An End to Intolerance

When I was in highschool, I worked on a student journal called An End to Intolerance. The journal's focus was educating students about the Holocaust, and fostering awareness of other human rights atrocities around the world.

While skimming through my hard drive (I'm a virtual packrat and need to offload on to a disk more often than I actually do), I found a draft/half-sketched out article I wrote after an interview with Holocaust survivor Helen Grossman. Since the file is still relevant, I reworked my find - and here it is.

*

Helen Grossman was born in Poland. She was thirteen years old when her family ran away from their hometown. “We were caught by the Germans and sent back,” she says. “Our house [had] burnt down, so we went to live with my grandfather.”

We’re standing on the second floor of Sydney’s Holocaust Museum, where Mrs. Grossman is leading a tour. Walking over to a wall covered with artifacts, she takes a round metal object from the shelf, and brings it to the center table.

“A few months later,” she continues, “an SS man broke the door down, and my parents were deported and my brother and I were sent to a camp to work in a factory.

“When I was 15, I was sent to Auschwitz and separated from my brother. I caught typhoid. [Then] I was then sent to Birkenau, a section of Auschwitz [that] was known as the ‘forest of death’ [because] people sent [there were forced] on a death march there to die. I worked on shell casings there for a few months.”

Leaning over the metal cylinder, Mrs. Grossman’s fingers move, swift and deft, as she breaks the shell into pieces. Just as nimbly, she re-assembles the casing and replaces it on the shelf.

“Then I was sent to another Auschwitz camp,” she tells us. “The Russians were coming, and the Germans were afraid. We were sent on a death march through knee-deep snow.” She makes eye-contact with each of us, matter-of-fact. “If you lagged behind, you were shot.”

The SS destroyed the gas chambers at Birkenau in November of 1944. In January of 1945, Nazi personnel began to leave the facility. Most of the prisoners were sent toward the West, on a death-march.

“Eventually we were put on a train. I was lucky. I was put in an open carriage […] The closed carriages were worse […] there was no air and no room. People were constantly dying, being sick and going to the toilet all the time. It was terrible.


“We were on the train for days going this way, then being sent that way. We had no food or water. People were begging for water. People were eating snow that was falling into the open carriages and getting diarrhoea and dying.

“We travelled through Czechoslovakia. When we reached the camp, we looked for food at the garbage dump. The female commandant did not like this, and as a punishment, we were not fed for another 48 hours. People were dying like flies. […] There were no burials or cremations so we were waking up amongst dead people.”

Current estimates suggest that almost 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Somewhere between 1.1 and 1.4 million Jews died at Auschwitz, alongside 150,000 Polish Catholics, and 23,000 Romani and Sinti (more commonly known as Gypsies).

“We stayed in these conditions for a long time until eventually the Russians liberated us.” At the end of January,1945, the Soviet Red Army caught up with prisoners sent west from Bireknau. Approximately 7,500 people were liberated.

Turning over her wrist, Mrs. Grossman shows us the line of small black number; people crowd ‘round to see. “these experiences still haunt me,” she says, calm and self-possessed, “but I can't remember the faces. I can see the German officers in their uniforms and their name tags, but my mind has blocked out their faces."

Mrs. Grossman is still an active volunteer at the Sydney Jewish Museum.

Vegetarian Children

Image via Wikipedia

Joe and I are both vegetarians, and happy about it. Granted, it wasn't very easy at first, especially for Joe (I've never been a big fan of meat - it was a seafood habit I had to kick). But, now that we're expecting (six months along on Wednesday), we've been considering the ramifications of our vegetarianism.

Sure, I have to be a little extra careful with my diet while pregnant, but what about after I've had our little Pikachu? Will he grow up to be a vegetarian? Will we say no to meat products at grandparents' places? Will he always order vegetarian meals at restaurants? What about fast food? McDonald's, Burger King, KFC - many childhood "treat foods" are brimming with meat.

That's when I stumbled across this article on Slate.com. Granted, it doesn't exactly address our situtation - neither of us eat meat - but it does raise a few interesting questions. What do you think?

From "Daddy Eats Dead Cows", by Mark Oppenheimer:

My wife, Cyd, is an unlikely vegetarian. Her mother is a genius with a chicken or a pot roast, and their small apartment in New York remains a kosher carnivore's delight. For nights out, her family could walk to temples of meat like Sammy's Roumanian Steak House and the Second Avenue Deli. But as a young girl, Cyd decided that eating meat was unethical, and she resolved that someday she would become a vegetarian. The summer before college, she worked to acquire a taste for eggplant, chickpeas, and other staples of the meat-free diet. She became a fine vegetarian cook; today she can do indescribable things with lentils.

From the time we met, I admired Cyd's commitment to vegetarianism. I had taken baby-steps toward vegetarianism myself: After reading Peter Singer's Animal Liberation in my mid-20s, I had given up chicken, which seemed to me the most cruelly abused of all the factory-farmed animals. Yet when, during our courtship, Cyd said that having a vegetarian household, and doing our best to raise vegetarian children, was important to her, I hesitated (or, rather, picked a long, loud fight). I didn't object to the meat-free household, and she was not asking me to abstain from meat in restaurants or at friends' houses. But trying to raise vegetarian children seemed to be buying trouble. I immediately generated a list of potential problems: Would it be healthy? What would our parents think when we asked them not to serve the grandchildren tuna fish? Would our children feel left out, abstaining from hot dogs at ballgames and birthday parties? Most important: Would they seem like freaks?

Decimate

Joe's sitting next to me watching Battlestar Galactica. Now, though I'm not a fan of the show - I've never successfully stayed awake during an episode before, I've been asking questions on and off throughout this one. And what I've learned so far is this: Joe can't misuse the word "decimated".

Part of me rejoices at this - I'm married to a man as pedantic as me. And part of me just finds it funny, especially since "decimated" is not one of my trigger words; even though I'm aware of the way it should be used, and the way it's usually used, I don't make the distinction (a very rare thing for me!).

So, what does "decimated" actually mean? Interestingly, "decimated" has two meanings - the original, and a created one (the first definition) that's grown out of general misusage (other examples of this include "irregardless" and "inflammable"). So, in the words of my trusty OED:

1 kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of : the project would decimate the fragile wetland wilderness | the American chestnut, a species decimated by blight.

• drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something) : plant viruses that can decimate yields.

2 historical kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group.

USAGE Historically, the meaning of the word decimate is ‘kill one in every ten of (a group of people).’ This sense has been superseded by the later, more general sense ‘kill or destroy a large percentage or part of,’ as in : the virus has decimated the population. Some traditionalists argue that this and other later senses are incorrect, but it is clear that these extended senses are now part of standard English. It is sometimes also argued that decimate should refer to people and not to things or animals such as weeds or insects. It is generally agreed that decimate should not be used to mean 'defeat utterly.'

And the result? Joe is a traditionalist, and I can say whatever I want (with only the tiniest twinge of guilt).

Pride & Prejudice - an audio book

For any Jane Austen fans out there - Learn Out Loud has been putting Pride and Prejudice up, chapter by chapter, as an audio book. The reader, Catherine Byers, is very good, though, thanks to the BBC, Ms. Byers Mrs. Bennett makes me think a little more of Lady Catherine than the flighty, nervous woman I'm used to.

Download or listen online here, and be sure to check out the rest of Learn Out Loud's excellent library!

Edit: I'm listening to this now, and I think Ms. Byers may have Miss Bingley and Donald Duck a little mixed up...

Girl & Castle in the Sky

I've spent a lot of time sketching lately - I find it relaxing, and I enjoy seeing something take shape on the page. Unlike reading (I'm still having pregnancy-induced reading trouble), it doesn't hurt my eyes. And unlike piano practice, I don't have to sit up in a specific position (pregnancy is tough on the joints, people!). But, perhaps most of all, I like it because I'm learning how to do it. One of my greatest character faults is that I hate not knowing how to do a thing; sketching every day makes me happy because I'm slowly filling in a gap.

In the past, I've done a lot of freehand-see-where-it-takes-me things. I still do those from time to time, but, since I'm attempting to learn a bit about how to draw sans a class, I've started doing copies of things. The copies rarely end up being exact - once I have an idea of the lines, I tend to let my own hands take over. This first image (creatively titled "girl") began life as a copy of a bookcover - one of Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic books, in fact. And, though I had planned to get around to reading that series at the time, I have to admit, I bought the book more because of the cover than anything else. Unfortunately, because the book is a UK edition I picked up in Australia, it's been difficult to track down an original image. The best I can do is the tiny one below, and a link to the original illustrator, Liselotte Watkins.

Liselotte's original

My copy

Somewhere along the way, the girl became a lot more middle eastern, and the hair grew into a veil. I'm not sure why, but I think I like it. I'm never quite sure!

The next picture began as a copy of a book I recieved for Christmas, The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrarult, illustrated by Sally Holmes. Although I can't put up the original illustration, if you page through the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon, you'll get an idea of the wonderful illustrations throughout the book.

In the original picture, from Bluebeard, the castle is atop a well-treed hill, with riders racing through the forest, and haystacks in the foreground. I went for a more castle in the sky feel, changing the trees and adding in clouds, some extra castle, and the pines.

(Please forgive the strange line; the scanner doesn't cope very well with my sketchbook!)

Castle in the Sky

Before doing this sketch, I had an idea of how castles and individual trees worked, but I'd not really understood how to draw a forest. Now, though, I'm much more comfortable with the idea, and I think I'll try a few general foresty sketches soon.

Reading: Dingo, by Charles de Lint

High school senior Miguel’s life is turned upside down when he meets new girl Lainey, whose family has just moved from Australia. With her tumbled red-gold hair, her instant understanding of who he is, and her unusual dog—a real Australian dingo—she’s unforgettable. And, as he quickly learns, she is on the run from an ancient bargain made by her ancestors. There’s no question that Miguel will do whatever he can to help her—but what price will each of them have to pay? Dingo is quintessential Charles de Lint, set close to his beloved, invented city of Newford—a mixture of darkness and hope, humor and mystery, and the friendship within love.


The cover of Dingo immediately caught my eye - the title was arresting (many Americans are completely unaware of the dingo, so hearing/seeing the word is rare), and the colours were bright without being garish. So I added the book to my already overflowing arms, paid, and carted it home, where it sat on the shelf for a month (my reading list is long, my time is short, and pregnancy-induced migraines are making life difficult). This weekend, I picked it up.

And was surprised.

Now, I read the inside jacket when I bought the book - I always read the synopsis, the author biography, and anything else that looks vaguely informative before taking a book home - but I forgot the exact details somewhere between buying and reading. So, thanks to the the cover, I spent the first few pages thinking I was reading a teen girl's voice.

From the first page of chapter one:

No one lies to think it of their father, but there are days when I can't help but feel that somehow I got stuck with the biggest loser of all loser dads. It's mostly on days like this when he's off on a house call to buy new stock and I'm stuck minding the store.

MIKE'S USED COMICS AND RECORDS, the sign says above the door in paint that's chipped and starting to fade.

Okay, so he's not a deadbeat, because ever since Mom died, he's always made sure we had food on the table and a roof over our heads. And some kids might think it was cool to have a dad so into comics and music. But try living with it, day in and day out. It's Superman this, and Spider-Man that, and wow, a Grateful Dead boot with a version of some song that they only ever played live one or two times and never recorded officially.

It was another two paragraphs, when the narrator begins to talk about hand-me-down clothes, before I realised I was reading a teen boy's voice.

So, what do you think?

• How does a book's cover affect our perception of the main character?
• Do you find the excerpt above leans toward the voice of a particular gender? Is it ambiguous?
• Do the mentions of comics and superheroes tip your perception of voice either way?
  

Kangaroo Cousins?

From the UK Newspaper, The Daily Mail:

'Kangaroos are Closely Related to Humans', Scientists Claim

Humans and kangaroos are close cousins on the evolutionary tree sharing a common ancestor 150 million years ago, according to Australian researchers.

Scientists have mapped the genetic code of the Australian marsupials for the first time and found large chunks of DNA are the same...[more]

This isn't a fairy tale. But it is pretty cool. Prior to this research, we could see some degree of relation between kangaroos and humans, the way we can see some degree of relation between humans and anything else that gets as far as Class Mammalia. (Kangaroos then split into Marsupials, while humans split to Eutherians, or placental mammals). Of course, now that I'm in the throes of morning sickness, I'm beginning to think the kangaroos got the better deal...