Word: wars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first high school band was Fast Eddie and the Electric Japs ("We used all Japanese equipment - real cheap - and hung a souvenir war flag of the Rising Sun behind us"), from which Johansen graduated to another group more easily than he graduated from Port Richmond High ("Lunch was definitely my favorite subject...
Still they come, the recollections of Jews caught in Europe during World War II, and still the genocide the authors try to describe is not fully understandable. We know about the Teutonic strain of extreme self-righteousness, Germany's economic chaos between the wars and about the ideology that found a target for this bitterness in the Jews. We have Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil, which suggests how good citizens, following orders given by other good citizens who were also following orders, could have run the death camps. We know in great detail...
This is incomplete knowledge because it is only rational. We hold back from the leap of despair that would let us see that human society always carries within it the capacity to commit such butcheries and think well of itself. Yet as World War II recedes into the past, the death camps have become part of the common memory of those who were neither victims nor executioners, but who share uncomfortably the humanity of each...
...memoir that stirs these thoughts is muted in its anguish. The author, Saul Friedländer, 46, now an Israeli historian, was a child of seven in Czechoslovakia at the outset of the war. His parents were nonpracticing Jews, and the religion that Pavel, as he was called, knew most about as a boy was the Roman Catholicism of his beloved governess Vlasta. It was this happenstance, perhaps, that made it possible for him to endure the enormous change in his life that occurred when he was ten. The family fled to France in 1939, but by the summer...
Only after the war did the boy learn what it had meant, in those years, to be a Jew. His allegiance shifted away from the Catholic Church to a belief in Zionism...