Dufay, "Flos florum"

Graindelavoix performs ...

Now.

Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.

Marcus Aurelius, from Meditations

Thanks to Walker's Arms for the brilliant photo.  This will great my students this morning.

Frank Sinatra, "Lost in the Stars"

Released.

Led Zeppelin released Coda on this day in 1982.

Rapture.

Goines, Garlic, 1977

Elizabeth David, from French Country Cooking ...

GARLIC
Anyone who may be alarmed by the quantities of garlic used in some of the recipes in this book, particularly in the Catalan and Provencal dishes, may be interested in the following story of the beautiful mannequin who found out how to indulge her insatiable appetite for garlic and at the same time keep her job. That girl was perfectly right. Eating garlic is a question of habit and digestion. There is also the indisputable fact that garlic changes its character according to the amount used. Half a clove crushed into the salad dressing has a more penetrating aroma than a J lb stewed with a chicken.

As a matter of fact, the best way of cooking that Poulet Bearnais of which Ford Madox Ford writes, is to place the peeled cloves of garlic (by all means use 2 lb if you can face peeling so much) underneath the chicken before putting it on to roast. The perfume coming from the kitchen while the roasting is going on is indescribably delicious. The chicken (or, for that matter, a leg of mutton) will be permeated with the flavour, but not unduly so; those who enjoy it may eat the garlic, inv pregnated with the juice from the roast, while those who do not can do without.

I came yesterday, also in Fitzroy Street, at a party, upon a young lady who was the type of young lady I did not think one ever could meet. She was one of those ravishing and, like the syrens of the Mediter/ ranean and Ulysses, fabulous beings who display new creations to the sound of harps, shawms and teacups. What made it all the more astounding was that she was introduced to me as being one of the best cooks in London - a real cordon bleu, and then some. She was, as you might expect, divinely tall and appeared to appear through such mists as surrounded Venus saving a warrior. But I found that she really could talk, if awfully, and at last she told me something that I did not know - about garlic. . . .

As do - as must - all good cooks, she used quantities of that bulb. It occurred to me at once that this was London and her work was social. Garlic is all very well on the bridge between Beaucaire and Tarascon or in the arena at Nimes amongst sixteen thousand civilized beings. . . . But in an atelier de couture in the neighbourhood of Hanover Square! . . . The lady answered mysteriously: No: there is no objection if only you take enough and train your organs to the assimilation. The perfume of allium officinale attends only on those timorous creatures who have not the courage as it were to wallow in that vegetable. I used to know a London literary lady who had that amount of civilization so that when she ate abroad she carried with her, in a hermetically sealed silver container, a single clove of the principal ingredient of a'ioli. With this she would rub her plate, her knife, her fork and the bread beside her place at the table. This, she claimed, satisfied her yearnings. But it did not enchant her friends or her neighbours at table.

My instructress said that that served her right. She herself, at the outset of her professional career, had had the cowardice o adopt exactly that stratagem that, amongst those in London who have seen the light, is not uncommon. But when she went to her studio the outcry amongst her comrades, attendants, employers, clients and the very conductor of the bus that took her to Oxford Circus had been something dreadful to hear. Not St Plothinus nor any martyr of Lyons had been so miscalled by those vulgarians.

So she had determined to resign her post and had gone home and cooked for herself a Poulet Beamais, the main garniture of which is a kilo - 2 lb - of garlic per chicken, you eating the stewed cloves as if they were haricots blancs. It had been a Friday before a Bank Holiday, so that the mannequins at that fashionable place would not be re quired for a whole week.

Gloomily, but with what rapture internally, she had for that space of time lived on hardly anything else but the usually eschewed bulb. Then she set out gloomily towards the place that she so beautified but that she must leave for ever. Whilst she had been buttoning her gloves she had kissed an old aunt whose protests had usually been as clamant as those of her studio/mates. The old lady had merely complimented her on her looks. At the studio there had been no outcry, and there too she had been congratulated on the improvement, if possible, of her skin, her hair, her carriage. . . .

She had solved the great problem; she had schooled her organs to assimilate, not to protest against, the sacred herb. . . .'

Provence by Ford Madox Ford (1938)

Happy Birthday, Sorum

Matt Sorum was born on this day in 1960.

With Billy F Gibbons on "Missin' Yo Kissin'" ...

Return.

All the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.

Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space

Resolve.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

“The Gettysburg Address,” delivered by President Abraham Lincoln on this day in 1863

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Staunch.

Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.

Richard Adams, from Watership Down

Tales.

THE CHARCOAL-BURNER

The charcoal-burner has tales to tell.

He lives in the Forest,

Alone in the Forest;

He sits in the Forest,

Alone in the Forest.

And the sun comes slanting between the trees,

And rabbits come up, and they give him good-morning,

And rabbits come up and say, "Beautiful morning"....

And the moon swings clear of the tall black trees,

And owls fly over and wish him good-night,

Quietly over to wish him good-night....

And he sits and thinks of the things they know,

He and the Forest, alone together—

The springs that come and the summers that go,

Autumn dew on bracken and heather,

The drip of the Forest beneath the snow....

All the things they have seen,

All the things they have heard:

An April sky swept clean and the song of a bird....

Oh, the charcoal-burner has tales to tell!

And he lives in the Forest and knows us well.

A.A. Milne

Mozart, Exsultate, jubilate, K. 165,

Catherine Trottman sings with the Orchestre du Palais Royal, directed by Jean Philippe Sarcos

Jubilate, indeed.

Virtuous.

Carracci, Boy Drinking, 1582

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

William Shakespeare, from Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 3

Preserve.

We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.

William F. Buckley Jr., from The Jeweler's Eye

Happy Birthday, Bronzino

Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man with a Book (detail), 1540

 Agnolo di Cosimo, known as Bronzino, was born on this day in 1503.

Smackerel.

Creamed herring, generously piled on a saltine, goes down the gullet.  Wrap a chunk of Pinconning cheddar in a towel, stuff it in the pocket, and off to the woods ...

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

A prerequisite for finding our way through any story or novel is to be lost: the journey can’t begin until we’ve been set down in a place somehow unfamiliar.  As readers, we are content, even delighted, to be lost, in the sense that we are both absorbed and uncertain of where we are or where we are going, as long as we feel confident we are following a guide who has not only the destination but our route to it clearly in mind.

Peter Turchi, from Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

Emphasize.

The State is an inherently illegitimate institution of organized aggression, of organized and regularized crime against the persons and properties of its subjects a profoundly antisocial institution which lives parasitically off of the productive activities of private citizens. Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the state is profoundly and inherently anti-capitalist. We must, therefore, emphasize that "we" are not the government; the government is not "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people.

Murray Rothbard, from America's Great Depression

Repeat.

SMOKED COD ROE

Ingredients

• 1/2 lb. smoked cod’s roe
• 1/3 c. extra virgin olive oil
• 3/4 c. creme fraiche
• white pepper, to taste
• zest and juice of 1 lemon

Technique

1. Whisk olive oil into roe, 1 tbsp at a time, until incorporated. 
2. Whisk in creme fraiche.
3. Add white pepper, lemon zest, lemon juice, and whip it good.

Serve with soft-boiled egg, grilled rustic bread, and Guinness.  

Repeat as needed.

Freed.

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces. 

Etienne de la Boetie, from "Discourse of Voluntary Servitude"

Gordon Lightfoot, "The House You Live In"

When you're caught by the gale and you're full under sail 

Beware of the dangers below 

And the song that you sing should not be too sad 

And be sure not to sing it too slow 

Be calm in the face of all common disgraces 

And know what they're doin' it for 

And the house you live in will never fall down

If you pity the stranger who stands at your door ...

Realize.

Donald Fagen on yacht rock.

Stick to the nachos, kids.  The differences are subtle, but once you've tried it, you'll realize that an extra side of ranch'll never let you down.  

Got any quarters?

Strength.

I teach middle-school kids in a rural community, surrounded by farmland.  The horse people that come through my classes tend to be smaller in stature, quiet, eerily-observant bad-asses.  Year-in, year-out they carry themselves with the inner strength of a person three times their size.

The football players tend to be the opposite.

Thanks, Kurt.

Happy Birthday, O'Keeffe

O'Keeffe, Pattern of Leaves, 1923

I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary – you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.

Georgia O'Keeffe, born on this day in 1887

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Risk.

I’m a little bit afraid of words like "proper form" because I don’t think that there is a "proper form."  Were are always on search; we are never there. And there is no "proper" interpretation of anything. The kiss of the muse is the real property. A mistake can be more inspiring than the "proper” thing.  For me, security and beauty and not compatible. When you seek beauty, you have to forget security, and you have to go to the rim of catastrophe. There you find the beauty. If a musician makes a mistake, a crack, because he risks everything to get the most beautiful thing and he fails, then I thank him for this failure because it is only with this risk you can get the beauty, the real beauty. The real beauty is not available at all. If you seek security, you should make another profession.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Anderson.

This morning the lake freighter SS Arthur M. Anderson, the last ship to be in contact with SS Edmund Fitzgerald before she sank on November 10, 1975, came into Duluth, Big Fitz' last port-of-call ...

The Anderson has been working on the Great Lakes since 1952.

Now.

'Tis Autumn.  The weekend begins now ...

"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon." 

Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington" 

For best results, order an extra side of ranch and  listen to these ...

The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day. 

Umberto Limongiello

Gabriela Montero, "Beyond Bach"

Published.

Wyeth, N.C., Billy Bones, 1911

His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were--about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.

Robert Louis Stevenson, from Treasure Island, published on this day in 1883

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Introduced.

The world was introduced to New Order on this day in 1981 as the band released their debut album, Movement.

Hooky sings Track One on Side One: "Dreams Never End"...

Trembingly.

Thomson, Dawn on Round Lake, 1915

The grey light of dawn that dropped, cold and glimmering, between the trees revealed the scene tolerably well. There stood the tent behind him, soaked with dew; the dark ashes of the fire, still warm; the lake, white beneath a coating of mist, the islands rising darkly out of it like objects packed in wool; and patches of snow beyond among the clearer spaces of the Bush—everything cold, still, waiting for the sun. But nowhere a sign of the vanished guide—still, doubtless, flying at frantic speed through the frozen woods. There was not even the sound of disappearing footsteps, nor the echoes of the dying voice. He had gone—utterly.

There was nothing; nothing but the sense of his recent presence, so strongly left behind about the camp; and—this penetrating, all-pervading odor.

And even this was now rapidly disappearing in its turn. In spite of his exceeding mental perturbation, Simpson struggled hard to detect its nature, and define it, but the ascertaining of an elusive scent, not recognized subconsciously and at once, is a very subtle operation of the mind. And he failed. It was gone before he could properly seize or name it. Approximate description, even, seems to have been difficult, for it was unlike any smell he knew. Acrid rather, not unlike the odor of a lion, he thinks, yet softer and not wholly unpleasing, with something almost sweet in it that reminded him of the scent of decaying garden leaves, earth, and the myriad, nameless perfumes that make up the odor of a big forest. Yet the "odor of lions" is the phrase with which he usually sums it all up.

Then—it was wholly gone, and he found himself standing by the ashes of the fire in a state of amazement and stupid terror that left him the helpless prey of anything that chose to happen. Had a muskrat poked its pointed muzzle over a rock, or a squirrel scuttled in that instant down the bark of a tree, he would most likely have collapsed without more ado and fainted. For he felt about the whole affair the touch somewhere of a great Outer Horror ... and his scattered powers had not as yet had time to collect themselves into a definite attitude of fighting self-control.

Nothing did happen, however. A great kiss of wind ran softly through the awakening forest, and a few maple leaves here and there rustled tremblingly to earth. The sky seemed to grow suddenly much lighter. Simpson felt the cool air upon his cheek and uncovered head; realized that he was shivering with the cold; and, making a great effort, realized next that he was alone in the bush—and that he was called upon to take immediate steps to find and succor his vanished companion.

Algernon Blackwood, from "The Wendigo"

Lawes, Consort Set No. 8 a 6 in F Major: II. Fantasia, "The Sunrise"

Work.

Repin, Ivan Turgenev, 1874

In old days, young men had to study; they didn't want to be called dunces, so they had to work hard whether they liked it or not. But now, they need only say, "Everything in the world is foolery!" and the trick's done. Young men are delighted. And, to be sure, they were simply geese before, and now they have suddenly turned nihilists.

Ivan Turgenev

Appointment.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Rodin

The artist is the confidant of nature; flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs toward him.

Auguste Rodin, born on this day in 1840

Hats matter.

Home.

I’ve got into trouble for saying this; apparently, since what I write is labelled fantasy, I should be a champion of it. But I didn’t begin to write fantasy because I was a great reader of it, a lifelong fan of orcs and elves and made-up languages. In fact, if you're a devotee of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, I should warn you that I have some stern things to say about The Lord of the Rings later on. In my own case, I began writing His Dark Materials hesitantly, doubtfully, and it was a surprise, not altogether a flattering one, to find that my imagination was liberated when it found itself in a world where people have personal demons, and polar bears make armour, and spies three inches tall ride on dragonflies.

But liberated was exactly what it was. In fact (and it embarrasses me to admit it), I even felt that in some odd way I had come home. ‘This was where I was connected with all the things. that gave me strength; where the air I breathed was full of the scents I recognised and relished, where my feet were on soil where the bones of my ancestors were laid, and where the language I heard around me was the language I thought and spoke and dreamed in, and where manners and customs were familiar — you know everything I mean when I say the word home; well, this world was home, in a way that no other world that I’ve written about has ever been — not even late nineteenth-century London, which I know pretty well. It was more than home, actually. This caused me a great deal of surprise, as I say, and I felt taken aback. 

Sir Philip Pullman, from Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Eyes.

I saw behind me those who had gone, and before me, those who are to come. I looked back and saw my father, and his father, and all our fathers, and in front, to see my son, and his son, and the sons upon sons beyond.

And their eyes were my eyes.

As I felt, so they had felt, and were to feel, as then, so now, as tomorrow and forever. Then I was not afraid, for I was in a long line that had no beginning, and no end, and the hand of his father grasped my father's hand, and his hand was in mine, and my unborn son took my right hand, and all, up and down the line stretched from Time That Was, to Time That Is, and is not yet, raised their hands to show the link, and we found that we were one, born of Woman, Son of Man, had in the Image, fashioned in the Womb by the Will of God, the eternal Father.

I was one of them, they were of me, and in me, and I in all of them.

Richard Llewellyn, from How Green Was My Valley

Pictured: Carl Robert Firchau (1884-1973)

Joy.

INTRODUCTION to the SONGS of INNOCENCE

Piping down the valleys wild 

Piping songs of pleasant glee 

On a cloud I saw a child. 

And he laughing said to me. 

Pipe a song about a Lamb; 

So I piped with merry chear, 

Piper pipe that song again— 

So I piped, he wept to hear.

Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe 

Sing thy songs of happy chear, 

So I sung the same again 

While he wept with joy to hear 

Piper sit thee down and write

In a book that all may read— 

So he vanish'd from my sight. 

And I pluck'd a hollow reed. 

And I made a rural pen,

And I stain'd the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear

William Blake

Aspire.

President Ronald Reagan's remarks at a Veterans Day Ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, November 11, 1988 ...

Those who live today remember those who do not. Those who know freedom remember today those who gave up life for freedom. Today, in honor of the dead, we conduct ceremonies. We lay wreaths. We speak words of tribute. And in our memories, in our hearts, we hold them close to us still. Yet we also know, even as their families knew when they last looked upon them, that they can never be fully ours again, that they belong now to God and to that for which they so selflessly made a final and eternal act of devotion.

We could not forget them. Even if they were not our own, we could not forget them. For all time, they are what we can only aspire to be: giving, unselfish, the epitome of human love -- to lay down one's life so that others might live. We think on their lives. We think on their final moments. In our mind's eye, we see young Americans in a European forest or on an Asian island or at sea or in aerial combat. And as life expired, we know that those who could had last thoughts of us and of their love for us. As they thought of us then, so, too, we think of them now, with love, with devotion, and with faith: the certainty that what they died for was worthy of their sacrifice -- faith, too, in God and in the Nation that has pledged itself to His work and to the dream of human freedom, and a nation, too, that today and always pledges itself to their eternal memory. 

Refuge.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

Big Fitz, Rest in Peace

At this hour, on this day in 1975, the ore freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a storm on Lake Superior. All 29 hands were lost.

The storm that brought the ship down contained sustained winds of nearly 70 miles per hour, producing waves over 25 feet.

There are many theories about what caused her loss. Mine is that, taking on water, she sat dangerously low in the water, and buried her nose in the trough of a 25 footer, disappearing quickly in 500 feet of Superior, her mighty engines driving her down. She's in two pieces at the bottom.

This is the last known photograph of the ship, taken two weeks before her sinking.


The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum always provides a fitting tribute.

Split Rock Lighthouse Memorial Beacon Lighting

Captain Darrel Walton with some very interesting stories and perspectives ...

Drink your glasses empty to "Big Fitz" ... rest in peace, boys.

Travel'd.

The man who never in his mind and thoughts travel'd to heaven is no artist. 

William Blake

Understand.

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

George Orwell, from 1984

New.

Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bach, Concerto in E Major, BWV 1042

Viktoria Mullova performs the autumnal Adagio with Jonathan Cohen's Music of the Baroque ...

Familiar.

Yitzhak S. Herz' remembrance of Kristallnacht at the Dinslaken Orphanage, which happened on this day in 1938 ...

At 7 A.M., the morning service in the synagogue of the institution was scheduled to commence. Some people from the town usually participated, but this time nobody turned up. About 7:30 A.M. I ordered 46 people - among them 32 children - into the dining hall of the institution and told them the following in a simple and brief address:

As you know, last night a Herr vom Rath, a member of the German Embassy in Paris, was assassinated. The Jews are held responsible for this murder. The high tension in the political field is now being directed against the Jews, and during the next few hours there will certainly be antisemitic excesses. This will happen even in our town. It is my feeling and my impression that we German Jews have never experienced such calamities since the Middle Ages. Be strong! Trust in God! I am sure we will withstand even these hard times. Nobody will remain in the rooms of the upper floor of the building. The exit door to the street will be opened only by myself! From this moment on everyone is to heed my orders only!

At 9:30 A.M. the bell at the main gate rang persistently. I opened the door: about 50 men stormed into the house, many of them with their coat or jacket collars turned up. At first they rushed into the dining room, which fortunately was empty, and there they began their work of destruction, which was carried out with the utmost precision. The frightened and fearful cries of the children resounded through the building. In a stentorian voice I shouted: "Children go out into the street immediately!" This advice was certainly contrary to the order of the Gestapo. I thought, however, that in the street, in a public place, we might be in less danger than inside the house. The children immediately ran down a small staircase at the back, most of them without hat or coat - despite the cold and wet weather. We tried to reach the next street crossing, which was close to Dinslaken's Town Hall, where I intended to ask for police protection. About ten policemen were stationed here, reason enough for a sensation-seeking mob to await the next development. This was not very long in coming; the senior police officer, Freihahn, shouted at us: "Jews do not get protection from us! Vacate the area together with your children as quickly as possible! Freihahn then chased us back to a side street in the direction of the backyard of the orphanage. As I was unable to hand over the key to the back gate, the policeman drew his bayonet and forced open the door. I then said to Freihahn: "The best thing is to kill me and the children, then our ordeal will be over quickly!" My officer responded to my "suggestion" merely with cynical laughter. Freihahn then drove all of us to the wet lawn of the orphanage garden. He gave us strict orders not to leave the place under any circumstances.

Facing the back of the building, we were able to watch how everything in the house was being systematically destroyed under the supervision of the men of law and order - the police. At short intervals we could hear the crunching of glass or the hammering against wood as windows and doors were broken. Books, chairs, beds, tables, linen, chests, parts of a piano, a radiogram, and maps were thrown through apertures in the wall, which, a short while ago, had been windows or doors.

In the meantime, the mob standing around the building had grown to several hundred. Among these people I recognized some familiar faces, suppliers of the orphanage or tradespeople, who, only a day or a week earlier had been happy to deal with us as customers. This time they were passive, watching the destruction without much emotion.

At 10:15 A.M. we heard the wailing of sirens! We noticed a heavy cloud of smoke billowing upward. It was obvious from the direction it was coming from that the Nazis had set the synagogue on fire. Very soon we saw smoke clouds rising up, mixed with sparks of fire. Later I noticed that some Jewish houses, close to the synagogue, had also been set alight under the expert guidance of the fire brigade. Its presence was a necessity, since the firemen had to save the homes of the non-Jewish neighborhood.

 Study history. Study perspectives. Never forget. 

Steve asks, "Where was this guy 180 days ago?"  He was "quietly submitting," playing to base instincts.  Both sides do it.  These are awful people and America is eating directly out of their filthy self-serving hands.

Rise above.  Be an actual human.