Books, craft & photos. 'Book buying psychopath' according to an X friend. 'Ipsa scienta potestas est' (knowledge itself is power) Francis Bacon
Joined December 2016
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200 years on Shelley's still right "the House of commons is not a representation of the people" but exercises sovereignty 'in contempt of them in a hospital for lunatics" #brexit #Parliament
Bookworm Bean retweeted
The Ode of Remembrance on a postbox topper in The Strand, Exmouth, honouring our armed forces and the fallen, surrounded by the badges of the services that kept everything running.
#PostboxSaturday #Exmouth #RemembranceSunday #LestWeForget
@PostedInThePast @letterappsoc
ALT A red pillar box in The Strand, Exmouth, covered in a knitted and crocheted Remembrance topper. Dozens of red poppies surround an embroidered panel carrying the Ode of Remembrance, with badges for the Women’s Land Army, Merchant Navy, FANY, ATA, Red Cross, Salvation Army and others around it. Knitted figures in army and RAF uniform sit on top, one of them saluting.
Bookworm Bean retweeted
Mary Sherer was MI5’s first female agent runner in Section B.1.a.
She joined the Security Service in 1936 as a secretary at the age of 21 and later rose to handle double agents within the Double Cross System during the Second World War.
Bookworm Bean retweeted
A gift tonight from a very good friend, presented at @i_w_m Churchill War Rooms … Before my talk with the excellent @ryebarcott in which we spoke about courage in all its forms - something that Anders Lassen VC personified. I’m speaking again at Bletchley Park tomorrow - do try to make it.
Bookworm Bean retweeted
▶️ The war is over for them.
Near Berstadt, Germany, in spring 1945, three boys stand among prisoners captured by the US 4th Armored Division, part of Patton’s Third Army.
Two smile at the camera. The third looks more guarded. Their weapons are gone. We cannot know what they had experienced, or what happened to them afterward. But the photograph captures the children caught in the final collapse of Hitler’s war.
For more WWII stories, follow @Vanguard_WW2
Bookworm Bean retweeted
Some of the best Remembrance postbox toppers from around the country.
They appear quietly every November, knitted and crocheted over weeks and set out on the postbox at the end of the road.
A Tommy in his tin helmet, standing over a ring of poppies. A pair of boots laid down between two flags. A nurse wheeling a stretcher under an arch of poppies. A soldier's horse, head bowed, above a postbox buried in red. Army, Navy, Air Force and the nurses who went with them, all remembered side by side.
The colours mean different things. Red for the lives lost, purple for the animals that served and died, white for peace.
Royal Mail has said it appreciates the creativity, with one request: leave room for the post.😀
Bookworm Bean retweeted
MI9 existed to get Allied airmen and soldiers home.
Silk maps, button compasses and coded letters were issued to those at risk of capture, while escape lines across occupied Europe were built with the same care as any sabotage circuit.
Bookworm Bean retweeted
The Radio Security Service (MI8) during WW2:
(a long-form post)
MI6 was responsible not only for the GC&CS at Bletchley Park but also for the Radio Security Service. The RSS began as a branch of MI5 in a prison cell at Wormwood Scrubs and was taken over by MI6’s Section VIII in March 1941, becoming known as MI8(c).
Because of bombing raids it was relocated to Arkley in Barnet, North London, with the postal address Box 25. Working closely with Bletchley Park, it intercepted Axis wireless and cable traffic, including diplomatic and military communications, and monitored the post and telephone lines of foreign embassies and missions in British territories.
Across the country some 1,700 people served as voluntary interceptors, only three of them women. Each was assigned a specific frequency and waveband to record any signal heard, whether a tone, Morse code or a hum, and relevant material was passed to Bletchley Park for deciphering.
(end).
Morning all just getting a bit damp now @cwestword @sussexbiker5360 @Little_G2 @VonBarkenTwins @BermudaBat @KettlebellYard @ThePolecat69 she did meet dogs too some were friends others new friends
Bookworm Bean retweeted
It’s interesting to observe that the secular and celebrated French Revolution killed more in 10 years than the religious and infamous Spanish Inquisition did in 356 years by a ratio of about 75:1.
Bookworm Bean retweeted
I never heard my grandmother’s voice, never received a hug from her, never knew her scent. Yet this beautiful woman is the most present absence in my life.
Today, November 6, 84 years ago, she boarded Transport No. 42 from Drancy to Auschwitz. listed 5th from the bottom. This is the last information we have about her. Did she survive the horrific journey and live to see another daylight before she was murdered? Did she die along the way? We will never know.
She was an extraordinary woman. A widow who raised her daughter as a single mother in Paris during the darkest period in human history, and yet she managed to bring light to the world around her.
One of my mother’s last memories of her was her sixth birthday, which they celebrated together. My mother recalled waking up to a room filled with flowers that her mother had picked in the middle of the night from the garden of the house where they were hiding. Was the room truly filled with flowers? Was it just a single bouquet? It does not really matter.
What matters is the lesson that, in any situation, we can try to find something good, however small, however seemingly insignificant. That is what makes the difference.
Be kind. Do good.
In memory of Charlotte Mendelson (née Schlesinger), 1903–1942.
From my dear friend, Netta Shay Zilberfarb author of “The Lost Daughter of Paris.”
Bookworm Bean retweeted
One of the more fascinating figures at Trent Park was General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, a captured German Panzer commander and fierce anti-Nazi.
His bugged conversations with fellow generals revealed astonishing details of Hitler’s secret weapons programme and the growing disillusionment within the German high command.
His outspoken views stunned British intelligence and provided intelligence that helped shape the course of the war.
More in my book 'The Walls Have Ears': amzn.to/3LYattn
Bookworm Bean retweeted
German SS guards, exhausted from their forced labour clearing the bodies of the dead at Bergen-Belsen, are allowed a brief rest by British soldiers but are forced to take it by lying face down in one of the empty mass graves, 1945
More haunting photos: bit.ly/46yA996
Bookworm Bean retweeted
Valentina Safronova, a savings bank clerk from Bryansk, became the intelligence officer of the city’s partisan detachment and crossed the front line many times in 1941 and 1942.
Her report on an enemy airfield is credited with the destruction of 58 aircraft, and under her leadership the group grew to 50 members with ten safe houses in the city. Captured after a firefight, she refused to talk and died in Gestapo hands on 1 May 1943. She was made a Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously on 8 May 1965.
She was born in 1918 into a Russian family in the village of Baksheyevo in the Oryol Oblast, and soon afterward the family moved to Lgovsky, which became part of Bryansk in 1921. After school she worked as a Young Pioneer leader and then as a supervisor at a small savings bank, which the resistance later used as a hideout. She was a member of the Komsomol.
Soon after the invasion she became intelligence officer of the Bryansk city partisan detachment, and in early September 1941 she went with it into the Kletnya forest behind the lines. The unit ambushed and sabotaged the occupiers and gathered intelligence, and she crossed the front many times. She had the lights cut during the mayor’s speech at the opening of a theatre built by the occupiers in Bryansk so that partisans could scatter leaflets. Made to shovel snow at an enemy airfield after an officer she knew gave her a lift, she noted its layout and anti-aircraft defences, and bombers acting on her report are credited with destroying 58 aircraft and five anti-aircraft batteries.
She also reported fuel and ammunition dumps and train schedules, and with a partisan disguised as a policeman she brought a crate of TNT from Moscow to Bryansk that was used to attack a factory making tanks and vehicles. Under her leadership the group grew to 50 members with ten safe houses in the city and derailed trains, sabotaged vehicles and communications and laid mines. Enemy intelligence got hold of her photograph and stepped up the hunt for her.
In February 1942, when the unit’s radio broke, she and six men walked more than 100 kilometres to Belev, beyond the front, to deliver maps and documents to the Red Army. On 16 March 1942 she suffered a severe concussion and was sent to hospital, and after recovering she parachuted back in May; the next day, when her detachment met an enemy search party, she took over a machine gun. Complications from her head injury put her back in hospital at Monino, where she learned she had received the Order of the Red Star, and then she flew back to Bryansk. Searching for their detachment, she and two other partisans, one of them her company commander, lost their way and sheltered in an abandoned dugout, where the enemy found them. She fired back with her submachine gun until she lost consciousness from her wounds, and she was taken to the village of Glinnoye and then to the Gestapo in Bryansk. A doctor treated her head wound in the hope that she would talk, but she refused all medicine and said nothing.
Besides her Gold Star she held the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Star.
She died on 1 May 1943, by some accounts tortured to death. A street and a secondary school in Bryansk bear her name, a monument to her was put up in the city in 1970, and a Soviet envelope carried her portrait in 1989.
Bookworm Bean retweeted
On November 7th, 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power Russia, promising “peace, land and bread” to the people. Over the next 74 years the people were starved, killed by death squads, thrown in work camps and gulags, and other things unrelated to “peace, land and bread”.
Bookworm Bean retweeted
Ta krucha, bohaterska dziewczyna wygrała z niemiecką machiną śmierci, ratując setki ludzkich istnień.
Swoją odwagą i miłością zawstydziła katów z SS.
Zapłaciła za to najwyższą cenę, umierając z wycieńczenia w wieku zaledwie 32 lat.
Jako pielęgniarka ratowała życie więźniów Auschwitz, usługując ciężko chorym.
Chroniła kobiety skazane na śmierć poprzez wykreślanie ich z list.
Chrzciła noworodki.
Codziennie narażała własne życie.
Oddawała swoje racje żywnościowe potrzebującym.
Deklarowała nawet gotowość pójścia na śmierć w zamian za współwięźniarkę.
Dziennikarka.
Nauczycielka.
Działaczka konspiracji.
"Ziemski Anioł Stróż".
"Serce w pasiaku".
Żywa definicja człowieczeństwa.
7 XI 1946 skonała
SŁUŻEBNICA BOŻA
STEFANIA ŁĄCKA.
Bookworm Bean retweeted
Анна Гончаренко, вдова, жила одна в собственном доме в пригороде Николаева (ныне Mykolaiv), Украина. Она была очень дружна с Софией Резниковой, еврейкой, которая дружила с её покойной дочерью, умершей совсем молодой, в возрасте около двадцати лет.
После оккупации Николаева немецкими войсками евреям приказали явиться в определённое место сбора, откуда их якобы должны были отправить на работу за пределы города. Когда София сообщила Анне, что ей необходимо явиться туда, та предложила оставить у неё свою девятилетнюю дочь Елену.
Вскоре выяснилось, что людей вовсе не отправляли на принудительные работы: евреев расстреливали.
Немцы и их пособники начали разыскивать тех евреев, которые не подчинились приказу и не явились в назначенное место. Анна подготовила для маленькой Елены тайное убежище в подвале кладовой, расположенной рядом с её домом. Там девочка скрывалась на протяжении двух с половиной лет. Во время обысков, которые проводили немцы, она пряталась в подвале, а в промежутках между ними могла находиться в самом доме.
После освобождения Николаева Елена осталась жить с Анной, которая воспитывала её как родную внучку. Когда Елена вышла замуж, Анна переселилась к молодой семье и прожила с ними до самой смерти, в 1964 году. Ей было 84 года.
5 ноября 2000 года мемориальный комплекс Яд Вашем признал Анну Гончаренко Праведницей народов мира.
Bookworm Bean retweeted
You should read books that are:
— Older than you
— More difficult than you are used to
— Written by people you disagree with
— Outside your usual interests
— Important enough to reread
— Uncomfortable to think about
Reading should not always be easy.
Sometimes the books that require the most effort are the ones that change how you think.
If you only read things you already understand and agree with, you are not learning very much.
Bookworm Bean retweeted
6 November 1944 | The daily employment list of women prisoners at Auschwitz I female camp shows for the last time that the family of the former camp commander SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss employed two IBV prisoners—Jehovah's Witnesses.
Our podcast about the fate of Jehovah's Witnesses in Auschwitz: youtu.be/VhxXs59bqIs
Most likely, the Höss family, including his wife Hedwig and their five children, left the villa they had occupied on the edge of the Auschwitz I main camp and moved near Ravensbrück. Four railway cars were required to transport the villa's luxury furnishings, accumulated belongings, and various goods.
ALT Black and white photo of Rudolf Hoess with four children and a baby on the arms of the mother, posing indoors near a plant.