Dr. Mircea, Barefoot Doctor Part III

Dr. Mircea in Poland

Photo: Private collection

In the spring of 1964 Dr. Mircea received the much sought-after invitation for a two-year post graduate ear nose and throat (ENT) fellowship in Warsaw, Poland. The nasty treatment at the Bucharest airport by armed guards, including confiscation of college photos as “security threat” because “the enemy of the communist regime must not know what the entrance to the university looks like,” did not dampen his spirit and elation to finally leave the oppression of communism behind.

The two-year surgical training included abdominal surgery and ENT, followed by three years of brief solo practice, government work, and part-time ENT work at the famous Alfa Clinic on the elegant Nowy Swiat Street in Warsaw. In the five years Dr. Mircea spent in the Polish healthcare system (1964-1969), he “never met a single male nurse” because of WWII’s massive casualties and male immigration to the west.

Dr. Mircea was fascinated by the basic freedoms that the Polish people enjoyed, even though they were under a communist regime. When compared to the other Iron Curtain countries in Poland:

-          Passports and travel visas were given with relative ease

-          Foreign goods could be purchased with U.S. dollars in stores

-          Owning foreign currency was not a crime

-          Private enterprise was allowed on a limited scale

-          Government’s stores had a variety of products and nobody had to wait in endless food lines

-          Disgruntled citizens expressed dissatisfaction in public without the fear of retribution

-          Religion was allowed and Catholicism practiced

-          No Marxism-Leninism indoctrinating courses were mandated in schools

-          Public transportation was better, very efficient, reliable, and cheap

-          Physicians, dentists, lawyers, and accountants could have their own practices

-          No state censorship prohibited the showing of American movies

-          Jazz clubs cherished American music and celebrated it with annual festivals

-          Private ownership of farmland and real estate was protected

The only Romanian medical practitioner in Poland, Dr. Mircea made the grand sum of $25 per month as an nose and throat specialist during 1966-1969 at a time when the average resident in the west was making $500 per month. He supplemented his income with tour guide stints and as a currency exchange trader, which was legal.

Invited to Paris for a visit by his old Romanian friend Sahak, thirty-year old Aurel embarked on an arduous 850-mile train journey in a second-class compartment, determined to find a post in the free world. He carried his passport and money in a specially made armpit wallet to guard against the famous Parisian pickpockets.

Iron Curtain between East and West Germany

Photo: Dr. Aurel E. Mircea

Of all the borders they had to cross between Poland and France, the real Iron Curtain crossing made a lasting impression on the adventurous and fearless young doctor. He described it, “The most diabolical creation of the postwar Stalinist ideology was a huge concrete wall with observation towers, every three hundred feet. The piece of land on the east side of it, the shoot-and-kill zone, about fifty feet wide was patrolled by uniformed East German guards with their Alsatian dogs on leashes. The steel fence on the western side of the Iron Curtain, twenty feet tall, was electrically charged with 5,000 volts of a deadly current. The whole border looked more menacing than the perimeter of a concentration camp. It would be impossible to penetrate it on foot, or by any other means. It was unmistakably a war zone, the real and most dreaded human barrier designed to keep the people in, and not enemies out.”

He carefully took several pictures of the Iron Curtain walls when the train stopped to change a steam engine to a modern Diesel one. The landscape and homes were drab, poor, and unkempt on the socialist side, cheery on the free western side, with large barns, prosperous-looking homes, well-fed cows, snowy farm fields, and no sign of poverty. The west, as he experienced it over and over from that point on, was “shimmering with the pulse of prosperity and capitalist opulence.”

With a suitcase full of polish sausage and cheese, to last him so that he did not have to buy street food he could not afford, Dr. Mircea arrived in the famous Parisian La Gare de Nord, greeted by his friend Sahak, who took him to a cheap hotel in the vicinity of his modest apartment on Rue de Lafayette, a few blocks from Montmartre and Moulin Rouge.

When his friend Sahak insisted that Aurel should settle in Warsaw and get married, Dr. Mircea explained to him that, although his situation under Polish communism was much better than under Romanian communism, “Socialism, communism, and the likes have severe limits on one’s freedom, from professional to financial point of view. I want to be a free man!” His medical journey is ongoing, but he is not afraid of the “tedious trail in the free world, toward capitalist prosperity.”

Explaining to Sahak that his destination is the land of the free and the home of the brave, he concluded his tirade with, “I have had it with the communist system and the limitations to freedom!”

Fate intervened again. After brief interviews with various African consulates in Paris during which he was more and less rejected immediately, he got lucky and, following an impassionate plea for freedom, he was well received at the South African Consulate. The reassuring vibes he received from the consul felt like he won the lottery.

Bad luck did not dampen his spirit when, having let his guard down in a moment of elation, his unattended hanging coat was pickpocketed on the returning train in La Gare de Nord. He lost his traveling papers, ticket, and passport on his attempted return to his Warsaw medical practice.

Walking miles and miles back and forth to reclaim his stolen identity and to borrow $100 from poor Sahak, dragging four suitcases full of merchandise destined to be sold in Warsaw, penniless, paperless, and hopeless, Dr. Mircea managed to get traveling papers from the French government, valid for a one time use without a passport. Neither the Romanian nor the Polish government were willing to help him, on the contrary, they reproached him for being too careless with pickpockets.

A few months after returning to Warsaw and after receiving a new green Romanian passport, he received an offer as a junior medical officer from the Republic of South Africa, Far East Rand Hospital in Springs, Transvaal Province, for $1,000 a month. The three-year contract paid twice as much as any western resident. No more $25 a month standard medical salary in Poland based on artificial socialist cost of living. His ship of freedom had finally arrived!  

Dr. Mircea in South Africa 

Photo: personal collection

South Africa became Dr. Mircea’s paradise of freedom he’s always dreamed about even in his most dire circumstances. He was now in the world of capitalist opportunity and prosperity. Dazed by the sunshine and the pleasant weather, he found South Africa immaculately clean. His doctor’s quarters, all paid for by the hospital, with its perfectly manicured English gardens took on palatial qualities. He was finally a free man living in Paradise!

But in the real world, nothing is perfect, the segregated Apartheid society separated blacks and whites in neighborhoods and in hospitals. The black people had their own Bantu-only hospital section and it offered Dr. Mircea the opportunity to practice varied surgical procedures. The Bantu did not trust the South African whites but, as a foreign doctor labeled as a non-discriminating person, Dr. Mircea became a medical magnet.

His fortunes improved, he bought his first car and appliances he’s never owned in Romania, opened a bank account, and eventually rented his first luxurious apartment. He met his future wife, Zona, in a music store, trying to find the name of a beloved song he had heard on radio, It Must Be Him.

In the Land of the Boers, he found the love of his life, the petite blonde Zona Visser, a famous South African recording star from the Springs. After a long courtship, they married in the South African Summer of 1973 on Zona’s birthday, February 26. Their marriage produced two daughters, Oltea and Calina.

His financial fortunes much improved, Dr. Mircea was able to sponsor and bring his mother (who defected) and one sister’s family to South Africa while the communists kept the rest of his family. His dad had to divorce his mom and marry someone else quickly in order to escape the Romanian gulag.

Among the many friends he made in South Africa, meeting Romania’s former monarch, exiled King Michael I and his wife Queen Ana, on a visit in Johannesburg to spread the Gospel of Peace, was most memorable.

The political instability in South Africa grew by 1976. During the infamous Soweto riots, Dr. Mircea’s office was closed for three days and patients trickled in with wounds and injuries from riots. Nurses were uncomfortable working for a white man.

Communist agitators abounded from the Kremlin, Cuba, and China. “All the leftist movements and communist-dominated organizations reared their ugly heads from the bush and started to rattle their sabers,” wrote Dr. Mircea. In the U.S., Jimmy Carter, the potato liberal, became president.

An unpleasant encounter one day with a black activist who posed as a patient shook Dr. Mircea to the core, opening the wounds of fear that “Marxism was alive and well, on a continuous march all over the world and that South Africa was not immune to it. The activist had said, “We like you for what you are doing for our black brothers and sisters. But we’ll soon take over this country and there will be no place for white people in South Africa.”

Dr. Mircea thought, “I’m starting to see the Dark Continent, without the benefits of the capitalist light!” After a brief visit from the SASS (South Africa Secret Service) warning him about the dangers to his life and his family’s, he decided to move everybody to America.

The agent had told him, “Carjacking, killing older family members, hurting your children and many more acts of violence could be unleashed upon you, by the local tsotsies. There is no shortage of them, with the fall of the Portuguese Empire and the infiltration of the subcontinent by millions of communists from China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. Gaborone, two-hundred miles away, has the largest KGB contingent outside of Kremlin.”

In the eight years that he practiced in South Africa, Dr. Mircea built a good practice among the Bantu people, acquired more surgical experience, built a family, had two daughters whom he can rightfully call African American as they were born in South Africa and raised in America, and helped part of his Romanian family escape communism.

As violence escalated in Johannesburg, and after having had their family car stolen and being shot at with an AK-47 from an overpass bridge Dr. Mircea was convinced more than ever that he had to move to America. A chance brochure advertising medical practices for foreign doctors in Texas, with an ECFMG certificate which he had, and a valid Green Card, was the turning point in the future of his family.

The American consul Aurel had an audience with, told him that, because none of the Romanian immigration quotas had been used since 1950, 40,000 unused Green Cards were at his disposal. In two days’ time, Dr. Mircea delivered all the necessary documents to the Embassy: health tests to prove that his family had no communicable diseases, proof of financial support, the physical address of a jazz buddy from his Poland days, his medical certification, birth certificates, and passports.

The long medical journey for Dr. Mircea was far from over but the final destination became clear, Pasadena General Hospital in Texas. The Bantu practice he had created on McIntyre Street in Jeppestown district of Johannesburg is, to this day, a thriving practice as seen on Google Camera, fifty years later. “It has the same size and color, protective steel bars and doors as it did when I have sold it to a Rhodesian doctor in the summer of 1977. The address is immortalized on my South African Medical and Dental Council’s Certificate of Status, dating February 11, 1969,” wrote Dr. Mircea.

Dr. Mircea overcame all odds and finally landed in his beloved namesake, AMERICA, a reward for his hard work and determination to escape communism and a huge gain for Texas – they got a well-trained and seasoned international physician like no other.

His remuneration was the stratospheric salary of $72,000 a year, rent-free and fully equipped medical office for two years, paid full-time staff for one year, free fully paid relocation expenses from South Africa for the whole family, and fully paid Texas licensure for two years.

All financial rewards for Dr. Aurel E. Mircea paled in comparison with the joy both he and his wife experienced breathing the freedom air of Texas in the year 1977, when he finally reached the dreamed destination of a medical journey decades in the making.

The Medical Journey of Dr. Mircea

Photo courtesy of 

Dr. Aurel Emilian Mircea

Dr. Aurel Emilian Mircea’s medical journey started in 1961 Socialist Republic of Romania and took “20,000 miles and 50 years to complete.” He crossed numerous countries and three continents. He should be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the only Romanian licensed doctor who had practiced medicine on three continents, Europe, Africa, and North America and in four countries, Romania, Poland, South Africa, and the United States.

On his journey, Dr. Mircea had pursued and finally reached in 1977 the American Dream through socialist country after socialist country until he found the state of Texas, in the land of the free and home of the brave, his last stop.

Now in his eighties, Dr. Mircea remembers his graduation in September 1961 from the Carol Davila College of Medicine in Bucharest, Romania. Forced by the socialist regime to practice medicine for three years in a village, as payment for the free socialist education he received, he joined the “rebellious Barefoot Doctors” brigade. Some of his colleagues refused the assignment and were forced to give up medicine, working as taxi drivers and waiters – the blue-collar salary was higher and much less responsibility.

But Dr. Mircea chose a double life – doctor by day and professional musician by night. Playing trumpet in a jazz band earned him more income than physicians earned and was able to be in contact with foreign tourists even though the socialists controlled by the Communist Party forbade any contact with foreign nationals.

As a teenager, his bleak life in a decaying apartment complex revolved around standing in long lines to find food and sneaking around the countrywide secret police that monitored every individual’s movement in public places, at home, at school, and controlling private life. Learning to function in whispering conversations, he was able to avoid operators listening on phone calls but not the full-time informers who reported on the comings and goings of everyone.

Ninety-five percent of the population was oppressed by five percent of the ruling class, party apparatchiks, and the unelected class of oligarchs. “The promotion of the utopian socialism, the daily school indoctrination with compulsory study of Russian language and Marxist ideology made us all an unwilling bunch of mind-numbed robots.”

Teenagers, upon reaching maturity, accepted their destiny and the demands made by the communist commissars. Resigned to their fate, all were forced to march from high school grounds to the Dear Leader’s parade grounds and shout slogans nobody believed to be true, enforcing the deep-seated hatred of communism. “The enormous risk of repercussions or incarceration, by manifesting any sign of disapproval with the regime, in public places held us into a submissive state of mind.”

The involuntary volunteerism that I was subjected to in high school twenty-five years later when we had to harvest crops, was much harder for Dr. Mircea. He had to work as forced volunteers on government construction sites from seventh grade until he graduated from high school in the summer of 1953. Students passed along bricks, from hand to hand, or were ordered to carry heavy buckets of mixed concrete up shaky scaffolding. There was no such thing as OSHA protection when the communists ran everything. Who was there to complain to or sue?

A young Aurel E. Mircea helped build the new and decrepit Soviet-style concrete apartments with poor electricity, bad drainage, unsafe passages, elevators that never worked, open walls, open electrical wiring, and unfinished balconies. Each resident was entitled to only 100 ft of living space, a miserable life in the new Socialist equality for all. Sadly, many historical buildings and Orthodox Churches had to be bulldozed in order to make room for the Soviet style apartment blocks made of crumbling concrete poured in a hurry with reinforcing iron bars.

During 1944-1950 Aurel Mircea’s family of five had to undergo six punishing reforms of equality for the collective good:

1.       The regime nationalized all private land and homes, making the population subservient to the new communist regime.

2.       All firearms were confiscated, making ownership of any weapon an offense punishable by prison.

3.       Gold, cameras, typewriters, sewing machines, telephones, Bibles, and other valuables were confiscated.

4.       Gangs of secret police thugs invaded their home without a warrant and took their family car.

5.       Old currency was canceled, new currency was issued, each family was only allowed to have one month of income.

6.       The new living space law relocated their family of five into one room, 400 square feet, sharing bathroom and kitchen with two other families.

High schools were infiltrated by communist commissars tasked to spread the Marxist ideology. They were indoctrinated and had to study Russian, Darwinism, Soviet Union’s history, Scientific Socialism, and Marxism-Leninism. Any intellectual, professional, person of means with a nice apartment was labeled Enemy of the People.

Mircea never became Lenin and Stalin’s Useful Idiot, he unwashed his brain of Marxism-Leninism and Dialectic Materialism by reading prohibited books, and learning the truth about the world from his uncle Constantin who had served a long and heavy jail sentence for being the Forestry Minister under the royal government before the communists took power and for having visited America. The inhumane socialist dogma never took root in Mircea’s mind, thoughts of freedom resided there always. After all, his scrambled name, A. Mircea, was AMERICA.

The communists reduced education from twelve years to ten. “The communist goal was to produce less educated people and more subservient factory workers. It was the goal of the Proletarian Paradise to have a huge class of Useful Idiots, as Stalin defined them: subservient people who want handouts, free healthcare, cheap food and housing.”

Children of the proletariat class (blue collar workers) received ten full points on the social college admission score, a sort of “bourgeois is evil” type of Affirmative Action. The social score only awarded five points to applicants from intellectual families and ten points to applicants from a blue-collar family. However, Aurel, the son of intellectuals, still managed to earn a spot in medical school.

With good test scores, luck, and giving “baksheesh” (bribery) to an old professor of infectious diseases and admission screener, who changed his family data to read that he was the son of a carpenter, Aurel had beaten the odds and was now part of the freshman class at the new Faculty of Public Health and Hygiene in Bucharest, established by the communist regime as the fourth branch of the Carol Davila Medical School to train doctors for “urban cleanliness.”

Aurel thought the Marxist indoctrination would stop in college but he was wrong. Each medical student was assigned to a group of twenty which had an “invisible” informer to the Communist Party. Their specific informer was not so invisible. Comrade Ghiorghi, an older communist commissar, was almost twenty years older, hailing from a rural primary school, with seven years of basic education, no high school, and no college entrance exam.

Comrade Ghiorghi was a “persecuted peasant, a member of the Communist Party, a devout Stalinist, and a cripple. Both his hands had the fingertips amputated by a new, Soviet-made thresher machine.” He was reporting everything the other students in the group said and did.

Comrade Ghiorghi Preda, the medical student communist stooge, never showed up for exams during the six years of college, never took notes during class, never showed up for written or oral exams, always took a roll call, pacing the amphitheater during daily classes, the perfect spy for the Communist Party. He received a diploma just like everybody else, landed a bureaucratic job with the Ministry of Health, never touching a patient, received a free apartment and a personal car, a Dacia. Until his retirement, he remained an employee of the Healthcare department in Bucharest – taking full advantage of his communist activist privilege.

Comrade Ghiorghi was one of the many commissars, trained agitators at all universities in Bucharest, architecture, polytechnic, economic, medical schools, arresting students during the student protests when they pelted the invading Soviet tanks in 1957. During the Hungarian Uprising and the Spring Prague, these commissars devastated the student communities – thousands were arrested, and some were deported to the Siberian gulag, never showing up again for class and their families never knew where they disappeared.

Comrade Preda was so hated by his medical school colleagues that, when the Carol Davila School of Medicine and Pharmacy 50-year class reunion took place in the fall of 2011 in Bucharest, a few who still remembered him and hated his guts, grabbed him and threw him out into the corridor.

For the next six years the study of Marxism-Leninism, Russian language, Darwinism, Dialectic Materialism, Scientific Socialism and other useless indoctrinating subjects continued. Students learned how to cheat and pass these Useful Idiot-classes while concentrating on medicine and science.

A classmate, Valeria, a Jewish girl, had great aspirations to move to Tel Aviv, taking advantage of the Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Bloc. Each émigré was bought and relocated to the promised land by the Prime Minister at the time, Davin Ben-Gurion. Nobody knew exactly how much was paid to the communist state per émigré, but Dr. Mircea alleges that the sum of $10,000 was the ransom paid for each Jewish person, money which “went straight to a secret bank account in Switzerland, for the use of the Politburo members and their international terrorist organizations.”

Medical school commissars brought many medical students on stage in front of the entire student body and made them confess and renounce their religious affiliations, the right to protest (many labor camps were packed with students who participated in anti-Soviet protests, never to be seen again), or denounce their parents for their illicit commercial trading and bartering done out of the necessity to survive.

By his fourth year of medical school, filled with clinical and practical courses in major hospitals and clinics, Aurel became a professional jazz musician, playing the trumpet. Mixing with gypsies, Jewish artists, Hungarian musicians, Italian singers, and a few German musicians, Aurel had no trouble getting weekend gigs in “dancing bombs.”

Government-owned basements in high rise buildings which had been assigned as bomb shelters during the war became dancing halls, making money for the starving musicians and for the government. The dancing halls became known as “bombs.” Aurel made more money on weekends playing trumpet by ear than most doctors working in the communist system made in a month.

Summers were spent on the Black Sea Riviera, Eforie Nord, playing in dancing halls and nightclubs. The tips and the excellent payroll, three times the meager salary of a physician, made them enough money to last a year. They received free modest accommodations, food, and free bus and train transportation. Compared to communist egalitarian payroll standards, the six band players were doing well.

Maestro Joe, the bandleader, and the showbiz agent, Sahak Baichian, connected them with VIP guests and restaurant managers, a steppingstone in their dream to escape communist Romania “by hook or by crook.” Sahak Baichian would eventually escape to Paris, reunited with his Armenian family, after a rich cousin paid a hefty ransom to the Communist government.

Luck intervened again for Aurel when he found a convenient place to complete his summer internship requirements for medical school graduation. He was assigned to the director of the Astoria Hotel and Spa in Eforie Nord where he was making money with his trumpet at night and helping people four hours a day with their rheumatism and psoriasis. His boarding was free with his jazz band and the Dean’s office was more than happy to assign him where they did not have to provide accommodations.

TO BE CONTINUED

They Love Globalism and I Know Why

Wladyslaw Szpilman
Photo: Wikipedia

I was seated recently at a table of educated Romanians, late twenties and early thirties, lawyers, businessmen, teachers, engineers, doctors, and lobbyists for various globalist non-profits in D.C.

We were celebrating the success of Romanian-Americans, a diaspora composed of individuals who belonged to my generation that escaped communism and others who were recent arrivals and successful entrepreneurs, people who won the citizenship lottery, or remained in the U.S., following their education in Ivy League schools.

Romanians are generally very smart and make exceptional students – it is easy for them to get an education abroad, especially in the U.S., on full merit scholarships.

I watched and listened to my interlocutors speak with reverence about socialism, communism, and the need to have a communist global government and global citizenship in order to promote the rights and freedoms of all people, no matter where they live.

These young people have not experienced the tragedy of having to grow up under communism; they only knew what was taught to them by teachers and books written by academic socialists. By the time Ceausescu’s tyrannical regime was gone, they were small children, babies, or not yet born.

Their parents chose to shelter them from the horrors of communist life; they grew up in a relative free and abundant life. Democracy to them was how to make a quick enterprise at the expense of generous grants and investors. Opportunity knocked very hard and they responded quickly – adaptation of the fittest.

Grandparents perhaps spoke with nostalgia about the times when they were paid so little and had no freedoms but a cement roof was assured over their heads and a stale loaf of bread on the table.

The new crony capitalism and politically-corrupt “free” society that ignored the elderly and their plight of continued poverty scared their grandparents so much that they wanted the welfare safety of socialism back.

“Yes, we are free now to say whatever we want but nobody listens, nobody pays attention to us,” said one eighty-something lady I interviewed on my last trip.

I listened to one teacher from California who was bemoaning the fact that she was going to miss her favorite CNN personality, Fareed Zacharias. I really had to bite my tongue into silence.

I can understand how these young people have been brainwashed into globalism by the western academia and by their lack of a reference point to the suffering that their families had to endure for decades under Soviet Marxism and the leadership of the “Maverick” Ceausescu who brought his people to the brink of disaster.

It is for this reason that Romania had such a hard time catching up with other nations that were former Soviet satellites under the Iron Curtain. Most of these countries had better living conditions for their people and amassed huge debts to the west that were eventually forgiven once communism “fell” in 1989.

Romania’s “Maverick” president, Ceausescu, paid back every cent to the west by stealing as much food that he could possibly steal before starving his people to death in the streets. When communism fell, Romania owed precious little to the west, there was negligible debt to be forgiven. But the people’s standard of living was so low, and the infrastructure so poor, they had a much harder road to catch up to prosperity.

Young people, I learned, think that stories of starvation and man’s inhumanity to man are just stories, nobody in his right mind would mistreat their fellow man. Life is just a bowl of cherries, there are no pits inside. Besides, history and truth have been greatly sanitized.

My breakfast under communism, almost every day, was a piece of dark bread with prune jam made by grandma and the occasional butter, if we were lucky to find any in the perennially empty “laptaria,”(dairy shop) where we had to stand in line as early as we could, even though the store did not open until 6 a.m. The line would wind around the block and there was never enough milk, butter, or cheese delivered to satisfy all the customers waiting.

Socialism, like you see in the today’s starved Venezuela, is not very good at basic economics and planning based on supply and demand. Socialists are good at propaganda and lies and centralized control of the population.

Prunes were plentiful to make jam but sugar was a different story. Grandma, like any other shopper, was entitled to only so much sugar a month on rationing cards. We all pooled the rationed sugar and grandma was able to make prune or sour cherry jam for everybody.

The scene in the 2002 Polansky movie, The Pianist, is fascinating and highly emotional in many ways, not the least of which is the utter joy of tasting something again that seemed impossible to find. In some ways it reminds me how I felt when I opened the first jar of prune marmalade or jam of the season. On my last visit, I actually brought back with me four sealed jars made by cousin Ana.

Szpilman, the pianist in the movie, hiding from the Nazis in the attic of a bombed-out house, is discovered one day by an SS officer while he is desperately trying to open a can of pickles with a fireplace poker and a shovel.

Closing his eyes, knowing what his fate was going to be, Szpilman is surprised by the sympathetic SS officer who is interrogating him about his profession, asking him to play something on the piano in the room, instead of killing him.

The beautiful classical music reverberates in the dilapidated and frigid room, while his warm breath and flying fingers on the piano keys are the only evidence that he is still alive, transported on a realm of beauty, joy, and hope that touches all senses and does not need translation in any language.

The officer is listening intently, mesmerized by this “Jude” as he calls him disrespectfully. He leaves and returns unexpectedly with a loaf of bread, a can opener, and a large serving of jam wrapped in waxed paper. As a last gesture of humanity, he hands the “Jude” his warm coat.

Szpilman licks his fingers of jam, with his eyes closed, in total culinary ecstasy. He is someone who barely survived, who had not eaten anything so delicious in many months; the officer wants to know his name so that he can listen to his music on Polish radio later. The Russians were approaching and the liberation of Poland was imminent.

 

House at 223 Niepodlegiosci Avenue

in Warsaw where Captain Hosenfeld found Szpilman

Photo: Wikipedia

 

In this true story, the real Wladyslaw Szpilman, pianist and composer, searched for the one enemy officer who found kindness in his heart and had spared him. Szpilman eventually learned in 1951 the SS officer’s name, Wilm Hosenfeld. Despite his efforts to rescue him, Hosenfeld died in a Stalingrad prison camp in 1952 after seven years of captivity.

I wonder how young people would feel if they were forced to suffer such deprivation of food and freedom in a war or in a tyrannical government like communism, theocracy, or fascism? Would they still be so willing to be multicultural globalists?

Cleaning the Trash and Destruction Left Behind

Photo credit: Polish blogger Kamil Bulonis

As I look at photos posted by witnesses at the Italian/Austrian border, Serbian/Hungarian border, and various train stations around Europe, I am wondering who is going to clean the mountains of trash left behind for miles and miles, as far as the eye can see, by the “refugees” from the Middle East.

“Why has everyone, from everywhere and all at once, decided to start heading towards Europe, five years into the Syrian civil war? This must be a manufactured mass migration.”

Photo credit: Polish blogger Kamil Bulonis

 

It is not what the refugees used on their journey, but what they left behind  unused – discarded Red Cross packaged water, crates of peaches, untouched packaged food, unopened baby diapers, brand new strollers, car seats, toys, and other necessities for someone traveling with a baby. Since these items were left behind, it is obvious that there were no babies among them.

Photo credit: Polish blogger Kamil Bulonis

 

Videos are coming in from various regions showing Muslim men fighting, throwing rocks and chairs at each other, breaking windows, throwing feces, blooding each other’s noses in vicious fights, Shia fighting the Sunnis, the same centuries old senseless religious tribal animosity and hatred.

Refugees have taken over Greek Islands, turning them into a gang-like war zone. Greeks are afraid, hiding in their homes, unable to go to work, or to take their children to school. There is no respect for private property and there is no civilized propriety. They are burning cars and flags, throwing feces at passing cars and at people unfortunate enough to be in the way.

A witness at the Italian Austrian border, a Polish travel blog writer, describes circumstances of horror. “This huge mass of people, but these are absolute savages … Vulgar, throwing bottles, shouting loudly, ‘We want Germany.’… But is Germany a paradise now?”

“I saw how they surrounded a car of an elderly Italian woman, pulled her by her hair out of the car and wanted to drive away in the car. They tried to overturn the bus in which I traveled myself with a group of others. They were throwing feces at us, banging on the doors to force the driver to open them, spat at the windshield. How is this savagery to assimilate in Germany? The bus is now damaged, covered with feces, scratched, with broken windows.” His group had to travel with Italian police escort from then on. He described the entire area as a war zone.

Should we not be compassionate to our fellow Muslims who, by no fault of their own, are invading Europe, fleeing a civil war in Syria? Since they are mostly young men 20-30 years old, would it not make sense that they stayed with their families and fought for their country, protecting their wives, children, and the elderly? Why trek 4,000 km to another continent whose culture they hate and despise, instead of going to the nearby rich Arab and Muslim countries that could have given them familiar shelter and religious accommodations?

Saudi Arabia promised Germany that they would build a mosque for every 100 refugees they take in. Why? Are they trying to colonize Europe with Islam? Why not take these refugees into Saudi Arabia?

As the blogger said, even though he felt subconscious compassion, he was glad the refugees did not choose Poland as their destination. “Poles are not prepared to accept these people culturally or financially.”

Why would refugees seek Germany and Sweden? The Poland MEP, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, of the conservative-liberal party, shed some light during his recent speech at the EU.

“Poland does not have a problem with immigrants. Poland has a problem with immigrants, who under the absurd Dublin regime (the Dublin Regulation), are being forced to stay at concentration camps although they want to escape from Poland to Germany, Austria, and other EU countries. Why? Because Poland has significantly lower social benefits. If we were to abolish social benefits, there wouldn’t be any people coming to Poland and Europe just to live off of handouts. People willing to work are valuable, but they are being sent back to their countries and we take in those unwilling to work. This is a ridiculous policy that results in Europe being flooded with human garbage. Let’s state this clearly: human garbage that does not want to work. America built its power because it took in immigrants willing to work and it does not give any handouts. We are ruining Europe and this policy is the cause of the downfall of Europe.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upTBiQEow94

The Polish MEP is wrong that America is not taking in immigrants that are unwilling to work. We have our share of them on welfare rolls as soon as they get here. There are legal immigrants who are still waiting for the resolution of their cases but southern border illegal jumpers get red carpet treatment at the welfare trough. Social Security offices are jam-packed with illegals, who do not speak English and have no intention of assimilating into our culture.

Angela Tocila, another European blogger, made some interesting points in her September 9, 2015 post. I translate ad litteram or paraphrase parts of her eloquent essay. We all learned to share as kids and to be compassionate. We remember the UNICEF ads begging for a few dollars to feed the starving children of Africa yet they are still dying of hunger.

Most people volunteer because they are Christians and want to help their fellow humans. Liberals volunteer because they are enamored with primitive cultures they view as superior and exploited by evil white men.  But Angela Tocila sees the new wave of European volunteerism to take in Syrian refugees as a new wave of “flower power.”

These “flower power” liberals are “pointing fingers and accusing that we are not in solidarity with the downtrodden on a blind quest with a fixed destination, Germany or nothing. Germany or I am going to throw my wife and child on the train tracks, Germany or death. The “flower power” ilk forces me to respond if I want to take in a family of refugees in my own home, in the name of human solidarity; they are trying to blackmail me into a sentimental guilt trip that I am not sensitive to, and I answer NO.”

She would not take in refugees because she does not have any duty or responsibility towards them. “That does not mean that I am insensitive to the drama of many, to the images of drowned kids whose dads survived miraculously while trying to save their kids. I am not insensitive to the male invasion who uses their women and children as shields, place them on train tracks or throw them through a fence.”  I loathe people who do not bathe, who demand that I cover my arms and legs in their presence, for fear that I might offend their religious obsessions, who would treat me in my own home as half a human being or less. I don’t want to feel obligated to find a shepherd to buy a sheep because I eat pork, beef, beans with smoked pork, or stuffed cabbage with pork.” If you stay in my house, you must eat what I eat. I don’t want to enter into a conflict with a male who treats his wife like a rag, while trying to explain to him that she is just as much of a human being as he is. I am agnostic and I would not want to create a prayer space in my own home and to respect a religious ritual foreign to me and to my culture. I would not want to become the victim of the conflict between the Shia family in my home and the Sunni family in my neighbor’s home. Last but not least, I would not take in a refugee family in my home when the conflict was caused by those who finance it and are responsible, the military industrial complex.” But the most compelling argument was, “I don’t want to wake up one morning with my throat slashed because I might be Christian.” https://politicstand.com/nu-nu-adopt-o-familie-de-refugiati/

The liberal do-gooders have moved from adopting starving African children to oppressed Afghani women and girls, to stopping the Darfur genocide caused by Muslims, to now adopting a refugee family from Syria. And the world’s problems seem to get worse while liberals are mum about the slaughter of Christians and Yezidis by ISIS.

Liberal humanitarians will try to run cover and explain benignly why 1,500 Muslims chanting Alahu Akbar, throwing rocks and bottles at police, are rioting at the closed Roszke-Horkos border crossing from Serbia into Hungary.  Hungarian police fired tear gas and water cannons at the refugees as they broke through the make-shift fence. http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/allahu-akbar-migrants-rampage-attack-police/

Germany and the EU are receiving a massive onslaught of militant multi-culturalism which they are ill-prepared to handle. Decades of European multi-culturalism has already been a substantial failure.