Book Recommendation & Pure Lunacy

“I approach Holocaust memoirs with knee-bending respect: for the survivors who recall the atrocities they suffered during World War II so that we will never forget, and for the historians who document man’s inhumanity to man,” wrote Washington Independent Review of Books reviewer Kitty Kelley on January 19, 2024. Kelley was referring to The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust by Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa.

Words immediately draw our attention and solicit sympathy. Holocaust memoirs, for instance. Atrocities. Rescue. We want to know more. We admire anyone who had the courage to oppose Hitler. The Simon & Schuster PR team reports that the book tells “the remarkable, unknown story of ‘Countess Janina Suchodolska,’ a Jewish woman who rescued more than 10,000 Poles imprisoned by Poland’s Nazi occupiers.” Were I back in the USA, I would immediately buy the book.

If America’s Republican politicians read more books like this one, rather than whatever they do in their spare time (Watch sports on TV? Debate LGBTQ rights and WOKE? Dream up new ways to denigrate President Biden?),  I bet they’d defend Ukraine’s right to exist more ferociously and work to get Zelinsky the help his country so desperately needs to defeat Vladimir Putin, this century’s Adolf Hitler. Europeans sense that if Ukraine falls, Russia’s dictator will go after for former Soviet Union territories next and seek war with NATO countries. Walking around Strömstad today in the cold rain, I thought about Ukraine’s soldiers, defending their homeland against an invader, living through much worse conditions than a day of cold rain, and felt sad that Republicans do not get it. Blocking aid to Ukraine is pure lunacy.