Tea at Trianon: Another Mass Grave Discovered

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

Saturday, June 22, 2019

Another Mass Grave Discovered

The vast extent of the Holocaust is still being revealed. From NPR:

More than 1,000 victims of the Holocaust were buried Wednesday in Belarus, some 70 years after they were killed in the genocide. Their bones were unearthed this winter by construction workers as they began to build luxury apartments in the southwestern city of Brest, near Poland.

Soldiers brought in to excavate found undisputed evidence of a mass grave: skulls with bullet holes, shoes and tattered clothing worn on the last day of people's lives. Because the newly uncovered mass grave was on the site of a wartime ghetto, the victims were believed to be Jews slaughtered by Nazis. Many Jewish people had been forced to live behind barbed wires in the Brest ghetto before they were executed.

On Wednesday, their remains were placed into 120 coffins decorated with the Star of David, according to The Associated Press. A burial and ceremony was held at a cemetery outside of the city. "I think it's very late, but better late than never," Marcel Drimer, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor from Poland, told NPR. "I am upset that the officials want to build on the sacred site," he added. Authorities permitted the apartment construction to continue, prompting locals and leaders in the Jewish community to denounce the way the mass grave discovery was handled. (Read more.)