Dream and Hallucination as symptoms

Kipling appears to be manipulating fear for the entertainment of his readers, fear of unknown forces which lie the other side of the familiar world, and fear for the human mind, which is vulnerable to invasion.

Kipling and Dreams(by Mary Hamer)

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_dreams.htm#phantom Dream and Hallucination as symptoms Shortly after Christmas 1876, Georgie Burne-Jones, wife of the painter, caught her eleven-year-old nephew, Ruddy, at the bottom of her London garden, striking out with a stick at a tree. When she asked what he was doing, ‘I thought it might be Grandma but I had to hit it to make sure,’ he replied. Georgie was alarmed by what she read as the signs of disturbance and she put investigations in train. As a result, Ruddy’s mother returned from India to reclaim him with his younger sister, Trix from ‘The House of Desolation’ as he would come to call it, in Southsea. They had been living there in the care of a foster-mother, Mrs. Holloway, a woman who turned out to be an unfortunate choice. A strict Evangelical, her piety was of the kind that takes pleasure in manipulating fear. As a man of seventy, Kipling recalled Mrs. Holloway with bitterness, in his autobiography, Something of Myself: ‘I had never heard of Hell, so I was introduced to it in all its terrors’ he wrote. I will explore the damaging impact of this encounter more deeply in due course. Yet in his maturity as an artist, he was able to extract some benefit. Over time, writing sensational stories about dreams brought to the surface his own intimate knowledge of terror and guilt. This was gold dust to him as a writer. Dreams created for sensation At the start of his career the teenage journalist would lie awake at night in India, pondering what would ‘take’ with the market at home. He was mainly concerned with exploiting the dramas and extremities of life in the East, with a stylish touch of cynicism. "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows" (Civil and Military Gazette, 26 September 1884) ventriloquised the drugged tones of a Eurasian addict come down to living in an opium den. The red and black dragons on the pillow that come to life and fight, like the Joss that ‘turns all sorts of queer colours late at night and stamps his feet and rolls his eyes’, are not mysteries but opium dreams of the kind the writer had experienced himself. They are offered as crowning details in a brilliant and disturbing tapestry. When Kipling did turn to using regular dreams, ones not fuelled by drugs, it was at first as a literary device. This allowed him to present a dialogue between the younger and older selves of the speaker. "The Dream of Duncan Parrenness" (Civil and Military Gazette, December 1884) with its pastiche of eighteenth-century idiom, is another dazzling work of virtuosity on the part of a very young man. It lays claim to an even more explicit cynicism. Parrenness is a Writer—that is, an administrator for the East India Company— in eighteenth-century Calcutta. The dream teaches him that in order to achieve his ambition to be Governor he must give up his trust in both men and women and lose ‘the tender conscience of a boy’. That story is dramatically appealing as a piece of imaginative writing, but the insights that its dream offers, with their striving for sophistication, are merely knowing. Neither is there any touch of the inscrutable, the resonance of hidden truths which makes important dreams compelling, in the dream which is reported in "The Last of the Stories" (1888). This time Kipling does present himself directly, the young writer now sure of a readership throughout India, as the dreamer. The Devil of Discontent takes him off to a sort of literary underworld peopled from novels, where he is greeted by the characters he created, and is brought to recognise how far his skill fell short.  The mind under stress, dream images of unwelcome knowledge  It was in composing "The Phantom Rickshaw" for Quartette, the Christmas supplement of the Civil and Military Gazettein 1885, that Kipling first felt himself moved by the force he was to call his Daemon. When it was in charge he learned:‘do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.’ This was also the first story to make a link between guilt and the images generated by the mind under stress. Dream and hallucination meet in the experience of Pansay, haunted by a vision of the woman he abandoned, as he last saw her, seated in a black and yellow rickshaw.  Earlier that year Kipling had learned for himself or been reminded of what it was to hallucinate without the benefit of any drug. In March 1885 he’d been sent as special correspondent to the Rawalpindi Durbar, his first serious assignment, from which he sent back a series of brilliant reports, overtaxing himself in the process. He completed his review of the marching troops. But when at last he tried to rest, exhausted by overwork yet hyperalert from too much sensation and too little sleep, he found himself watching a relentless vision of infinite pairs of legs marching past.  ‘One of the few advantages that India has over England is a great Knowability,’ opens "The Phantom Rickshaw". It’s only on rereading that the irony comes home. Readers are not given the option of simply taking "The Phantom Rickshaw" as a straight ghost story, gripping as the writer makes it. Instead they are encouraged to speculate from the first about the sources of Pansay’s waking visions and night-dreams. The practical Dr Heatherlegh’s diagnosis of overwork is advanced only to be challenged by the author’s more alluring and sinister theory ‘that there was a crack in Pansay’s head and a little bit of the Dark World came through’. However, ‘never trust the teller, trust the tale’, as D. H. Lawrence advised. The story itself nudges us towards less vague and more challenging interpretations. Almost to the end, Pansay is made to deny his own cruelty, even to attempt justification. When his mind brings back an image of the woman he has crushed and killed by his heartless behaviour, what he knows but does not want to know is brought home. The main actor in the tale is the unwelcome knowledge that Pansay attempts to leave behind but will never be able to escape.  In a final irony he believes that what haunts him is a spirit coming from outside himself. Today we might call those hauntings a projection, the condensed image of the guilt that Pansay would prefer not to confront. That is where the story gets its power. At this point in his career as a writer, Kipling appears to be manipulating fear for the entertainment of his readers, fear of unknown forces which lie the other side of the familiar world, and fear for the human mind, which is vulnerable to invasion.  As a child however, at a deep level he was left in a state of confusion and shock. His parents were not believers and had given him little or no religious instruction. In Bombay his encounters with religion had taken the form of joining his Catholic ayah at prayer by a wayside cross, or of glimpsing ‘the friendly gods’ in the small Hindu temples where he went with the bearer. Under normal conditions of development a child builds up a picture of the world drawn from the evidence of its own senses. Yet all Ruddy’s previously benign experience was now trumped by the news of a God of revelation, that is one he did not discover for himself but could only know by means of others’ teaching. More shocking still, this new God was one who might wish to punish him in everlasting fire. This was no small thing. Such an attack on all he thought that he understood put him at risk, psychologically speaking. Destroying his confidence in the world, it also undermined his trust in his own senses, threatening to rob him of the power of judgment.  The children, left without warning or explanation, only knew that they had been abandoned, ‘deserted’, as Trix would remember, many years later. Though Trix herself was gifted and she too became a writer, as a grown woman she suffered breakdowns and was never to overcome the harm she suffered as a child. Mrs. Holloway imposed a cloying intimacy on Trix, while she bullied Ruddy: his confusion and loss were compounded by her attempts to break his spirit. He portrayed this experience directly in a story, "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" ’ (1889). But it is the effects which come much later, when trauma experienced in childhood, or even in the womb, erupts into the present in the form of dreams, that he takes up and explores repeatedly as an artist.  Dream and Truth Before moving on to consider Kipling’s dream stories in the order they were written, I’d like to go back to that scene in the garden, which his biographer, Andrew Lycett, reports. At that time Ruddy had been subject to Mrs. Holloway, and her campaign to break his spirit in the name of godliness, for more than five years. When Ruddy hit out at his grandmother, he probably thought he was seeing a ghost: his maternal grandmother, Hannah Macdonald, had died in the previous March. Little love had been lost between them. Strongly critical of Rudyard’s behaviour as a two-year-old, Hannah dismissed him then as ‘that self-willed rebel’. She herself was a clergyman’s wife. On a visit to Southsea when he was rising seven, according to biographer Harry Ricketts, she aligned herself with Mrs. Holloway by subjecting him to a Sunday passed in ‘reading the Scriptures and repeating hymns’. In after years, his Aunt Georgie would often ask Rudyard why he had never spoken of his unhappiness in Southsea or of the assaults made by Mrs. Holloway. Aside from the fear of reprisals, as a child he lacked the language to frame what he was going through; his distress remained buried and unnamed. But in that fantasy of his dead grandmother, so close in association to the figure of Mrs. Holloway and her teachings, his overtaxed mind projected an image in which his fear and anger were condensed. When he did find words, in his twenties, to tell the story of those Southsea years in ""Baa, Black Sheep", the writing released those feelings to be examined. In certain of his subsequent dream stories from then on he gradually began to include the image of a pious mother in the background. Instead of associating these figures with the cruelties he had personally experienced, however, as an artist he indicated that they were dangerous for a different reason: their teachings misled their sons, disabling them by blinding them to the real world. Dream and Trance as a way of knowing As a famous writer, Rudyard Kipling’s curiosity, his appetite for accurate information, was notorious. When they saw his name on a passenger list ships’ crews groaned, for they foresaw the barrage of questions they’d be encountering throughout the voyage. But he was also a man of his time, when the public was alive with an excitement about unseen forces that scarcely distinguished between mesmerism and electricity, between the telegraph and radio waves or spiritualism. Though he was chary of the latter, Kipling too was fascinated by science, and the new technologies that allowed information to be transmitted at a distance. He also came to ask about the form of knowledge that is not picked up from ordinary observation and experience, but arrives into the mind unbidden. In Kipling’s mature stories, dream and trance are not escapes from reality but conduits for a knowledge that would otherwise remain inaccessible. Yet who knows what powers that current or where it takes its source? The question had a special relevance for him as a writer. In "The Finest Story in the World" (1891) he wrote speculatively of ‘the half-memory falsely called imagination’. The weight that Kipling would lay in his stories on uncommon means of knowing and communication, their importance for him as a more convincing alternative to Christian explanations of the world, would increase over time, in parallel with his own experiences as an adult. But his aims were more modest when he was publishing his first stories.

"Moti Guj – Mutineer"

Nazim perhaps Nazim-ul-Mulk, the hereditary style of the reigning prince of the Hyderabad Territories – see Hobson-Jobson, p. 628. Page 364, line 8] elephant-language See Chapter IX of Beast and |Man in India by Lockwood Kipling for further information on the belief that elephants came from the furthest East, as some of the words of command are Chinese or Burmese. Eric Scigliano in Seeing the Elephant (Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc., 2006, first published in Britain as Love, War and Circuses , p.167), notes

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_motiguj1.htm "Moti Guj – Mutineer"  (notes edited by John McGivering)  notes on the text  [July 14th 2006] Publication First published in Mine Own People in the United States of America in 1891 and collected in Life’s Handicap the same year. The story Moti Guj is a magnificent and powerful elephant, who works clearing forest land for planting coffee. He is owned by a dissipated mahout, Deesa, to whom he is devoted. One day Deesa asks for leave to go off on a drunken orgy, and the planter allows him ten days off, provided Moti Guj will work while he is away. Deesa tells the elephant that for ten days he must work for Chihun, another mahout, and departs. To the planter's surprise Moti Guj works well – for ten days. On the eleventh day, however, he refuses to do his daily stint, and wanders around the camp looking for Deesa and generally causing trouble. At dawn the following day Deesa returns, has a joyous reunion with Moti Guj, and – to the planter's astonishment – they get back to work clearing stumps.  Some critical comments KJ 253/8 has what the Editor called 'a rather maudlin sketch' by the French artist H. Deluermoz, showing a larger than life Deesa embracing the elephant. This is another of the stories which Lionel Johnson believes does not deserve publication (R L Green p. 93.) Hart (p. 107) points out the importance of the British in India understanding the point of view of the Indians if they are to rule successfully, and including the view of the elephant who will work just as long as his master tells him to and no longer. Hart also refers to the orang-outangs in “Bertran and Bimi” (earlier in this volume) which he sees as significant as anticipating the further variation of points of view in the Jungle Books. Other stories concerning elephants include “Toomai of the Elephants” and “Her Majesty’s Servants” (The Jungle Book), “Namgay Doola” earlier in this volume, “ Letters of Marque X” (p.82) and "From Sea to Sea III" (p.231) (From Sea to Sea, Vol. 1), “The Killing of Hatim Tai” (From Sea to Sea, Vol. 2 p. 369), “My Lord the Elephant” (Many Inventions), and the verse “Municipal.” See also Chapter IX of Beast and Man in India, by Lockwood Kipling, for illustrations, folk-lore, instructions in management and an outline of this story. See also Colonel J.H. Williams, Elephant Bill (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950) for observations on their intelligence and sense of humour (p. 60 etc.), and Seeing the Elephant by Eric Scigliano (Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc., 2006, first published in Britain as Love, War and Circuses 2004)  [J H McG]

"The Phantom Rickshaw"

"The Phantom Rickshaw"  (notes edited by John McGivering) notes on the text  [May 19 2004] Publication This story was first published in Quartette, the Christmas Annual of the Civil and Military Gazette for 1885, which included four stories by the nineteen-year-old Kipling with other items of prose and verse by his parents and sister. It was revised before being collected in The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales, Volume 5 of the Indian Railway Library, of 1888. It was included in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories, published in 1890, and in numerous later editions of that collection. The story  Jack Pansay has had a passionate ship-board romance with Agnes Keith-Wessington, the golden-haired wife of an officer. He wearies of her and tells her so, but she refuses to accept his rejection, insisting that it is all "a hideous mistake". She grows wan and thin, but he continues to respond curtly and brutally. He becomes engaged to Kitty Mannering, a lively young woman, whom he deeply loves, and - not long after - Agnes dies of a broken heart. Soon after, his rides out with Kitty around Simla are disrupted by the ghost of Agnes, in her familiar yellow-panelled rickshaw, which only he can see. She is still insisting that it is all "a hideous mistake". His friends think he is mad or drunk, his doctor is mystified, and Kitty breaks off the engagement. His life is ruined, and he goes to his death, still haunted by the golden-haired ghost.  Some critical comments Cornell (p. 105) likens this story to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”, finding it only better in that it takes place in Kipling’s Simla and not a Gothic (or perhaps 'Gothick') setting at some time in the past. See also “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes“ later in this volume. Tompkins (pp. 120 and 198-9) discusses this story in her chapters entitled “Hatred and Revenge” and “Man and the Abyss”, taking the view that: The young writer had neither the tact nor the self-denying consistency to carry such a difficult mode to complete success…..He managed better in …. “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes”. Carrington (pp. 68-9) observes that: "...this story has some claim to a study of hallucination, the first and not the weakest of the many tales of psychopathic states which he was to publish...It is well worth reading today. Harry Ricketts (pp. 81-2) sees this story as expressing some of Kipling's feeling of being abandoned, and haunted, by Flo Garrard, who had rejected him. Ricketts notes that in Something of Myself Kipling refers to "The Phantom Rickshaw" as one of the first fruits of his 'Personal Daemon', the compelling force outside himself which influenced his most deeply felt writing. In Something of Myself he said of it (page 209): "Some of it was weak, much was bad and out of key, but it was my first serious attempt to think in another man's skin." See also Mary Hamer's essay "Kipling and Dreams"  Kipling and the Supernatural Kipling's other stories of the supernatural include “By Word of Mouth” and “The Bisara of Pooree” in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), “At the End of the Passage”, “The Mark of the Beast” and “The Dream of Duncan Parrenness" inLife’s Handicap (1891), “The Lost Legion” in Many Inventions (1893), “The House Surgeon” in Actions and Reactions(1909), “In the Same Boat” in A Diversity of Creatures (1917), “The Wish House” and “A Madonna of the Trenches” inDebits and Credits (1926), and “Unprofessional” in Limits and Renewals (1932). A visit to the Cow’s Mouth (Gau-Mukh/Gye-Mukh), a very sinister place, with a strong aura of the supernatural, is described in Letters of Marque No.XI (From Sea to Sea, Vol I) and elaborated in Chapter 12 of The Naulahka.  [Page 126, line 20] the drop-bolts are drawn A man about to be hanged stood on a trap-door with the noose about his neck: the bolts were drawn and that was that. See the poem “Danny Deever”, and “The Debt” in Limits and Renewals.  [Page 136, line 3] Arab A beautiful, intelligent and spirited horse - The whole effect is one of symmetry and grace, carried with pride and full of life, and the action straight, free and airy. (Caroline Silver, pp. 132 ff.) See “The Maltese Cat” inThe Day’s Work and the poem “The Moral.”  [Page 138, line 31] cholera see Dr. Sheehan’s "Kipling and Medicine".  Kipling's experience of cholera  In November, 1905, Kipling advised a man going to work in Northern Nigeria, to “keep a spare and dry belly-band (cholera belt or whatever they call it) about one......to change into after a wetting or a sweating and it just fortifies the lower intestines and the kidneys.” [Information from Thomas Pinney, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol.3.] In a letter to Edith Macdonald, 2-7 June 1884, Kipling called cholera “the Abominable”, and said he saw it “knock a man down ... he died in a trifle under two hours”. He blamed “rotten melons and bad arrack”. But, surprisingly, he went on to assure her that “an English East wind is more deadly than most epidemics of Asiatic cholera.” [Information from Thomas Pinney, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol.1, p.63] In 1889, when Kipling was in Hong Kong, he was mistaken for a doctor by an intoxicated woman terrified that she had cholera. A neighbour had died of cholera in 6 hours the previous week. He had to reassure her that cholera never attacks a person twice. In the circumstances he did his best to reassure and comfort her. But getting cholera once does not give enough immunity to guarantee against possible later infection. [Information from Philip D Curtin, Death By Migration, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.71.] Fresh air was thought to be very important in the prevention of cholera. A regiment struck by cholera would leave their barracks and set up a 'cholera camp' in the countryside until the disease had run its course. [Information from George and Christopher Newark, Kipling’s Soldiers, The Pompadour Gallery, 1996, p.118] Cholera in the stories  In “The World Without”, (1888), Curtiss of the Royal Artillery says they had two cases of cholera, one of which died, and if they had another they would be ordered into camp. In the same story “Miggy”(Mingle), was so fearful of catching the disease that he “dies of cholera once a week in the Rains and gets drunk on chlorodyne in between.” “Only A Subaltern”, (1888), gives an excellent description of life and death in a cholera-camp. In “My Lord The Elephant”,(1892), cholera was hanging round the cells used by the Ould Regiment “like mildew on wet boots, an’ ’twas murdher to confine in ut.” When Kipling arrived in San Francisco in May 1889, he wrote: “but for the blessed sea-breezes San Francisco would enjoy cholera every season.” [Information from From Sea To Sea, Vol.1, p.487.] In “The Daughter Of The Regiment”, (1887), Kipling described the trains overcrowded with soldiers - 870 troops, 12 women and 13 children in two trains - told to move to new quarters 600 miles away during very hot weather. He described the panic at “Ludianny”: “ivry sowl av the followers ran for dear life as soon as the thrain stopped”. The telegraph clerk had to be physically restrained from bolting while he sent a telegraph 300 miles up the line asking for help. He describes the men “fallin’ over, arms an’ all” and the Doctor “dropped on to the platform from the door av a carriage where we was takin’ out the ead.” The women were “huddled up anyways, screamin’ wid fear”. Presumably they and the children had travelled in a separate carriage and had so far escaped the infection. Ould Pummeloe knew that the men needed water and got all the women “wid horse-buckets and cookin’ pots” to carry water to them from a nearby well. She literally worked herself to death. Mulvaney said she died because of the sun “she misremembered she was only wearin’ her ould black bonnet”. That night there was a lot of wind and “it blew the cholera away”. This could not have happened as cholera is not spread by the wind. It is water-borne. The well from which they were drawing water must have remained uninfected during the time they were quarantined there. In “Cholera Camp”,(1896) : “Though they’ve ‘ad us out by marches an’ they’ve ad’ us back by rail; But it runs as fast as troop trains, and we cannot get away,.....” The troops in question must have been using contaminated water or food all the time, and carrying the disease with them as they travelled. In “A Germ Destroyer” (1887), E S Mellish had spent 15 years in Lower Bengal studying cholera and held the theory that cholera was “a germ that propagated itself as it flew through a muggy atmosphere and stuck in the branches of trees like a wool flake”. The germ could be rendered sterile by Mellish’s Own Invincible Fumigatory - a heavy violet-black powder containing nitrate of strontia, baryta, and bone meal. In Kim (1901), the lama believed that the dung of a black horse, mixed with sulphur and carried in a snake-skin was a sound remedy for cholera. The doctor in “At The End Of The Passage” (1890), was having about fifteen deaths a day among the cholera-stricken coolies building the Gaudhari State Line. He said: “And the worst of it is that the poor devils look at you as though you ought to save them....My last attempt was empirical, but it pulled an old man through. He was brought to me apparently past hope, and I gave him gin and Worcester sauce with cayenne. It cured him; but I don’t recommend it.” In “William The Conqueror” (1895), Raines, the editor of the daily paper told Scott he would be put on relief-works “with a horde of Madrassis dying like flies; one native apothecary and half a pint of cholera-mixture among the ten thousand of you”.  William had previously been through a very bad cholera year, “seeing sights unfit to be told”. One of Martyn’s loaned policemen died of cholera when the Rains came, but there was no mention of a major cholera epidemic. The “cholera-mixture” referred to in “William The Conqueror” may have been a mixture of tincture of ginger, aromatic spirits of ammonia, spirits of nitrous ether and brandy, or it may have consisted of a mixture of chloroform, aromatic spirits of ammonia, chlorodyne and brandy. Chlorodyne was a mixture of chloroform and morphine. [Information from William Moore, A Manual of Family Medicine & Hygiene for India, reprinted Delhi, 1989, 6th edition 1893, p.637-8] The verses at the beginning of “At The End Of The Passage” (1890), mention “the blasts they blow on the cholera-horn”. According to Hobson-Jobson’s Anglo-Indian Dictionary this was really a “Collery Horn” - “a long brass horn of hideous sound, often used at native funerals”. In “Without Benefit Of Clergy”, (1890), during a cholera epidemic, the conches used in the Hindu temples “screamed and bellowed, for the gods were inattentive in those days”. After death from cholera there is sometimes a contraction of the muscles of the limbs “which has led to stories of persons being removed to the dead-house while yet alive”. Possibly hearing of such a story gave Kipling the idea for ‘The Strange Ride Of Morrowbie Jukes’, (1885). [Information from William Moore, A Manual of Family Medicine & Hygiene for India, reprinted Delhi, 1989, 6th edition 1893, p.103] [Page 155, line 20] Powers of Darkness An echo of Luke 22, 53: ...This your hour and the power of darkness... The phrase is also used in Kim at - for example - page 257, line 10, and in the fifth verse of Hymn 23 Hymns Ancient and Modern ("Glory to Thee, my God this night") Let no ill dreams disturb my rest No powers of darkness me molest. [Page 152, line 10] ’I seemed to move amid a world of ghosts’ from Tennyson’s poem “The Princess” Canto 1, line 17. [Page 152, line 29] chimera Also spelt chimaera. Both words signify a fabulous monster, or any wild or idle fancy.

Miracle at Midnight

 

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

165 of 167 people found the following review helpful

Miracle at Midnight is a WONDERFUL Movie! A MUST-SEE!!

By LactivistAnti-VaccineLiberal on June 14, 2005

Format: DVD

I watched this outstanding Disney made-for-tv movie many, many times, and I LOVE it!!

I first saw when it premiered on TV on the "Wonderful World of Disney" show in the spring of 1998. At that time I taped it on a VHS tape off of TV, and I loved it so much that I watched it over and over many, many times.

I should have broken the security tab on the tape, but because there were still several hours of free space left on the tape (it was taped in EP/SLP mode) I thought I would wait until the tape was filled before breaking it.

Unfortunately a couple of years later, I ended up accidentally taping over this great movie with something else, thereby erasing it. I was so upset, and so I am VERY glad to FINALLY have this movie on DVD!!

Since getting this terrific movie on DVD I have watched it so many times I have lost count!! I am also going to buy the soundtrack for it too, because the music is so moving and poignant.

Miracle at Midnight is the touching made-for-TV movie based on true events during World War II. It is set in Denmark during September 1943,(the information in the Amazon.com Editorial Reviews is either a typo or other error)and stars Sam Waterston and Mia Farrow as

Dr. Karl (Waterston) and Doris(Farrow) Koster, a Christian couple living in Copenhagen with their two children, 18 year old Hendrik (Justin Whalin) and preteen Elsa (Nicola Mycroft) during the Nazi occupation of Denmark.

When Dr. Koster learns that after three years of occupation, the Nazis are going to start deporting the Jewish people in Denmark, he and his family realize that they can no longer sit by and watch their friends, neighbors and countrymen, be taken, and dragged away to Nazi concentration camps and death camps. They decide to do whatever they can to help those in danger.

While Dr. Koster uses his position of Chief Surgeon to protect a young Resistance fighter who was shot by the Nazis, his 18 year old son Hendrik risks his life working for the same Resistance group, commandeering and seizing shipments of weapons that were sent to the Nazis.

But it all comes to a head on Wednesday, September 29, 1943, when Dr. Koster gets word that the Nazis have planned a mass arrest and deportation of all Jewish people, at Midnight on that Friday, which is the start of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah.

Dr. Koster, his family, and his entire hospital staff, band together with the Resistance, and the Danish people,

realizing that they are going to have to work really fast if they want to save the thousands and thousands of innocent Jewish people in Denmark from being dragged off to Theresienstadt Concentration Camp by the Nazis.

They set up plans to find hiding places for the Jewish people, and get them safely through the initial raids, while they try to convince the Swedish government, to accept them, and find ways to transport them up the Danish coast to Sweden. As a majority of the Danes hate the Nazis, they are all willing to help, opening their homes, providing money and transportation.

While Hendrik works with the Resistance, securing trucks and other means to take Jewish people up the coast of Denmark to Sweden, his father, Dr. Karl Koster uses his position as Chief Surgeon at Christiana Hospital to hide Jews in the hospital, and his mother, Doris, and sister, Elsa, help out by letting their Jewish friends, Rabbi Ben Abrams, his wife, his daughter Hannah, and her fiance Michael hide in their attic.

Eventually the Nazis catch up to them, and the Kosters themselves are forced to flee for their lives. But before escaping, they are, in a matter of a couple of days, able to help save over 7,000 Danish Jews, in a miraculous rescue!

Miracle at Midnight is a TERRIFIC movie! It is just WONDERFUL having it on DVD! Now I can enjoy it for years to come!!

  43 of 43 people found the following review helpful

Touching, Uplifting Movie

By A Customer on June 27, 2000

Format: VHS Tape

The story of Christian Danes who risked their lives to save their Jewish fellow citizens from the Holocaust is not well known. This movie tells the story of one such Danish family, their struggles against Nazis and collaborators, and their efforts to save Danish Jews. Sam Waterston and Mia Farrow give outstanding performances. The story is gripping. More important, it will touch your heart.

Lamed Vavniks: The thirty-six righteous who sustain the world

JEWISH MYTH, MAGIC, AND MYSTICISM

JEWISH MYTH, MAGIC, AND MYSTICISM IS DEVOTED TO ALL ASPECTS OF JEWISH ESOTERIC TRADITIONS AND OCCULT LORE. IT IS THE OFFICIAL BLOG FOR THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF JEWISH MYTH, MAGIC, AND MYSTICISM. THE JMMM HAS BEEN RECOGNIZED AS ONE OF THE TOP 50 JEWISH BLOGS ON THE INTERNET IN 2010

FRIDAY, MARCH 20, 2009

Lamed Vavniks: The thirty-six righteous who sustain the world

[One of the 36 hidden?]

A slight digression from my earlier entries on esoteric masters of the Talmud, but not much of one. Think of it as a byway on the theme. A congregant asked me about the Tzadikim Nistarim(Heb.) or Lamed Vovniks/"Thirty-Sixers" (Yiddish).

The Thirty-Six [Righteous] are the minimum number of utterly moral people in each generation that are necessary to sustain the world. The legend evidently evolved from an earlier tradition of interpreting the “thirty shekels of silver” mentioned in Zechariah 11:12 as an allegory for godly people; God ensures there will always be thirty righteous people in every generation.

It also may have roots in the story of Abraham's efforts to save Sodom (Gen. 18), where it becomes evident that any society must have a minimum number of decent people in order to survive (Gen. R. 49:3; Zohar I:105b; Tikkunei Zohar, 21).

In the earliest version of this idea in rabbinic literature, found in Gen. R. 49:3, there are forty-five, “fifteen in Babylon, thirty in the land of Israel.” There is no firm explanation for how the tradition settles upon the number thirty-six (Sanh. 97b). Perhaps it is symbolic of "abundant life": double the number eighteen, the number value of the word chai / "life." According to the “thirty-six” legend, most of the thirty-six are nisterim, unknown, anonymously doing their good work unnoticed by the world. A esoteric prooftext for the number is found in Isaiah 30:18 - "For the Eternal is a God of justice; fortunate are those who wait for Him." In Hebrew, the pronoun "for Him" has the numeric value of 36. Thus the verse is read as "...fortunate are those who wait - [the] 36"
(Thanks to the anonymous reader who called my attention to this Isa. verse)

The reward for their anonymous labors is that they are privileged to directly experience the Shekhinah. One of them in each generation is suitable to be the Messiah (Sanh. 97b; Chul. 45a; Gen. R. 35:2; Mid. Teh. 5:5; Zohar 2:151a).

The fine Holocaust novel by Andre Bart-Schwarz, The Last of the Just, employs this legend, but "christianizes" this Jewish tradition in that the book claims that the 36 are destined to suffer for the sake of sustaining the world. Suffering and myrtrdom is not a big element of the lamed-vavnik tradition

To learn more consult the: Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism: http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Jewish-Myth-Magic-Mysticism/dp/0738709050

collection of 80 classic short stories

http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0607731h.html#s01

Author: Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Guy Boothby, Guy de Maupassant, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe
Date:
11-MAY-2014
Narrator:
Cathy Dobson
Provider:
Red Door Audiobooks
Running Time:
7 h 55 min
Format 4
A breathtaking collection of 80 classic short stories inspired by different locations, people and customs across the globe.Australia1. "A Visit to Droughtland" by Banjo Paterson"2." The Drover?s Wife", by Henry Lawson3. "Hughey?s Dog", by Banjo Paterson4. "In the Cattle Country", by Banjo Paterson5." An Error of Judgement", by John Barry6." A Strange Goldfield", by Guy Boothby7." The Dog", by Banjo Paterson8. "The Downfall of Mulligans", by Banjo Paterson Asia9. "The Phantom Rickshaw", by Rudyard Kipling10."Moti Guj - Mutineer", by Rudyard Kipling11. "The Mark of the Beast", by Rudyard Kipling12."The Secret Sharer", by Joseph Conrad13."The Monkey and the Queen?s Jewels"14."The Tale of Princess Sambula"15."The Ass in the Lion?s Skin"16."The Talkative Tortoise"17."The Peach Blossom Fountain"18. "The Lute Girl?s Lament"19".Typhoon off the Coast of Japan", by Jack LondonPlus dozens of other classic tales from around the globe!

A.B. 'Banjo' Paterson

( Andrew Barton Paterson )
1864 - 1941

Australian poet and writer

ANDREW BARTON PATERSON IS known to people as Banjo Paterson. The family owned a race horse named Banjo and in his earlier writings for the Bulletin, Paterson used the pseudonym 'The Banjo'.

Banjo Paterson was born at Narambla Station, New South Wales but considered his home on Illalong Station near Yass, New South Wales as his childhood home. Many experiences duringhis childhood, where he was in contact with drovers, bushrangers, and teamsters became the basis for his writings including the Australian Bush Myths.

Paterson was the eldest child of Andrew Bogle Paterson, an immigrant to Australia in 1850, and Rose Isabella (nee Barton). Banjo began his education at the small country school in Binalong and later was sent to Sydney (Gladesville) where he lived with his widowed grandmother Emily Mary Barton. After finishing his education in Sydney, he became a clerk in a solicitor's office. Paterson was admitted as a solicitor in August 1886.

His first published poem was El Mahdi to the Australian Troops.He was only 21 years old when it was published by the Bulletinin February 1885.

Fame greeting Paterson in the publication of his first work, The Man From Snowy River and Other Verses. Published in 1895, it was sold out within a week. For over 100 years, it has consistently outsold any other collection of Australian poetry. It's popularity today is evident is the success of the movie based onThe Man From Snowy River.

Paterson let a very interesting life. His interests included being a crocodile hunter, pearl diver, and amateur sportsman. His interests in politics led him to leave his law studies and become a war correspondent where he covered the Boer War and the Chinese Boxer Rebellion. He continued to travel the world learning first hand about politics.

Abandoning his pursuit of the law, he focused on a career as a journalist. Then while touring Australia in 1902, Paterson met Alice Emily Walker at Tenterfield Station in northern New South Wales. He married her at the station on April 8, 1903.

They made their home in Woolahra, a suburb of Sydney after he was appointed editor of the Sydney Evening News. His two children were born during this period. Looking for a less stressful and confining life, he resigned as editor and bought Coodra, a property in the Yass district. This decision ended in failure and Paterson turned for a short time to wheat farming at Grenfell.

In 1914 Paterson left for England to become a war correspondent during the First World War. Unable to secure a position, he became an ambulance driver instead. He returned to Australia where he enlisted and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the A.I.F. He spent his war years in the Middle East and rose to the rank of Major. Alice joined her husband in 1917 and worked for two years as a volunteer at the hospital in Ismailia. In 1919 the two returned to Australia where he went back to writing. He wrote forSmith's Weekly, edited the Sydney Sportsman along with a variety of fiction, verse and radio scripts. 

Henry Lawson and Banjo debated the aspects of the simple, rustic life of the Australian bush. Their debate in the Bulletin during 1892-1893 came at a time when nationalism was on the rise in Australia. Banjo was often considered a radical of his times for writings such as A Bushman's Song in which he takes the side of the drovers and shearers against the squatters and absentee landlords. 

In 1930 Paterson retired from journalism. The rest of his life was spent writing and enjoying his grandchildren. He was never out of the public eye and in 1939 received the Order of Commander of the British Empire. Paterson's likeness can be seen on the Australian $10 note (Dame Mary Gilmore is on the reverse).

Andrew Barton Paterson was admitted to hospital just before his 77th birthday and died on February 5, 1941.

Banjo was known not only for the song Waltzing Matilda, but also for his attempt to improve the lives of his fellow Australians by exposing their hardships to the public.

Paterson's works include:

• 1889  Australia for the Australians (political pamphlet)
• 1895  The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses
• 1902  Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses
• 1905  Waltzing Matilda (music)
• 1905  Old Bush Songs (collection)
• 1906  An Outback Marriage (fiction )
• 1917  Saltbush Bill J.P. and Other Verses
• 1917  Three Elephant Power and Other Stories
• 1923  The Collected Verse of A.B. Paterson
• 1933  The Animals Noah Forgot (children)
• 1934  Happy Dispatches (semi-autobiographical of his travels)
• 1936  The Shearer's Colt (fiction)

The Great Raid

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Great Raid
Theatrical poster
Directed by	John Dahl
Produced by	Lawrence Bender Marty Katz
Written by	Carlo Bernard Doug Miro
Starring	Benjamin Bratt Joseph Fiennes James Franco Marton Csokas Connie Nielsen Motoki Kobayashi Cesar Montano Kenny Doughty
Music by	Trevor Rabin
Cinematography	Peter Menzies Jr.
Edited by	Scott Chestnut Pietro Scalia
Distributed by	Miramax Films
Release dates	August 10, 2005 (U.S.) August 12, 2005
Running time	132 minutes
Country	United States Australia
Language	English
Budget	$80 million
Box office	$10,769,311[1]

The Great Raid is a 2005 war film about the Raid at Cabanatuan on the island of Luzon, Philippines during World War II. It is directed by John Dahland stars Benjamin Bratt, Joseph Fiennes, James Franco, Connie Nielsen, Motoki Kobayashi and Cesar Montano. The principal photography took place from July 4, to November 6, 2002, but its release was delayed several times from the original target of fall 2003. The film is adapted from two books,William Breuer's The Great Raid on Cabanatuan and Hampton Sides' Ghost Soldiers.

The film opened in theaters across the United States on August 12, 2005, three days before the 60th anniversary of V-J Day.

The real-life efforts of Filipino guerrillas are also specifically highlighted, especially a stand at a bridge that delayed Japanese reinforcements. These units fought alongside Americans against Japanese occupiers during the war.

Plot[edit]

In 1944, American forces were closing in on the Japanese-occupied Philippines. The Japanese held around 500 American prisoners who had survived the Bataan Death March in a notorious POW camp at Cabanatuanand subjected them to brutal treatment and summary execution. Many prisoners were also stricken with malaria.

The film opens with the massacre of prisoners of war on Palawan by theKempeitai, the Imperial Japanese military's secret police (though factually, it was committed by the Japanese Fourteenth Area Army).

Meanwhile at Lingayen Gulf, the 6th Ranger Battalion under Lt. Col Mucci is ordered by Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger to liberate all of the POWs at Cabanatuan prison camp before they are killed by the Japanese. The film chronicles the efforts of the Rangers, Alamo Scouts from the 6th Army and Filipino guerrillas as they undertake the Raid at Cabanatuan.

Throughout the film, the viewpoint switches between the POWs at Cabanatuan, the Rangers, the Filipino resistance and the Japanese.

In particular, the film covers the resistance work undertaken by nurse Margaret Utinsky, who smuggled medicine into the POW camps. The Kempeitai arrested her and sent her to Fort Santiago prison. She was eventually released, but spent six weeks recovering from gangrene as a result of injuries sustained from beatings.