Things Learned From Reading Spies, Lies and Algorithms

• The codebreakers in Bletchley Park cracked the German code and saved England from a German invasion, only “the third time in 350 years that codebreaking prevented a foreign invasion.”
• George Washington was a cunning fox who lied with purpose: to keep his troop movements a secret.
• The era of “coordinated intelligence” — collecting intelligence from a variety of sources — was born in 1863, “when Mayor Gen. Joseph Hooker was given command of the Army of the Potomac and ordered the creation of the Bureau of Military Information.” It had one employee.
• The Bureau of Military Information morphed into the Military Intelligence Division (MID) in the 1880s. In 1916, the MID “had only three people. When World War I erupted, MID staff ballooned to more than 14,000.”

Fascinating stuff!

Cee’s Black & White Challenge: The Back of Things

This is a very interesting, creative challenge Cee has devised for this week’s CBWC! It was so much fun going into my archives to find “back of things” shots.

Without further ado:

• Daffodils from my front yard
• me and a guide walking to the Japanese shrine at Patag, site of a bloody World War II battle on the island of Negros
• Touring an old house in Silay, Negros Occidental with its owner
• the Baclaran Church in Parañaque, Manila, shrine to Our Mother of Perpetual Help

Macro Monday: Japanese Torii

The entrance to the shrine is in the middle of a jungle in the highlands of Negros Occidental, near the town of Silay. In this area, the Japanese in Negros chose to make their last stand. The Americans, coming up from below, and fighting thick jungle all the way, had their work cut out for them. But after much loss of life on both sides, the Americans prevailed.

The Japanese erected a temple on the site to honor their many dead.

Posting for Macro Monday (this is the closest she could get, with her cell, apologies if it’s not truly . . . macro . . . )

It’s rather a lonely site, down a mossy mud path studded with rocks.

Stay tuned.

April 1944: The Auschwitz Report

Stayed up all night reading The Escape Artist. The news of the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews has finally begun to trickle out of Auschwitz. Self is now at Chapter 21, the ironically titled “Men of God.”

The earliest recipients of the over 30 pages of the Auschwitz Report were the religious leaders of Hungary, in the hopes that they could prevail on the Nazis to halt the deportation of Jews.

The highest Catholic authority in Hungary, Archbishop Jusztinian Serédi, did nothing, saying “If the Pope himself does not undertake anything against Hitler, what can I do?”

A month later, the Cardinal was still insisting, “If I could do anything, I would. But any plan we might come up with, the Germans would thwart.” Then he knelt and prayed for the next two hours.

pp. 155 – 156 of The Escape Artist

Self can’t even begin to summarize what’s taking place here, but it’s as if a series of invisible gears were tightening in that desolate Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, circa 1944 (and it’s a good thing there is absolutely nothing going on, Holy Thursday in Bacolod, April 2023, because she has nothing to distract her from this moment), and it involves six camp inmates. The cards break this way: 3-1-2. It’s up to you to guess which way the chips fall. If you’ve been reading with concentration, you’ll know as soon as you get to these pages that THIS IS IT, the point at which the hero’s hopes reach their highest pitch. Excuse self while she keeps on reading.

Stay tuned.

That is all.

How to Read a Book About Auschwitz (during Holy Week)

Self started a few days ago. First she read about the awful Jakob Fries, who was so scared of catching typhus that on one night he sent 756 Jews he suspected of having typhus to the crematoriums.

“On 20 October 1974, he died in his hometown of Albertshofen.” (ww2portraits.com)

UGH. Not the end she wished for Jakob Fries.

Next: Maximilian Grabner, a doctor who (wearing a protective gas mask) personally emptied the canisters of Zyklon B on the Jews packed into the crematoriums of Auschwitz. His was often the last face the victims saw, peering down at them from an opening in the roof.

He was hanged in 1948. (Wikipedia) Hooray.

Finally, Josef Mengele, “doctor,” who “once punished a Jewish woman by making a dog of her young son because she had, in self-defense, killed an SS attack dog: he had the boy trained at the point of a whip to run on all fours, bark without pause and attack and bite Jews.” (The Escape Artist, p. 109) Self sincerely wishes Mengele received some heavy life sentence, but apparently he was able to elude all attempts to capture him (despite the Mossad making every attempt; he must have had an army of enablers) and died of a drowning accident in Brazil, in the coastal resort of Bertioga, in 1979. (Wikipedia) His descendants kept his name (??? If self had a father like Mengele, the first thing she would do would be to change her name).

If you look at the photographs of the aforementioned, they look perfectly ordinary, nothing behind those faces that screams “murderer.” The most amiable-looking is Gerber, the administrator of the Zyklon B. The scariest looking is Jakob Fries who, post-war, was able to make a living as a plasterer.

Stay tuned.

Holy Thursday: The Escape Artist, p. 96

Self can hardly bear to describe the fascination of this book, which is the first she’s ever read that describes the “system” — of course there was a system to the murder camps (She refuses to use the Nazi term “concentration camp”), the Germans lived for numbers and tallies and all that. That was how they were able to “detach” — to view the Jews as just so much human cargo that needed to be “processed” as quickly as possible.

Each train car that arrived in Auschwitz was greeted by blinding electric lights, lighting up the platform as if it were noon. The separation of the men from the women and children had to be done quickly, so clubs and beatings were liberally employed. Then, the emptying of the cattle cars. Men rushed in at top speed and threw out luggage, everything landing in a heap on the platform.

The job of unloading the luggage was a privilege given only to the group known as “the Kanada boys.”

The Kanada boys knew which Jews they were unloading by the provisions that suddenly became available. If they were tasting cheese, they had just received Jews from the Netherlands. If it was sardines, a transport of French Jews had arrived. Halva and olives identified the Greek Jews of Salonica, dressed in colours Walter had never seen before and speaking a language that was new to his Ashkenazi ear: the Sephardic Jewish dialect of Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish. He saw them all, delivered to Auschwitz by the thousand.

— The Escape Artist, p. 97

Only after every last piece of luggage was unloaded would the men attend to unloading the dead. And there were always dead.

A transport from the East, in midwinter, that took ten days, might have as many as a third of the passengers, perhaps 300 people, dead on arrival.

— The Escape Artist, p. 97

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Canada/Kanada: The Escape Artist, Chapter 6

Canada was the name given by camp inmates in Auschwitz to the section where the material goods of the murdered were stored. Why Canada? Because, in the minds of the inmates, Canada was a veritable paradise, overflowing with wealth (They could have called it America; never mind, Canada will do)

Towering mountains of suitcases here, a mountain of prams and toddler shoes there. Stealing was not permitted, those goods were intended for recycling (except for the stealing of shoes: everyone just looked the other way when an inmate showed up wearing crocodile leather). If you were caught with a stolen item, you could be shot on the spot. But you were only caught if you were unlucky.

Delicacies and luxury goods could buy whatever was needed, even if the rate of exchange was often perverse. A diamond ring might be swapped for a cup of water; a bottle of champagne traded for quinine tablets; a precious gem for an apple to be passed to a sick and hungry friend.

— The Escape Artist, pp. 88 – 89

Administratively, Your Facility Sucks

Reading The Escape Artist, one question occurs to self, over and over: Who made the decisions — a myriad of decisions — that made daily life in Auschwitz as miserable as possible for the Jews? Someone had to be making these decisions, and self so badly needs to know WHO. So that they can be held accountable, at least in her head.

For instance, food. Since the camps were packed (at least in the beginning, before its inmates started dying off), the only way to feed these men was to impose rations, since the Germans had not figured the cost of feeding a large population into their camp budgets. It would be best, of course, if the inmates died, as quickly as possible. But in Auschwitz, 1942, the Germans were quite content to have inmates die of slow starvation. Which could take weeks. Even, months. Seems rather inefficient. Wouldn’t they have saved on food if the population died quickly?

Reading the passage below shows how the ever-inventive adminstrators of Auschwitz managed to come up with a food budget that was as cheap as possible. And, of course, they didn’t bother providing eating utensils. That would have added to the expense:

After four hours, a whistle blew and Walter could stop . . . it was noon, and food appeared. A version of soup, the same as every other day, either potato or turnip, doled out in one bowl containing about a litre, to be shared between five people. There were no spoons. So desperate men, famished from the work and thirsty from the heat, would have to discipline themselves to swallow no more than the two or three mouthfuls that were theirs. Afterwards, the same routine, one bowl between five men, this time containing some ersatz tea.

— The Escape Artist, p. 57

Starting The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

Finished The Impossible City, a Hong Kong memoir, two days ago and began The Escape Artist, by Jonathan Freedland.

This book, by a writer for The Guardian, has the same immersive quality as the books of Ben Macintyre.

When the seventeen-year-old hero refuses to present himself at the train station for “resettlement” in Poland, he tries to make a break for it by slipping into Hungary. Unable to find anyone in Hungary willing to give him false identity papers, he is forced to re-trace his steps, back to his home in Slovakia. He is apprehended at the border by Hungarian border guards.

What happens next is brutal. The violence must have been doubly shocking to a teen-ager who had never had a hand laid on him in his life.

The guards approached, only for one to hit his head with the butt of his gun while the other greeted him with a hard kick in the crotch. They frogmarched him to the nearest border post, where he was punched in the mouth and propelled into a wall. A corporal arrived, eager to join in the fun: he hit Walter repeatedly with his pistol.

The Hungarians were insistent that Walter was a spy, a charge they accompanied with a punch or a kick each time they made it.

— The Escape Artist, p. 24