Books

[rice_pudding]

It is funny you make the music comparison using RR as an example. What a great comparison too.

[...]

If in writing you do not consider your chocie of words, instead going the largest most impressive language-and in rock guitar you do not think of melody first and foremost as your priority, bypassing it for flurries of notes that are virtusosic, in both you can end up with something that is in danger of sounding superficial.

Rob I feel I am having a beer with you now

Matt

i suppose i've ended up having a very broad expierience of art at what would be termed an academic level, and i see no reason why whats relevant in one context is not so in another. After all any movements such as surrealism crossed over in to numerous medium.

McEwan is a truly great writer though, every sentence, word, punctuation has a purpose yet the writing rolls out in a very un-complicated manner. He manages to weave together themes and ideas in a very neat way and tie up the novel as a whole. Randy's composing is comparable for example the way a motif or chord pattern would be repeated later in a song in an evolved form to tie things up. Everything has a purpose/statement in itself and yet it compliments that which follows and precedes it perfectly.

I bought another McEwan novel today. I've fallen in love with reading again, its nice to read for fun rather than stringently picking apart a text for academic means.

Rob

[Cpt Matt Sparrow]

LOL

YES!!

I don't miss having to scribble jargon all over my lovely books

Mattxxx

[therhoadlesstraveled]

i just read a book about auschwitz. the doktor in it was a hungarian jew and it was a vivid depiction of life in the camp and the horrors and good that happened. i still am in awe over what i read.

[therhoadlesstraveled]

this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miklos_Nyiszli

[wareagle]

talking about the holocaust, im jewish. i went to meet some holocaust survivors and you could see in their eyes how horrible it was. i dont know what id do if i was faced with the holocaust again, id prob just say im christian, (whcih isnt tht alse, my dad is christian, or baptist, idk the diff but baptism is mainly in the south). i read a book about the holocaust, very hard when you paint a picture of it in your head then think, very hard not to cry.

[Cpt Matt Sparrow]

i just read a book about auschwitz. the doktor in it was a hungarian jew and it was a vivid depiction of life in the camp and the horrors and good that happened. i still am in awe over what i read.

I just read the wilkepedia article. I don't know if I am up to reading a book about this at the moment but I would like to maybe later.

In the article they said he was forced to do an ss death march. What is that?

Cheers

Matt

[NicDots]

From what I understand, the SS death march is simply that...prisoners were made to march miles and miles to a new camp. Many of them died.
I took a class on the Holocaust and met several survivors and got to see a few of the prison number tattoos. Chilling stuff.

[wareagle]

yes, theyd walk out of the camp, with guards, they fell, they were sometimes shot, ran, they were shot, and just kept walking until they died. i dont really get the point of it... it is chilling.

[Alex]

xx123456

[NicDots]

Actually, the REAL point was to thin out the prisoners, letting the weak ones be killed. I don't think the soldiers cared who got there and who didn't.

[Paul Wolfe]

This may explain the "point" of the death march:

A massive Soviet 1944 summer offensive in eastern Belarus annihilated German Army Group Center and permitted Soviet forces to overrun the first of the major Nazi concentration camps, Lublin/Majdanek. Shortly after that offensive, SS chief (Reichsfuehrer SS) Heinrich Himmler ordered that prisoners in all concentration camps and subcamps be evacuated toward the interior of the Reich. Due to the rapid Soviet advance, the SS had not had time to complete the evacuation of Majdanek. Soviet and western media widely publicized SS atrocities at the camp, using both footage of the camp at liberation and interviews with some of the surviving prisoners. The evacuations of the concentration camps had three purposes:

(1) SS authorities did not want prisoners to fall into enemy hands alive to tell their stories to Allied and Soviet liberators

(2) the SS thought they needed prisoners to maintain production of armaments wherever possible

(3) some SS leaders, including Himmler, believed irrationally that they could use Jewish concentration camp prisoners as hostages to bargain for a separate peace in the west that would guarantee the survival of the Nazi regime.

Here is an account from someone who was there:

Word came to us that we were going to evacuate Auschwitz. Why
were we evacuating Auschwitz? It is because the Russians were
coming close by. And so we...we all walked out Auschwitz and we
started walking. And we started walking, we walked for days. I'll
never forget it. I don't know how many days we walked. We walked
and then we took cattle cars and then we walked again. And as we
walked we heard gun shots and they told us to keep on marching.
We heard gun shots and they were shooting people in the back who
couldn't keep up with the walking. It ended up being called the
death march because the ravines and the gutters, they were all
red from blood. From people, some people who spoke Polish, we
were walking through Poland, and some people who thought they
could escape would try and escape. Some people who couldn't keep
up with the walking anymore, they got weak, they threw all their
bundles away and they walked until they couldn't keep up anymore,
they fell behind and the Germans just shot them. We saw people
being shot in the front in their chests, in their back. They were
laying all over, on top of hills, behind trees. It was really
like a war zone. And this is how we finally arrived in a camp
called Bergen-Belsen.

The Nazi regime was made up of some very sick individuals with no regard for human life. The Japanese regime during World War 2 were equally - if not more - twisted.

The Bataan Death March (also known as The Death March of Bataan) took place in the Philippines in 1942 and was later accounted as a Japanese war crime. The 60-mile (97 km) march occurred after the three-month Battle of Bataan, part of the Battle of the Philippines (1941–42), during World War II. In Japanese, it is known as Batān Shi no Kōshin (バターン死の行進, Batān Shi no Kōshin?), with the same meaning.

The march, involving the forcible transfer of 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war captured by the Japanese in the Philippines from the Bataan peninsula to prison camps, was characterized by wide-ranging physical abuse and murder, and resulted in very high fatalities inflicted upon the prisoners and civilians along the route by the armed forces of the Empire of Japan. Beheadings, cut throats and casual shootings were the more common and merciful actions — compared to bayonet stabbings, rapes, disembowelments, numerous rifle butt beatings and a deliberate refusal to allow the prisoners food or water while keeping them continually marching for nearly a week (for the slowest survivors) in tropical heat. Falling down, unable to continue moving was tantamount to a death sentence, as was any degree of protest or expression of displeasure.

Prisoners were attacked for assisting someone failing due to weakness, or for no apparent reason whatsoever. Strings of Japanese trucks were known to drive over anyone who fell. Riders in vehicles would casually stick out a rifle bayonet and cut a string of throats in the lines of men marching alongside the road. Accounts of being forcibly marched for five to six days with no food and a single sip of water are in post war archives including filmed reports.

The exact death count has been impossible to determine, but some historians have placed the minimum death toll between six and eleven thousand men; whereas other post war allied reports have tabulated that only 54,000 of the 72,000 prisoners reached their destination— taken together, the figures document a casual killing rate of one in four up to two in seven (25% to 28.5%) of those brutalized by the forcible march. The number of deaths that took place in the internment camps from delayed effects of the march is uncertain, but believed to be high.

[NicDots]

The Japanese allowed many Chinese prisoners to be eaten. When asked why the Japanese allowed cannibalism, they said that it wasn't cannibalism as the Chinese were not human.
The Japanese were huge bastards during the war (with a few exceptions, like Sugihara). My grandmother and great aunts were both at the mercy of the Japanese when they were stationed in Korea. Till their dying days, they hated...HATED Japanese people.
More people need to look into the Pacific Theatre in WWII and just war in general in Asia. I don't know what it is, but Asian wars always seem more brutal than wars in the west. Same with natural disasters. If you thought Hurricane Katrina was bad, the Huang He river in China (nicknamed to "China's Sorrow" roughly) killed over a million people when it flooded in the late 19th century another 3 million in 1931

At the Holocaust Museum, I got to meet a man (the only male survivor I ever got to me, actually) and he was on a Death March right as he got liberated. He said he was about 6'1 when he was liberated...and about 85 lbs.

[JustTakeAPebble]

talking about the holocaust, im jewish. i went to meet some holocaust survivors and you could see in their eyes how horrible it was. i dont know what id do if i was faced with the holocaust again, id prob just say im christian, (whcih isnt tht alse, my dad is christian, or baptist, idk the diff but baptism is mainly in the south). i read a book about the holocaust, very hard when you paint a picture of it in your head then think, very hard not to cry.

I met three survivours of the holocaust, got them to help me with my painting in memory of the victims. ya see i did a painting of a raven on a barbed wire brick wall, cloudy and VERY moody and depressing, and on the corner it said "What if holocaust never ended? Would we however be free?"

I had the jewish survivors write on it (quotes, signatures) in a thick red marker.

Didn't win the teachers point of view but i keep it as a reminder

Simon

[wareagle]

ye nic dots is right, it wasnt to relocate. it was most likeley to let the weaker die.

[shanic]

ye nic dots is right, it wasnt to relocate. it was most likeley to let the weaker die.

Alex is partially right I believe, you must remember the German’s did not really want the rest of the world knowing that they were killing millions of innocent people in camps. When the front lines started to get close to some of these umm errr camps they forced marched many to their deaths on the pretext of moving them away from the front line to safer areas. The truth was more likely that they didn’t need the bad publicity that is why some were relocated .