Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Finished!

Today I watched the last DVD of "War and Remembrance". I had already read the ending but it was still a tearful one.  I do remember hearing about the War Refugees after WWII but I am not sure I understood how many lost children there were and how many were psychologically disturbed.  Most of them had lost their parents so were in reality orphans...some too old to be in orphanages.  They were spread all over Europe, even in England and some were sent to Canada.  Probably some were sent to America, I am not sure.

Of course, if they lived, they were the lucky ones but as the documentary showed I had watched earlier today, many had too much to forget and never get back into the mainstream of society.  I also learned that near the end of the war the Nazis did not bother to gas the children, they just threw them directly into fire.  Besides the ovens, they also had pits outside which were like huge drains and they would pile alternate layers of bodies and wood and then throw gasoline on the whole thing and let it burn and the ashes would fall into the huge holes under the large grate.


So if the refuges did survive, the older people did not have homes to go back to, as they had been usurped by others, and the children did not know where or if they had any family anywhere.

I still have three more DVDs coming on the Holocaust so my learning is not over yet.

John Hardy Memorial Hike 2015

My Life So Far