Two Polaks Meet 13 Year Old Girls

So these two Polaks meet 13 year old girls.

One is Roman Polanski.

One is Karol Wojtyla.

The links from The Anchoress's new location seem a little rickety but the contrast will show through, worth a quick look and thought.

Here is an excerpt on the Wojtyla matter with it's link:

'During the summer of 1942, two women in Krakow, Poland, were denounced as Jews, taken to the city's prison, held there for a few months and then sent to the Belzec death camp, where in October they were killed in primitive Nazi gas chambers by carbon monoxide from diesel engines.

Their names were Frimeta Gelband and Salomea Zierer; they were sisters. As it happens, Frimeta was my wife's grandmother. Salomea - known as Salla - had two daughters, one of whom survived the war and one of whom did not.

The elder of these daughters was Edith Zierer. In January 1945, at age 13, she emerged from a Nazi labor camp in Czestochowa, Poland, a waif on the verge of death. Separated from her family, unaware that her mother had been killed by the Germans, she could scarcely walk.

But walk she did, to a train station, where she climbed onto a coal wagon. The train moved slowly, the wind cut through her. When the cold became too much to bear, she got down at a village called Jedrzejow. In a corner of the station, she sat. Nobody looked at her, a girl in the striped and numbered uniform of a prisoner, late in a terrible war. Unable to move, Edith waited.

Death was approaching, but a young man approached first, "very good looking," as she recalled, and vigorous. He wore a long robe and appeared to be a priest. "Why are you here?" he asked. "What are you doing?" Edith said she was trying to get to Krakow to find her parents.

The man disappeared. He came back with a cup of tea. Edith drank. He said he could help her get to Krakow. Again the mysterious benefactor went away, returning with bread and cheese. They talked about the advancing Soviet Army. Edith said she believed that her parents and younger sister, Judith, were alive.

"Try to stand," the man said. Edith tried and failed. He carried her to another village, where he put her in the cattle car of a train bound for Krakow. Another family was there. The man got in beside Edith, covered her with his cloak and made a small fire.

His name, he told Edith, was Karol Wojtyla. Although she took him for a priest, he was still a seminarian who would not be ordained until the next year. Thirty-three more years would pass before he became Pope John Paul II and embarked on a papacy that would help break the Communist hold on Central Europe and so transform the world.

What moved this young seminarian to save the life of a lost Jewish girl cannot be known. But it is clear that his was an act of humanity made as the two great mass movements of the 20th century, the twin totalitarianisms of Fascism and Communism, bore down on his nation, Poland.

Here were two people in a ravaged land, a 24-year-old Catholic and a 13-year-old Jew. The future pope had already lost his mother, father and brother. Edith, although she did not know it yet, had already lost her mother at Belzec, her father at Maidanek and her little sister at Auschwitz. They could not have been more alone.

Pope John Paul II is widely viewed as having been a man of unshakable convictions that some found old-fashioned or rigid. But perhaps he offered his truth with the same simplicity and directness he showed in proffering tea and bread and shelter from cold to an abandoned Jewish girl in 1945, when nobody was watching.

It was based in the belief that, as he once put it, "a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human being" was at the root of the mass movements of the 20th century, Communism and Fascism.

Stalin once contemptuously asked, "How many divisions has the pope?" Starting with his 1979 visit to Poland, John Paul gave an answer.

Perhaps the strength that enabled him to play a central role in ending Communism and the strength that led him to save Edith Zierer did not differ fundamentally. Like his healing ecumenism, those acts required the courage born of a core certitude.

Edith fled from Karol Wojtyla when they arrived at Krakow in 1945. The family on the train, also Jews, had warned her that he might take her off to "the cloisters." She recalls him calling out, "Edyta, Edyta!" - the Polish form of her name - as she hid behind large containers of milk.

But hiding was not forgetting. She wrote his name in a diary, her savior, and in 1978, when she read in a copy of Paris-Match that he had become pope, she broke into tears. By then Edith Zierer was in Haifa, Israel, where she now lives.

Letters to him went unanswered. But at last, in 1997, she received a letter from the Vatican in which the pope recalled their meeting. A year later they met again at the Vatican. Edith thanked the pope for saving her. He put one hand on her head, another hand in hers, and blessed her. As she parted, he said, "Come back, my child."'

Tar and Feathers

The tarring and the feathering is coming...Don't forget the journalists.

via Boortz

"Suspected flag burner pilloried

Alleged offender hunted down, ridiculed after incident at VFW post

VALLEY FALLS -- The young man was given three choices: get turned over to the police, go one-on-one in a fight with a seasoned war veteran, or be duct-taped to a flagpole for six hours with a sign around his neck identifying his alleged crime: flag burning. It was the third option that would still have the small town buzzing a week after a 21-year-old was hunted down and forced to endure a public humiliation with its roots dating to the Middle Ages. Members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1938 were incensed enough to tie up the man last Sunday after they accused him of setting the flag in front of their building on fire.

Post Commander Nick Normile, a Vietnam War veteran, said the man came into the post's bar Sept. 18 on Poplar Avenue and was eventually turned away for not having a proper ID.

Apparently angered, the young man, who Normile did not want to name, cut the rope of the American flag flying overhead and used a cigarette lighter to set it on fire, Normile and others said.

The man sat pilloried as the village had its fall youth soccer picnic with a long parade of children passing in front of him.

"He'll never disrespect the flag again, I can tell you that," Normile said.

Normile said the flag had at one point flown over U.S. troops in Iraq had special significance."

University Students

Ugh.

Via IMAO.US

Carl Sagan

worked on a top secret cold war project which would detonate a nuclear weapon on the moon which would be visible from Earth as a show of force?

Does Frank J. know?

Tilt Shift

I noticed a tilt-shift generator over at generator blog.

This is my first one ever, from Jimmy's bday a couple of years ago.

I really need to work on that...

Our Concerned Guardians Hard at Work

Don't worry. I'm sure they had each read every word of the legislation involved in the "marathon 13 hour" budget session which left CT borrowing a BILLION DOLLARS and raising taxes.

Playing solitaire on their computers:

Lambert wants to have a FIVE CENT FEE on every paper and plastic bag used in shopping.

At least Hennessey calls it a TAX. (Don't forget that their estimations on revenue are part of the budget process. So while they are enacting taxes to discourage behavior they are overestimating the behavior to pass the budget. Or underestimating the behavior and it's impact to sell the tax as less impactfull on us, the constituents. Always assume the least pleasant and you will be nearer to the truth, the worse than worthless bastards. For example they allowed alcohol sales until 9 p.m. to help pass a budget one year. Most package stores don't stay open untile nine. I should get their estimates of increased tax revenues just to see the "bill of goods" they sold on that session.)

Wow, what an intrusive do gooder and how typical of our legislative shepherds.

Take a moment, however, and glance at the shear volume of laws they function upon. "Bills introduced by 118 Lambert".

There are over 170 pieces of legislation introduced at the beginning of session by this woman and don't try and dodge using the notion of the term "introduced".

Hundreds of laws, every session. For ever more.

Morin is supporting an act regarding the treatment of Elephants. Elephant concern in Connecticut he puts on the table while doing nothing as a billion dollars is borrowed and taxes are raised.

Tar.

Feathers.

Here is another. "An Act Concerning the Freedom to Dry" which tries to prohibit laws against how you dry your clothes.

I shit you not. He must feel like quite the cowboy watching out for all of our freedoms.

They think they have the duty to monitor how we dry our clothes and then they think they are liberty angels when they struggle against the tyranny of clothes drying, and we let them.

Tar.

Feathers.

I have yet to meet someone who does not loath the political class, but we need to step up and step up hard, if no real forward motion is attained at least we can have the satisfaction of knowing we are "community organizing".

Their point is to ultimately have every last aspect of existence on earth covered by legislative language to the extent that at all times we are violating some aspect thereof.

That is the intention. All must be law. If you don't realize that those who don't read legislation before voting on it, feel comfortable with the gargantuan volume of it, and do not hold themselves to the same laws that they hold you or I to, you are the fleece wrapped sucker they wish to control.

Oh my God. Please go and read some of the new agenda and then visit the bastards.

Do you think they will be happy to take the time to discuss their plans for us?

I need a flip cam gdammit.

I also need to proofread the above. Please know that I condemn both parties.

We need to address the worst political class ever.

Julia Child

"was furious at Meryl Streep for her role in the apple scare".

via Overlawyered

They also link to this stunning example of our lords and masters efforts and regard.

Via the CPSIA rocks must be tested for lead and free of sharp points...oh jeez, just go read.

Chimpanzee on a Segway

Adam links to a video of said segway in this post.

Dear Lord.

That's frightening. Can you imagine platoons of these monsters ripping off our hands and eating our faces only to flee on those gyroscopic wings in search of more flesh?

Yeesh.

Holy Crap

Some stunning firefight footage conveys not detail, but just the tiniest hint of the intensity of Afghanistan.

God Bless those troops.

God Bless them.



Now, for diversity's sake, let's hear it for the cocktail of Canadians with American rounds.



Could the journalist and the soldier be more antipodean?

Except That It Is Not An F-18

Is She Single?

aahhh...she looks too much like myself, and everyone has already heard my panda theory.

via instapundit

America Day!

"I'm not gonna lie...I like the chickens...Listen, I just realized you're despicable..."



Watch more cool animation and creative cartoons at Aniboom

Some are More Robust than Others

Carnegie Mellon ranks death risks...

via Instapundit