June 7, and still alive!

It dawned on me this morning what it would have felt like to be a foreigner in France on June 7, 1944.  D-Day is over!  You are in a foreign country, you're alive.  You have no idea how long you will be here.  Hell you have no idea if you will survive the war.

Imagine what that must have felt like to participate in such an event, such a dramatic pivotal point in history and survived.  Faced with the unknown, being in a foreign country and looking forward to surviving long enough to see other countries and someday even the chance at returning home.

You will not return the same person you left as.  There would be no way to go through what those people did and not have it totally change who they were, how they thought about things, and their view of the world.  No certainty, no guarantees, being part of the conflict and most of the world being at war with each other.

As I ponder these thoughts and try to imagine what that must have felt like, it makes the things in my life seem trivial by comparison.  I knew these people as old men when I was younger; my Grandfather, my Great Uncle Garth who my son is named after.  I thought they were a bit too tough, too set in their ways, and very idealistic.  But looking back as an older person myself I see they had to be that way.  What they endured, fought for, and came home and created with their lives, made them the way that they were.  We should maybe be a bit more idealistic, demand better from our leaders and those we chose to glorify by praise and respect.  I look at the heroes and stars of today, the top people in the news and tabloids and think, "Really!  Seriously!  You have got to be kidding!"

We need to be harder on ourselves, as American's.  We need to strive more to help our companies we work for to do more with less, so we can be more competitive in the world market place.  We need to stand up for things like freedom of religion, all of them!  Freedom of speech!  Freedom of ideas!  The right to bear arms!  We should defend our borders, our language, and our heritage as Americans!

We should not let groups strip Christianity from our government and from being displayed in public.  America was founded as a Christian country with tolerance and understanding to other people's beliefs.  To attack Christianity is to attack the very country providing your freedom to practice whatever religion you want.  For those who wish to destroy and assimilate our country by tearing down its foundations, will they be as tolerant to freedom, or freedoms of the people who are left.

It can be argued that America is the great social experiment.  Can a country exist and provide freedom and understanding for all people and all their different beliefs?  Can such a group of people actually manage to rule themselves and exist in the modern world?  As a country we are still very young.  The truth of where our country ends up and how it turns out is in our hands at this time.  By turning our backs on many of the things that our country was founded on we are destroying the core and foundation of what this country was built upon.  It is what our forefathers wanted for our country, and what generations of Americans have fought to defend.

It scares me when I see shades of the early Nazi party in one of the current political parties of this country.  Originally the National Socialist German Workers Party is what turned into the Nazi Party and not just the Germans stood by and let it flourish and take control but the entire world stood by and watched it grow and flourish into power.

It scares me because people say it could never happen here, we wouldn't let it.  Yet day by day we sell and give our freedom away by allowing things to change without standing up to say "Enough is enough!"  It's about time the American people took back our country from the idiots who think they can steal, cheat, change our country any way they want to because we will stand by and let them.

1942 Oct 5 By accident, Hermann Graebe, a German engineer and manager of a German construction firm in the Ukraine, and his foreman, came upon an Einsatz execution squad killing Jews from the small town of Dubno in the Ukraine. He gave the following eyewitness account:

"My foreman and I went directly to the pits.  Nobody bothered us.  Now I heard rifle shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds.  The people who had got off the trucks - men, women and children of all ages - had to undress upon the order of an SS man who carried a riding or dog whip.

They had to put down their clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top clothing and undergarments.  I saw heaps of shoes of about 800 to 1000 pairs, great piles of under-linen and clothing.  Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells, and waited for a sign from another SS man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand.

During the fifteen minutes I stood near, I heard no complaint or plea for mercy. I watched a family of about eight persons, a man and a woman both of about fifty, with their children of about twenty to twenty-four, and two grown-up daughters about twenty-eight or twenty-nine.  An old woman with snow white hair was holding a one year old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it.  The child was cooing with delight.  The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes.  The father was holding the hand of a boy about ten years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears.  The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him.

At that moment the SS man at the pit started shouting something to his comrade.  The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound.  Among them was the family I have just mentioned.  I well remember a girl, slim with black hair, who, as she passed me, pointed to herself and said, "twenty-three years old."  I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave.  People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible.  Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads.  Some of the people shot were still moving.  Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive.  The pit was nearly two-thirds full.

I estimated that it already contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting.  He was an SS man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit.  He had a tommy-gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette.

The people, completely naked, went down some steps which were cut in the clay wall of the pit and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the SS man directed them.  They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice.  Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them.  Blood was running from their necks.  The next batch was approaching already.  They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot."

Anything can happen by good people not getting involved, not saying enough!  Our grandparents understood this because it was mostly their generation that had to stop the shit caused by the apathy of the generation before them.  They fought the fight to say enough was enough.

June 7, and still alive!  Let your actions, words and life not let their sacrifices be in vain.  Let's get tough and not let things spiral out of control before our children have to stop what we tried to ignore.  Because I can't imagine holding my children and trying to keep them calm and express my love to them, moments before someone else kills me, them and my entire family, outside, naked, in a mass grave.

Posted in: Freedom Nazi Socialist Enough Tough