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3962bbf
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The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same.
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world-war-2
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Lois Lowry |
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073d344
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That they were torn from mistakes they had no chance to fix; everything unfinished. All the sins of love without detail, detail without love. The regret of having spoken, of having run out of time to speak. Of hoarding oneself. Of turning one's back too often in favour of sleep. I tried to imagine their physical needs, the indignity of human needs grown so extreme they equal your longing for wife, child, sister, parent, friend. But truthfully I couldn't even begin to imagine the trauma of their hearts, of being taken in the middle of their lives. Those with young children. Or those newly in love, wrenched from that state of grace. Or those who had lived invisibly, who were never know.
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world-war-2
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Anne Michaels |
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d48b656
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It was harder for the ones who were waiting, Annemarie knew. Less danger, perhaps, but more fear.
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war
fear
inspirational
world-war-2
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Lois Lowry |
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b2c323d
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Over everything--up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks--was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of the plants intact; it had stimulated them.
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hiroshima
world-war-2
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John Hersey |
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a00c6fa
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She didn't care so much whether the world would ever forgive her people; but she did hope that someday, somehow, she would be able to forgive herself.
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world-war-2
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Chris Bohjalian |
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b3010ae
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"We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when the war is won, we shall have a better world. And we work toward that end. We buy war bonds and put out incendiaries and knit stockings---" And pumpkin-colored scarves, Polly thought. "---and volunteer to take in evacuated children and work in hospitals and drive ambulances" - here Alf grinned and nudged Eileen sharply in the ribs - "and man anti-aircraft guns. We join the Home Guard and the ATS and the Civil Defence, but we cannot know whether the scrap metal we collect, the letter we write to a solider, the vegetables we grow, will turn out in the end to have helped win the war or not. We act in faith. "But the vital thing is that we act. We do not rely on hope alone, thought hope is our bulwark, our light through dark days and darker nights. We also work, and fight, and endure, and it does not matter whether the part we play is large or small. The reason that God marks the fall of the sparrow is that he knows that it is as important to the world as the bulldog or the wolf. We all, all must do 'our bit'. For it is through our deeds that the war will be won, through our kindness and devotion and courage that we make that better world for which we long."
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hope
wartime
world-war-2
world-war-ii
london
resistance
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Connie Willis |
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ef19ef3
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In the eleven months preceding the outbreak of World War II, 211 treaties of peace were signed. Were these treaties of peace written on paper, or were they written on the hearts of men? And we must ask ourselves as we hear of treaties being written today, whether the treaties of the UN are written with the full cognizance of the fact that those who sign them are responsible before God?
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politics
treaties
world-war-2
peace
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Fulton J. Sheen |
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457ee95
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Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not percieve.
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universe
world-war-2
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Philip K. Dick |
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883490f
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"One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing the "Nazi regime has ruined German industry." And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, "What a fool ( Dummkopf ) I was!"
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politics
fritz-thyssen
world-war-2
third-reich
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William L. Shirer |
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37c714d
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In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement.
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war
journalist
world-war-2
ww2
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Malcolm Lowry |
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d5f3cc1
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"The plight of Jews in German-occupied Europe, which many people thought was at the heart of the war against the Axis, was not a chief concern of Roosevelt. Henry Feingold's research (The Politics of Rescue) shows that, while the Jews were being put in camps and the process of annihilation was beginning that would end in the horrifying extermination of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, Roosevelt failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives. He did not see it as a high priority; he left it to the State Department, and in the State Department anti-Semitism and a cold bureaucracy became obstacles to action. Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old. The Red Cross, with government approval, separated the blood donations of black and white. It was, ironically, a black physician named Charles Drew who developed the blood bank system. He was put in charge of the wartime donations, and then fired when he tried to end blood segregation. Despite the urgent need for wartime labor, blacks were still being discriminated against for jobs. A spokesman for a West Coast aviation plant said: "The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities.... Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them." Roosevelt never did anything to enforce the orders of the Fair Employment Practices Commission he had set up."
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racism
war
world-war-2
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Howard Zinn |
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5242a6e
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People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. they don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.
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fiction
world-war-2
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Nevil Shute |
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50214de
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it was so beautiful', he said. 'the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains....we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. however terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful.
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fiction
world-war-2
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Nevil Shute |
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4ba9ebb
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Musel jsem se divat na pruzory do plynovych komor a sam sledovat proces smrti... Znovu a znovu se me ptali, jak se ja a moji lide na tyto operace muzeme nepretrzite divat a jak jsme schopni to vydrzet. Ma stala odpoved znela, ze je to otazka zelezneho odhodlani, s jakym musime plnit Hitlerovy rozkazy, a takove odhodlani ze lze ziskat pouze potlacenim vsech lidskych citu.
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czech
world-war-2
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William Styron |
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1697520
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La semaine derniere, nous avons pris une decision. Nous allions sortir pour deblayer les briques. Des femmes de notre quartier y travaillaient quotidiennement. Les Trummerfrauen. Elles nettoyaient les briques de toute trace de ciment. Elles empilaient dans des brouettes. Les emportaient dans un depot. On utiliserait les briques pour recronstruire Berlin. Une tache utile, mais epuisante.
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family
british-literature
turkey
exile
world-war-2
british
istanbul
secrets
london
suspense
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Barbara Taylor Bradford |
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864bf71
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She did this because Hitler and him men had given her no other choice.
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inspiring
world-war-2
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Melanie Dobson |
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59d0ea5
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"In the way of a reflection of my family and friends I mused at the number of people that I encountered during the past 85 years. Everyone here has played an important part but there have been others, many of whom have now passed across the horizon of life, however the purpose of my reminiscing is to share happy thoughts while at the same time take a peek into the future. I can look back to those first few glimpses of my life and find my grandmother Ohme, Gertrude Thieme standing at what I perceived to be a high kitchen counter making sandwiches using a slice of almost not eatable German black bread they called schwartsbrod. With great care she laden it with lard, blootwurst or sometimes liberwurst, topped with the half of a crusty Keiser roll. I always got the heel of the roll, with a quarter lengthwise slice of a crunchy dill pickle. It was the first and last time I remember seeing her before she returned to Germany and the war.
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inspirational
german-language
mma-captain-hank-bracker
world-war-2
speech
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Captain Hank Bracker "Seawater One" |
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553dae1
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For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles. He seemed no less engaging than Goethe's.
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nuremberg-trials
world-war-2
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Albert Speer |