Car Troubles... again...

Ok so I just had my AC serviced on my Honda on Friday, and on Saturday it was blowing out sweaty, lukewarm air.  Oh and the Mercury I'm going to be trying to sell needs a torque converter... PERFECT...  And I need to register my Honda and leave for Birmingham by tomorrow morning... Should be fun!!

Movie Recommendation

If you're a fan of old movies (particularly foreign ones) you need to see "M," which was Fritz Lang's first "talkie."  The film contains the original soundtrack in German with English subtitles.  It's billed as the first real psychological thriller in movie history and it really was quite good.  Disturbingly modern themes.  And, for a film made in 1931 for a much less jaded movie-going audience, the acting is actually quite compelling. 

Random Photos

I miss the snow......  :(

Still missing it...

Me and my old lady (isn't she perdee??!!)

(Front to back:  Lyla, Lizzie, Chloe {Don't they look happy!!})

Me & Brutus (Doesn't he look happy??)

Recollections

So I had this really amazing talk with my grandmother yesterday.  She was born in Ukraine back in 1925 (I believe), and was 16 when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.  She has these incredible memories about one of the most epic wars in the history of the world.  I'd like to put a few of them down right now, and this post may be a bit long, but I guess this is more for posterity than anything else, although if you're a relative or a history buff it at least should be interesting.  :)

I've recently been reading a book called "The Third Reich at War" by Richard Evans, which is the last part of a 3 book series on the Third Reich (all of them are highly recommended by the way), and a question popped up in my mind about who he was referring to as "Ukrainian Nationalists," and several well known atrocities that they committed against Jews particularly.  My understanding had always been that certain parts of Ukraine tended towards anti-Semitism more than others, and I also knew that many Ukrainians welcomed the Germans because of how brutal the Stalinist regime was.  So the term "Ukrainian Nationalists" threw me a bit, because I wasn't sure if he was referring to Ukrainians who sought independence from the Soviet Union or what.

So I asked my grandmother.  She told me that this term surely refers to Ukrainians under Polish control in the northern part of the country.  She informed me that these people tended towards the hatred of Jews much more than Ukrainians in other parts of the country.  She grew up in Odessa, a port city in the South on the Black Sea, and never saw any examples of prejudice against Jews in her city, personally.  Nana (as I call her) went on to clarify the reasons many people in Ukraine were so willing to welcome the German invasion.  It had less to do with ideology as it had to do with survival.

Ukraine is known as the bread-basket of Europe, and from what I understand gave some staunch resistance to accommodating the new Communist regime in the early and mid 1920's.  When Stalin came to power, he ruthlessly continued Lenin's policy of collectivizing farms and destroying the reputations and livelihoods of the kulaks, or the more wealthy of the peasant farmers.  Stalin proceeded to arrest anyone who he deemed a possible physical, emotional or ideological threat to this new system, and in most cases send them to forced labor camps in Siberia or somewhere like it.  So, Nana explained, many men during that time slept in full winter clothes-- heavy underwear, fur coats, boots and all-- year round, simply because they were afraid of being arrested in the middle of the night (for nothing most of the time) and being sent to some frozen tundra in nothing but their shorts.

Another personal example she gave of this kind of gripping fear in the population was that of a woman in my grandmother's building who would sit on her balcony all night long.  The apartment building could only be accessed through a gate which lead into an outdoor courtyard, and the stairways and doors to each apartment where in this courtyard.  My grandmother found it interesting that this woman would sit there all through the night, and asked her once why she did.  The woman replied that she sat on her balcony all night so that if she heard the gate open and someone rush up the stairs towards her apartment she could throw herself from the third story rather than be arrested by the NKVD.  

Nana's mother was a Ukrainian woman, and her step father was also Ukrainian or Russian, but had a German last name.  His family had apparently immigrated from Germany or Austria generations back, because he did not know of any German roots, and certainly did not speak German.  He had been born in Ukraine or Russia, and lived there his whole life.  However, because of his name, he was interrogated by the secret police on at least one occasion leading up to the war, and released only after it was determined that he was not a Nazi spy or saboteur.  He was fortunate, as many Russians with Germanic or foreign names were rounded up at the time and sent to forced labor camps being guilty of nothing, and we must remember that it is likely that the vast majority of them never returned alive.

At the time of the German invasion in 1941, this was the world in which many ordinary Ukrainians lived.  The fear of being a good communist, and being denounced by a neighbor or friend who you had a disagreement with.  Fear of being shipped to a gulag to mine salt, or to build a road with your bare hands, or to the front lines to dig trenches in the middle of an onslaught.  The fear of being stolen from your wife and children, who would be labelled as traitors and turned out into the streets.  And on top of all the fear, add starvation.  

Nana explained that these were valid reasons for accepting, even hoping, that the Germans would invade and win the war.  In addition, she told me, ordinary Ukrainians had no idea about the racial policies of the Germans-- the persecution of Jews and minorities in German and Poland, the harsh and draconian regimes they put in place in many cases to subdue the conquered, the Einsatzgruppen in place to wipe Eastern Jewry off the map.  All they knew was that they had heard that every German family had plenty of food on the table and plenty of coal for a warm home in the winter.  They were not ignorant that Hitler was a tyrant, but based on the information available to them at the time, they figured life would be much easier under his tyranny than under Stalin's.

There is one more significant thing that she shared with me during this conversation.  Last week, she said, she woke up for the first time in many years, in a state of panic and fear that she hadn't experienced since the war.  It is a singular type of fear that I assume only people who have experienced aerial bombings and total war can fully comprehend.  She said that she remembered as a teenager, waking up in the middle of the night and hearing quietly, in the distance, a "hum... hum... hum..." sound.  This signaled the approach of large bombers.  They made this particular sound because they were so loaded down with tons of bombs, that it was almost as if their engines were struggling to keep them in the air.  The sound would grow closer and closer, louder and louder, until you would finally hear the sound of bombs falling, and then seconds later exploding.  She lived through many nights like this in utter fear, bombs falling to the left and the right, in front and behind;  bombs destroying your city and killing your friends.  What woke her up in this similar state of panic just last week in Connecticut, USA, was the "hum... hum... hum..." of a lawnmower across the street.  Nana said, "How has this war, this fear, been so burned into my very soul, that 70 years later I am still waking up in panic because of this sound?"   

Hey There

Hey everyone.  Just a quick thought to start us off.  

This hit me rather hard when I just re-read it recently.

Take words with you and return to the Lord.

Say to him:

"Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously,

that we may offer the fruit of our lips. . ."

[And God said] "I will heal their waywardness

and love them freely,

for my anger has turned away from them." Hosea 14:2,4