WWII – Don't Gel Too Soon

Aunts and Cousins: Great Memories and an Uncertain Future

Sunday night both boys, their wives and kids came for dinner. We won’t all be together for Thanksgiving; one son and his two kids will be with his wife and her family; we’ll be with our other daughter-in-law’s family. So Sunday was special, and it was a lovely evening.

Afterward, for some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Thanksgivings when we were kids. It was always at our house: my parents, my mom’s sisters and their husbands, my grandmother and “the cousins.” There were 9 of us, six girls (I was the oldest) and three boys. My Aunt Bettie, her husband, two sons and a daughter lived in Cleveland; the rest of us were all local, so when the Cleveland Cousins showed up, it was a big deal.

There was a kids table of course. Nobody, not even bossy me, was in a hurry to move to the old folks’ territory. We were having too much fun. In addition to everything else (including games of “Murder” and “Sardines” and lots of running around outside) we planned and performed little dramas every year. I doubt they were very good, but everyone clapped and we had fun.

I wonder about so much now, though: the covert sisterly conversations in my parents’ bedroom, my grandmother (that’s her in the picture), whom I thought had gotten mean but was apparently losing her sight and trying to hide it, the lovely uncle and the wild one, and the impact of the Depression on the sisters and their men. There’s so much of that time that I’d love to see with my grown up eyes: about raising kids and being a grandparent of course, but even more, about what WWII and the Depression had done to them. After all, as I watch events unfold, it’s scary to think how close we are to leaving our kids and theirs to face similar harshness.

I wrote this about them back in 2007, when the last sister died:

In some ways, they were the lucky ones; all three sisters and my father and uncles — were able, on scholarships, to go to college. All three marriages, despite tensions and tough times, survived with a real friendship between spouses for most of their lives. Each had three children who were smart, interesting, and self-sufficient. Even so, the bounty of choices they gave to us was so much more than they had had themselves. The young women in this photograph, and their husbands, never had the luxury of dropping out of school to campaign for Eugene McCarthy or majoring in music or theater or spending years doing trauma medicine a couple of months a year to pay for a life of mountain climbing and exploration. There was no give, no leeway, in the lives of those whom the Depression and the war that ended it – had stamped forever.

I’d give anything to hear it all now. All of it.

I hope we, and our kids, have the guts to be as courageous — and tenacious, as they were.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Battles and Bougainvillea in the South of France

maquis — Maquis of the French Resistance

There’s lots of history around here – spread out among the beauty that distracts from most of it. For the second time, today in the village of Borme Les Mimosas, the flowers overwhelm. Borme wins the best in show award for the region regularly and it’s not hard to see why. But before I share the loveliness, here’s a cool fact: the WWII resistance fighters known as Maquis got their nickname from the dark green plants and shrubs that covered huge swaths of ground and offered perfect hiding places – so perfect that the brave men and women they sheltered came to share the name.

War history haunts the fields and French villages crammed with memorials and statues, villages also overflowing with flowers, climbing the walls, overtaking public walkways and making very turn in the tiny streets a wonderful new surprise.

So for the second and probably the last time, here are the award-winning blooms. This time: the flowers of Borme des Mimosas.

Multicolored Bloomd og Borme — Multicolored Blooms of Borme

Bourn flower petals — Flower petals fill a tiny square

Bourn Bougenvillia path — Borme’s purple pathway

Bourn covered passage — Flower-decked covered passageway

How’s that for a treat and a break from all the awfulness that seems to haunt us lately. Whoever urged us to stop and smell the roses – well. . .

Barcelona and The Spanish Civil War Revealed

This poster recruiting women to join and support the anti-fascist militias was just one of the remarkable graphics and photographs shared during this tour of civil war history in Barcelona.

The tour’s guide, Nick Lloyd offered a passionate, rich, information-crammed account of the war and the complicated situation that preceded and followed it. The topic is thrilling, but it’s the teacher – the guide – who makes it real – and he does just that.

B Nick 2 — Spanish Civil War guru Nick Lloyd delivers his lessons and brings clients to the edge of their “seats” — actually, feet….

The stories are stunning. The first: the International Brigades from all over the world who came to help, including the Abraham Lincoln Battalion – the first integrated US military force, the second, the alliance among the police, the workers and the community – anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals – all trying to stop the viciousness that was the emerging Fascist machine. The next, individual courage demonstrated among so many under cruel, sadistic conditions.

The women, of course, did find a place in the movement. This first poster is the emblem of the Anarchist women in Spain. The second, was for the “people’s Olympics” conducted in protest of the “real” 1936 games in Nazi Germany. Young people came from everywhere for the event and many remained to support the struggle to sustain democracy and keep the Fascists at bay. And the third – a shattering portrait of American “Negro” contributions to Spain’s struggle.

Very few stories combine romance, politics, evil, idealism, danger and courage as well as those surrounding the Spanish Civil War. Some of the stories were so moving they were hard to bear. To the people of Barcelona, they are still real, and tangible and tough to hear and recall. For the rest of us, they bring pain and inspiration and sadness at how often similar tragedies have entered our history. And never seem to have taught anything to those who came after.

Do We Americans Still Have It? Do We Care? #MicroblogMonday

I’ve spent most of my life thinking about disasters and potential apocalypses and injustice and misery: I’m a journalist, or at least I was, so I don’t get discouraged easily. So far the world, or at least our country, has always seemed to right itself in the nick of time. I seriously wonder if we can still do it though. We all know why:

A bitterly divided country

Racism

Institutional injustice

The terrifying assault on women’s rights and well-being, here and elsewhere

The decline of our public schools

Climate change

The rise of fundamentalism

The coarsening of our culture

The cost of a college education

Ebola

ISIS

Hunger

Anti-Vaxx-ers (seriously)

Add your own here____________________

Beneath those individual issues lies the biggest threat: what appears to be the larger change in our values. As I watched The Roosevelts and, strangely enough, re-watched The King’s Speech, I wondered (not for the first time) where those sorts of world leaders (FDR, a president with political skills, toughness, vision and an understanding both of where the country was and where he needed to take it, Teddy Roosevelt who took on income inequality through trust busting and began what became the environmental movement (and yes he also started a couple of wars… or a reluctant King George IV, who not only held Britain together and committed under horrible circumstances but also led by example) are today, whether they could be elected or heeded — whether they would even be willing to try. Even more, I wondered if our country would accept them; whether we are still capable of selflessness or a sense of duty or a thoughtful response to a call to sacrifice. I hope so.

Living with History: Ghosts of WWII Still Haunt Europe

Outside the shipyard where Solidarity was born

There’s Europe, and then there’s Europe. Before St. Petersburg, we visited Gdansk, Poland and Klaipeda, Lithuania, each with a great (and strategically valuable) coastline and harbor. Along with those very desirable traits came a dark, terrible, history of invasion and occupation, Nazis and Communists and pre-Nazi Germans in the 20th Century alone. Listen to the guides and it sounds as if the last of them left only last week, the memories are so fresh. Each city was all but obliterated after the War, first by the Nazis as they fled and then by the victorious Russians who declared the residents “Nazis” and burned much of what hadn’t been bombed.

In Gdansk, along with the Jews, many Poles, including 3,000 priests, died in concentration camps. This statue of Jesus mourning the 3,000 priests murdered in Auschwitz is from the gorgeous Gdansk St. Mary’s Church was placed there in their honor. A visit to this city is a rapid education in the continued immediacy of the devastation and misery of the War and the Soviet occupation that followed. It isn’t history, it’s family.

Veterans of Siberian exile sing songs of their country
In Lithuania they work to preserve memories of forced exile to Siberia and Soviet abuse through an ever-shrinking choir of village elders, many of them survivors of the Siberian deportations, on the lawn of a one-room museum that combines these memories with a commemoration of WWII partisans.

While there is little argument about the roles that Poland and Lithuania had in the Holocaust, I’m offering these examples to demonstrate the immediacy of the War that remains among the communities even today. Wherever we’ve gone in these places, or in Helsingborg Sweden entire tours are constructed around these memories.

It was quite a shock to meet the ghosts that still haunt these old cities. Gdansk is charming, and of course visiting the scene where Solidarity was born was wonderful. What really left with us though, was the enduring impact of a war that ended long before many of those affected were even born.

Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck and Roman Holiday: a Political Lesson? No, Really.

It was a fairy tale about a princess on a journey. Doing her duty, kind of like Diana (but, since she was played by Audrey Hepburn, even classier,) she came to Rome, after Athens, London and Paris, to conclude her mission.

But she was young and beautiful and sick of receptions and parades. And so, in the middle of the night, she snuck out the embassy window and ventured across the Piazza di Spagna and into the Roman night.

If you know this movie at all, you remember with sweet nostalgia the way you felt the first time you saw it. The princess asleep near the Trevi Fountain on the Roman equivalent of a park bench is awakened, like Sleeping Beauty, by reporter Joe Bradley, played by Gregory Peck. ( If the film has a flaw, it’s that we know some of what will happen once we see him there. He’s a good guy and that’s who he plays. He is Atticus Finch, after all.)
The film was released in 1953, right in the middle of the 1950’s. Written by Dalton Trumbo, “Roman Holiday” was credited to a “front” named Ian McLellan Hunter, because Trumbo, blacklisted as a member of the Hollywood Ten, wasn’t permitted to write for movies any longer. It’s one of the darkest chapters in Hollywood history, very much a part of the image of the decade and a sad facet of a beloved film that won three Oscars and introduced the world to Audrey Hepburn.
There’s something else though. The people in this film behave well. There are things that they want, desperately, but there are principals at stake, and they honor them. When Peck meets Hepburn, he doesn’t recognize her but lets her crash at his apartment. Once he figures out who she is, he knows this “runaway” could be the story of his life. Even so, after a brief, idyllic tour of the city, (SPOILER ALERT) she honors her responsibilities and returns to her royal duties, and of course, he never writes the story. It was very much an artifact of the
“Greatest Generation” ideals, manifested with such courage during
WWII and very much the flip side of the jaundiced (and just as accurate) Mad Men view of the 50’s. Duty and honor trump romance and ambition.

Once again, I’m struck with admiration for the people of these times. Yes the 50’s did terrible damage and made it difficult to be eccentric or rebellious or even creative. But films like this one, or Now Voyager and similar films of the 40’s, sentimental as they may be, remind us of what else these people were. They’d lived through the Depression and the war and they had an elevated sense of responsibility. As we watch much of our government (and some of the rest of us) disintegrate into partisanship and self-interest, it makes a lot more sense than it did when we rose up against it all in the 1960’s. Doesn’t it?