Tea at Trianon: One Victim

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, April 13, 2015

One Victim

Sometimes the reality of the Holocaust is made more vivid for us when we take one victim at a time. This is because it is too hard for the human mind to comprehend the deaths of six million people. So here is one, just one. To quote:

Born: March 18, 1921
Vertujeni, Romania
Eva was one of three children born to Jewish parents in Vertujeni, a Bessarabian town that was 90 percent Jewish. Eva attended a public school. Her family was religious, attending synagogue every day. Eva's father made his living as a kosher butcher, preparing chicken according to Jewish dietary laws

1933-39: In 1936, when Eva was 15 years old, her family moved to Vysoka, where she later got a job as a seamstress. Vysoka was very different from her hometown. There were only about 15 Jewish families in Vysoka and Eva believed that people were less tolerant of Jews. While there were not any fights, tensions ran high.

1940-44: Eva married in 1940, the year the USSR annexed Bessarabia. Her husband was drafted into the Red Army a year later when Germany attacked the USSR. Eva, pregnant, remained in Vysoka and was deported with the town's Jews by the Romanian army, allies of the Germans. The Jews were marched for days without food or water. One day in a forest, the soldiers raped some of the girls. In the Vertujeni transit camp, Eva gave birth on the floor, without a doctor. A week later, during a march to Transnistria, her baby died. (Read more.)