Doc Doofus
25th Dec 2007, 05:49 AM
I have posted this little true story a few times on S2C in comments, although in shorter form. I thought maybe it was a good time to bring this back up again. I crossposted this at Dailykos tonight, and it made the top of the Recommended List, first time I've had that honor. You can read the comments there, if you like. (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/24/195517/79/915/426219)
This is a debate. It's about how we should treat prisoners and what it says about us.
My Mother Baked Biscuits for Nazis
My mother is 87 years old. She's not as spry as she used to be, but she's still going and can wear out her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I'd love to tell you a little tale about her. And as sweet an historical anecdote as this is, there's an important moral and political point to it, at the end.
Born in 1920, my mother ran off to Hollywood with her sister when she turned 18 so they could be movie stars. Well, that never came to be, but they did well in the service industry. My mother eventually married a reserve officer in the US Army who was also a stunt man and stunt coordinator, as well as a schoolteacher.
Then came World War II. He was activated. She spent the rest of World War II being rotated around the states to various Army camps with her husband. Louis was placed in charge of training the First Armored Cavalry for General George S. Patton. As the army demands grew, that division later split and split again into the Second Cavalry, Fourth, Seventeenth, etc. I'm not a military historian, so don't expect perfect accuracy from me, here.
As wife of a base CO, she got to know George Patton. Patton had some rather colorful if not flattering ideas about Jews, which he felt free to share with my mother, over coffee. She never was exactly friends with him, but they went to the same parties, some of which it was her job, by army tradition, to organize. So she knew him and even danced with him.
Louis had a violent streak to him, and he sometimes took it out on my mother. She often had bruises and black eyes. Louis' soldiers offered to beat the crap out of him for her. Why ? Well, this is true, and pardon me if I sound not objective here, she was a VERY beautiful woman in her early twenties -- a beauty by the standards of 1940s Hollywood.
As the war progressed, some of the army camps (we think Fort Knox) received captured enemy soldiers from Europe, at first Italians, then later Nazi German soldiers. According to my mom, the Nazis at Fort Knox were imprisoned behind chicken wire fences that they could easily have jumped over, if they had had anywhere better to go. Fort Knox wasn't too bad, though. They received better treatment there than the black American soldiers who were still required to obey Jim Crow laws with regards to bathrooms and drinking fountains.
Because they were kept not very far from her housing unit, my Mom got to speak to them occasionally. They were very polite and eager to try out their English on her. She remembers them as being a bunch of handsome blond-haired boys. As close to her home as they were, she could see them outside her kitchen window. She used to take them extra biscuits from the kitchen.
Just think about that for a moment. Nazi soldiers in the United States in a prison camp, being fed biscuits by a young Jewish woman who thought it humane to share what she had with them and to speak with them.
Nowadays, we torture prisoners just because it makes us feel good.
Who would blame my mother if she had spit on them, instead of fed them? Americans didn't know everything that was going on in Germany, but they knew enough to know women like my mother were being killed brutally by the thousands. They knew about the concentration camps. They knew about the stars. But my mother never thought of taking it out on them. She fed them f'ing biscuits from the family kitchen.
I asked my mother, why? She said, well, they were so cute, for one thing, with all their blond hair and blue eyes. And so happy and eager to try out their English on her. And she couldn't see why she would hate people that were prisoners. The war was over for them. And they were always so grateful. I can imagine.
This memory is a source of great honor to me and everybody else in my family. This is what distinguished us from the barbarians of the world. Today, as we find out the things that our government does in our name, with our tax dollars, the memory of my mother's compassion and tolerance leaves me feeling hollowed out. They have robbed us all of our honor and decency. And for what? For intelligence?
Think again, for just a moment, how much intelligence they could have gleaned from thousands of Nazi soldiers, many of them officers. Lord knows, some of them must have been involved in much worse atrocities than the people in Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. World War II was a real war, not a fake metaphorical war like the War on Terror. American soldiers were coming home dead from Europe by the thousands. If Americans in 1944 could muster enough decency to treat Nazi prisoners with more humanity than we treat mere suspects today, what have we come to?
I tell this story quite frequently to total strangers, when the subject of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and water-boarding comes up. Those that have insulated themselves from the collective evil we commit by dwelling on how awful 9/11 need to be reminded, we suffered much worse than 9/11 sixty years ago, and yet we retained our decency then. What changed?
This is not just a source of pride to me. It's a source of pride to our whole country. And the Bush administration and all its defenders need to be held to justice, some day, if we are ever to reclaim our pride.
This is a debate. It's about how we should treat prisoners and what it says about us.
My Mother Baked Biscuits for Nazis
My mother is 87 years old. She's not as spry as she used to be, but she's still going and can wear out her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I'd love to tell you a little tale about her. And as sweet an historical anecdote as this is, there's an important moral and political point to it, at the end.
Born in 1920, my mother ran off to Hollywood with her sister when she turned 18 so they could be movie stars. Well, that never came to be, but they did well in the service industry. My mother eventually married a reserve officer in the US Army who was also a stunt man and stunt coordinator, as well as a schoolteacher.
Then came World War II. He was activated. She spent the rest of World War II being rotated around the states to various Army camps with her husband. Louis was placed in charge of training the First Armored Cavalry for General George S. Patton. As the army demands grew, that division later split and split again into the Second Cavalry, Fourth, Seventeenth, etc. I'm not a military historian, so don't expect perfect accuracy from me, here.
As wife of a base CO, she got to know George Patton. Patton had some rather colorful if not flattering ideas about Jews, which he felt free to share with my mother, over coffee. She never was exactly friends with him, but they went to the same parties, some of which it was her job, by army tradition, to organize. So she knew him and even danced with him.
Louis had a violent streak to him, and he sometimes took it out on my mother. She often had bruises and black eyes. Louis' soldiers offered to beat the crap out of him for her. Why ? Well, this is true, and pardon me if I sound not objective here, she was a VERY beautiful woman in her early twenties -- a beauty by the standards of 1940s Hollywood.
As the war progressed, some of the army camps (we think Fort Knox) received captured enemy soldiers from Europe, at first Italians, then later Nazi German soldiers. According to my mom, the Nazis at Fort Knox were imprisoned behind chicken wire fences that they could easily have jumped over, if they had had anywhere better to go. Fort Knox wasn't too bad, though. They received better treatment there than the black American soldiers who were still required to obey Jim Crow laws with regards to bathrooms and drinking fountains.
Because they were kept not very far from her housing unit, my Mom got to speak to them occasionally. They were very polite and eager to try out their English on her. She remembers them as being a bunch of handsome blond-haired boys. As close to her home as they were, she could see them outside her kitchen window. She used to take them extra biscuits from the kitchen.
Just think about that for a moment. Nazi soldiers in the United States in a prison camp, being fed biscuits by a young Jewish woman who thought it humane to share what she had with them and to speak with them.
Nowadays, we torture prisoners just because it makes us feel good.
Who would blame my mother if she had spit on them, instead of fed them? Americans didn't know everything that was going on in Germany, but they knew enough to know women like my mother were being killed brutally by the thousands. They knew about the concentration camps. They knew about the stars. But my mother never thought of taking it out on them. She fed them f'ing biscuits from the family kitchen.
I asked my mother, why? She said, well, they were so cute, for one thing, with all their blond hair and blue eyes. And so happy and eager to try out their English on her. And she couldn't see why she would hate people that were prisoners. The war was over for them. And they were always so grateful. I can imagine.
This memory is a source of great honor to me and everybody else in my family. This is what distinguished us from the barbarians of the world. Today, as we find out the things that our government does in our name, with our tax dollars, the memory of my mother's compassion and tolerance leaves me feeling hollowed out. They have robbed us all of our honor and decency. And for what? For intelligence?
Think again, for just a moment, how much intelligence they could have gleaned from thousands of Nazi soldiers, many of them officers. Lord knows, some of them must have been involved in much worse atrocities than the people in Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. World War II was a real war, not a fake metaphorical war like the War on Terror. American soldiers were coming home dead from Europe by the thousands. If Americans in 1944 could muster enough decency to treat Nazi prisoners with more humanity than we treat mere suspects today, what have we come to?
I tell this story quite frequently to total strangers, when the subject of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and water-boarding comes up. Those that have insulated themselves from the collective evil we commit by dwelling on how awful 9/11 need to be reminded, we suffered much worse than 9/11 sixty years ago, and yet we retained our decency then. What changed?
This is not just a source of pride to me. It's a source of pride to our whole country. And the Bush administration and all its defenders need to be held to justice, some day, if we are ever to reclaim our pride.