Have you been to Budapest recently?
I have never been back to Hungary. One of my cousins who escaped in 1956 did visit with his whole family. I asked him why he did it. “To be at peace with my demons” whatever that means. He and his older sister had disappeared for several days during the revolution and the family was worried. “Where have you been?” “Collecting corpses.”
So, while there seems to be many cases where an individual kindness in war it can be the governments policy to the contrary both during and after conflict.
That is the whole point of my anecdote! Group identity is a terrible thing. It leads to terrible acts like the Holocaust and the Ruanda massacres. Each individual should be valued on his individual merits or lack thereof. The whole idea of the original sin and its derivatives is preposterous! It’s evil!
I’m a holocaust surviver and I have a hard time hating German soldiers. It just so happens that my father was a German soldier, a sergeant, in WWI with a higher rank that Hitler and the recipient of the Iron Cross. Is he to blame for WWI or just a victim of circumstance?
I did often wonder how the most civilized nation on Earth, Brahms, Bach, and Beethoven, could fall to the depth of NAZISM. Then I experienced the Chavez revolution in Venezuela. Civilization is but a thin veneer. Combine poor economic conditions with a silver tongued charismatic leader and you can get to the depths of hell.
If you Americans feel very virtuous, how do you justify the extermination of buffalos to exterminate native Americans?
Never forget the mote and the beam parable!
P.S. Anyone that goes to Budapest must visit the “Shoes” Memorial.
The victims include my nine year old brother.
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+%22Shoes%22+Memorial&…
Denny Schlesinger