Tea at Trianon: Mystery of Holocaust Escape Girls Solved

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

Sunday, July 16, 2023

Mystery of Holocaust Escape Girls Solved

From the BBC:

The picture of three Jewish girls fleeing Nazi Germany became an iconic image appearing in museums, exhibitions and publications. It was taken at London's Liverpool Street station, but for more than 80 years the girls' identities were a mystery. Until now. Inge doesn't remember the picture being taken and for decades did not even know of its existence. The five-year-old had fled her home in Breslau, Germany, now Wroclaw in Poland, with her seven-year-old sister Ruth. Their mother and younger sister had stayed behind and were murdered at Auschwitz. It was not until she was a pensioner that Inge even realised she and Ruth, who died in 2015, had been forever immortalised as an icon of the Holocaust and Kindertransport, the mass evacuation of Jewish children from Nazi Germany in 1939. (Read more.)