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SternSkipper -> RE: Rmoney campaign can't even spell Amercia right! (5/30/2012 4:43:55 PM)
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quote:
At least he didn't talk about any Polish death camps.
Just to offer something from my own experience as a young man. When I was about 25, my first wife and I lived in SE Mass and rented an apartment from a little old man named Irving Schwebber. He was a jewish as ANYONE I have ever met in my life. Both spiritually, and culturally. He was a man frozen in time and I don't think I ever met anyone who GOT being human as well before or since.
He used to constantly tell me about his life as a young man. And he was this guy who was born at the turn of the 20th century and by 1920 had himself a push-cart business selling linens to the Newport aristocracy, his best customers were the Vanderbilts. Apparently someone in the house who was an actual family member took a liking to him and would have him into the kitchen for tea and offer him news of Germany, where much of his family still remained.
Irving worked harder than 3 guys today, and he eventually had things like a Model A, so that the 3 day trip to and from Newport on foot got reduced to an afternoon there and back. Still though he kept his appointments with this family member and as time progressed, he got more information and more help (they had a telegraph and later the first phone, so it was a really special experience for Irving in more ways than one. It was also awful since closer contact with his family made him aware they were slowly disappearing first, quietly (probably just murdered by overzealous early Nazis), and then later QUITE OFFICIALLY.
After a few years ALL of Irving's known family was gone, and he was basically alone in the world. His family had not wanted to leave behind everything they had worked for to start over and it was their undoing.
So some time later he made friends with a family of Polish Jews with family near Krakow. And he started the whole cycle of tea with the Vanderbilt family member and attempting to find out things about them.
Well, before long, that family was down to one small nuclear family of three and he just couldn't take it anymore. He got it in his mind to rescue the family and spent the next year of so wiring his life savings to people who assisted in getting the family out of Poland probably just days before their neighborhood was taken into custody.
The family stayed in France, because they just didn't want to leave Europe. But they knew France would one day fall and sent their teenage daughter Paula to the states to stay in Irving's care. Irving married her two years later.
I know this is a long story, but I wanted you to understand HOW CLOSE the principals were to the real life events.
Anyway, I asked Mrs Schwebber one day about how they could stand being overrun with all those Nazis and simply surrender to them. She said that hardly ANY of the people holding the country at gunpoint were actual Germans. They were almost all Poles and she even described the terror she felt as she went by one of the camps with a bunch of farm workers and and were stopped in front of the road leading into a concentration camp. The man gave her the once over, but didn't raise any alert. The man KNEW her, had lived across the street from her. She told me she had never been so scared in her life. OF A NEIGHBOR.
So yeah, Polish Death Camps.
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