A true defeatist foremother just passed away and, ta-da, her memory is dishonored by Al Gore haters. Well, given the rightwingnut propensity for gratutious nastiness, I'm not surprised. It's a classic defeatist moment -- you feel good about humanity for a second, and then the critical thinking component, the "What the fuck! You bastards!" kicks in. The email text in bold below...
There
recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena.
During WWII, Irena, got permission to work
in the Warsaw Ghetto,
as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an 'ulterior
motive' ... She KNEW what the Nazi's plans were for the
Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled infants out in the
bottom of the
tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her
truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..) She also had a dog
in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers
let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course
wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered
the kids/infants noises.. During her time of doing this,
she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She
was caught, and the Nazi's broke both her legs, arms and
beat her severely. Irena kept
a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and
kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back
yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that
may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been
gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family
homes or adopted.
Last
year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize .....
She
was not selected.
Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.
Well, goddamn Al Gore. Except, of course, that is lunacy. Linking Al Gore to the Holocaust would have made this babushka break down in tears. The story, while basically true, has some very serious omissions. Check Snopes. She was a Pole, a social worker posing as a nurse. It's a minor form of holocaust denial to contend that she was a German.
Incredible valor and an amazing story. Snopes has some more detail that is critically
important to understanding the snarky end of the email-- there's no way
to know if Gore and his co-awardees beat out her nomination, because
the nominees are kept secret for decades to avoid politicization of the
award. The Social Workers who sent the complaint to the Nobel Committee
were expressing disappointment. Lobbying for the next year, I suspect.
This is where the skill of critical thinking comes in. Who started the internet rumor and why? I could start an internet rumor about Dick Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, Anne Coulter, Laura Ingram, unconsenting chickens and a
ballerina tutu and it would take on the same category of outrage that
the dig at Gore is intended to cause. Since only nutcases are really enraged with Al Gore these days, it must have been started by...disgruntled Hillary supporters?
The fact that the
Poles haven't been telling the world that this little social worker
saved thousands of lives and was tortured for it is interesting. They
could easily have let the world know and started a groundswell years
ago. The fact, unfortunate as it is, that the Poles were historically
as or more anti-Semitic than the Germans might have played
here...likewise, the Catholic Church. ( I'm assuming Sendler was
Catholic, which is a pretty safe assumption in Poland.) I seem to
recall a Polish figure in the Church who might have done something with
this; Copernicus? Chopin? I don't know, Karol Wojtyla?
Something like that...Got a job in Rome, as I recall, back in the late
70s and passed away with little notice a couple of years ago. There's something in that book the religious-rightwingnuts like to quote so much out of context, the Bible (Not Axis Shrugged), about "what you do to the least of these you do unto me." It's difficult for me to imagine anyone lesser than a baby in the Warsaw ghetto with the SS closing in.
Why
didn't the state of Isreal do something to honor her? Probably for the
same reason as the Polish Church -- awareness of this would highlight a
number of things they don't want to highlight about the holocaust. It's
convenient to ignore the people who tried to help -- adds to the guilt
of the rest. In not showing this to the world in technicolor, the Poles
hid their own guilt; the Isrealis hide the fact that unlike lambs led
to the slaughter, they walked.
The Hasadic Jewish tradition
holds that at any time, there are 70 anonymous "just" men and women on
whom the survival of the world depends; without them, God gives up
on humanity and goes off to Sandals in Bermuda to swim with Mrs. God in a bikini or something.
Well, if Irena Sendler wasn't one of the 70, the world is in better shape than I think it is. I wonder what they
have in the Holocaust museum about her? And, since I regard the Nazi SD a forerunner of the Cheney Homeland Security, I wonder what our servants would have done to a woman smuggling babies out of horror?
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