Think of this Flash Mob not as Jews being driven from the Temple of Solomon to be enslaved in Babylon, but helpless Spanish tourists in the railway station in Bilbao being transported to a place sterile and foreign, say Los Angeles. Regard the hopeless looks of quiet desperation!
How a famous Scorsese scene taught a generation to slice just a certain way.
It’s one of the most iconic scenes in one of the greatest movies in American history, and it has almost nothing to do with the rest of the plot. It’s mob capo Paulie Cicero, played by the late Paul Sorvino. He’s in a minimum-security prison with the rest of the wise guys. They’ve bribed the guards so they can have all the stuff they need for a proper Italian dinner, which they are about to cook themselves: Vinnie’s making the tomato sauce, his meatballs a mixture of veal, beef, pork, and too many onions; Johnny Dio’s cooking T-bones in a pan over a portable electric burner; then Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, shows up with fresh Italian loaves, prosciutto, salami, and a bottle of J&B Scotch.
There’s some Bobby Darin playing, and, most importantly, they’re using Paulie’s system for slicing garlic in a seemingly knife-free environment “so thin that it used to liquefy in the pan with just a little oil,” Liotta’s Hill says in a voiceover, adding, “It’s a very good system.”
But is it? “I’ve never seen anybody do it that way,” Sabino Curcio tells me of Paulie’s approach, which we see almost exactly halfway through the 1990 film Goodfellas. I figured that if anybody knew, it would be Curcio. The Growing Up Italian podcast host was raised behind the counter at his family’s Brooklyn sandwich spot, Anthony & Son Panini Shoppe. “What’s crazy about the garlic thing is that it’s the Italian Americans that really claim the garlic, not Italians in Italy. They make fun of us a lot for using it so much.”
Curcio doesn’t know exactly how garlic became a staple in Italian dishes made in the United States, but there are ideas about when it started becoming so prevalent, which Danielle Callegari wrote about for TASTE in 2020. Curcio says it’s not far-fetched, though, that somebody would use a razor to slice it extra thin, since everybody has their own way of doing it. “Some people put the knife over it to make it flat before chopping; others chop it extra thin. It depends on the person, really.”
As for the famous garlic bread sandwiches—including one variation on the classic chopped cheese and, my personal favorite, a chicken sandwich with broccoli rabe, mozzarella sticks, cherry peppers, and vodka sauce poured on top—they make at his family’s shop, Curcio tells me it would be too time-intensive to chop as much garlic as they need to satisfy their customers, so they use granulated garlic. “About two gallons a week,” he says, is the staggering amount required.
Garlic bread is what got me thinking about garlic and its impact on Italian American cuisine, especially the type we’d define as “red sauce,” when I was out in Los Angeles last summer and eating at famous yacht rock haunt Dan Tana’s in the city’s West Hollywood neighborhood. My friend told me something I wasn’t expecting—that I “must try the garlic bread.” I haven’t had somebody tell me that since I was ten and enjoying frozen Pepperidge Farm loaves I heated in the microwave, or the Little Caesars Crazy Bread I would happily ruin my dinner with if given the chance, but I couldn’t say no to my three favorite things in one bite: bread, cheese, and garlic.
What I was surprised to find was that it wasn’t like the garlic bread I was used to, the sort that I make at home on a split loaf of semolina slathered in garlic butter with some fresh parsley and sea salt sprinkled on top—or even the knots I get at my local slice spot, with little chunks of garlic that are visible to the eye. The server told me the secret to Dan Tana’s bread is that they brush garlic-infused olive oil on it, then put some grated mozzarella on top and toast it. At first, I felt a little cheated, but then I thought that the Goodfellas approach is technically a garlic infusion.
“There are different ways to do it depending on your purpose,” PJ Monte says. Shaving it with a razor blade is one of the ways Monte sees it being done. “I think there’s a lot of validity to that.”
Monte would know. He’s red sauce royalty. His family has been cooking Italian food in America since the late 19th century, at what was in 1906 a tavern in the part of Brooklyn where Park Slope and Gowanus meet that would be rebranded Monte’s Venetian Room in the 1940s and remain so until it closed in 2008. (It was reopened by new owners in 2011, only to close again a few years later.) Today, it lives on in the family’s sauce that Monte sells by the jar. “You could also shave raw garlic on a mandoline for some dishes, or maybe a salad.”
I’ve been eating in Italian American restaurants and households since as far back as I can recall. Even though I’m not Italian, I’ve always connected deeply with the food and the way the most arbitrary methods yield the most beautiful tastes. I once worked as a runner in a Brooklyn restaurant I’m certain was a mob front, when one of the guys I assumed was an owner walked behind the line and yelled at a cook for “not pounding the veal tenderly enough.” He picked up the hammer and explained how “it’s all in the wrist,” then went to town on the meat as I noticed a pistol in a holster dangling under his suit jacket.
I’ve seen nonnas labor for hours over Sunday sauce—adding chunks of beef they needed two hands to carry, tomatoes they crushed by hand, and an amount of garlic that boring people might find offensive—and I’ve watched a chef count how many capers were on a plate of chicken piccata because he believed too few or too many threw the balance off. But no, I’d never seen anybody use a razor blade to slice garlic, and I hadn’t done so myself. Thankfully, Monte gave me an excuse when he sent me the newest item of Monte’s sauce swag: a box cutter with the brand’s logo on it. Next to it is an image of fingers chopping a clove of garlic with a razor.
I used it when I made a simple side of broccoli rabe after my wife demanded I “add a damn vegetable” to what I like to call my “Moonstruck dinner,” a panfried rib eye with a side of spaghetti that has butter and pepper mixed into it. The joke is that I could wipe out an entire family of vampires with the amount of garlic I tend to use, but something about the time and concentration it took to slice the cloves so thin—and also not take off the tip of my finger—really did bring something to my dinner. The side of greens I added wasn’t overpowered, dare I say, it was subtle. It was the razor blade, I told my wife. It’s a very good system.
Good Things with Garlic: In this limited-run column, Jason Diamond digs into the world of garlic around the world, from Brooklyn to Kazakhstan.
Kentucky WWII veteran, 107, looks back on the Battle of the Bulge
FEATUREDWIB HISTORY October 6, 2023 Staff Writer
Linda Blackford
Lexington Herald-Leader
(TNS)
Jim Hellard is not the oldest World War II veteran in Kentucky; that distinction goes to Oakley Hacker, who recently celebrated his 107th birthday with great fanfare in Clay County.
But Hellard is 98, so he’s one of the few remaining people who fought in the last world war. He hasn’t been interviewed by this newspaper in quite a while — 77 years ago on Tuesday exactly. When he came home from Europe with a Nazi dog.
So, 77 years is a good anniversary, and after all, the best time to interview a 98-year-old is right away.
He lives alone in a small house on the south side of Lexington. He uses a walker but still irons his clothes, cooks for himself and goes to church. He turned 98 on Sept. 17, and the pastor at Gardenside Christian Church made him sit in a chair and asked everyone to shake his hand as they were leaving.
“I shook hands until I thought it would fall off,” he said.
In celebrating Hellard, the pastor reminded his congregants about the Greatest Generation, the people who lived through hardship that we, the generations of complainers, can’t even imagine. Add together World War I, the Great Depression, World War II.
Then imagine Hellard, an 18-year-old Versailles High School football team captain who’d never been outside of Central Kentucky, shipped out to Europe for the final, bloody last stands of the war. Hellard arrived in time for the Battle of the Bulge, the last major offensive by the German Army, which lasted five weeks in the winter of 1945 in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg.
“We had 17 weeks of basic training, and one day we were on maneuvers, and they called us in and said, ‘Boys, the Germans are breaking through, and you’ve got to go now,’” Hellard said.
He was in the U.S. Army’s Ninth Division, first shipped to England and then to the front of a frozen European wasteland where war had been going on for four years.
“I was scared as hell,” he said.
His memories are clear but disjointed, a kaleidoscope of blood, mud, bullets and fear. His first day on the front and his unit found shelter in an abandoned house. It was so cold, they built a fire. A sergeant yelled and told them to get out. A few seconds later, a German artillery shell landed on the house, demolishing it.
His division moved into Germany for an important siege known as the Battle of Remagen in March 1945. The Ninth Division was about to capture the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine River, which, despite having been wired with explosives, was still intact.
“I was approaching that bridge when one of our soldiers came back across it,” Hellard recalled in an oral history he compiled a few years ago. “Part of his shoulder had been shot off, and his arm was just dangling.
He said, ‘Man, don’t let anybody kid you. It’s rough out there.”
Hellard had a bayonet and started cutting every wire he could see on the bridge as German and American fighter planes held a dogfight over top of the bridge. When they got to the other side, the fighting continued, with artillery screaming around their heads.
Finally, the Germans surrendered, and that battle is credited with getting the Allies into the German interior three weeks ahead of schedule.
Hellard and his unit kept moving further and further into Germany. He watched friends die. He marched so much his heels would bleed.
“I would take off my boot and there would be blood in it,” he said. “The only way I could endure the pain was to keep telling myself, ‘I can take one more step.’ They were never told where they were going.
They made it to the Elbe River, 30 miles from Berlin, where the Russians were moving in. Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945.
“I woke up one morning, and the sun was shining, and the birds were singing,” Hellard recounted in his oral history.
“There was no rumble of artillery in the distance, no bullets pinging off rocks and metal, and no chatter of German machine guns. The war was over, and it was the first day of peace. I recall strolling through some woods near a creek. Birds were singing. It was so peaceful it seemed like heaven.”
Next stop, Dachau
It didn’t stay heavenly for long.
The Ninth Division was ordered to become part of the occupation forces. His next stop was the Dauchau concentration camp, originally set up in 1933 to hold Hitler’s political opponents. It soon grew to much more, of course; more than 30,000 documented deaths and many more besides.
When U.S. forces liberated it on April 29, 1945, there were still 30,000 prisoners.
The camp was reused as a holding cell for SS soldiers awaiting trial. When Hellard got there, he could still smell the odor of dead bodies stacked on each other, awaiting cremation in the ovens. As soon as the prisoners were sentenced, they were shipped to Nuremberg for execution, Hellard said.
“They were the meanest men I ever met,” he said of the SS soldiers. “Hitler made them that way.”
But that’s where he met Tiger, a former German Shepherd guard dog in the camp also used in interrogations.
The rumor was that an older U.S. soldier had come across Tiger and his handler. He shot the German and kept the dog. When the soldier went home, he passed him onto Tiger. He got his name for his habit of biting GIs but Hellard cured him with a canine “de-Nazification” training of a switch every time he did it.
Pretty soon, he would stay by Hellard all day long, even on guard duty, where he would wake Hellard if anyone approached.
By 1946, Hellard was due to be shipped home, and he arranged for Tiger to come with him. He showed up a few weeks later in a wooden crate that he was chewing his way out of. That’s when Hellard and Tiger were interviewed by Herald reporter Betty Pugh on Oct. 2, 1946, with the headline: “Tiger, detrained Nazi canine, now has a home in Lexington.”
Tiger lasted another three years, no doubt worn out by his own PTSD.
The transition was hard. “I was pretty wild and my mother was worried about me,” Hellard said. “My father had been in World War I and told her to give me some time, and I would settle down and straighten out.”
Nowadays, when the word “trauma” is heard in everyday conversation, it’s incredible to think that returning GIs — who’d witnessed the worst that man can do to one another — got little to no counseling. The “shell shock” first diagnosed in World War I did not get an official mental health diagnosis of PTSD until 1980.
Hellard found work as an auto insurance adjuster, got married and raised two children. He played guitar in bands and orchestras around town. But he admitted that he was still wild, his drinking more or less ended his marriage and he never remarried.
Just last week, he told me, he woke up from a nightmare about the war.
“I do remember growing up, that if he was asleep, there was a rule that you don’t jump on Daddy and give him a hug,” said his daughter, LaTonna Wilson. “It was too startling to him. Other than that, he didn’t talk about it.”
Sometimes, when Wilson takes her dad out to dinner, people may stop and thank him for his service. But as its last participants fade out, the reality of World War II gets further and further away.
“Think about it,” Wilson said. “You take a boy at 18, put them on a plane to a foreign country and give them a gun and tell them to fight for this country, digging foxholes and getting shot at. They just did what they had to do to survive. I don’t think any of us hearing the stories can comprehend it. I don’t know how you recuperate from that or if ever.”
Hellard prides himself on his stoicism. So many years, later his stories are just that. Until a nightmare wakes him up.
“I don’t think people understand the war,” he said. “They don’t know how much suffering I’ve done.”
©2023 Lexington Herald-Leader. Visit kentucky.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Today's selection -- from Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical by Laurie Winer. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein wrote one of the greatest songs ever performed on Broadway: “Ol’ Man River” for the musical Show Boat. It was originally written for the legendary singer Paul Robeson:
"Not surprisingly, Hammerstein and Kern each believed it had been his idea to write 'Ol' Man River.' The Mississippi River is ever present in the novel. By the time she is eight [protagonist] Magnolia 'had fallen into and been fished out of every river in the Mississippi Basin from the Gulf of Mexico to Minnesota.' The Hawks family lives on the river, drinks its water, and eats its catfish. Andy loses his life in it.
"Hammerstein biographer Hugh Fordin reports that, initially, Kern did not see how a river song would be intrinsic to the story and resisted writing it, just as Hammerstein would later resist writing the title number for Oklahoma! -- emblematic songs are not, in fact, relevant to creators' primary concerns, which revolve around plot and character. Fordin says that Hammerstein studied Kern's score and suggested taking some of the banjo music from 'Cotton Blossom' and slowing it down to a dirge. This was the springboard from which Kem started on the song, which they assigned to Joe, thereby promoting an intriguing but minor character and evolving the work's thinking on race.
"Kern told friends that he formulated the melody to 'Ol' Man River' after hearing Robeson's speaking voice -- 'those organ-like tones' -- in a 1926 play called Black Boy. It was one of the first songs Kem and Hammerstein completed for Show Boat. Critic Alexander Woollcott recalled getting a 'frantic' call from Kern in late 1926 asking for Paul Robeson's phone number. That same day Kem took his new song and drove uptown to Harlem, where he played the number on Robeson's piano. Paul sang while his wife, Essie, listened. Kern couldn't wait for Hammerstein to hear Robeson's rendition; he asked the singer to drive back downtown with him. Unfortunately, Woollcott's story ends with Paul and Essie haggling over cab fare for Paul's return trip. There's no record of Hammerstein hearing Robeson that day.
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"Because of the delayed opening -- Ziegfeld christened his gorgeous new theater in February 1927 with the more conventional Rio Rita -- Robeson did not take the role of Joe immediately, as he was booked for an international concert tour that fall. In fact, while the cast of Show Boat rehearsed in October, Robeson was singing spirituals at the Salle Gaveau in Paris, where five hundred hopeful concertgoers were turned away. At the show's finale, the audience (which included novelist James Joyce) refused to let the singer leave the stage; he gave a full hour of encores.
"According to Robert Russell Bennett, who saw an early draft of 'Ol' Man River,' 'It was thirty-two not wholly convincing measures that sounded to me like they wanted to be wanted. In the first place, it starts with two harmonically powerful and self-reliant bars and then comes to a mud puddle and doesn't know where to put its feet for the next two.' Bennett only warmed to the song when he heard Hammerstein's lyric, telling Kern, 'Gee, that's a great song!' Kern responded sharply, 'You didn't say that when I gave it to you before.' Bennett writes. 'He knew as well as I did that it wasn't a song at all until Oscar came in with the words. Reading them for the first time I was convinced that he was sent here to be a poet.'
"Early in the show, Joe sings the song as he sits on the dock, looking into the water and meditating on what he sees as its equanimity in the face of all the turmoil on shore:
Dere's an ol' man called de Mississippi
Dat's de ol' man dat I'd like to be
What does he care if de world's got troubles
What does he care if de land ain't free?
"Kern's melody uses the pentatonic scale, with five instead of seven different notes per octave. The composer did the same for another, if lesser, song of uplift, 'Look for the Silver Lining' from Sally. In fact, many spirituals are written using this more constrictive scale. Hammerstein kept Joe's words simple, employing repetition and little rhyming, guessing that the audience would listen more deeply when they understood they were not waiting for the next rhyme. Rhyme bestows sense, the feeling of completing a puzzle; Joe is grappling with a reality beyond sense, beyond articulated meaning. In the chorus, Hammerstein allows himself only near rhyme:
"Ol' man river,
dat ol' man river
He mus' know sumpin,'
but don't say nuthin'
He jes' keeps rollin'
He keeps on rollin' along.
"Joe projects onto the river some of his own characteristics, primarily an endurance full of grace and mystery. As the sole Black man among the play's major characters, he has access to varieties of human experience not available to the others. He knows more than he wants to know and, like the river, is unable to express his knowledge -- not due to his own limitations, but because his experience is inexpressible, literally unspeakable. Still, he owns it; it is a part of him. Whatever comfort or strength he might acquire in this communion with the river is translated through the mournful surge of the melody, which goes where the lyrics cannot (and do not try).
"'Ol' Man River' brought out in both Kern and Hammerstein a quality neither had yet exhibited, and one they would not summon again. The song stands apart from other anthems of endurance Hammerstein would write with Richard Rodgers for white characters, like 'You'll Never Walk Alone' and its weaker cousin, 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain.' Unlike those songs, 'Ol' Man River' offers no promise of relief except death, no other side of the storm where the 'sweet silver song of a lark' awaits, and no assurance that if you keep hope in your heart you will again be made whole. Joe sings:
Let me go 'way from the Mississippi
Let me go 'way from the white man boss
Show me that stream called the river Jordan
That's the ol' stream that I long to cross.
"Part prayer, part soliloquy, 'Ol' Man River' acknowledges suffering that remains out of frame. In writing it, Kern and Hammerstein offered a deep bow to the Negro spirituals that Paul Robeson spent years showcasing, songs in which the biblical river Jordan serves as the crossing from slavery to freedom and from life to death. With this song, Kern and Hammerstein played a central role in opening American popular music to any subject under the sun.
"Robeson first played Joe in the 1928 London production, and New York finally saw him in the spring of 1932 in the first of the show's many revivals. Ferber thought it too soon to bring back the show but went to see it nonetheless, mostly so she could catch Robeson's version of 'Ol' Man River.' She captured her experience in a letter to Woollcott: 'I have never seen an ovation like that given any figure of the stage, the concert hall, or the opera. It was completely spontaneous, whole-hearted, and thrilling .... That audience stood up and howled. They applauded and shouted and stamped .... The show stopped. He sang it again. The show stopped. They called him back again and again. Other actors came out and made motions and their lips moved, but the bravos of the audience drowned all other sounds.'
"Robeson would be forever linked to the song; it was what audiences always wanted to hear him sing. By the time of the 1936 movie version, though, Robeson's portrayal already seemed out of date; leading African American writers did not approve. Marcus Garvey's magazine wrote that Robeson was using his 'genius to appear in pictures and plays that tend to dishonor, mimic, discredit and abuse the cultural attainment of the Black Race.' After seeing the film, dancer Bill Robinson ribbed Robeson's wife, Essie, in a letter: 'Tell Paul that we saw Show Boat twice; just to hear him sing and to get the new way of shelling peas.' Robeson left the country soon after, spending four years mostly in Europe and the Soviet Union, where he felt less racial animosity. 'Here I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life,' he said.
"When he returned home Robeson began to alter the lyric in performance, changing 'I'm tired of living and scared of dying' to 'I must keep fighting until I'm dying.' Hammerstein was not pleased. His original line says as much about the human condition as is possible in eight words, and Robeson's replacement did not. The lyricist issued a statement in 1949, saying, 'As the author of these words, I have no intention of changing them or permitting anyone else to change them. I further suggest that Paul write his own songs and leave mine alone.'
"Indeed, Hammerstein's lyric has resounded through the years. In his book Who Should Sing 'Ol' Man River'? Todd Decker documents how often it was recorded during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. And in a 2015 New Yorker essay about songwriter and performer Sam Cooke, David Cantwell also drew a connection between 'Ol' Man River' and the great protest songs of the '60s. Cooke recorded the song on his debut album in 1958, six years before he wrote 'A Change Is Gonna Come,' with its Hammersteinian lyric 'It's been too hard livin', but I'm afraid to die.'"
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| author: Laurie Winer | |||
| title: Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical | |||
| publisher: Yale University Press |
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Today's selection -- from Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe. Famine in world War II:
“One of the few things that united Europe during the war was the ubiquitous presence of hunger. International trade in foodstuffs had faltered almost as soon as war broke out, and ceased altogether when the various military blockades began to take hold around the continent. The first foods to disappear were imported fruits. In Britain, the public attempted to take this with good humour. Signs began to appear in greengrocers' windows, claiming 'Yes, we have no bananas' and in 1943 the feature film Millions Like Us began with an ironic on-screen definition of an orange, supposedly for those who could not remember what one looked like. On the continent one of the shortages that made itself most immediately felt was of coffee, which became so scarce that the population was forced to drink a variety of substitutes made from chicory, dandelion roots or acorns. “Other, more serious shortages soon followed. Sugar was one of the first things to become scarce, as well as perishable goods like milk, cream, eggs and fresh meat. In response to such shortages, rationing was introduced in Britain, across most of continental Europe, and even in the United States. Neither were the neutral countries immune to shortages: in Spain, for example, even staple foods such as potatoes and olive oil were tightly rationed, and the huge drop in imported goods forced the people of Switzerland to make do with 28 per cent fewer calories in 1944 than they had before the war. Over the course of the next five years eggs were almost universally powdered in order to preserve them, butter was replaced with margarine, milk was reserved for young children, and traditional meats such as lamb, pork or beef became so scarce that people began rearing rabbits in their back gardens and allotments as a substitute. The struggle to stave off famine was every bit as important as the military struggle, and was taken just as seriously. “The first country to topple over the brink was Greece. In the winter of 1941-2, just six months after being invaded by Axis troops, more than 100,000 people starved to death. The coming of war had thrown the country into administrative anarchy and, coupled with restrictions on people's movement, this had caused a collapse of the food distribution systems. Farmers began to hoard their foodstuffs, inflation spiralled out of control and unemployment soared. There was also a near complete breakdown of law and order. Many historians have blamed the occupying German troops for sparking the famine by requisitioning food stores, but in truth these food stores were often looted by local people, partisans or individual soldiers. “Regardless of what caused the famine, the results were catastrophic. In Athens and Thessaloniki the mortality rate increased threefold. In some of the islands, such as Mykonos, the death rate was as much as nine times its usual level. Of the 410,000 Greek deaths that occurred during the whole of the war, probably 250,000 were due to starvation and related problems. The situation became so parlous that in the autumn of 1942 the British took the unprecedented step of raising their blockade to allow ships carrying food through to the country. By agreement between the Germans and the British, relief flowed into Greece throughout the rest of the war, and continued to do so for almost all of the chaotic period that followed liberation at the end of 1944.
“If the effect of war on Greek food distribution was fairly instantaneous, in western Europe the full force of the shortages took much longer to materialize. Holland, for example, did not feel the worst effects of famine until the winter of 1944-5. Unlike in Greece it was not administrative chaos that caused Holland's 'Hunger Winter', but the Nazis' long-term policy of depriving the country of what it needed to survive. Almost from the moment the Germans arrived in May 1940 they had begun to requisition everything: metals, clothing, textiles, bicycles, food and livestock. Entire factories were dismantled and shipped into Germany. Holland had always relied on importing food and fodder for its livestock, but these imports ceased in 1940, leaving the country to struggle on with what little was left after the German requisitions. Potatoes and bread were severely rationed throughout the war, and the people were forced to supplement their diet with sugar beets and even tulip bulbs. “By May 1944 the situation was desperate. Reports coming from inside Holland warned of impending disaster unless the country were liberated soon. Once again, the British raised their blockade to allow aid through, but only to a very limited degree. Churchill was worried that regular food aid would simply end up in German hands, and the British Chiefs of Staff feared that the German navy would use the aid ships as guides through the mined waters of the Dutch coast. So the people of Holland were forced to wait for the liberation and starve. “By the time the Allies finally entered western Holland in May 1945 between 100,000 and 150,000 Dutch people were suffering from hunger oedema ('dropsy'). The country was spared a catastrophe on the scale of the Greek famine only because the war ended, and huge quantities of relief were finally allowed in. But for thousands it was already too late. Journalists entering Amsterdam described the city as 'a vast concentration camp' displaying 'horrors comparable to those of Belsen and Buchenwald'. Over 5,000 people had died of starvation or related illnesses in that city alone. The famine death toll for the country as a whole was between 16,000 and 20,000. “The Nazis did not starve Holland out of pure malice. Compared with other nationalities, the Nazis actually felt well disposed towards the Dutch, whom they regarded as essentially 'Germanic' people who needed to be led 'back to the Germanic community'. The problem was that Germany had her own food problems to worry about. Even before the war the German leadership had believed national food production to be in crisis. By the beginning of 1942 grain stocks were all but exhausted, the national swine herd had been reduced by 25 per cent for lack of feed, and rations of both bread and meat had been cut. Even the bumper German harvest in 1943 did not stave off crisis, and while rations were raised temporarily, they soon resumed their decline. “To give some idea of the problem Germany faced, one must consider the calorific needs of the population. The average adult requires about 2,500 calories per day to keep themselves healthy, and more if they are doing heavy work. Crucially, this amount cannot be made up of carbohydrates alone if they are to avoid hunger-related illnesses like oedema - it must also contain vitamins supplied by fresh vegetables, proteins and fat. At the beginning of the war German civilians were consuming a healthy average of 2,570 calories per day. This fell to 2,445 the following year, to 2,078 calories in 1943, and to 1,412 calories by the end of the war. 'Hunger knocks on every door,' wrote one German housewife in February 1945. 'New ration cards are to last for five weeks instead of four, and no one knows if they will be issued at all. We count out potatoes every day, five small ones each, and bread is becoming more scarce. We are growing thinner and thinner, colder and colder and more and more ravenous.’ “In order to prevent their own people from starving, the Nazis plundered their occupied territories. As early as 1941 they reduced the official ration for 'normal consumers' in Norway and Czechoslovakia to around 1,600 calories per day, and in Belgium and France to only 1,300 calories per day. 15 The local populations in these countries only prevented themselves from being slowly starved to death by resorting to the black market. The situation in Holland was not substantially different from that in Belgium or France: the main difference was that Holland was not liberated until nine months later. The famine occurred because by that time even the black market had been exhausted, and the Wehrmacht's scorched earth policy had destroyed more than 20 per cent of the nation's farmland through flooding. By the end of the war, the official daily food ration in occupied Holland had dropped to just 400 calories—that is, half the amount received by the inmates of the Belsen concentration camp. In Rotterdam, the food ran out altogether." |
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Author: Keith Lowe Title: Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II Publisher: Picador Date: Copyright 2023 by Keith Lowe page(s): 34-37 |
October 3, 2023
Next week, the nation—except for a few woke states—will honor Christopher Columbus with an annual Monday holiday. Those few, which have decided that Columbus was a bad man and cruel to the Indians, have chosen to declare it Indigenous Peoples Day, or somesuch. But let’s examine that reasoning.
The first thing to get out of the way is this: Columbus didn’t discover America. He wasn’t Columbus, his name was Colon, he couldn’t discover lands that had been settled for at least 1,700 years, and the name America didn’t until 1509, and then in honor of Americus Vespucci, whose writings about the new world were far more popular than anything Colon wrote.
Then let’s forget the business of him being a bad man who killed and enslaved Indians and led the Spanish hidalgos in their pursuit of gold and the overrunning of the island of Hispaniola, ideas that I must confess a good many took away from my 1990 biography of Columbus, The Conquest of Paradise. It’s not that he was a saintly man, and to be true to history I had to describe the way he failed badly in his task as governor of Hispaniola, under whom Indians were treated most harshly, and his willing despoliation of the island in his search for gold.
But he was not a governor, he was a sailor, and no one should have expected him to be able to run the island. That was asking much too much—as the Spanish rulers found out. Eventually they clapped him in irons and shipped him back to Spain, where he was shunned by the court and forced to live a life alone.
But all that is not important about Christopher Columbus. What’s important is that he found for Europe what was a new world, new continents rich with treasure and resources, which effectively over time brought Europe out of a long period of poverty and violence and disease. And which, in being discovered and settled and exploited, implanted Christian civilization on fertile continents and changed the entire history of the world.
That was what made Columbus special. And he knew it, too.
In 1498, on his Third Voyage (the Sovereigns were sponsoring many voyages in those years), Columbus landed on the west coast of what is now Venezuela, near where the Orinoco emptied into the ocean. His ship’s log, as rendered by a Spanish friar some decades after the journey, says “He observed that the Land stretched out wider and appeared flatter and more beautiful down toward the west….He therefore came to the conclusion that so great a land as not an island but a continent; and as if addressing the Sovereigns, he speaks thus:
“I have come to believe this is a mighty continent which was hitherto unknown. I am greatly supported in this view by reason of this great river and by this sea which is fresh….And if this is a continent it is a wonderful thing and will be so regarded by all men of learning.”
And in a letter to the Sovereigns he would use the phrase “otro mundo,” bragging of his achievement: “No princes of Spain ever gained territory outside these borders until now, when Your Highnesses have an other world here, by which our holy faith can be so greatly advanced and from which such great wealth can be drawn.”
Most history books argue that Columbus died thinking he had gone to islands off India. Obviously not true: he knew he had discovered—for the Sovereigns and Christianity—a new continent, a new world, and history would acclaim him for it. As indeed it did: Spanish historian Lopez de Gomara in 1552called it “the greatest event in the history of the world, excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it.” And Adam Smith two centuries later wrote, “The discovery of /America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.”
That’s how we should be thinking of him today, not as an imperfect man and inept governor. His achievement enabled Europe to expand beyond its borders, Westernizing the great bulk of humanity; to accumulate wealth and power on a scale previously unknown and create the structures of modern civilization; and to alter the distribution of life forms and transform nature as nothing before in the earth’s history. That was unique and transformative and, if not the greatest, great.
And why his statues and monuments—said to be more than for any secular figure in history—should not be defiled or removed.