultured peoples, most learned peoples, the Germans and the French, the recurrent spectre of the Blood Libel myth ,the myth that Jewry had soaked their matzos with the blood of Christian children, were prolonged into the twentieth century and were alive and well even beyond the Nazi era."In Little Jewish villages,a wise man was a prince".

Another Haunting book, The Trial of God, has its setting in a Ukranian village. Only two Jews survive brutal Cossak raids,Berish and his daughter Hannah .Three itinerant actors arrive to perform a Purim play and Berish insists they stage a mock trial of God indicting Him.
Indicting Him for His silence in the face of evil.The idea for this play came from an event Elie Wiesel witnessed at Auschwitz. Three pious Rabbis decided one evening to indict God for allowing His people to be massacred. Wiesel felt like crying but there nobody cried.Searching for faith in a world where God was silent were two joining Christian theologians Robert Brown and Matthew Fox.

Resplendent in Victory

Pere Jacques: Resplendent in Victory
Article from: The Catholic Historical Review Article date: April 1, 2000 Author: Sciurba, Salvatore | Copyright information
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3885/is_199907?pnum=2&opg=n8871595&tag=artBody;col1
Pyre Jacques: Resplendent in Victory. By Francis J. Murphy. (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies. 1998. Pp. xiii, 200. $10.95 paperback.)
Francis J Murphy wrote a second book on Fr Jacques which is on Amazon Listen to the Silence
I have taken a quote from Francis J Murray. Note the above link.

I first saw Pere Jacques in May 1944 through the bars of block 27, in the infirmary of Gusen, where devoured by fever and stretched out on a pallet, with an arm slashed by a scalpel-I longed for a comforting smile from heaven. He brought it to me.

With our friends Jean Cayrol, Louis Boussel, and Gaston Passagey, he came each day for three months, morning and evening, with a word of encouragement. His bits and pieces of daily news were enlivened by an ardent optimism and strong faith in an early Allied victory. In these furtive predawn visits, I drew deeply from this miraculous source the stamina sorely needed for my own victory over an apparently definitive decline.
These long weeks of physical pain finally ended. Another existence, fraught with danger, was beginning-that of a factory worker. I was no longer a dying man but a resurrected one, and each day I witnessed Pere Jacques fully devoted to his work. And what a work! Little by little, his prestige asserted itself in the camp. He became a most respected personality, whose role, both moral and material, would be essential to the French community....

Many French, and foreigners too, met with him daily for words of encouragement and peace. Shunning prudence, he exposed himself to denunciation. However, he continued his ministry as the only priest in a camp of 20,000 men. He risked death at every second, since the S.S. would tolerate no religion other than Hitler-worship. His whole appearance was that of a man of action. Nre Jacques always

struck me as a fighter; he had the soul of a fighter. For him, nothing was too great an effort. He gave of himself just as naturally as others spared themselves. In the same way he lived a life of charity, with ardor and concern; he defended his points of view heatedly, vivaciously, and even sharply.... My last view of Gusen and of its drill yard, where so many had perished, is for me inseparable from the memory of the man, the priest, who in this multitude once more overcame every adversity and who, in the end, brought us the victory-the triumph of the human spirit over a system born of materialism and depravity. The great victor was the one who had survived these trials, just as the salamander survives fire. April 28, 1945! In our eyes, Pere Jacques was resplendent in victory.
... Nre Jacques, you who for months each morning and evening brought me words of comfort, affection, and love; you who sustained in me each day the feeble flame of life by your presence and your smile; you who prayed for a bad Christian and for the others; you who radiated in this death camp so much light, so much life; you who taught men, all men, true nobility of soul, enthusiasm of heart, and strength of mind; allow me, tonight, to give you this message from the living, the repatriated from Compiegne, Gusen, and Mauthausen, the beneficiaries of a miracle, Nre Jacques, we are always with you.

New blog for videos on various subjects

I have set up a link for topical videos I consider significant

www.myspace.com/edwardsGallery Go under the section of my recent blog entries

Edward's Educational thoughts on Literacy: A voice for peace

Edward's Educational thoughts on Literacy: A voice for peace

A voice for peace

http://mousemedicine.blogspot.com/2009/01/voice-for-peace.html

I posted a comment to this blog and I heard the attached video. More is required for peace than an era of peace, but a perrmanent shift in the consciousness of many individuals in the world and an end to the main domineering of our selfishness which is ingrained in us . This shift is not likely to occur in our present state as we(most of us) are not willing to pay the price of peace. It's true and we (most of us again) tacitly know our flawed nature, ah! that's the rub.

Pope Pius XII Savior of the Jews?

Even until this day controversy rages if this Pontiff truly saved Jews during the Holocaust in the countless thousands. The answer is resoundingly yes and his silence was self imposed through the fear of anti Catholic and anti Jewish reprisals. A truthful film concerning the Pontiff was the film The Red and the Black with Gregory Peck and Sir Michael Gielgud as Pius XII . He arranged clandestine safe houses, namely monasteries and convents to shelter and house countless Jewish children and abundant proof attests to his lifesaving efforts. Some references will prove in order:

http://catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=12994 note the attached video presentation here

http://popepiusxiiandthejews.blogspot.com/ A plethora of articles and news clips with factual allusions attest to his rescue efforts and rescue work in general .

Letter from Rabbi André Zaoui, http://www.zenit.org/rssenglish-24162 This letter and many more such documents attests to the Pontiff's lifesaving work. If ever someone deserved canonization, he does.

I honor and deem him a hero and among the blessed.

Also I will never ever forget the Jesuits heroic deeds in that era

The Jesuits hide and Rescue the Jews during the Holocaust

The Jesuits rescue and hiding of Jews in Italy during the holocaust is well known in some circles, now in many more circles than formerly.
The following post amply demonstrates their heroic stand.
http://www।firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5551


As partial explanation for the unbalanced impression many have of “Catholic indifference and inaction,” Lapomarda refers to the postwar Stalinist policy in Eastern Bloc countries. The Communist governments that took over these countries after 1945 consistently spread lies to the effect that Catholic authorities had collaborated with the Nazis during wartime occupations. When church leaders sought to correct such false accusations by bringing evidence before the people, they were usually thrown into prison or hunted down as traitors to their country. The result, says Lapomarda, “has been a silence so tight that the truth about much of the heroic efforts of various individuals in the Nazi era has been neglected. . . .” Lapomarda’s work is one of the first to breach that silence, especially with regard to the situations in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Baltic states, Yugoslavia, and Russia. He outlines in separate chapters the persecution of the Jesuits and their role in inspiring and sustaining Church resistance in Germany and throughout the different nations of occupied Europe.



.

Lucien Burel

Father Jacques de Jesus (Lucien Burel) a Carmelite friar was headmaster of a school in Avon. Young men who were being forced to go to Germany as laborers and appealed to him for help. Father Jacques hid these men along with the Jewish children he wanted to save. He was arrested by the Gestapo and badly mistreated. He died soon after he was liberated by American troops (The above was an excerpt from the below web site)













This post is a tribute to this Carmelite father. He was featured and honored in a Louis Malle film (English titled "Goodbye My Children" "Au revoir les enfants"). Many were the outsanding Catholic heroes of the Holocaust mentioned in the first cite below in an article. Louis Malle finally paid tribute to his former headmaster.

• In Belgium Father Bruno rescued more than 300 Jews in France




• Protestant Pastor Andre Trocme hid several 1000 Jews in silence around the village of Le Chambon a story of amazing courage



• Father Jules-Gerard Saliege



• Father Pierre-Marie Benoit




• Father Jacques headed a school in Avon and hid Jewish boys from the Nazis and was transported when caught to Mathausen and died several weeks later after liberation.The photo to the right features Maurice Schlosser one of the hidden boys on the rocks of Avon.



• Father Pietro Boetto saved at least 800 lives The first website refers to their lives and heroic deeds.

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/catholic_stories/cs0058.html


http://www.gusen.org/pers/bunel01x.htm


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Bunel_-_Père_Jacques_de_Jesus



http://tree-in-the-sea.blogspot.com/2007/09/remembering-holocaust-era-catholic.html


http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Father_Jacques.html


A further article on Father Jacques





The boy's school in Avon France was a refuge for hiding Jewish youth from the Nazis. He placed the noted Jewish botanist Lucien Weil on the school faculty.





Here are some of the written sources on this amazing hero, Fr. Jacques.


Bernadac Christian, Les Sorciers du Ciel - Le Pere Jacques a Gusen (Lucien Bunel), France Empire, Paris 1969
Carrouges Michel, Père Jacques (Lucien Bunel ... as remembered by his fellow prsioners at GUSEN concentration camp) , The Macmillan Company, New York, 1961
Hugelé, Gavard, Murphy, Gufoni, Sterckx, Bédarida, Choumoff, Maccise, Par la Croix vers la lumière, Le Père Jacques de Jésus 1900-1945, Textes des journées de recontre organisées à la mémoire du Père Jacques, les 9-11 juin et 22-24 septembre 1995, Les Èditions du Cerf, Paris 1999
Murphy Fancis J., Pére Jacques - Resplendent in Victory, Institute of Carmelite Studies (ICS Publications), Washington, D.C. 1998
USHMM, Temporary Exhibition on the Actions of Father Jacques, On-line version, Washington, Spring 1997

Tipping Points

We all of us have seminal moments , influences that propel us to take one fork in the road as opposed to another. Seminal moments are what they are often called and often they are subliminal causes we are not always aware of. I was reminded of these by listening to an audible interview by Don Katz, CEO of audibles.com ,interviewing Jane Fonda. Her tipping point for anti war activist involvement was Kent State and the invasion of Cambodia, seemingly small beginnings and innocuous in nature. I am convinced trhese moments are never small and have impact that know not of at the moment of their origin. They awaken us out of the comfort of the ignorance we once had ,and such awakening forever changes us and we are never the same afterwards. In another post I will describe my tipping point(s). One additional fact about them, they are never obvious but subtle ,often unrecognized, and fully develop over a span of time.

The uprising of Warsaw. where the partisans who fought the Nazis knew they would die as flame throwers and incendiary bombs burned the ghetto to ashes along with many of its defenders .The survivors were shot or deported in cattle cars to the death camps.

Euthanasia Centers abounded in the Nazi Third Reich a killing machine of no mercy which regarded the elderly and infirm as mere cattle and deserving of extermination. May I never forget these nameless hordes as they all had names. I have often heard it stated "May God Avenge their blood." I concur . How could fellow humans, no I dare not class them as such, commit these atrocities? They have not learned to cease as Africa is the ongoing scene of other types of atrocities. Of unspeakable crimes. These are not even humans who performed these execrable deeds.

Canavan disease

Canavan disease is a neurological disorder in infants due to a defective gene and results in death by age four,so I've read. Genetic testing is crucial in its treatment to prolong life, yet this gene is patented and requires a royalty beyond what most parents can afford to progress with the testing. The royalties supercede the importance of the treatment,so it seems.

This is Irena Sendler hero of the Holocaust who saved the lives of 2500+ children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto taken over by the Nazis. She was tortured by the Nazis but never divulged their whereabouts. That there are heroes of her stature even today never ceases to amaze me and they are ohhhhh so few. During the war and Nazi occupations many (yet comparatively few) rose to the occasion.

What was amazing in genetic research and dna research from what I have studied is that even slight genetic differences are crucial and small differences have great meaning due to the way we are wired. (Shawn Carroll ,The Making of the Fittest). Is this not very indicative of intelligent design?

Literacy is awareneass -especially in science

I just heard an interview with the elder James Watson who broke the DNA code and wrote the book Avoid Boring People . He made the observation that arrogance and assertiveness is essential especially for young people in making great discoveries. We,at least some of us, would recoil from such a comment . Yet what he does say makes a great deal of sense to me in that context.

Genetic Resarch

Am investigating Shawn Carroll's The Making of the Fittest.. and find genetic research to be utterly a fascinating endeavor. He's from the University of Wisconsin. Forensic dna records can now explain why genetic development of certain species happened that way. The selection process is predictable and not random whereas the mutated genes and non functional genes are random. He also discusses "trichromatic vision", full color spectrum vision, which we as humans have and not all mammals have this full spectrum.Some birds have ultraviolet perception we don't have.

Edward's Functional Resume

My functional resume is attached below:

Email: edwyablo@hotmail.com

EDUCATION:

Candidate for ABA Associates Certificate in Paralegal Studies
Phoenix College Phoenix AZ Certificate in Process through Fall 2007 Semester

Maintained Straight A Average to date at Phoenix College

B.A. English Humanities
Arizona State University Tempe AZ Graduated 1969

SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS

Self motivated and proficient in training and interviewing employees, as an accountant. Effective
In oral and written skills namely explanation of accounting systems, recon programs, and proficient in Microsoft systems and Excel spreadsheets. Researched tax law issues and active in using latest software, TAX ACT. Problem solving in tax law and tax audit related issues for clients. Have as matter of course multi tasked tax law related and audit related projects with clients. Confronted I.R.S. under POA aegis representing clients at audit hearings successfully. I excel in identifying accounting problems, incorporating suggestive solutions in a solution package.I established accounting standards and model programs/spreadsheets on Excel which became standard for the company.

AREAS OF STRENGTH

Organizational Skills
Prioritizing accounting projects by deadlines and content type
Maintained client files by audit and tax file designations
Interviewed clients on self-devised forms as to info used in return preparation and P-L’s

Administrative skills Drafting status of account letters to clients,
· Drafting “status of account” letters , preparing memos to that effect to management
· Answering client inquiries timely

· Proficiently trained new employees constructing Microsoft word Power Point displays of software and accounting forms in a presentation format