[Cz-L] RE: czernowitz-l digest: August 15, 2010

Hardy's very brief summary about facing reality brings back to my mind the incredible and inexplicable capacity of mankind to delude itself, to avoid the unpleasant, the disturbing thoughts that come when facing reality.

My dad had gone on a business trip to Berlin in '33 several weeks after Hitler became chancellor. He saw enough to come home to say, "Europe is doomed. There will be war. The only sensible thing is to emigrate."

He obtained a visa from Australia but all his Czernowitzer friends told him he was alarmist. They persuaded him to postpone leaving. He postponed it for so long, the visa expired. Fortunately, later, he met a man with Canada's CPR Immigration service who persuaded dad to move to Canada. We left in mid-April of 1939.

I wouldn't turn twelve until September of that year but even as a youngster of eleven I had political awareness and I recall seeing a cartoon in a local paper in which Hitler was a barber in a barbershop. Schuschnig of Austria was leaving the barbershop with a terrible hair cut, half shaved, a mess. King Carol sat on a chair waiting for his hair cut and Hitler said, "Next."

 The coming disaster was even obvious to me, a youngster of eleven, but our friends were still telling us we were crazy to leave.

We all have mental blocks about accepting monstrous realities. Even though I was aware, I was not convinced. On the train through Germany there was no sign, no evidence of what was to come. No one knew of concentration camps that were already in existence and murderously active.

We spent a week or two in Antwerp, Belgium, to get our papers in order, and then took an overnight ferry across the English Channel to Harwich.

As we approached the English shore, I saw PBY Boats anchored in the sea every few hundred yards offshore. These were called flying boats, amphibious airplanes that landed in water on their bellies and had small pontoons on the tips of their wings. They were later used in submarine warfare. They also had plastic bubbles on their sides with machine gun barrels protruding. Those flying war machines brought full reality to me. I said to myself, "Dad is right. There WILL be a war."

Of course, none of us, no matter how realistic we might have been, had fathomed how much of a war there would be or the monstrosity of the Holocaust.

Much of the world today is again wearing blinders regarding the future.

Andy Halmay,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: czernowitz-l_at_list.cornell.edu
> Sent: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:17:12 -0400
> To: czernowitz-l_at_list.cornell.edu
> Subject: czernowitz-l digest: August 15, 2010
>
> CZERNOWITZ-L Digest for Sunday, August 15, 2010.
>
> 1. [Cz-L] Prime of town.
> 2. RE: [Cz-L] Request for your help, please - where do you live?
> 3. AW: [Cz-L] Request for your help, please - where do you live?

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Received on 2010-08-16 09:17:13