radiojamming:

radiojamming:

radiojamming:

There was one of those hyperspecific polls that had an option like “your grandfather told you war stories that he never told anyone else” and now I feel like I have to tell the story about how a spider saved my grandpa’s life in WWII and how my family doesn’t kill spiders because we owe our existence to that One Single Spider

So to set the scene, it’s the height of WWII in France and my grandpa—a 6'3" 20 year old upper Michigan farm boy—has been separated from his company after their temporary camp was shelled. My grandpa (who, I have to add, was nicknamed ‘the Suicide Kid’ at this point because he worked in demolitions and bomb interception and kept taking the jobs no one wanted with the expectation that he was never going home anyway) is scared out of his wits, wandering around the French countryside alone. He has to move at night and sleep in barns and sheds during the day to hide from people who most definitely want him dead.

On one of these days, he finds a farmhouse of a very jittery couple who agree to let him sleep in the barn, with the conditions that he sleeps in the barn loft and if he’s found, they disavow all knowledge that he was there. He agrees, because he’s exhausted and will sleep in a hay pile if he has to. My grandpa manages to fit all six foot three inches of himself into a feed trough stored upstairs and tries to get some sleep.

However, right when he’s half-snoozing, he hears motors outside and sure enough, here are some very angry officers of mixed Nazi and Vichy make confronting the couple saying someone up the road spotted an American soldier walking this way. They wouldn’t know anything about that, would they? No, of course not.

All the while, my grandpa—now trying to figure out how to either escape the barn unseen or how to fight off six? seven? eight? people at once—freezes up and waits for the inevitable. While he does, a HUGE spider crawls next to his head and onto the loft railing. For one second, he thinks about swatting it away, but that would risk him being seen and killed.

So, instead, he lays there and waits to either fight to the death or get executed in a feed trough. And while he lays there, the spider starts making a huge web on the railing. My grandpa’s transfixed by this thing. He watches her go around and around, building a solid web before plopping herself off to one side and waiting for breakfast. At the same time, the officers finally go into the barn.

My grandpa can hear them searching around, turning over crates and checking animal pens. Then, he hears one say to check the loft.

And then another say, “Don’t bother. Look at the spiderwebs up there. No one’s been there in a while.”

And they leave.

Because my grandpa didn’t swat the spider away and let her build her web, the officers thought no one was there and left him alone. They drive off and my grandpa immediately thanks the farmer couple and hauls ass out of there as soon as he can.

After this, my grandpa refused to kill any spider, and his kids did the same. Because if it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t have lived and would never have had kids or grandkids. So we owe her one.

There’s the man himself. Go grandpa!!

bladester:

sharper-and-bigger:

bard-owl:

The Army of Poland employed a brown bear as part of an artillery team in the Second World War. His name was Wojtek (pronounced “voytek”) and he worked in the 22nd Artillery Company.

In spring of 1942, after the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, thousands of Polish citizens and elements of the Polish military were deported from Soviet territory. They journeyed through Iran to British Palestine.

Along the way, they encountered an Iranian boy with an orphaned bear cub. According to the boy, the cub’s mother had been killed by hunters. The teenage neice of a Polish general convinced an officer to buy the bear cub, which they nursed back to health and eventually made their mascot.

The bear was trained to perform a military salute, cuddle with soldiers on cold nights, and even march with them by standing on his back legs. He copied the soldiers in every way, even attempting to smoke cigarettes (he usually just ate them).

When the Polish army finally reunited with allied forces, they were assigned to join the invasion of Italy alongside the British 8th Army. However, the transport ships banned all pets and mascot animals.

The Poles refused to leave Wojtek, and got around the rule by drafting the bear into the army as a legally recognized soldier. He had his own personal records files, his own paycheck, his own dogtag ID number, and even held the rank of Private.

It wasn’t symbolic, either. Private Wojtek actually participated in combat at the Battle of Monte Casino by carrying 100-pound crates full of artillery shells. It was a job that normal required four men, but Wojtek did it alone and perfectly, never dropping a single shell. His actions kept the artillery barrage well supplied until Allied forces finally seized the fortified mountaintop from Nazi paratroopers.

In recognition of his excellent performance, Private Wojtek was promoted to Corporal Wojtek and the 22nd Artillery Company made their flag the image of a bear lifting an artillery shell. They still use that flag today.

After the war, Corporal Wojtek retired to the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland, where he was frequently visited by fellow Polish veterans, who game him cigarettes just like old times. He enjoyed a long and happy life, weighing over 1,000 pounds as any successful brown bear should. There are several memorials in his honor, both in Poland and Scotland.

laxsara-deactivated20210802:

laxsara-deactivated20210802:

the meaning of life is summed up in the story elmer bendiner tells about how when he was a pilot the second world war, his plane was hit with a barrage of anti-aircraft fire from the nazi forces but the crew survived. and how everyone was saying it was a miracle until they investigated the shells that got in the fuselage and found there was no explosive charges in any of them. in one they found a note scribbled in czech, written by the person who had been forced to manufacture the shells, and it just said ‘this is all we can do for you now’.

every time i see someone acting tough online about how harm reduction is pointless and in some convoluted way worse than doing nothing i think about that person in some soul-destroying nazi factory in occupied czechoslovakia removing all of the explosive charges from their anti-aircraft shells and writing a note that they must have known would probably never be read, just to say ‘this is all we can do for you, and we’re going to do it’. they are trying to make us kill you and we refuse. i do think that maybe it’s all going to be okay.

localbadgirl:

16 May, Romani Day of Resistance.

Romani are usually excluded whenever the topic of the Holocaust/WW2 comes up, so it’s not all too surprising that the Romani Day of Resistance is very unknown to the majority. But it should be celebrated and embraced since it represents a change in the way Romani culture and identity appear in public space - where a history of resistance replaces a history of oppression:

• On 15 May 1944, the underground resistance movement in the Auschwitz, Birkenau concentration camp BIIe warned the Roma that the SS guards were planning to round up the nearly 6,000 Roma and Sinti prisoners and send them to the gas chambers. 
  
• On the morning of 16 May, the Romani prisoners did not show up for the usual morning roll call and ceased cooperating with the SS guards.
• The Roma barricaded themselves into their shanties. They had broken into an equipment warehouse and armed themselves with hammers, pickaxes and shovels, taking apart the wooden sections of the bunks they slept on to make wooden stakes. 
• When the SS guards approached the area, they were met with armed resistance from the inmates. 
• The prisoners forced the guards into retreat, and though some prisoners were shot that night, the act of resistance allowed the Roma and Sinti prisoners to put off execution for several more months.
• The SS were in shock because they had completely failed to anticipate this resistance. Concerned they might lose more men and that the uprising might spread to other parts of Auschwitz, they retreated from camp BIIe.
  
• No Roma died in the gas chambers that day. The Nazis subsequently put the prisoners of BIIe on a starvation diet.
• Later, on 23 May 1944 the Nazis moved 1,500 of the strongest Romani prisoners to Auschwitz I, many of whom were then sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.
• On 25 May 1944, 82 Romani men were transported to the Flossenburg concentration camp and 144 young Romani women were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.  
• Less than 3,000 Romani prisoners remained in the family camp at BIIe, most of them children.
• On 2 August 1944, the Nazis gassed all the remaining Romani prisoners to death in gas chamber V, although the Roma fought back on that dark night as well.

In Hungary the 2nd of August was designated in 2005 by the Parliament as “Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day”, yet most European countries make no or insufficient mention of the Roma victims in their official position regarding the Holocaust. 

Roma are still misrepresented by stereotypes that overshadow our culture and real identity and it should be needless to say that Europe should put some effort on making the Roma genocide widely known and recognized, to serve as a counterforce to the increasingly violent rhetoric and action against the Roma because and through them. Yet it does not seem like anything like that will happen any time soon. 

& Yes, please reblog this to make at least some of our history known.