Friday, August 31, 2012

The Final Mission of Bottoms Up:

A World War II Pilot's Story

By Dennis Okerstrom

Flying their B24J Liberator on a bombing mission over Germany the Bottom's Up (the plane's name) went down. The young crew found themselves in enemy territory. This book tells their story with an interesting twist. Lamar, who is the one the story is about, received a strange email from Croatia asking about his plane that went down in WWII. Over time they come to realize the archeology crew in Croatia has found the remnants of Bottom's Up. Its an excellent story!

Point to note: the crew went to Stalag Luft I, one of the largest POW camps in Germany and relevant to the next book I read.

Book 56

Friday, August 17, 2012

In The Garden of Beasts

By Erik Larson

Larson takes a specific story of one US diplomat and his family as a means of exposing many details of the Nazi rise to power. Through this narrative many answers to the question "how could this happen" are are explored at the ground level. Driving home the point, you can not underestimate the power of fear. And the strong, deep desire for everything to be ok, for the horrible things you see in front of you to not be long-term but instead a temporary problem. These driving forces led to inexplicable silence on the part of those living in Germany and even abroad. The story also sheds light on the anti-semitism and subsequent apathy playing itself out inside the US. 

The brutal and cut throat world of politics the Nazis played laid a foundation for the later atrocities played out against the Jews. Once the stage was set for complete conformity to the regime at the risk of death, there was no sound of reason within the party left to question their authority or their final decisions. 

"In this new world, the calling card was the crucial currency. The character of an individual's card reflected the character of the individual, his perception of himself, or how he wanted the world to perceive him. The Nazi leadership invariably had the largest cards with the most imposing titles, usually printed in some bold Teutonic font." page 71

"Fromm added, 'There is nobody among the officials of the National Socialist party who would not cheerfully cut the throat of every other official in order to further his own advancement.'" Page 266

Book 55

A Writer At War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army

By Vasily Grossman

This is an incredible book based on Vasily Grossman's notebooks while embedded with the Russian army in WWII. As the introduction states, "Grossman's uncomfortable honesty was dangerous. If the NKVD secret police had read these notebooks he would have disappeared into the Gulag." Location 197

In the battle of Stalingrad, he was the "longest serving journalist in the embattled city." His style was engaging, "he never wrote anything down during the interview" which "helped Grossman to win people's confidence." Location 209

His article 'The Hell Called Treblinka' is one of his most im[portant essays and an important piece of Holocaust literature. It was quoted at the Nuremberg tribunals. 

I loved his courage, dedication and willingness to speak from the soldiers perspective with an unflinching honesty. This was in particularly admirable and difficult in the times of great propaganda and re-editing to slant things in favor of the Russian perspective. This was easier to do when Russia was winning but a very difficult line to walk when the war was not going in their favor. 

"Dozens of aerial boats are gliding in the sky, slowly and smoothly, in triangular ranks. They are moving towards us. Dozens, hundreds of people climb over the sides of trucks, jump out of cabins, run towards the forest. Everyone is infected with panic, the running crowd is growing bigger every minute. And then everyone hears the shrill voice of a woman: 'Cowards, cowards, they are just cranes flying over!' Confusion." Page 48

"This poverty, this urban poverty is somehow worse than the village sort. It's deeper and blacker, an all-embracing poverty, deprived even of air and light." Page 50

"Problems for the artillery: battle in a village. Everything has got mixed up. One house is ours, another one is theirs." Page 68

"Throughout the war, the chief obsession of may members of the Red Army was to obtain alcohol or anything which even looked like alcohol." Notes from editors  Page 73

"War is an art. WIthin it elements of calculation, cool knowledge and experience are combined with inspiration, change and something completely irrational (battle for Zaliman, Pesochin). These elements are compatible with one another, but sometimes they come into conflict. It's like a musical improvisation which is unthinkable without a brilliant technique." Page 97

"The blue, ash-grey main road. Villages have become the kingdom of women. They drive tractors, guard warehouses and stables, queue for vodka. . . They are coping with an enormous amount of work and send bread, aircraft, weapons and ammunition to the front. They feed us and arm us now." Page 119

"Stalingrad is burned down. I would have to write too much if I wanted to describe it. Stalingrad is burned down. Stalingrad is in ashes. It is dead. People are in basements. Everything is burned out. The hot walls of the buildings are like the bodies of people who have died in the terrible heat and haven't gone cold yet. " Page 125

"That was a terrible dust, the dust of retreat. It ate up the men's faith, it extinguished the warmth of people's hearts, it stood in a murky cloud in front of the eyes of gun crews." Page 130

"Soviet pitilessness more than matched that of the Germans, when it came to forcing their own men into the attack. Stalin's Order No. 227 - 'Not One Step Back' - included the instruction to each army command to organise 'three to five well-armed detachments (up to two hundred men each)' to form a second line to 'combat cowardice' by shooting down any soldier who tried to run away." Page 140

Editor's comment: "The defense of Stalingrad was stiffened by the most terrifying discipline. Some 13,500 soldiers were executed during the five-month battle. Most of these were during the earlier days when many men broke." Page 141

(men were condemned to death if they self-inflicted wounds to get off the battlefield)

"The courage of the young women medical orderlies was respected by everyone. . . . 'We have gone into the attack with our platoon, and crawled side by side with them. We have fed soldiers, given them water, bandaged them under fire. We turned out to be more resilient than the soldiers, we even used to urge them on. Sometimes, trembling at night, we would think: 'oh, if i were at home right now.'" Page 184

Editor's comment: "After the intensity and importance of the battle of Stalingrad, Grossman found it was hard to accept that life moved on it its usual way, that goodbyes could be hurried and casual after such momentous events." Page 203

"The winder sun is shining over mass graves, over handmade tombstones at the places where soldiers had been killed on the axis of the main attack. The dead are sleeping on the heights by the ruins of factory workshops, in gullies and balkas. THey aere sleeping now right where they had been fighting when alive. . . . They are so majstic and matter of fact in their heroism." Page 204

"The gun was reminiscent of a ragged, long-suffering man." Page 235

"Every soldier, every officer and every general of the Red Army who had seen the Ukraine in blood and fire, who had heard the true story of what had been happening in the Ukraine during the two years of German rule, understands to the bottom of their souls that there are only two sacred words left to us. One of them is 'love' the other one is 'revenge.'" Page 248

"There are no Jews in the Ukraine. Nowhere - Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, Yagotin - in none of the cities, hundreds of towns, or thousands of villages will you see the black, tear-filled eyes of little girls; you will not hear the pained voice of an old woman; you will not see the dark face of a hungry baby. All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people has been brutally murdered." Page 250

Editor's comments: "It soon became clear to Grossman that his reports on what was to be known later as the holocaust were unwelcome to the Soviet authorities. The Stalinist line refused to accept any special categories of suffering. All victims of Nazism on Soviet soil had to be defined as 'citizens of the SOviet Union' without qualification. Official reports on atrocities, even those describing corpses wearing the yellow star, avoided any mention of the word Jew. In late 1943, Grossman joined Ilya Ehrenburg on a commission to gather details fo German crimes for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an organization which later attracted the suspicion of the Stalinist authorities. Ehrenburg and Grossman planned that all the material collected should be published in a 'Black Book' but this would be suppressed after the war, partly because of the Stalinist position on Soviet suffering - 'Do Not Divide the Dead' - and partly because the involvement of Ukrainians in the anti-SEmitic persecution was embarrassing for the authorities. The subject of collaboration during the Great Patriotic War was almost entirely suppressed unti after the fall of communism." Page 251

"There's no one left in Kazary to complain, no one to tell, no one to cry. Silence and calm hover over the dead bodies buried under the collapsed fireplaces now overgrown by weeds. This quiet is much more frightening than tears and curses. 
Old men and women are dead, as well as craftsmen and professional people: tailors, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewelers, house painters, ironmongers, bookbinders, workers, freight handlers, carpenters, stove-makers, jokers, cabinetmakers, water carriers, millers, bakers, and cooks; also dead are physicians, prothesists, surgeons, gynecologists, scientists - bacteriologists, biochemists, directors of university clinics - teachers of history, algebra, trigonometry. Dead are professors, lecturers and doctors of science engineers and architects. Dead are agronomists, field workers, accountants, clerks, shop assistants, supply agents, secretaries, night watchmen, dead are teachers, dead are babushkas who could knit stockings and make tasty buns, cook bouillon and make strudel with apples and nuts, dead are women who had been faithful to their husbands and frivolous women are dead, too, beautiful girls, and learned students and cheerful schoolgirls, dead are ugly and silly girls, women with hunches, dead are singers, dead are blind and deaf mutes, dead are violinists and pianists, dead are two-year-olds and three-year-olds, dead are eighty-year-old men and women with cataracts on hazy eyes, with cold and transparent fingers and hair that rustled quietly like white paper, dead are newly born babies who had sucked their mothers' breast greedily until their last minute.
This was different from the death of people in war, with weapons in their hands, the deaths of people who had left behind their houses, families, fields, songs, traditions and stories. This was the murder of a great and ancient professional experience, passed from one generation to another in thousands of families of craftsmen and members of the intelligentsia. This was the murder of everyday traditions that grandfathers had passed to their grandchildren, this was the murder of memories, of a mournful song, folk poetry, of life, happy and bitter, this was the destruction of hearths and cemetries, this the death of the nation which ha been living side by side with Ukrainians over hundreds of years. . . " Page 252

Editor's notes: "For him, the greatest shock was to discover the major role which local Ukrainians had played in the horror." Page 254

The two letters he wrote his mother

"There was one kind of complaint and lament that I didn't hear in Poland, only one kind of tears that I didn't see: those of Jews. THere are no Jews in POland. They have all been suffocated, killed, from elders to newly-born babies. Their dead bodies have been burned in furnaces." Page 279

"It is infinitely hard even to read this. The reader must believe me, it is as hard to write it. Someone might ask: 'Why write about this, why remember all that?' It is the writer's duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it." Page 301

"And one feels as if one's heart could stop right now, seized with such sorrow, such grief, that a human being cannot possibly stand it." Page 306

Editor's notes: "Not surprisingly, Grossman himself fount it very hard to stand. He collapsed from nervous exhaustion, stress and nausea on his return to Moscow." 

"Vasily Grossman's belief in a 'ruthless truth of war' was cruelly scorned by the Soviet authorities, especially when they attempted to suppress information about the Holocaust." Location 5473
Book 54