Christmas Every Day

1899 Birth of Hart Crane

What is it about poets? Their lives seem so much more troubled and eventful than ordinary mortals. Ovid dies in exile; François Villon is tortured and banished; Christopher Marlowe is stabbed to death in a bar fight; Milton goes blind; adulterous, incestuous Byron dies in a civil war; Shelley dies at sea; Thomas Chatterton and John Keats die poor and young; Christopher Smart and Ezra Pound spend years in an insane asylum; Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, and John  McCrae perish in the trenches of World War I; Anne Sexton, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sylvia Plath commit suicide; Garcia Lorca is murdered; Dylan Thomas drinks himself to death. And then there is Hart Crane.

Born into a prosperous family, the son of the inventor of Life-Saver candy, Crane dropped out of high school to become a writer. He soon attracted a supportive readership — his unhappiness was not caused by an unfeeling world. Since few poets have ever managed to feed and clothe themselves from the financial rewards of their art (Rod McKuen is a dishonourable exception), he relied on handouts, generous patrons, and long-suffering friends as he laboured to complete The Bridge, his attempt at The Great American Poem, his answer to Virgil’s Aeniad or Eliot’s The Waste Land.

His homosexuality, which sought relief at the hands of sailors and other rough trade, brought him beatings rather than joy. His alcoholism and belligerence as a drunk earned him a spell in a Parisian jail. Crane’s one heterosexual excursion with painter Peggy Cowley ended unhappily and soon after that period, in April 1932, clothed in his pyjamas and a top coat, he threw himself off the railing of a ship in the Gulf of Mexico. His last words were “Goodbye, everybody!”

My favourite poem of this unhappy fellow is “My Grandmother’s Love Letters”.

There are no stars tonight

But those of memory.

Yet how much room for memory there is

In the loose girdle of soft rain.


There is even room enough

For the letters of my mother’s mother,

Elizabeth,

That have been pressed so long

Into a corner of the roof

That they are brown and soft,

And liable to melt as snow.


Over the greatness of such space

Steps must be gentle.

It is all hung by an invisible white hair.

It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.


And I ask myself:


"Are your fingers long enough to play

Old keys that are but echoes:

Is the silence strong enough

To carry back the music to its source

And back to you again

As though to her?"


Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand

Through much of what she would not understand;

And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof

With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

Operation Valkyrie fails

By the summer of 1944 it was evident to all but Adolf Hitler that Germany was soon going to lose the war. The western Allies were ashore in great numbers in Normandy and were headed for Paris. In Italy, Rome  had fallen. At sea, the Atlantic had been scoured of U-boats and Germany’s few remaining capital ships dared not leave port. The Vaterland’s cities were being incinerated night (RAF) and day (USAAF) while the relentless push of the Red Army was driving the Wehrmacht and its allies back toward Berlin. 

The doom that awaited those who bore responsibility for starting the war and the revenge that would be wrought on Germany was clear to the officer elite. Some hoped that a new government, cleansed of Nazis, might be able to get better terms than Unconditional Surrender and some may even have thought of an Anglo-American-German alliance against the Soviet Union. A group of officers, dominated by those with aristocratic or Christian connections, planned to kill Hitler in his Prussian Wolf’s Lair (as close as he ever got to the Eastern Front) on July 20. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, head of the Home Army, was to place a bomb in the conference room near the Führer, and then radio his fellow plotters in Berlin when the assassination had been successfully carried out. 

Unfortunately, Stauffenberg had suffered the loss of an eye, one hand and fingers on he other and from a war injury and he was unable to prime all the explosives in the case. Moreover, an aide had nudged the bomb farther under a thick oak table which shielded Hitler from the blast. Worse yet, Stauffenberg thought that Hitler had been killed in the explosion and told the Berlin cabal to carry out their coup. Within hours the truth was known, and the conspirators were either dead (the lucky ones) or arrested to await torture and execution. The war would continue.

The best short book on the subject is “Countdown to Valkyrie by Nigel Jones. Ben Pastor’s Night of Falling Stars is an entertaining fictional account. Of Tom Cruise’s portrayal of Stauffenberg in Valkyrie, it is best not to speak.

1942

The Vel’ d’Hiv’ Roundup

Early in 1942, the German government decided on a policy of exterminating Jews in the territories under their control by shipping them to death camps in eastern Europe. To do so in  France required the permission of the puppet French government in Vichy, which agreed that the German occupying forces could arrest foreign Jews, while French Jews would be scooped up by local police. After securing the agreement of the Vichy government, German officials and French police conducted roundups of Jews in both the occupied and unoccupied zones of France throughout the summer of 1942. The Vél d’Hiv was part of a series of roundups codenamed Opération Vent printanier (Operation Spring Wind) that took place across the country in spring and summer of 1942.

Preparations for the Roundup

Planning for the Vél d’Hiv roundup took place among René Bousquet, secretary general of the French national police; Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Commissioner for Jewish Affairs under the Vichy Régime; SS-Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, head of Adolf Eichmann’s Judenreferat [Jewish Section] in France; and SS-Oberstürmführer Helmut Knochen, head of the German Security Police in France.

The Director of the local Paris Municipal Police, Emile Hennequin, sent precise expectations for the roundup to the police prefecture three days before the event. The roundup was originally set to take place from July 13–15, which included Bastille Day, the French national holiday. The holiday was not celebrated in the occupied zones of France, and in order to preclude local rioting, Nazi officials allowed French officials to delay the operation until July 16–17.

The German goal was that French police would round up 28,000 foreign and stateless Jews in the greater Paris area. They were to exempt “sensitive cases” such as British or American Jews. Although German authorities had originally agreed to exempt children under the age of 16, French Prime Minister Pierre Laval suggested for “humanitarian” reasons that children be arrested with their parents, unless a family member remained behind to care for them. Four thousand children were among those arrested in Paris.

In order to maintain a detailed record of the roundup, the police were to report the number of people they arrested each hour to their local prefecture.

July 16–17

Beginning in the early hours of July 16, French police rounded up thousands of men, women, and children throughout Paris. By the end of the day, the police had taken 2,573 men, 5,165 women, and 3,625 children from their homes. The roundup continued the following day, but with a much smaller number of arrests.

Approximately 6,000 of those rounded up were immediately transported to Drancy, in the northern suburbs of Paris. Drancy was at that point a transit camp for Jews being deported from France. The rest of the arrestees were detained at the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Winter Cycling Track), an indoor sporting arena in Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement.

Officials could have held few illusions of the unsuitability of the “Vél d’Hiv” for holding such a large population indefinitely. Early in the war, it had been used to intern German nationals, mainly refugees. In 1940 it housed interned foreign women. In both instances, conditions were deplorable.

Following the roundup of Jews in greater Paris, some 7,000 Jews, among them almost 4,000 children, were crowded together in the sports arena. There was scarcely space to lie down and the incarcerated Jews faced appalling circumstances. No arrangements had been made for food, water, or sanitary facilities. Only two physicians a shift were allowed in to treat the internees. The glass ceiling of the arena contributed to a stifling environment by day, as all ventilation had been sealed to prevent escape, and led to chilly temperatures at night. Parisian Quakers came to bring food and water.

Aftermath

After five days, Jews incarcerated at the Vél d’Hiv were transferred to other transit camps outside Paris. At Drancy, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande, French police guarded these men, women, and children until transport to concentration camps and killing centers in the east. At the end of July, the remaining adults were separated from their children and deported to Auschwitz. Over 3,000 children remained interned without their parents until they were deported, among adult strangers, to Auschwitz as well.

German authorities continued the deportations of Jews from French soil until August 1944. In all, some 77,000 Jews living on French territory perished, the overwhelming majority of them at Auschwitz.

Postwar Trials

For his prominent role in the deportation of Jews from France, Pierre Laval, formerly the French Prime Minister, was arrested and tried after the liberation of France. He was shot by firing squad on 15 October 1945.

The fate of two German officials most involved in the Vél d’Hiv mirrored the common fates of high-ranking SS administrators. Theodor Dannecker was arrested by American officials in Bad Tölz, Bavaria, in December 1945, and committed suicide while in custody. Helmut Knochen, sentenced by a British court to 21 years in prison for a separate offense, was sentenced to death by a French court in 1954. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and Knochen was released on orders of French President Charles de Gaulle in November 1962.

In 1949, René Bousquet, secretary general of the French police, was found guilty for his role in the complicit Vichy government, but his sentence was immediately commuted for “having actively and sustainably participated in the resistance against the occupier.” In 1991, French justice authorities in Paris indicted Bousquet for his participation in the deportation of Jews from France. Christian Didier, a mentally ill individual, assassinated Bousquet in his home in Paris on June 8, 1993, before proceedings could take place.

Acknowledging the Role of the State and Police

On July 16, 1995, on the fifty-third anniversary of the Vél d’Hiv roundup, French President Jacques Chirac acknowledged the role the state and its police had played in the persecution of Jews and other victims of the German occupation. “France,” Chirac said, “land of the Enlightenment and of Human Rights, land of hospitality and asylum, France, on that day, committed an irreparable act. It failed to keep its word and delivered those under its protection to their executioners.”

This post is taken from the Holocaust Museum’s excellent website. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008213

 

 

Agitation for a Second Front

When, in August 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, agreeing to a 10-year peace, Communists in the West were startled. They were no longer to say bad things about Hitler and, in the next month, when the invasion of Poland by the armies of both Hitler and Stalin started World War Two, party loyalists were instructed to oppose, sabotage, and obstruct the military efforts of Britain and France. In the United States, leftists such as Peter Seeger and Woody Guthrie, urged America to stay out of the conflict, calling President Roosevelt a war-monger.

Things changed in the summer of 1941 when Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union. Communists in the UK and USA now enthusiastically backed the war effort and soon began to clamour for a “Second Front in Europe” to ease the pressure on the Red Army. When this failed to take shape soon enough, leftists claimed that the capitalist West was happy to see the USSR suffer horrific losses.

The failure of the Dieppe raid in 1942, where the largely Canadian invading force was pinned down and butchered scarcely having got off the beaches, convinced planners that taking a port was not the way to go. Amphibious attacks were undertaken in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, with mixed results and many lessons learned. It was not until June 1944 that the western Allies felt ready to launch Operation Overland and land on five Normandy beaches.

The call for a “Second Front” was always a code phrase for “more help for Russia.” Britain was fighting on a number of fronts in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, Asia, and in the air over Germany, and when the USA joined they too waged war from Alaska to New Guinea in the Pacific and in Europe.

 

A plethora of birthdays

Appearing on Earth for the first time on this day were

1821 Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate cavalryman, war criminal, founder of the Ku Klux, and, apparently, a late convert to racial harmony.

1863 Margaret Murray, English anthropologist and horribly mistaken proponent of the origin of witchcraft.

1940 Patrick Stewart, English actor and Star Trek captain.

1942 Harrison Ford, American actor, starship captain, and archaeologist.

 

And best of all:

1903 Sir Kenneth Clark, English art historian. Born into a life of aristocratic privilege, be was chosen at a very early age to be director of Britain’s National Gallery and Keeper of the King’s Pictures. He is best known for the greatest documentary series in television history, 1969’s Civilisation: A Personal View. This 13-episode gem could never be made in today’s woke times. Imagine a broadcasting company giving a limitless budget to an elderly white male with a crooked tooth and a comb-over, tailored in 1930s-style suits, sitting still and talking about great art and architecture. Not the slightest nod to diversity, intersectionality, or the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Imagine allowing someone with these sorts of ideas to have a public platform:

I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.

Watch the series or read the book. You will be a better human being for having done so.