History

  • You’re Beautiful

    On this day 21 years ago, I escorted my wife to the maternity hospital in Limerick. Our beautiful baby girl was born that day. Although I did not like James Blunt’s song “You’re Beautiful” prior to that moment, when it played on the radio in the maternity hospital room at the exact second she was…

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  • WWII- A Mickey Mouse war

    It was January 7,1942, just about a month after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Fearing imminent chemical attack on American soil, the government issued thousands of gas mask to civilians. But the smallest citizens couldn’t fit into the regulation-sized masks. They were too heavy and too big. Plus, aren’t those things scary? The production of…

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  • The Thing-not the movie.

    The Thing, also known as The Great Seal Bug, was a passive covert listening device, developed in the Soviet Union and planted in the study of the US Ambassador in Moscow, hidden inside a wooden carving of the Great Seal of the United States. It is called a passive device as it does not have its own power source.…

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  • Walk a mile in your shoes.

    As the title might suggest I was trying to find some poetic sentences to describe this picture. But I couldn’t,because the more I looked at the picture the less sense it made. In fact it made no sense to me at all. What is the sense of keeping all these shoes? Were they meant as…

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  • Jan Ruschkewitz

    Jan Ruschkewitz, just a name of a young boy. A young bot born in the Hague in the Netherlands. 23 years after the international peace palace was established. A palace that was suppose to safeguard your peace. In the picture you are about 2 or 3, but your peace would soon be destroyed. Jan Ruschkewitz,…

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  • I have seen so many gruesome images of the Holocaust, but for some reason, the pictures of these smiling and playing children touched me more than any other. I know none of them survived, and the only crime they committed was being a child. On the morning of 6 April 1944, members of the Lyon…

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  • I know it is easy to call people like Rudolf Höss and others who worked in Auschwitz monsters, and to en extent I can understand that, I have done so in the past. However when you call them monsters you take the risk of given them an excuse for their acts, because we only expect…

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  • I am always amazed by the fact that there are still people who desperately want to deny the Holocaust. Although there is so much evident and a lot of it very graphic, they still say it never happened and that the photographic evidence are staged pictures, produced by the allies. The one thing they do…

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  • The title of this blog could be from any fictitious novel. A children’s book or even a fairy tale, but it actually describes a bizarre reality which caused so much destruction. The story of Hitler’s naturalization process resembles something of a farce. On April 7 1925 he had given up his Austrian citizenship, it was…

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  • War brings out the best and the worst out of people, that is just a fact. It is easy to acknowledge the good but there is often a struggle acknowledging the bad, even to the extent of trying to completely erase it from history. When it comes to the Holocaust there is no question about…

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