I visited Russia recently on a cruise and as part of the trip we got to meet with WWII veterans. Hearing what they had to go through during the war I just had to write it down and pass it on to anyone who will listen. The war has left so many dead that, in the former Soviet Union republics, virtually every family was touched by it. Many families lost their fathers and mothers to the war. Others were wounded or captured. The list is long. This is a small attempt to preserve their stories so that we may remember the burden of war.

Raissa

“As soon as the war started, I volunteered for the army. I wasn’t drafted, I went of my own will to defend my motherland. I was sixteen years old. First, they placed me in a nursing school to learn how to bandage the wounded. After a month of training I was sent to the front – to Stalingrad. I arrived there when the city was under siege. Above us the Germans were flying bombers. They dropped bombs, railroad tracks, barrels… anything they could to shock the people below. When I arrived, the city and everything around me was on fire. It all burned. The tanks burned, the buildings burned, the wheat fields burned, even the water burned. A large oil tank spilled into the water and it burned. Imagine me, a little girl of only 16 years being there. I was scared and confused. I simply sat down and cried.”

“There were many wounded. My task was to find those people who were alive and to get them to a field hospital. Mostly, I had to drag them across the battle field on top of a trench coat. When I said I was little, it wasn’t just age. I’m not very tall, nor very muscular. These guys I had to drag across the field were tank operators. They were from Siberia. They weighed up to a hundred kilograms (200 lb.) and I was all alone trying to get them to the hospital. When a tank was shot and there were wounded people or survivors inside, they would open and close the top hatch of the tank. This is how I found them. I remember trying to climb a tank and having trouble doing so. The man inside was also very heavy and I couldn’t have lifted him out of the tank if it wasn’t for a couple of men inside who helped me. He was severely burned. His hip was shattered. When we finally got off the tank, we sometimes walked on three legs, sometimes walked on our knees and sometimes crawled our way off the battlefield. I did get that man to the hospital though.”

“At some later point, our army was surrounded and I was captured along with many others. The Germans brought us to a barn where they kept the POWs. They didn’t care of you were a man or a woman. They just pointed me toward a cot padded with raw wet hay. That was my bed. In the morning, an angry german woman came with an angry german shepherd. She brought us out to work. She would sick the shepherd on us and keep it within centimeters of us on the leash. I was afraid. It seemed that the dog would just devour us. The woman was just as angry. She made us carry buckets full of wet sand that weighed forty kilos (80 lb.) each to the road that the germans were building. Just so that we wouldn’t die, the germans fed us an awful mixture. They would take flour and dump it into water just enough to make the mixture look glue-like. That’s what we would eat. We were constantly hungry. Many of us were swollen from hunger.”

“Eventually, the germans put us on a train headed for Germany. We were riding in a wooden car and a few of our guys would knock out the planks in the bottom of the car and offer anyone willing to jump down onto the train tracks. Of course, the train was going at full speed and it was very dangerous. Not everyone jumped. I did. When I landed, it was very scary, I was between huge train wheels and the train cars were passing overhead. I tried to lie motionless until the last car passed. When I stood up, I was free from my german captors but I was deep behind enemy lines. The Germans occupied everything around me. But what can one do? I somehow had to survive…”
[Raissa did not go into detail about her life within enemy territory.]

“The Russian army eventually liberated the territory where I stayed and I once again joined the front. I made myself a promise to go all the way to Berlin, to Reichstag. I went through Poland, Czech Republic and reached Berlin. When I finally stood at the Reichstag, I bent down to the ground and picked up a piece of shrapnel. With it, I scratched on the wall of the Reichstag: ‘I will remember’. And I remember until this day.”

Through a friend of mine I have stumbled upon a very well written, eloquent and challenging article by David Kupelian. It is a bit long but the author does an amazing job describing the American dream, the foundations upon which it was built and the social changes that have taken place since America first became the land of the free.

I include a few excerpts below. The rest you can read here.

“Inscribed in bronze at the base of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus’ transcendent 1883 poem, “The New Colossus,” captures the spirit of America’s big-heartedness and generosity perhaps more than anything else, except for “Lady Liberty” herself.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.”Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

There has always been something different about America, which enabled this magnanimous nation to wrap her arms around the “wretched refuse” of other nations.
This nation of immigrants was bound together by a spirit, you might say. For although one cannot become French or Chinese or Russian, one can become an American – by embracing that spirit.

Becoming a naturalized American citizen therefore meant more than passing the federal government’s screening process and stumbling through a few civics questions. It meant an implicit and heartfelt agreement to abide not only by the nation’s laws, but by its hidden, unwritten “laws” as well – the principles that made up the invisible but vital fabric of Western Civilization: the individual as citizen-sovereign; a balance of freedom and responsibility; unlimited opportunity – to succeed or fail; independence and self-reliance; tolerance; the work ethic; equality under the law; and other core Judeo-Christian values. [...]

[...] The teacher had questioned the unquestionable, injecting doubt into a room of impressionable young boys and girls. It was one of those moments you remember 40 years later because it created a spark, a momentary contact with another dimension – that alien dimension of cynicism and disbelief.

Within a few years, the gathering tides of rebellion against traditional America would come crashing down with great ferocity and on many shores. One key area was the Civil Rights Movement.Despite the fact that America had long-since forsaken slavery, and – thanks to the movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., which culminated in the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act – had outlawed segregation and made great strides in moving beyond racism altogether, a demand for “black studies” nevertheless arose in the nation’s colleges.

The idea was that past denigration and mistreatment of blacks necessitated special emphasis on their culture and accomplishments. “Black pride” was born and “black studies,” “black history” and the like proliferated through the nation’s university campuses.

Although most people didn’t comprehend it at the time, “black pride” and similar “liberation movements” did not arise out of the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement, which had arrived, in King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, at the ultimate solution to racism: the “color-blind” society where people would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This enlightened vision of America – which would have completed the promise of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” – was hijacked by forces of the ’60s radical left. These were people who did not want peace and racial harmony. They condemned racial integration as “Uncle Tomism” and “co-optation.” Their aim was to indict America as a racist oppressor as a means to foment division, revolution and societal transformation.”

You know, I really get discouraged when people (sometimes atheists, sometimes agnostics) state that religion is unreasonable and men of faith go along with that presupposition without challenging it. Of all the debates about God’s existence, only a few get down to the very core of whether it is reasonable to begin with, to believe in God. Granted, I do not have a vast amount of theistic knowledge to claim that I know otherwise, but from the literature I read and from scripture itself, it is evident to me that we must use our minds along with whatever else drives us to believe: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength” – Mark 12:30.

Just this evening I received the newest issue of Newsweek (April 9, 2007 – yes, I know, apparently they come out a week early), and it has a huge article on the topic of God. Obviously, with the advent of science, our world view has been drastically expanded and altered. It is expected that a sharp, reasonable mind will question dogma, whether secular or religious, and uncover inconsistencies. But since when did that make the truth less true? Just because Newton did not discover the relativistic laws of gravity does not mean that his conclusions about gravity as a force are false. Religious dogma, just as scientific dogma, requires correction at times. Does a scientific discovery that the world is round necessitate dismissal of God? Science is full of special statements, called theories, that are built on the premise that they are not exact because they are human interpretations of the world around us. Certain religious claims are just that – theories – interpretations of the word of God. Religion and science simply deal in different realms. Traditionally, religion has been slow to recognize its own inconsistencies so maybe that is why it gets a bad rap. But I keep seeing more and more evidence that just like science it is a self-correcting entity that is very firm and true at the core and is still expanding (and correcting) at the fringes (in no small part thanks to science!). And by the way, science also has its share of inconsistencies, except that here we call them “paradoxes”. Regardless, I fail to see the merit in the claim that just because human interpretation is fallible, we must discard an entire discipline.

I should also say that I fail to see how atheistic claims are in any way more reasonable (in regards to God) than theistic claims. As Geisler and Turek, very acutely, point out, atheists rule out a theistic force at work prior to examining evidence for a case. So that when they look at a case, they can only come up with theories that do not involve a deity. Hearing some of these theories, I cannot help but wonder how such knowledgeable and intelligent minds can come up with such garbage! Here again, Geisler and Turek have a great example.

Let’s say you wake up one morning and go to the kitchen where you find…

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Welcome to my corner of the internet. I am glad you found me and I hope you take some time to browse through the various topics and pages that this blog contains. I have decided to make something special out of my first post. Here’s what I have in mind…

Just like you, I learn about this world through experience. Most experiences are good, some are bad but in either case there is a lesson to learn. What I learned I want to retain and share with all of you through this page. This will be my neverending post as our learning experiences are also neverending. With every word comes a story and with every story comes an experience that has influenced my way of life. Please feel free to share your stories and experiences as I share mine. And by all means, keep coming back to this page because this page will never cease to grow in content.

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