Awesome stuff you see on the internet
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@r-l said in Awesome stuff you see on the internet:
@victor-meldrew odd choice, but then my car is called Steve Coogan.
Because you have trouble keeping your car away from hookers and illicit substances?
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@mn5 said in Awesome stuff you see on the internet:
Get a load of that! At least he knows his station...
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Two men not to be forgotten:
At the heart of the story is Zwartendijk and the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who improvised an improbable escape route from Lithuania to the Japanese port of Tsuruga and beyond. Over 10 frantic days in the summer of 1940, the two men issued “visas” to 2,139 people. Researchers estimate 6,000 to 10,000 may have escaped, as women and children often travelled on male relatives’ documents.
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Yet, long after the war, when the scale of the Holocaust was well known, Zwartendijk was never feted. In 1964, he was even reprimanded by the Dutch foreign ministry after a newspaper report about the mysterious “Angel of Curaçao” emerged. Brokken suggests that Zwartendijk’s heroism may have shamed his contemporaries.
Zwartendijk was furious about the reprimand, but he was tormented by not knowing how many had escaped on his Curaçao visas. In later years, in failing health, he never stopped asking what became of the people who had stood before him in that light-brown panelled office in Kaunas. His son thinks his father feared none had made it beyond Siberia. “He must have thought that most of these people perished. He must have been worried that he sent them to their deaths.”
In 1976, researchers assessed that 95% of Jewish refugees with Zwartendijk’s papers survived the war. The news arrived at the Zwartendijk house the day after Jan’s funeral.
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Partial quotes from:
Unsung hero: how ‘Mr Radio Philips’ helped thousands flee the Nazis
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Thanks for posting that - some people are truly astonishing human beings.
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@daffy-jaffy perhaps I rolled out of bed the wrong way today, but what's amazing about that? Other than the belief he has that no good deed should go unheard of on the internet?
