Everyday Canvas

Berlin Embassy 1939, Bird's-eye View, and Reading

Prompt: A Bird's Eye-- write your entry about the view a bird has flying over the mundane things you see every day, give us a new perspective on the repetitive places and tasks most days bring you.

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My house: From above, the roof would be L-shaped with gray shingles. The palm trees would look like green flowers with thin petals opening. Our street would look like a long curvy river with greens on both sides and the tops of the boxes (houses) along the two sides of that river.

I used to watch the ground from the windows of the airplanes during the time when we traveled a lot. The ground looked very much like Gulliver’s Lilliput.

Prompt: Discuss something that appeals to you from the link or something that happened to you personally on this day in history.

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March 9, 1936 - The German press warned that all Jews who vote in the upcoming elections would be arrested.

It was the notice of the end, I think. Although this wasn’t really the beginning of the end as the many other incidents pointed to what would happen many years earlier.

At the moment, I am reading William Russell’s Berlin Embassy. William Russell (1915-2000) was a diplomat in the American Embassy in Berlin. This book was first published in 1941. Its e-book version was out last year, and I grabbed it.

It is probably the most important and most telling book I came across about the start of the Holocaust. The book covers the time from 1939 to 1941. It has in it, the author’s observations, his newspaper clippings, the plight of the masses, especially that of the Jewish, and the overall atmosphere Hitler’s regime had created in Germany and in the world.

He says, “If the United States goes into this war, there is one thing I do not want to forget. There are millions of people in Germany who do not agree with the policies of their leaders. And there are other millions, simple people, who believe exactly what their leaders tell them — especially when they tell them the same thing day after day.”

He says the regime, just to confuse everybody, didn't let the real news out but created rumors. The people in Germany never knew of the news and their listening to the foreign news on the radio was prohibited. ~As an aside, there is a lesson here to be learned for our day with all the fake-news business going on.~

He also talks about how the people who wanted to leave Germany went from embassy to embassy to get a visa to get out. It is absolutely heart-rending and nerve-wrenching.

This also involves me to some degree as my parents were in Munich in 1939 but they got out.

Prompt: What books are on your Spring Reading List?

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I don’t have a Spring Reading list, necessarily, because I have more than 6000 books on my Kindle, which I probably read about a 1000+ so far since I read all the time.

I read on the Kindle, Nook, and Book Bazaar reading apps on my laptop, or on my Kindle e-readers, or on my Cellphone. I usually have close to ten books going at the same time with one of them a print book. I also have at least ten print books waiting for me to get to them, I hope by the summer's end.