Famous Last Words

Death is weird if you think about it. One moment we’re here, the next we’re gone. Different religions have different explanations for what happens next, but none of them answer the questions that really bother me. Will it hurt? Who will I see first? Will I go to the afterlife immediately, or will I linger on Earth for awhile?

Below are five different quotes from people facing death. Feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments.

#1 - Marie-Antoinette

Contrary to her reputation as a spoiled princess, Marie-Antoinette showed remarkable courage in the face of the guillotine. As they led her up onto the execution platform she kept her sorrow veiled. No tears. No screaming. No cursing. All she did was offer an apology to the executioner when she stepped on his foot. “Pardon me, sir, I did not mean to do it.”

#2 - John Adams

Even though he was seven years older, John Adams always said he would outlive his rival, Thomas Jefferson. But by Independence Day of 1826, Adams’ health was failing. As he lay on his deathbed, this final defeat seemed to disquiet him. His last words were “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

Actually, Jefferson had died just a few hours earlier. It's said that the messenger dispatched to carry the news of Adams’ death passed the one bearing the news of Jeffersons’ on the road.

#3 - Emperor Nero

June, 64 AD: with civil war raging in the Empire, times were changing in Rome. Nero, fearing for his life, decided to flee the city. He tried to persuade his bodyguards to accompany him, but they refused. One soldier even taunted him with a line from the Aeneid, saying, “Is it so dreadful a thing to die?”

Nero didn’t like that at all. He went back to his palace and tried to write a speech apologizing to the people for his past atrocities, but didn’t dare deliver it for fear of being torn to pieces on his way to the Forum. Instead Caesar went back to bed, deciding to sort this mess out in the morning.

However, when Nero woke up, the palace was empty.

He ran to his friends’ rooms, but found them vacant. Even the slaves ran away, taking their master’s wealth with them. Despairing, Nero called for a gladiator to finish him off. When nobody answered, he cried, “have I neither friend nor foe?” and ran out as if to throw himself in the river.

#4 - Julius Caesar

Et tu, Brutae? These are commonly thought to be Caesar’s last words as he was stabbed by Brutus. It’s probably one of most popular Latin phrases outside the courthouse--but in reality, Julius probably didn’t say it at all.

Some ancient historians recorded his last words as “Και συ, τεκνον,” a notoriously ambiguous phrase. It could be translated as either “Even you, my son?” or “You’re next, kid.” Not quite as dramatic.

#5 - James D. French

On August 10th, 1966, reporters gathered at Oklahoma State Penitentiary to witness the execution of James D. French. Originally he had been given a life sentence, but after murdering his cellmate, he was condemned to the electric chair.

“How’s this for a headline?” James said to the reporters. “‘French Fries!’”

The guillotine blade believed to have beheaded Marie-Antoinette

Ten Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Church

Every religion has its fanatics. Every religion has its martyrs. Every religion has its quirks, its bright points, its growing pains and skeletons in the closet. Christianity is no different. Below I have listed some of the Church’s forgotten moments and factoids. Hope you find it as interesting as I did.

1. Coffee was condemned by the Church as an invention of Satan until 1600, when Pope Clement VIII sanctioned its consumption, declaring that it was “so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall cheat Satan by baptizing it.”
2. Early Christians were considered incestuous because they called everybody “brother” and “sister.” Even their spouses.
3. Pope Alexander VI had four children whom he publicly acknowledged.
4. In the '90s, many churches condemned Rock and Roll (even Christian Rock and Roll) as satanic. According to christwire.org, each instrument has a corrupting effect upon our youth. The bass, for instance, lulls the listeners into a "false sense of security and easily influenced zombie state," while the guitar "turns child agains parent, friend against ally, and man against God." Biblebelieves.com asks "Are Christians losing the ability to discern the difference between good and evil?" Apparently, yes.
5. Early Christians were believed to have dark initiation ceremonies, such as slaying an infant, covering it in oats to disguise it as a loaf of bread, and then devouring it. Misconceptions like these were common.
6. Peter was crucified upside down.
7. During the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) the Catholic monarchs became paranoid about people secretly practicing Judaism. They encouraged neighbors to spy on each other, watching to see if they engaged in Jewish activities such as abstaining from pork, wearing clean linen on Friday, or lighting candles unusually early.
8. The ichthys (fish) symbol is an acrostic made by the early Christians from the Greek “Iesous Christos Theou Yious Soter,” which is translated as “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”
9. Galileo, a prominent astronomer, was placed under house arrest by the Church because he believed in a heliocentric universe. At the time, the Church only tolerated geocentric beliefs.
10. In 3rd century Gaul, Saint Denis was beheaded by the local pagans for making too many converts. However, according to legend, Denis just picked up his head and continued preaching. He walked on for six miles before finally dropping dead.

So what do you think? Did you know about some of these? If so, which ones?

Children of the Lebensborn Program

It’s 1935, and Germany’s birthrate is nosediving. To Heinrich Himmler, it must have felt like an injustice on nature’s part. He set out to rectify this heinous mistake by establishing the Lebensborn Program, a grand scheme aiming to boost the Aryan population to 120 million. 

Originally the program consisted of several nurseries set up around the Third Reich, safe havens where women could have their children in peace and comfort. For thousands of unwed mothers this seemed like a godsend. It was safe at the nursery. If they had the baby there, nobody would ever find out. All they had to do was pass a racial purity test to get inside.

Himmler encouraged his SS men to father as many children as possible. With the war raging in Europe, they needed new stock to replace war casualties. Thousands were born in Germany alone, and productive women were awarded the Mother’s Cross.

After the babies were born, they were often christened in a special SS ceremony in which a dagger was held over the child and the mother swore allegiance to the Nazi Party. If she didn’t wish to keep the infant, it would be adopted out to an Aryan family.

A girl undergoes testing to see if she is "racially valuable."

As the Nazis advanced into neighboring countries such as Poland, Russia and Ukraine, the Program evolved to include the kidnapping of local children who ‘looked Aryan.’ Nearly 200,000 boys and girls were taken from Poland alone. Some were orphans, but a others were literally torn from their mothers’ arms and shipped to Lebensborn homes.

Upon arrival, the children underwent a series of tests to see if they were “racially valuable.” Those who passed were sent to German boarding schools or to Aryan foster families; those who failed went to concentration camps.

For the “racially valuable” children, this was just the beginning of a strange new life. They were forbidden to speak their native languages and more or less brainwashed into accepting Nazi propaganda. Those who resisted were savagely beaten.

As the Allies made progress into Germany, soldiers began to uncover Lebensborn homes. American troops found 300 children at a clinic in Steinhoering--most of the adults had fled, and the kids were on their own. I’m sure it was a shock to the soldiers. What were they supposed to do with all these babies?

The majority were put up for adoption, some were repatriated to their home countries, and still others refused to leave Germany, having embraced Nazi propaganda. Unfortunately only 25,000 returned to their families.

Kidnapping of a Polish (?) boy

As you might expect, children from Lebensborn clinics have had difficulty fitting in after the War. Caught in the no-man’s-land between the Axis and the Allies, neither side seemed willing to accept them. To the Germans, Lebensborn children were an embarrassment, a reminder of their defeat. The Allied countries condemned them as “German kids,” and many were denied reentry into their home countries.

For the babies born at the clinic, there was often some confusion about the identity of their fathers. Most Lebensborn mothers refused to answer their children’s questions, and the kids had to do a bit of detective work.

"My mother told me my father was a truck driver for the Luftwaffe who had never fired a gun and died in Croatia when he drove over a landmine. She told me she had married him in 1938 on a beautiful sunny day and that they had driven to church in a horse-drawn cart. She said she didn't want to say any more about him because it was too painful," said Guntram Weber, a child from the Lebensborn Program. "But there were no documents and no photos.”

After a bit of digging, Weber discovered that his father was an SS major-general, convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death. However, he had escaped to Argentina and died peacefully.

“From one day to the next I knew my father was a war criminal. He was a man who allowed himself everything. And the SS enabled him to live that way. I assume my mother fell in love with a powerful military man. And he obviously couldn't resist any woman. It gave me a feeling of low self-esteem, of loneliness, of uncertainty.”

Snapshots of WWII

Nagasaki, 20 minutes after the bombing.

Freed Jew holding a Nazi soldier at gunpoint.

Hitler's pants after a failed assassination attempt.

Germans bombing Moscow in 1941

American soldier renames Adolf Hitler Street after the defeat of Germany.

German soldiers put the war on hold to play with a kitten.

The Mona Lisa is returned to its home after being stolen by the Germans in WWII

Little girl sits in the ruins of her bombed house in London.

Outstanding People in History - Witold Pilecki, Part II

 

Auschwitz gate. The sign above it says, "Work makes you free."

Escaping from Auschwitz would not be easy.

The camp was divided into subcamps, and each subcamp was ringed with electric barbed wire. SS guards and attack dogs were stationed every few meters--nobody had any qualms about shooting escapees on sight, regardless of age or gender. Security was so tight that one Commandant said inmates would only be freed through the crematorium chimney.

Thankfully, Witold Pilecki found a gap in their defenses. Auschwitz had a bakery. And the bakery had a back door.

He and a two other members of the resistance, Jan Redzej and Edward Ciesielski, managed to get jobs there. Using a piece of dough they took an imprint of the nut holding the door, then found the appropriate wrench and managed to break out.

Only two SS men were on guard that night. Shots were fired, but no one was hurt. Somebody had cut the phone lines previous to the escape, and there was nothing the Germans could do except watch their prisoners disappear into the night.

“How fast we were running, it is hard to describe,” Pilecki later wrote. “We were tearing the air into rags by quick movements of our hands.”

They kept going until they reached the Vistula River, which is a journey of roughly 529 kilometers. Or 238 miles.

After several days of travel, Pilecki arrived at the Vistula. Boats were docked by shore, secured with chains, which they were able to break off using the same wrench as before. However--this part is a little ambiguous--Pilecki didn’t get on the ship. I suppose they let it float away, so that when the missing boat was reported the Germans would think that they had gone down the Vistula.

Whatever the case, the three continued their trek through the forest.

During the course of their travels, the threesome unwittingly crossed paths with German soldiers. They ran, of course. But Pilecki was shot in the arm. Thankfully they weren’t too far from their final destination. The next morning found them safe inside the home of a fellow inmate’s stepparents.

Everybody dies. It’s just a matter of when and where and why.

After the war, you’d think that Pilecki would settle down with his family. He had survived Auschwitz, for goodness sake. His wife and kids were waiting for him. But when the Soviets invaded Poland he was once again called to serve as an espionage agent. This time, he would be fighting the Polish Communist regime.

Ironic, that he should escape from the Nazis only to be killed by his own countrymen.

Witold Pilecki was captured, tortured, interrogated and finally executed on May 25th, 1948. The Communists censored his name from historical records, and banned his children from higher education. Nobody really knew much about Pilecki until after the collapse of the Berlin wall--but recently he has been receiving some well-deserved recognition.

In 2006 he posthumously received the Order of the White Eagle, the highest possible decoration in Poland. A movie, entitled Operation Auschwitz, is currently in the production stages and several books have been published about him. NPR did a special on Pilecki as well, which you can listen to here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129956107

“Having a beautiful wife and two kids that he loved dearly, he decided to leave them behind and go to a concentration camp in Auschwitz,” said Marek Probosz, the actor who played Pilecki in a Polish film. “Human beings were the most precious thing for Pilecki, especially those who were oppressed, and he would do anything to liberate them. To help them.”

Witold Pilecki and his family.

Outstanding People in History - Witold Pilecki

When I think of Auschwitz, I think of Hell. I think of gas chambers, torture, hangings, starvation. Disease wrought havoc among the prisoners and so many people were slaughtered that the crematoriums were kept running all day. Despite all this, Witold Pilecki wanted to be there.
As a Polish resistance agent, he believed that the information he could gather from inside the concentration camp was vital. Nobody on the outside knew what was taking place in Auschwitz, and he made it his mission to find out.
It proved to be quite easy to get inside. All Pilecki had to do was get himself arrested.

Mugshot of Witold Pilecki

In the beginning, Pilecki though Auschwitz was like any other POW camp. Unpleasant, yes, but a corpse factory? Even Hitler wasn’t that bad, or so the Allies thought. His first clue about the camp’s true purpose was the prisoner’s rations. They were calculated so that each man would only last six weeks. Anyone who lived longer, an SS officer told him, was stealing.
About this time I’m sure Pilecki was thinking, what have I thrown myself into?
No matter. He couldn’t turn back now.
Pilecki set about establishing a clandestine resistance network among the prisoners, seeking to improve living conditions, smuggle information back to the Allies, and arrange escapes. At the beginning, his spy network included only five prisoners; towards the end, it encompassed over a thousand.
In the course of his two-and-a-half years at Auschwitz, Pilecki and his team pulled some incredible stunts in Hitler's backyard. At one point the Germans set up a mailbox for informants to drop tips in; anyone giving away significant information would be rewarded. Pilecki broke into the mailbox, destroyed the most dangerous letters, and replaced them with some of his own to denounce the informants.
Another difficult task that Pilecki faced was removing SS agents. He couldn’t just walk into the mess hall and start shooting--that would only result in his death as well. No, he needed a quieter way. Somebody had the bright idea of exposing them to typhus-carrying lice, and it worked like a charm.
In order to deliver reports back to his superiors, Pilecki had to organize several prison breaks. Perhaps his most successful involved escapees dressed in SS uniforms stealing the camp commander’s car and driving out the front door. A little cocky, but it worked.
In his reports, Pilecki detailed all sorts of aspects about life in Auschwitz. He was the first to mention the gas chambers to the Allies, but this was met with skepticism. Nobody believed that the Germans would trouble themselves to build a gas chamber when they could just shoot the Jews instead. It made no sense, unless you factored in the Nazis’ irrational cruelty, which the rest of the world wasn’t ready to believe yet.
In 1943, the SS started to catch onto the  resistance movement. Several operatives were arrested, and it was decided that it was too dangerous for Pilecki to remain in Auschwitz any longer. So on the night of April 26th, he and two other prisoners planned their escape.

Typical selection process outside a concentration camp.

Witold Pilecki's story is so incredible that I can’t fit it all into one blog post. Sorry to leave you hanging, but I’ll post the second half on Tuesday. In the meanwhile, can you think of another outstanding historical figure that I could do a special on?