The man who walked 4,000 miles from Siberian death camp

Witold Glinski is the last survivor of World War Two’s greatest escape. As he lovingly crafts another willow basket in the shed at his seaside bungalow in Cornwall, it’s hard to believe that this modest man walked 4,000 miles to freedom… all the way from a Siberian prison camp to India...

Witold was a teenager living in the Polish border town of Glabokia when he was arrested with his family by the invading Russians – at the time, in 1939, allies of Hitler.

Separated from his parents, he was taken to Moscow’s notorious Lubianka Prison and, aged just 17, condemned to 25 years hard labour, one among a million-and-a-half Poles sent to Siberia. It might as well have been a death sentence. So, he could either wait to die, or try to get away. Witold began plotting his escape as soon as he arrived, shackled in chains.

He volunteered to work as a lumberjack, and secretly carved signs on the trees, pointing the way to the south, and the free world.

Then he was befriended by the camp commandant’s wife. “She asked me to fix her radio,” he remembers. “She rewarded me with sweet tea and a slice of bread. But the best thing was that, above a desk, there was a map of Asia.”

Already a daring plan was forming as he tried desperately to memorise the details.

But commandant’s wife Maria Uszakof – even after all these years he remembers her name – read his mind. “She told me, ‘You’ll need good clothes and sensible shoes.’ She gave me a parcel of dried meat, new shoes, hand-knitted socks and long underwear.”

At midnight, with a savage blizzard howling around the camp, carrying a haversack that was a blanket tied at the corners, he tunnelled under the wire.

But when he made it through he turned to find six men had silently followed him.

“They were coming out of nowhere, like cockroaches in a bakery,” Witold says.

“I told them, we’ll walk for 20 hours a day, is that agreed? If they didn’t like it, they could sit down and wait for the Russians.

“The weather was too bad for patrols to operate, no animal or human would stick a nose out of the door, so this was our only chance. Our immediate aim was to get out of Russia. The border was 1,600 miles away. I pointed south – ‘That way!’”

The walkers set up a pattern. One man in front, forming a trail through the forest, two at the back sweeping over the footprints with pine branches.

He never discovered much about his comrades. They dared not trust one another. Their relationship was built on silent suspicion, not conversation.

...

Once they found a deer trapped in a ravine. They feasted on it for days afterwards and used pieces of the hide to bind up their thick felt prison boots.

Days before they reached the border with China, they had an encounter which is still vivid in Witold’s memory.

On the path was 18-year-old Kristina Polansk, a terrified young Polish girl who had fled barefoot through the forest from the Russians, who had killed her family and tried to rape her.

“She was very lonely and distressed and when I inspected her foot I knew straight away she had gangrene,” Witold says. “I didn’t want to be saddled with a sick girl, but what could we do?

“I made moccasins for her with the rest of the deer skin, and we carried her on a stretcher of poles with dry grass.

“But every day she got worse. Her leg turned black and the skin swelled and burst, it was terrible to watch.”

They crossed the Trans-Siberian Railway line, pushed on into Mongolia, and there Kristina became ravaged by fever. She shook each of the men’s hands, then closed her eyes and died.

...

The first to die were two of the Polish soldiers. Witold watched them deteriorate and recognised the signs of scurvy.

“They walked more and more slowly, their legs swelled up and they could pull out teeth with their fingers,” he says. “They died on the same day. By the time we had buried the first, the second was almost gone.”

The two men had always walked side by side. Now they were laid side by side in graves.

As they moved through Tibet and the Himalayas, they helped out on farms in return for food and shelter. But in the climb, the next man perished – another of the Polish soldiers, who stood on a ledge that crumbled under him.

In the final two weeks of their march, Witold had become ill and weak, and he can remember only snatches of images.

...

mirror.co.uk

Anthony Esolen, at Inside Catholic:

"History is bunk," said Henry Ford, as he set about destroying a way of life that rewarded craftsmanship and thrift. "Education," said the great American flattener of our schools, John Dewey, "[must] undermine and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages," including, as far as he was concerned, the hoary old prejudices of religion. Neither Ford nor Dewey was much of a thinker. But we did not need them to tell us that we owed nothing to the past. We required no encouragement to forget. We have been doing that ever since Eve forgot the multitudinous blessings of God and ate of the single forbidden fruit.

...

Take Ford's quote, and replace "history" with "tradition," or "the faith expressed in the first creeds," or "the piety of past ages of Catholics," and you express the sentiment of any number of Catholics, lay and clergy. Do something similar with Dewey's challenge: Tack on the name of a chancery director of religious education, and see if the result raises an eyebrow. So thoroughly have we committed ourselves to amnesia that we now hug ourselves for our betrayal of our heritage, as if it were a virtue.

...

So too, without memory, you have no Church. You may have thousands thronging the coffee shops at Willow Creek, in the market for the latest therapeutic Jesus promo. You may have 20 people in a little niche chapel in the country, where Pastor Joanne turns Christianity into chicken soup for old ladies. But you have no Church.

Dynamite the Catholic Hospitals!

John Zmirak, at Inside Catholic:

Since Catholics who vote primarily on life and other "values" issues are a minority of a minority, we will need to go on relying on the activism of the Protestant Christian Right. Up to now, we've been suspicious of their apparent unconcern for the poor, their small-government bias. We were wrong. We should join them in fighting for the smallest, most localized government possible, and build our institutions to survive without state aid, and in the face of state persecution -- which may be coming. FOCA could force our hospitals to perform abortions or close -- in which case we should not only close them, but dynamite them, simultaneously. Preferably on Guy Fawkes Day.

"How much do you have to hate someone to not proselytize"

He was deeply moved by a man who gave him a Bible. Unfortunately, he still claims that he knows that there is no God.

Even for me, an ultra-loyal Republican...

...the two creepiest words in the English language are "Christian rock."

I've listened to my fair share of it, too—long drive across the country; busted iPod—and there's something so weird about it. It sounds like regular bad music when you first tune in. The lyrics always seem like regular bad music lyrics, too—"I feel your body next to mine/ And that makes my whole life shine"—but after a second or two you realize that they're singing about Jesus, not some girl named Mandy, and the whole thing just seems, well, creepy. Because rock music—and most other forms of entertainment, when you really think about it—is fundamentally about carnal desire. And Jesus, when you really think about it, is fundamentally not.

PC Campus...

...Academia’s Top 10 Abuses of 2008

My favorite is the one involving the "Zimbabwe of American universities." Thank you Father Dease!

PP performs more than 250,000 abortions a year...

...That's a 2, a 5, and four zeros - a figure that accounts, by Allen's reckoning, for somewhere north of $100 million in annual revenue for the organization, and that contrasts rather strikingly with the number 1,414, which is how many women the organization referred to an adoption agency in 2004-2005. (They've since stopped even reporting the adoption-referral number, apparently.)

If you're not against abortion, obviously, there's no reason any of this should bother you: Planned Parenthood's commitment to performing hundreds of thousands of low-cost abortions annually is a feature, not a bug. But telling people who are against abortion that they're "pro-herpes" because they don't support channeling three hundred million public dollars a year to America's largest abortion provider is the equivalent of me accusing a fierce and moralizing anti-theist like Sam Harris of being "anti-education" because he doesn't want his tax dollars being used to, say, fund the Catholic school system.

What do the KGB, David Irving, and Daniel Goldhagen have in common?

You can find the answer here. An excerpt:

Like many Jews in post-war America, "I grew up in a Conservative home hating Pius," he says. But when Krupp received a call from author Dan Kurzman, the tables began to turn.Kurzman needed help with research for his book, A Special Mission: Hitler's Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII. Krupp contacted an archivist at Yad VaShem, who wasn't aware of the story; nor was the Israeli ambassador to the Vatican. "I thought, 'Something's wrong here,'" says Krupp, who was eventually put in touch with a nun in New Jersey. "She told me, 'Not only was he not a Nazi collaborator or an antisemite, but he did more to save more Jews than anyone else,'" Krupp recalls.

The same principles and ideals that move Catholic hospitals to care for the weakest and neediest...

...also move them to oppose abortion, sterilization, and other practices at the juncture of medicine and morality. And at that juncture, Catholic hospitals are running into an increasingly hostile public health establishment with very different values. It is simply incomprehensible to many people in positions of power in both the public and private sectors that the same vision that inspires widely-respected compassionate care would also compel closure or sale of a facility to avoid complicity in providing abortions—yet that is just the difficult choice some Catholic health facilities have faced.

"Health Care wth a Conscience," by James C. Capretta, in The New Atlantis

India. Christians between a Rock...

... and a Hard Place.

Just when you thought the New York Times couldn't get worse...

...it does:

The New York Times opened a profile of Klaus, 67, this week with a quote from a 1980s communist secret agent's report...

The mob were chanting Jihad verses...

...as well as slogans saying "we will demolish the church" and "We sacrifice our blood and souls, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Islam", while the entrapped Christians chanted "Lord have mercy".

'creating primary classrooms where queer sexualities are affirmed and celebrated'

Children as young as five should be taught to understand the pleasures of gay sex, according to leaders of a taxpayer-funded education project...The ambition was revealed in documents prepared for the No Outsiders project run by researchers from universities and backed with £600,000 of public money provided by the Economic and Social Research Council.

etc., etc.

Are Obama Catholics...

...starting to get nervous?

Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Chicago warned of "devastating consequences" to the health care system, insisting Obama could force the closure of all Catholic hospitals in the country. That's a third of all hospitals, providing care in many neighborhoods that are not exactly otherwise overprovided for. It couldn't happen, could it?

You wouldn't think so. Only, I am increasingly convinced that it could. If the Freedom of Choice Act passes Congress, and that's a big if, Obama has promised to sign it the second it hits his desk. (Here he is at a Planned Parenthood Action Fund event in 2007, vowing, "The first thing I'd do as president is, is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That's the first thing I'd do.") Though it's often referred to as a mere codification of Roe, FOCA, as currently drafted, actually goes well beyond that: According to the Senate sponsor of the bill, Barbara Boxer, in a statement on her Web site, FOCA would nullify all existing laws and regulations that limit abortion in any way, up to the time of fetal viability. Laws requiring parental notification and informed consent would be tossed out. While there is strenuous debate among legal experts on the matter, many believe the act would invalidate the freedom-of-conscience laws on the books in 46 states. These are the laws that allow Catholic hospitals and health providers that receive public funds through Medicaid and Medicare to opt out of performing abortions. Without public funds, these health centers couldn't stay open; if forced to do abortions, they would sooner close their doors. Even the prospect of selling the institutions to other providers wouldn't be an option, the bishops have said, because that would constitute "material cooperation with an intrinsic evil."

...

And as I think I have made clear—here, here, here, and here—I have high hopes for President Obama, I was so looking forward to dancing at this party. Yet, although abortion was not a major issue in the race, the pro-life argument that he was the candidate most likely to decrease the need for—and number of—abortions did make it easier for many Catholics to cast their votes for him. I think we should hold him to that commitment now.

At the very moment when Obama and his party have won the trust of so many Catholics who favor at least some limits on abortion, I hope he does not prove them wrong. I hope he does not make a fool out of that nice Doug Kmiec, who led the pro-life charge on his behalf. I hope he does not spit on the rest of us—though I don't take him for the spitting sort—on his way in the door. I hope that his appointment of Ellen Moran, formerly of EMILY's List, as his communications director is followed by the appointment of some equally good Democrats who hold pro-life views. By supporting and signing the current version of FOCA, Obama would reignite the culture war he so deftly sidestepped throughout this campaign. This is a fight he just doesn't need at a moment when there is no shortage of other crises to manage.

The National Catholic Obama Supporter, doing what it does best...

Opponents of the “Freedom of Choice Act” (FOCA), legislation supported by President-elect Obama that would establish a federal statutory right to abortion that goes beyond Roe v. Wade, must act urgently to halt its passage.

Or so the nation’s leading antiabortion advocates would have you believe.
“WE NEED YOUR HELP!!! WE MUST ACT IMMEDIATELY!!!” screams the flier produced by the National Right to Life Committee, formed in 1973 to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Meanwhile, Chicago Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Paprocki said this month that FOCA “could mean discontinuing obstetrics in our hospitals, and we may need to consider taking the drastic step of closing our Catholic hospitals entirely.” Cardinal Francis George, president of the bishops’ conference, agreed, saying that Paprocki’s warning was “well-founded.”

Here’s the reality: FOCA has as much chance of passage as the 0-10 Detroit Lions have of winning the next Super Bowl.

etc., etc., etc.

"It was definitely gruesome..."

...she said. "You could make out what a fetus could look like, tiny feet, lungs, but it didn't look like a person." She knew this abortion was an act that her friend Litty considered tantamount to murder. She herself expected to be very upset. She'd felt that way at her first autopsy, that of a teenage boy who'd shot himself in the head. For weeks, she could not shake the image of the boy. But this was different. She didn't regard the fetus as a person yet. She said she was happy to help the woman: "I feel like I was giving [her] a new lease" on life.

The recipe for economic prosperity?

The Pope's Children is the story of the Irish baby boom that began in the early 1970s and peaked in June of 1980, nine months to the daythat Pope John Paul II visited Dublin. This was the impetus behindIreland's astonishing economic growth.

Sign of bad news to come for any person nine months old or younger?

The director of EMILY'S list (of little people to whack) will be the White House communications director.

Reject credulity: affirm the creed!

In a study released in September, researchers at Baylor University found that adherence to "traditional . . . religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses, communicating with the dead, and astrology." By contrast, those who reject traditional religion - "self-identified theological liberals and the irreligious" - are "far more likely" to believe in superstition and the occult. Or other nonsense: Maher, for example, claims that aspirin is lethal, doubts that the Salk vaccine eradicated polio, and has praised the horse that threw Christopher Reeve.

"Hello Douglas, this is the Pope..."

Is your conscience annoying you about something you've done or failed to do? Don't worry. Unless the Pope has phoned you personally to straighten you out, you haven't really done anything wrong.