Six on WW II [Part Two]: The War That Started 80 Years Ago Wouldn't Happen Today. We Can Still Learn From It; The Ardeatine Caves Massacre - A war crime that was hidden for 10 years and still unpunished; The Righteous Mayor of Vibraye; Robert Fisk, H
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And please don't forget to check out the pertinent images attached to every post
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"Conflict between China — an ancient empire then suffering from a long decline — and Japan, an island nation that had decided to modernize in the 1860s, had begun in 1894 when Japan attacked China and also secured part of Korea and Taiwan. It had continued during the First World War and afterwards. The Japanese sought full equality with the great powers of the West — especially after defeating Russia in 1904-5 — and by the 1930s were claiming a special role as the leader of Asia. In 1931 they had seized Manchuria, and had begun extending their influence into China. Meanwhile, in China, a new political movement, the Kuomintang, had put an end to the Chinese empire and tried to unify the country under Chiang Kai-shek.
After the First World War, the western powers, led by Britain and the United States, had endorsed the idea of a free, independent and unified China, but Chiang had not really been able to establish such a state. Meanwhile, the Japanese in 1937 had increased their troop presence around Beijing. With no clear boundaries, Chinese and Japanese troops were bound to clash, as they did early in the morning of July 8, 1937. While the initial clash was insignificant, both sides turned it into a test of strength, and full-scale war broke out by the end of the month."
Cold Blood in Caves
Before World War II, the Ardeatine Caves were exploited for a volcanic rock used in cement production. But on March 24, 1944, production had long since ceased. On that day, several trucks with prisoners were brought there — a total of 335 Italians, the youngest of whom was only 15 years old.
In the case of the Ardeatine Caves massacre, the initiative to leave the incident behind came from the Italian government. The first attempts to see the Nazi crimes punished were abandoned fairly quickly. Many of those to be tried lived in post-war Germany, but the Christian Democrats who ran the Italian government wanted to avoid a scandal over extradition requests. As one Italian diplomat put it:
“the day the first German murderer is extradited, there will be a wave of protests in countries demanding the extradition of Italian criminals.”
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"Huguette had heard one story about this mayor from her brother: that he once ran all the way to the farm where their parents were hidden to warn them that the Germans were looking for them. But she’d had no inkling that this local official, who also ran the village grocery, had orchestrated an underground operation that sheltered not just the Fajwelewiczes but some two dozen other Jewish refugees. (Evidently, Huguette had been too young to recall being assembled for the photograph that appears at the head of this article.)
The man’s name was Aristide Gasnier. He’d already been mayor for fifteen years and was nearly seventy when the occupation began, in 1940. No doubt, this length of service gave Gasnier the moral authority in the community to carry out his bold conspiracy against the occupiers; even the local gendarmerie went along with it. Gasnier ensured that the hideaways got food tokens, and issued them with new identity papers—Huguette learned that hers listed her “occupation” as schoolgirl—removing the word “Jew” and, where necessary, changing telltale patronymics such as Zilberbaum to a more French-sounding “Vilberbaun.”
It was an extraordinary undertaking. I found a reference in The New York Times to a village named Pontlevoy, not far away in the Loire Valley, where a Resistance cell run by a local restaurateur had tried to do the same thing. Four men were caught by the Gestapo, deported to the camps, and killed. Over the four-year occupation, Gasnier received several “denunciations” from locals hostile to the refugees or those sheltering them. When he got a letter like this, he tossed it in the trash.
That last detail appears in Aristide Gasnier’s citation from the French Committee for Yad Vashem, the Israel-based Holocaust Remembrance Center. For, in 2006, the mayor of Vibraye was posthumously named one of the “Righteous Among the Nations,” Yad Vashem’s official honor for gentiles who aided Jews in World War II. For Huguette, to learn at last—and in these times—that her family’s escape was not just a random act of kindness from a couple of strangers but a concerted act of communal resistance has been deeply heartening.
“This [moment in US history] is maybe the worst period of time I’ve known since I was a child,” she said. “This is why finding out that example of goodness among the people of Vibraye is such a solace.”
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