text:
Schloss, Eva
German Occupation of Holland and the Frank Family
Betrayal of the Frank Family
Otto Frank and the German Entry into Austria Fleeing Their Homeland and Being a Refugee Life in Amsterdam before the German Occupation Being in Hiding
House to House Searches
Betrayal and Capture
Father Bargains for Elderly Couples Freedom
Sent to Auschwitz Auschwitz
How Gas Chambers Operated
Death Marches and Liberation Being witht he Russian Army after Liberation Returning to Holland After the War Publishing the Diary of Anne Frank Reflections The Loss of So Many People Slowly Losing ther Rights, Deportation, and Going into Hiding
Anti-Semitism in Holland
European Theater of Operations (ETO)
Personal/family relationships\" Ethnic/racial identity Rationing \"Friendships
Personal/family relationships\" \"Ethnic/racial identity
Personal/family relationships Ethnic/racial identity Friendships
Ethnic/racial identity Friendships
Ethnic/racial identity Feelings toward enemies
Personal/family relationships Ethnic/racial identity
Personal/family relationships Ethnic/racial identity Concentration camps Feelings toward enemies Food/mess
Exposure injuries Concentration camps Interactions with superiors
Personal/family relationships Experience with death Exposure injuries Concentration camps Feelings toward enemies
Personal/family relationships Interactions with Allied troops Concentration camps Liberation of concentration camps Food/mess Friendships
Personal/family relationships Interactions with Allied troops Concentration camps Liberation of concentration camps Red Cross Games and entertainment Friendships
Personal/family relationships Feelings toward enemies Liberation of concentration camps Red Cross Friendships
Personal/family relationships Reflections
Personal/family relationships Feelings toward enemies Reflections
Ethnic/racial identity Feelings toward enemies Internment camps
Otto Frank and the German Entry into Austria
Fleeing Their Homeland and Being a Refugee
Life in Amsterdam before the German Occupation
Being in Hiding
Sent to Auschwitz
Death Marches and Liberation
Being witht he Russian Army after Liberation
Returning to Holland After the War
Publishing the Diary of Anne Frank
The Loss of So Many People
Slowly Losing ther Rights, Deportation, and Going into Hiding
Eva Schloss begins by describing what life was like in Holland mid 1940. The German Army marched into Holland and there were 3,000 deaths soon after they arrived. It was very difficult for Jews to live there. There were posters everywhere, newspapers and radio condemning Jews. They had to go to Jewish schools. Jews were not allowed in cinemas, swimming pools, or public transport, and were not allowed to visit Christians. They had to give up their bicycles and radios and begin wearing the yellow star. They lived in fear every day. Once, the Germans came into the Jewish school and arrested everyone, so the children did not come home from school. For two years Schloss lived in fear. Many people received notices and were "called up" to a cinema, a holding place. They were then sent to Germany and killed. Many families went into hiding. This is when the Franks decided to disappear and hide in Otto Frank's office [Annotator's Note: the Frank family including Anne Frank]. In Amsterdam people built deep narrow homes because of the tax. They had an achta-house, a house behind a house. They constructed a bookcase as a secret door. They lived in fear for two years. Two women and two men knew about the family and provided them with food, books, and news. Many went into hiding on this day. The Dutch Resistance was a group the Jews relied on. They hated the Germans. In Holland, they printed the newspapers and later printed new identification cards. With ration cards they could get cigarettes, chocolates, and a new dress. No one could take Jews into hiding if they did not have ration cards from the DR [Annotator's Note: Dutch Resistance]. The Franks could not go shopping, so the couple who bought them food had to leave the city and use the Franks' ration books to not look suspicious. By 1944 meat was unavailable and bread was scarce. Everyone was hungry among the Jews in hiding. Dutch men were put into forced labor camps. Many Dutch people went into hiding. It was hard to find safe hiding places. The Frank family hid for two years, until August 1944, when they were betrayed. It is still not known who betrayed them. Their father came back after the war and tried to find out who it was. They were transported to a holding camp in Holland called Westerbork for a month then they were taken to a concentration camp. They were never told where they were going to go. They and another thousand ended up in Auschwitz. [Annotator's Note: Frank ended up at Bergen-Belsen eventually]. Luckily for everyone Anne wrote a diary for those two years. From the age of 13 to 15 she recorded everything that happened. There was young boy, Peter, whom she fell in love with. She still had a wonderful relationship, which was her last in her short life. Food was difficult to obtain, so people were hungry. One person who lived there was a smoker and could not get cigarettes so he was often in a bad mood. With eight people, they got on each other's nerves. Schloss feels that Anna was opinionated and didn't hide her emotions so she had several quarrels with her mother, and Mrs. Van Daan, and with the dentist with whom she had to share a room.
The only person who returned from the concentration camps was Otto Frank. It is amazing he was able to survive. He became Eva Schloss's stepfather because her mother married Otto and she heard a lot about what life was like in the annex. Schloss says he was an amazing father to Margot and Anna. He became the grandfather to her children and he was wonderful to them. He told them bedtime stories and changed their diapers. While in hiding, Otto Frank educated the girls. He read them Dickens and taught them math and history. Many of Anne's opinions in her diary are on politics and women's rights; all of this she was able to discuss with him. Schloss feels Anne was lucky to hide with such a wonderful person. Growing up in Vienna, Austria, Schloss's family had been there for many generations and was not religious. They were more Austrian than Jewish. She had an extended family; her second cousins were all in the neighborhood. Vienna is a beautiful city with mountains and lakes nearby. Her family went on excursions and picnics, went skiing, went to Italy and to the sea. Life was wonderful. They lived in a big home but moved to a smaller one. Her father inherited a shoe factory from his father. Schloss had great relationships with her brother and parents. This collapsed suddenly when Germany marched into Vienna. She was nine years old. Her parents and grandparents were very anxious and listened to the radio. They were children though, so they did not kno much and thier parents protected them. It changed in March 1938 when the German Army marched into Austria. Hitler promised the German people, and extended it to Austrians, that they would become the biggest empire in Europe. The Austrians loved it. He was welcomed in Austria. He was an Austrian himself. When he came to Vienna in his open car, people stood on the street, shouting "Heil Hitler" and throwing flowers; people had flags with swastikas. Schloss said Jews stayed behind closed windows. Life changed drastically. Her first experience with anti-semitism was when she wanted to play with a school friend who was not Jewish. She went to her home and her mother told her that she was not welcome there anymore and slammed the door in her face. Schloss went home crying. She did not understand. Her mother explained that life was going to be very difficult for them.
Eva Schloss had many Christian friends and nobody really minded what religion one was. Anti-semitism was not open and she had not experienced it at all. They knew Hitler was outside and were very scared. Anti-semitism in Austria was less organized. People knew who the Jews were. There was compulsory religious educatio so the Catholics stayed in the classroom and the Jews would leave the class and were taken to a different classroom for Jewish education. No one minded and it was not a problem. Eventually, the Catholics did not want to sit next to them or be their friends. Schloss's brother got attacked by his friends. The teachers did nothing. Jews' beards were cut. Jews had to clean the pavement. But this wasn't organized. People started to be deported. In late 1938, 1939 and 1940, there were no more Jews. The whole population disappeared. Her family left by then, but she lost many relatives who could not get out. The youngest of her relatives was a cousin of three years old. Her father left for England to try to get visas for his wife and little girl. It was difficult and by the time he got them they had been deported. Schloss's family left [Annotator's Note: left Austria] because of the persecution. They knew of the danger. It had been going on for years and was expected. Her parents planned for their departure. Her father had a shoe factory and in Holland the shoe industry was not doing well. He exported shoes to Holland and had connections. Only half his export money came back to him, he created a bank account with the rest. They had to leave with a little suitcase with small personal items, no jewelry or money. This was a way for her father to go into business. He became a partner with an ailing shoe factory and worked to build up the business there. He was a very good businessman. He did well immediately. He wanted to find a place for them to live first, but did not realize it would become impossible for them to leave. When Schloss wanted to leave they could not get a visa. They had to go to Belgium and cross over illegally, like Mexicans in the United States. As a child, Schloss thought she was being adventurous. She understands that she didn't know the danger, that she could have been shot or deported. It was hard for many to decide. They did not have the courage to start a new life if they were elderly when they knew no one and did not know the language. Schloss states that now [Annotator's Note: current social organizations that help immigrants assimilate in new countries] there is help and advice. At that time, nothing like that was organized so they had to stand on their own two feet. They were living in a small boarding house in Belgium in two rooms; her mother in one, and her brother and her in another. Schloss's mother had no kitchen and did not shop. It was frustrating for her. She did not speak French but her mother and brother did. It was very difficult for her. People in Belgium did not know how to handle a refugee child. They put her in the back of class and took no notice of her. She didn't follow what was going on. No one spoke to her. She became very shy and frustrated. She used to be open and happy but her character changed. She eventually started to make friends once she learned the language. Her father continued to live in Holland and would visit them on weekends. Her only relief was when they were together as a family. On her tenth birthday, she asked if she could have a party and if her friends could come. She made invitations for them. All the girls brought notes from their parents saying they were not allowed to come to her party. Schloss cried. Her mother said, as Jewish refugees, they did not want to know them.
Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland and the Allies declared war in October 1939 [Annotator's Note: Britain and France declared war on Germany in September 1939]. Eva Schloss's father tried to get a visiting permit for them to visit him. He was worried about the borders during the war. They finally got a visa and visited him for three months. Schloss moved to Amsterdam. They lived on a big square called Rembrandtplein. Her father took a furnished apartment. Dutch school and children were different. The Dutch had many refugees by 1940. It was a port so there were many people from different counties; they were used to foreigners. Schloss was happy there. The language is French and Flemish. She could speak a little Dutch so it was not too difficult. They had a nice apartment and she was again with her family. But it did not last long. By May [Annotator's Note: May 1940], the Germans invaded the Netherlands. Schloss has pictures of them on the square before the occupation; children after school would play there. This is how Schloss met Anne Frank. She was one month younger than her. They weren't best friends, because her personality was different than Schloss'. Schloss was a tomboy and not an intellectual. She wasn't into reading. She enjoyed playing baseball with the boys. She was always chosen first on the team. She had confidence. Anne sometimes played but sometimes the girls played separately. They played hop scotch and other girls' games. They'd gossip and talk about boys. Frank was quite jealous that Schloss had boys coming to her house because of her brother, and Anne only had a sister. Anne was very interested in her hairstyles. She changed them often. Another little girl, Suzanne Littleman, was Anne's friend; she was very pretty with long plaits. Hannah also was good friends with them. Schloss had a crush on Suzanne. They lived happily for those months until the Germans invaded Holland. The Dutch did not want to be occupied; they were very independent. Schloss explained that this was why so many Jews tried to get to Holland, because in the First World War, the Germans didn't get there, it was neutral. The Germans occupied Belgium and France. The Dutch flooded their country. They opened the dykes and the German vehicles couldn't enter. The Dutch claimed they were going to flood out the Germans again. But warfare changed this time around. They came with planes and parachutes. They landed behind the waterline and the Dutch were not prepared. They bombed Rotterdam. The Germans warned that if the Dutch did not comply they were going to bomb all their cities. The Dutch royalty fled and the people felt betrayed by this, so an armistice was signed and they marched in. There were no flags displayed in Holland, but there was a big Nazi party there nonetheless. They put Seyss-Inquart [Annotator's Note: Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands] in power. He was a good leader in a way. He organized the Dutch Nazi party. It was very strict and difficult regime for the Dutch and Jewish people. When the Dutch started to form a resistance, two groups emerged; the Dutch Resistance and the Nazis.
Eva Schloss's family's hiding was different. They didn't have an office in Amsterdam that depended on Christian people in the Resistance. They risked their life to take in Jewish people. Schloss feels that those were the brave people, those who took Jews in and helped them. Many people lived in apartments during this time so nobody could to take in four people. Schloss's family had to split up. She stayed with her mother and her father and brother went elsewhere. Her father and brother never went out, only when they had to change hiding places. Her mother and she had fake identification cards made by the Resistance. They were not very good at first but became better later on. Schloss' said she was Christian. They would go out to visit her brother and father. They took a lot of risks. If she would have had to show her ID card she would have been arrested. She was lucky. She had to change hiding locations several times because the Nazis knew the Jews had disappeared and they tried to find them. The Nazis did house searches. They would come with trucks and knock on doors. People had no rights. Schloss compares this with America, stating that if this happened, people would not let them in. But there, they had to let them in or they would shoot them. In most places, Schloss had to have a hiding place within a hiding place. They were staying with a school teacher. She had a little apartment. The second floor had two little rooms and a bathroom. They had those two rooms and her mother slept on the couch. In the bathroom, they created a partisan from the toilet and tiled it, made a trap door so they could sneak in, and put a door with tiles so it wouldn't be noticed. The Dutch Resistance brought in the materials and tiled everything. The men worked late to finish this. By midnight she heard the trucks and the knocking and quickly jumped into the little space. She recalled that she could smell the building materials; the new smell. She could see the little space so it wasn't fool proof. They heard them come up the stairs and Schloss thought the Nazis would know, but somehow they didn't. They heard them walking down the stairs and the door slam. This happened often. After nine months or so, the teacher couldn't take the tension and said they had to move on. In two years, she moved to seven different places. In the last place, they didn't have a hiding place in a hiding place. This was when they were betrayed. The Germans were near the Dutch palace. They had been in the hiding place for about nine months. The woman hiding them started to blackmail her father for more money, for the risks she took. She recalls that many people wanted to make money off the situation. A majority of people hid out of principle, but this woman thought the war would be over soon and needed more capital. Her father didn't have much money, but bought jewelry that was easy to keep and take into hiding. He sold a lot and didn't have a lot left. They tried to contact the Dutch Resistance to get a new hiding place.
It was difficult for Eva Schloss and her family to find safe houses. Not many people wanted to take the risks anymore. A Dutch nurse came forward with a new house, so her father and brother escaped at night from the blackmailing woman. Her brother bleached his hair, so he wouldn't be obvious. They also took a great risk with no identification cards and were very lucky. They met the nurse at the station and went to the safe house on a Sunday. Schloss and her mother weren't far from them now so they went to visit them for the evening. The nurse was a double agent, not part of the Dutch Resistance. She helped people so the Jews would trust her but she was really a Nazi. The Nazis knew where she and her mother were hiding then also, so all four of them were arrested. It was very quick. An elderly couple with a young son were hiding Schloss and her mother. When the son heard the Germans coming, he escaped over the roof. They would have taken him too. They were stunned and couldn't escape. They took them to headquarters where she saw her father and brother and knew what had happened. They were all interrogated. Schloss was the youngest so they thought she would give away what they wanted to know about the Dutch Resistance. They wanted to know their names [Annotator's Note: the real names of members of the Dutch Resistance]. She didn't know where they lived or their real names so she didn't give away anything. They said they'd beat her if she didn't say, but she didn't know anything. They beat her and slapped her. The SS men beat her with sticks. It was her fifteenth birthday. It lasted about a half an hour and they realized if she knew she would have told by now. The elderly couple that hid them wouldn't have survived a camp. Very often those people died. Schloss's father was a clever and wonderful person and said to the Germans that he would tell them where they had some jewelry if they let the elderly couple free. Her mother had a powder compact and in the compact she had hidden a diamond watch and ring. The SS sent her mother back to the house to pick up the powder box. He opened it, and saw the jewelry which he pocketed and sent the old couple back home. They were taken to a local prison with hundreds of people. There were no toilets and no food. There was a pregnant woman there who gave birth. Another woman was asthmatic. Children and babies were there. It was terrible. They were taken to a holding camp, Westerbork. The Germans took gays, gypsies, black people, Jehovah's Witness, and communists. There were 500 gypsies in this holding camp with Schloss's family. By Friday a transport was going, and they were put on the list to be transported to the east with the gypsies. About 2,000 people in total. They were put on cattle trains with big iron doors. There were two sides with very narrow slits, with barbed wire; it was dark and especially so when so many people were there. There was not enough room for everyone to sit so some sit and some stood. The doors were closed and bolted up.
They were not told where they going or how long the journey was. This was the last time Eva Schloss was together with her family, on the train in May 1944. People were desperate on the train; there were two buckets, one for drinking water and one for toilets. The smell was terrible. Somebody died and there was no way to get them out. Her father apologized to his family for not being able to protect them anymore. It was sad. He tried everything to keep them safe, but he realized he was powerless. Her father told them to try to keep clean, wash their hands as much as they can. He said it was important to do everything they're told. Obey and nothing will happen. To keep hope was the only thing they could do, to hope the Nazis were not going to kill them. They had a lot of doubt, but didn't want anyone to know. They knew about the death camps. The Germans only talked about victories, so they didn't know about the losses like Stalingrad and South Africa [Annotator's Note: Schloss probably means the North African campaign]. The British sent out much more valid news. The BBC had broadcasts at nine at night. Hidden in cupboards, they listened and were always told about death camps, concentration camps and the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Schloss didn't know where they were going but knew it was a concentration camp. After three or four days, the doors were opened, the buckets were exchanged and they received bread. The Nazis threw it at them and, like wild beasts, they tried to tear it apart and get chunks of it. Sometimes the train stopped, and they had to hand over rings, jewelry and watches, and the Nazis took it and pocked it all as private property. Some people threw it out of the little space before they had to hand it over. Some people wrote little notes; some of those notes have been retrieved. Sometimes the train would stop and it was really unbearable because they didn't get air in. Once it finally stopped they heard barking dogs and a command in German to jump down. It was a relief to get fresh air and stretch but then they saw the sign, Auschwitz, and they knew it was the worst of the death camps. Schloss knew that they would be killed. It's human nature, as long as there is life there is hope. She knew this would be their last day on earth. The next command was men and women on different sides. This was the last time she saw her brother. The SS put everyone in rows of five so it was easy for them to keep an eye on things. She marched forward and was looked over. She didn't know what the sides meant. Her mother gave her her hat and coat. She thought she could keep it and use it later. Her mother said later, she didn't know why she did that; a voice inside said she should give it to her daughter. That was a selection, no young or old were going into the camp. It went by looks, not by age. From 15 to 40 one was allowed. They never told their age. Because Schloss had her mother's hat on, they didn't see how young she actually was so she passed to the right side. They passed selection, she and her mother had to undress and all their belongings were taken away, but that hat saved her life that time.
[Annotator's Note: Eva Schloss is an Austrian born Jew who fled to Amsterdam with her family after the Nazis came to power. They went into hiding after the Germans occupied Holland and hid for two years before being betrayed, captured and sent to Auschwitz.] At the first selection, no child entered the camp nor any old persons from 40 onward [Annotator's Note: at the Auschwitz concentration camp]. Many looked worn out. The SS were tricky. They would say they had trucks who could take them into the camp if they couldn't make it, so many would get on the truck, but it was trick. They'd be killed immediately. The people who walked to the left side were immediately taken into the gas chambers also. Schloss recalled a mother and a toddler, and the child was given to an elderly woman who said she'd look after the child but they were taken to the gas chamber immediately. They walked into barracks and went through a process of registration. The Germans kept excellent records. This is why it's amazing that Holocaust deniers can say it never happened. All the documents are now in Auschwitz for people to see. They were documented and tattooed. Schloss's number is 85272. She has a crossed out number. It was originally 85222 but they realized that someone had slipped up a number. They had to be so accurate so her whole transport had to be recalled and re-tattooed. There was just one number wrong on her. Everyone else had to scratch out their number with a new number. She never met another person who has such an altered number on their arm which shows there were no survivors from her transport. All their heads were shaved. This took many hours. They received nothing to drink and it was very hot. Many fainted, and the people who were cutting their hair told them not to faint or they'd be gassed. They tried to prop up the people who had fainted so they didn't get gassed. She heard stories about families separated. Some inmates were herded in a barrack and told to undress, given a towel and bar of soap, and went into showers that looked like barracks with low ceilings with pipes. People would wait for the water to come out and couldn't understand why the water didn't come. Then they'd feel dizzy and faint because of the poison gas. There were peep holes in the ceiling so the Nazis could watch until everyone fell to the ground to make sure everyone was down. The desk commander would make inmates take out the dead bodies. It was a very quick process, within an hour of arriving those people were dead. There were big chimneys, where they could smell the burning flesh. Schloss knew the smell. They smelled it day and night in the camp and knew what was happening. The fear of dying was constant.
There was cholera, dysentery and skin illnesses [Annotator's Note: inside the Auschwitz concentration camp]. Eva Schloss had head and body lice. She was covered in them, it was unbearable. The itching and scratching became open wounds and they would get sores. There was no way of cleaning it treating it. The food was a cup of liquid and a chunk of bread. Only through hope and mental effort of thinking they would get through it could they survive. When she saw the film [Annotator's Note: probably discussing actual footage of the camps], she can't believe she was able to live through that and survive as a 15 year old child. It was miracle. They lived like that for nine months. By that time it was mid-winter and extremely cold. Schloss had frost bite on her toes and open wounds. Sometimes she didn't have shoes. In October [Annotator's Note: October 1944], the Nazis dynamited the gas chambers so there was no more gassing, although many still died of sickness. The Nazis took many inmates to other camps. They were death marches. Many were shot on the roadside, many collapsed and died. Her father and brother were marched to Mauthausen. They survived the march. The Red Cross later told her and her mother that her father and brother both perished days before liberation of the Mauthausen camp. Her father was 45 years old and very strong, mentally and physically. She thinks that after his son died, he just gave up living. Schloss and her mother did not go on the marches. They did not want to stay because rumors spread that when the Germans left they were going to lock up the barracks and burn the place down so there would be no survivors. They went to Birkenau [Annotator's Note: a women's camp that was part of Auschwitz]. This was lucky, because she didn't have to wait until the end of the war. They were liberated four months earlier than the end of the war. The Russians freed them. Liberation day they were in Birkenau. It was a women's camp. A, B, C, and D [Annotator's Note: sections of the camp] were surrounded by electrified barbed wire. Her mother and her were in a camp called the hospital camp, but it wasn't a hospital. People were dying from exhaustion, starvation and illness. If they couldn't work they were taken to the hospital camp, put in bunks and fed a little. There was no medical treatment. Her mother went there and she had bad frost bite, so she was together with her mother. All the other barracks were cleared. Some SS were still there, some had left already. There were air raids because the Russians were bombing around them. The Germans didn't want to march with the planes overhead. They had them out several times a day to march. Schloss and her mother wanted to march so they would not be burned alive. It went on for many days. Then, one evening, the Nazis called everyone out. Her mother was very weak. Schloss said that she thought they should not go out for this march since they probably would not march anyway. In the morning they woke up, everyone had gone. Some of the inmates had left the camp with the Germans. About 300 of them were left that couldn't get down from the bunks. That, for Schloss, was freedom. They could walk out, the gates were open. She didn't know who was outside, or what anyone would do. For ten days they were on their own. Many died. She helped bring out the dead bodies. There was no way to bury them. They had no tools and the ground was frozen so they heaped them outside the barracks.
[Annotator's Note: Eva Schloss is an Austrian born Jew who fled to Amsterdam with her family after the Nazis came to power. They went into hiding after the Germans occupied Holland and hid for two years before being betrayed, captured and sent to Auschwitz.] At the gate they saw a huge creature, wrapped in icicles, completely frozen [Annotator's Note: after the Germans left Auschwitz Concentration Camp]. They thought it was bear, but it was a human being. It was the first Russian soldier in the camp. She took him to show him the barracks. This big man had tears running down his cheeks looking at everything. He couldn't speak to them, since they didn't speak the same language, but he let them know that although he couldn't do anything, more help was coming. People came and fed them and cooked soup with beans and cabbage. It was not very easy to digest since they didn't have food for so long. Their bodies couldn't handle it and many died. They shot a horse and made a stew of it. Four of them had gone outside the camp to a German barrack. They found wood and a stove and cooked there. A Polish woman got the knife and carved the horse from the middle. It turned out the horse was pregnant and the Russians killed it because they couldn't take a pregnant horse into battle. They ate it. The whole night, Schloss had diarrhea. Her mother told her to eat carefully in little bites, but they were so hungry they didn't care. Some of them decided to go to the main Auschwitz camp to find loved ones. Schloss tried to find her father and brother. By this time, the Russians had their headquarters there and it was organized. It was supposed to be liberation but it wasn't like that all. There was confusion about their future, what was going to happen and they were still getting sick. It was acknowledged that the Germans were gone but they didn't know if this was the end. There was no partying. There was fierce fighting and battles going on near the camp. At one point, the Germans came near to conquering Auschwitz again. The Russians decided not leave the prisoners but to take them eastward. When they went to look for her father and brother, they weren't there, but she and her mother saw two people they knew in Amsterdam. One man was Mr. Hersh and the other was Otto Frank, Anne's father. He was left behind on transport because he chose not go. He went with them on the whole journey back to Holland. Once the Russians left, more people joined their transports, prisoners of war, Americans, Australians, Italians and French; it became an international transport. They lost sight of Otto Frank. They spent four months on the road on cattle trucks, but the doors were open and they got a stove to burn wood and make food. The Russians gave them Russian uniforms to wear. They provided for them in any way they could. Once, in the middle of the night, the Russian army asked for help to peel potatoes for the Russian front that needed to be fed. They gave them knives and they helped peel potatoes to eat. Everyone got into a big circle and danced and sang. The young soldiers went in the morning to fight the Germans and many died.
Eva Schloss feels that they were wonderful people [Annotator's Note: the Russian soldiers after her liberation from Auschwitz concentration camp]. One can't judge a government by the people. They loved Stalin but they also had pictures of their families. With many Jewish Russian soldiers, Schloss and her mother could speak Yiddish, or at least German. Some soldiers were boys they picked up through the death marches. There were people who had lost everything and decided to join the Russian Army and go into Germany to avenge their families. These men did horrible things in Germany. In May [Annotator's Note: 1945] they were in Odessa [Annotator's Note: Odessa, Ukraine] in a palace, or a shell of a palace. They got fed, and waited for the end of the war. The prisoners of war got passes from the Red Cross, they got chocolate and cigarettes. Concentration camp survivors didn't get anything. The president of the Red Cross at the time was a Nazi sympathizer. The Red Cross never came to visit Auschwitz. The camp they visited was set up to look wonderful, with an orchestra and food. Once they left it was set back to a concentration camp. The end of the war was near. The Germans had retreated everywhere. The Russians told them what was going on, so they knew it would end soon. It ended with Hitler committing suicide and an armistice was signed. Everyone in Odessa had a big celebration. They brought people from the local opera in to perform for them. They all sat on the floor and they gave a wonderful performance. That's when she realized they had survived. It was a wonderful relief but everyone was anxious to get home to find out what happened to their families. Otto Frank was alone and very anxious to hear. He met someone on the transport that told him his wife had died but he had hope for his daughters. He thought they might have survived those few months at Auschwitz. At the time, they didn't know about the death marches so they were hopeful the Schloss family had survived also. They were transported westward to drop of the Italians and French, then traveled up through France to the Dutch border. Schloss could not enter Holland because all the bridges were damaged. Holland had seen fierce fighting, it was awful because the Germans still remained in occupation up until the end and there was terrible destruction and hunger. They couldn't enter Holland for several weeks. When people were arrested or went into hiding there was a Dutch Removal Firm called Pulst [Annotator's Note: unsure of spelling] and everything was taken out and rented. The woman who owned their furnished apartment allowed them to come back. Many people didn't have a place to go. One can imagine how hard it was to return. Otto Frank went to live with Miep Geis, a helper of theirs. Schloss and her mother received a letter from the Red Cross about the deaths of her father and brother.
[Annotator's Note: Eva Schloss is an Austrian born Jew who fled to Amsterdam with her family after the Nazis came to power. They went into hiding after the Germans occupied Holland and hid for two years before being betrayed, captured and sent to Auschwitz. After the camp was liberated by Russian Forces, she and her mother returned to Holland.] Otto Frank went to live with one of his helpers [Annotator's Note: in Holland after surviving the Auschwitz Concentration Camp]. After several weeks they received word from the Red Cross that members of their family were killed at Mauthausen. Her brother would have been 18. Otto came to Schloss's home to give them the bad news that both of his daughters had died. He was 57 at the time and a broken person. He realized that he had Anne's diary. Her diary was compiled very loosely. Meip Geis went upstairs after the Franks' were taken in and took Anne's diary. When Schloss saw the diary it was in rough shape. Pages were coming out and it was actually compiled in a few different books. The diary was given to Otto. The writings of the diary helped to keep Otto alive in a way. He realized that it was an incredibly valuable document. At first he decided not to publish it but he showed it to a Dutch history professor, Professor Romein. He convinced Otto to publish it. In 1947 it was hard to find a publisher to do it. He found a Catholic Dutch publisher who agreed to publish it. Otto was told that he had to edit it because it had what was considered inappropriate material at the time. An example would be how Anne Frank talks about getting her period. A Dutch Catholic publisher did not want that kind of information to come out. Otto did not want the world to know about some of the personal struggles that Anne talks about. In 1952 it was published in America and became an immediate best seller. It is not really a Holocaust book but rather a personal account of living under German occupation. Otto married Schloss's mom in 1953. They spent a good amount of time answering people's letters and questions regarding Anne Frank's diary. Schloss thought it was touching that children of former Nazi's wrote Otto discussing the diary. Otto made many friends; people would come to visit just to talk to Otto. It became a very profitable business selling the diary. Otto donated alot of the money into charities. He always thought that it was Anne's money and not his. He donated a lot of the money to Israel and for the promotion of the book. It was always in the back of his mind to promote what happened in order to educate the world. Otto realized that not everyone in Germany was bad.
Eva Schloss believes it is important to study World War 2 because of the immensity of the conflict and the diversity of the stories. Schloss believes it is important to remember the amount of civilian casualties that occurred during the war. It is important to get this information down so that people will be able to learn about their families. People are much more interested in knowing their family history today because it is easy to do. Schloss believes it is important that people learn about World War 2 because it informs them about their past. She believes that people need to unite to fight things such as racial bigotry and hatred. She hopes that one day people will grow up not knowing war. Schloss has spoken to people all over the world. She thinks it is important for young people to know what happened because it changed the history of the world. Schloss feels that it is very important that the Jewish people got their own country. If prejudice every happens again with Jewish people where they cannot immigrate, they will have Israel where they can always immigrate; the doors will always be open to them. The creation of Israel unfortunately caused a lot of strife in the Middle East. She believes that Jewish people will fight to the last man over Israel. She believes that it is important to tell people what happened and why; that history changes life. Since the Holocaust, Jewish people have spread all over the world. Schloss lives in England. Her kids have no cousins, aunts, or uncles because they were killed or her distant relatives live all over the world.
Eva Schloss lost her father and her brother. Her brother was a very talented young man, he was a great musician. She characterizes her brother as a genius. He could paint and write poetry. He taught himself seven languages when he was in hiding. Schloss feels bad that so many people could of contributed to the world had they not been killed. Twenty Jewish people who survived the Holocaust were awarded Nobel Prizes. Schloss can only wonder how many more out of the six million Jews that were killed could have won the award. She believes that we cannot tolerate hate and that life is incredibly beautiful. She believes that we must give every human being the chance to live and to build for the future.
[Annotator's Note: Eva Schloss is an Austrian born Jew who fled to Amsterdam with her family after the Nazis came to power.] It was hard to know who was who because the Dutch Resistance were not allowed to be out in the open and the Nazis tried to infiltrate them with their spy system. It was hard to get in touch with the real Dutch Resistance. There was a German Nazi organization and they organized things pretty quickly. The Nazis were very clever. Danger was not immediate; it was little measures every week, and Jews agreed to live with the limitations on them. Eventually it became more and more difficult until the end when it was completely impossible to exist as a Jew in any occupied country. There was no public transport but they still had their bicycles. Schloss couldn't go out in mornings or evenings. Jews couldn't visit Christians, but would still meet them in public places like cafes until the Nazis forbid Jews from going to public places and they had to hand in their bicycles. Jews were not allowed to have radios so they couldn't hear any news. Life became difficult. They had to wear the yellow star so people knew who was a Jew. By 1941 they arrested 5,000 to 6,000 Jewish men in the street. Everyone with a star was put on truck and deported and never heard from again. In February, the Dutch rebelled [Annotator's Note: The Strike of February 1941]. The Nazis took hostages and said if the Dutch did not go back to work they would kill the hostages, so everyone went back to work. When they had to wear the yellow star, many non-Jewish Dutch wore the star to confuse the Nazis, and when arrested they'd say they weren't Jewish. The J was stamped on passports. This idea originated from the Swiss. Many tourists went to Switzerland. The Swiss didn't mind the Germans or Austrians, but they didn't want the Jews to stay, so they put a J on their passports to distinguish who they were. All of Schloss's family's passports were stamped with a J. She lost her Austrian nationality when they became occupied. They had to get new German passports which they didn't want for obvious reasons. Later in Holland, she lost any nationality and became stateless. According to the Geneva conference, her and other Jews with similar problems had no country to protect them with no rights whatsoever. Schloss knew what the star was for. The stars were written in the language of the wearer. Hers said, "Jew" in Dutch. Schloss was very stubborn as a little girl and didn't want to wear it. Her mother explained that they had to or they'd be picked up and taken to a camp so she wore it. They all did. By July 1942, many young people between 16 and 25 got a call up notice to report to a certain place to be deported to a German work camp. The Germans blackmailed them saying that if they did not send their kids they would arrest the whole family. Many parents decided to send their children to the work camps since they felt they didn't have a choice. After two or three years of war the Germans needed workers and since the kids were healthy and young the Germans had them work in factories. Only later did they find out they were sent to Mauthausen, an Austrian camp, with stone quarries and the kids were thrown down from the cliffs. Margot, Anne Frank's sister, and Schloss's brother Hans got this call up notice. Many went to this meeting; many Jewish families went into hiding on this same day. Schloss's family fled with her brother and her.


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Home » TV & Movies » New 'Sweet Valley High' Series in Development at The CW
New 'Sweet Valley High' Series in Development at The CW
The Wakefield twins are back courtesy of "Gossip Girl" star Ashley Wigfield
Ashley Wigfield (courtesy of Ashley Wigfield)
The Wakefield twins Elizabeth and Jessica may be returning to the small screen. "Sweet Valley," a new series based onFrancine Pascal's YA series from the 1980s — "Sweet Valley High" — is in development at The CW.
Ashley Wigfield will serve as writer and executive producer of the new series.
Joining Wigfield, whose credits also include HBO Max's "Gossip Girl," and Hulu's "Looking For Alaska," as executive producers are Fake Empire's Josh Schwartz, Stephanie Savage and Lis Rowinski. Executive producers from Chernin Entertainment are Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping. The studios involved are CBS Studios and Paramount TV studios.
The series sounds reminiscent of early "Riverdale," with Sweet Valley being a town folks dream of growing up in, with Elizabeth Wakefield a shining example of the city's promise. When her twin sister Jessica, who is missing, returns, their lifelong rivalry reignites. Enid Ruiz, a new girl in town, is left to figure out who — or what — is pulling the strings. But, will she be able to sway the Wakefield twins to put their interpersonal conflicts aside to bring Sweet Valley's dark roots into the sunshine of California?
The "Sweet Valley High" twins — bookish Elizabeth, and her bolder sister Jessica — made it to the small screen in 1994, played by Cynthia (Elizabeth) and Brittany (Jessica) Daniel. It ran from 1994-1997, first starting out on Fox, before moving to UPN.
TV reporter Jenny Maas contributed to this story.
Amy Robach explains how a debilitating health crisis has led to her absence from GMA

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What about the iceberg?
by Emily Drabinski
I spend a lot of time in critical librarian spaces. I am an active tweeter in the #critlib community. I'm organizing a colloquium on critical perspectives on gender and sexuality in the field (abstracts due Monday!) and edit a related book series. I'm working on a talk this spring about critical pedagogy in a time of compliance, trying to figure out how to make social change happen in contexts that sometimes make that feel impossible. I have lately been struck by the relative smallness of our conversations, and feel myself straining to talk more about bigger pictures, to understand the structures that produce the problems and solutions that we engage.
Last week, I talked about critical librarianship at the Charleston Conference. Rachel Fleming (Appalachian State University), Nora Almeida (New York City College of Technology, CUNY), and I developed a "Lively Lunch" presentation titled #critchs, an effort to rough out a frame of what would constitute a critical acquisitions and technical services activist agenda. As we brainstormed topics, I was struck by how much the issues we defined—open access and open educational resources, consolidation in the vendor marketplace, the relentless desire for universal technical solutions to complex and contingent human problems—were the same issues that mainstream librarianship takes up again and again. Ours was hardly the only time set aside to discuss OERs.
The same issue crops up when we talk about critical information literacy. If the self-consciously political project is simply one of replacing rote lectures with guide-on-the-side active learning, well, that's what they teach in Immersion, about as mainstream as professional work gets. What can a critical or political librarianship offer the field that is potentially transformative of librarianship and the world?
Charleston was a particularly apropos location for these thoughts. Walking between the conference hotels and the sessions at the Gaillard Center took us right past Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, site of the horrific murders nine people engaged in prayer. We walked right past it, on our way to coffee and meetings and drinks with vendors. Organizer Katina Stauch offered a moment of silence as the conference began, and opening keynote Courtney Young pointed to Emanuel AME as a sign of how much more work there is to do in terms of disrupting and upending white supremacy. But then we did what people always do, we went about our business.
Of course, the uncomfortable conjunction of past and present in Charleston is much older than that. The city's port was the entry point for more than 40% of enslaved African people forcibly transported to North America. (The National Park Service site at Fort Moultrie chooses to tell the story of America's coastal defense history instead.) Plantations surround the city, pitching themselves as sites of genteel Southern grandeur rather than as the sites of America's evil origin story. Cabins built to house enslaved people in the 1840s—small, overcrowded, without heat or running water—remained in use until the 1990s, when they were steps from the bank branches and gas stations of the outskirts of town. History is very present in Charleston, as it is everywhere, but distinctly so for me in this place I had never seen before. Sure, Charleston has a hot restaurant scene and cool film festival. But I could feel the blood oozing up from the sidewalk. It was difficult not to know where I was.
But what does this have to do with open educational resources or library classrooms? For me, Charleston was another reminder that the field could stand to look up from our close reading of library problems to the social, political, and economic forces that structure those issues for us. A call to more critically engaged teaching librarianship emerges simultaneous with the adjunctification of higher education, including librarianship, demanding more from people being paid less and less. We talk a lot about digital humanities and open access online publishing, but a lot less about extractive industries and electronic waste. We want to make lifelong learners, but what are we doing to extend those lives, to address premature death caused by maldistribution of wealth and white supremacy? How does the future of libraries account for the radically different futures we face depending on the historical forces that have structured our presents?
There's always something parochial about a professional conference, of course, especially one with a narrow focus. The opportunity to talk among ourselves about the issues of our daily work lives matters. (How *are* people dealing with reference stats these days, anyway?) But in these spaces, I'd like to think bigger about what critical and political librarianship has to offer the field. At its best, I think this means richer analyses of the structural issues beyond our conference rooms and vendor dinners. We can't talk about the Big Deal without talking about capitalism. We can't talk about student learning without talking about student debt. If we want a librarianship that does more than embroider a pincushion while the Titanic goes down, we must generate a better account of the iceberg.
Filed under: Essays by — Emily Drabinski @ 11:23 am
Hedgehog Review – Spring issue focuses on information overload…
Focusing on the theme of "Too Much Information," the spring issue of The Hedgehog Review devotes five essays to a close examination of the unprecedented and ever-increasing availability, use, and abuse of information relating to our public and private lives. Some of this information we disclose intentionally, some we do not, but all of it can be used, in the words of THR editor Jay Tolson, to "shape ourselves and our culture in ways that are less than benign."
Read about this in the …
Filed under: Essays by — Rory Litwin @ 5:38 pm
Among the Disrupted (NYT Book Review Essay)
Among the Disrupted
By Leon Wieseltier
Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into "content." What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous…
Filed under: Essays,Technology by — Rory Litwin @ 10:05 am
Inland Editions
Inland Editions is a new publisher out of London that is particularly interested in libraries. They are preparing to publish their first book, which appears to be a beautifully designed art book primarily about library architecture. It's called Bookspace , and they are running a Kickstarter campaign to fund its production. That seems a little bit hinky to me if they are a commercial publisher, but okay, they need capital because it appears to be a book that will be expensive to produce. The expected publication date is February 2015, coming right up. Inland Editions also has a blog that focuses on libraries and is quite different from the usual library-related fare, as they are not librarians but artists and intellectuals of various stripes.
Filed under: Books,Editorials,Essays,Publishing by — Rory Litwin @ 10:13 am
Voltaire and Islam
Malise Ruthven, frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books , wrote the preface to the recent Litwin Books publication, Voltaire's Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet: A New Translation . His preface is titled Voltaire and Islam, and provides an insightful picture of the great 18th century liberal's relationship with the religion of the region Europe called "the Orient."
Voltaire's play has been translated into English several times, but this prose translation is less archaic-sounding, and captures the intensity of the melodramatic passions among the characters. The play itself is an enjoyable, light read. Ruthven's preface and the translator's introduction, which focuses on the reception that the play received among contemporaries and how it was viewed by later critics, illuminate some of the background to the way Islam is understood in the West.
Filed under: About Litwin Books & Library Juice Press,Essays,Fun,Non Library by — Rory Litwin @ 6:57 am
Political Identities
In a Library Juice blog post some time ago, Rory Litwin recommended an essay by Karl Mannheim entitled "Conservative Thought." In the essay, Mannheim argues that political groupings can be distinguished by specific "styles of thought" (though a style of thought will not be limited to politics). Styles of thought characterize more than just the subjective thinking of individuals. At the same time, they are not entirely objective. Individuals participate in a style of thought which will survive their coming and going, but it does not exist apart from the individuals. Mannheim goes on to illustrate this by describing the style of thought that made up the German conservatives of the 19th century. In essence, Mannheim was trying to answer the questions, "who were the German conservatives and what was it that made them a distinct and coherent political group?"
This got me thinking about what unifies political groupings today which led me to read George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, and Chinni and Gimpel's Our Patchwork Nation. Each of these works examines political identities in recent U.S. politics more or less in the manner that Mannheim sought to make sense of the political identity of 19th century German conservatives. Lakoff examines what distinguishes conservatives from liberals. His attempt to discover a master trait that explains all or most of this political divide comes closest to Mannheim's attempt to find a "style of thought" that governs German conservativism. In contrast to this, Frank examines the distinctions between moderate Republicans, conservative Republicans, and liberals. Here the similarity with Mannhiem is that Frank defines conservative Republicans in opposition to liberals rather as Mannhiem defines conservativism in opposition to Enlightenment rationalism. Chinni and Gimpel take a slightly different approach by positing and examining twelve different "nations" within the United States, each composed of counties having similar demographic characteristics. It is noteworthy that Lakoff contrasts two abstract ideological systems as does Mannheim, while Frank and Chinni and Gimpel approach the question more concretely by distinguishing specific policy positions and character traits that hang together sociologically.
There is much in each of the three works on the U.S. political landscape to recommend them. Chinni and Gimpel is perhaps best; however, each of them underestimates the complexity of political groupings within the U.S. If librarians are to understand better our patron populations and their relations to politics, we'll need to see deeper into the body politic than any sociological assessment thus far has seen and we'll need to be sympathetic to a multiplicity of political perspectives. We need not abandon our own political views, but to accurately understand the views of our patrons, we must see them as complex rational individuals and avoid the easy shorthand of political stereotypes.
Of the three works under examination here, Lakoff's book is the most ambitious in that it purports to identify a master trait that distinguishes liberals from conservatives; however, in doing so, it becomes the most superficial. Lakoff believes that American politics are driven by two models of the family: the Strict Father Model and the Nurturing Parent Model. These models serve as frames for how conservatives and liberals respectively think, not just about family life, but also about politics and other spheres of life. Lakoff argues that conservatives implicitly have recognized that emphasizing the values inherent in the Strict Father Model reinforces voters' tendency to employ these values when thinking about politics. After emphasizing this family model for four decades, conservatives have established in the electorate a way of thinking about politics that prevents voters from accepting (and sometimes even understanding) the policies advanced by liberals.
Lakoff's theory is initially attractive, as one often can see ties between the family models and a number of Republican and Democratic political positions; however, as important as family dynamics are to establishing our world views, the idea that all of the variations within U.S. politics are rooted a single social-psychological character trait that admits of only two values overlooks the complexity of the political world in the interest of theoretic simplicity. I suspect that Lakoff's dichotomy was both generated by and helped to entrench the Red-Blue vision of U.S. politics that has done so much to mask political reality. Mostly, the Red-Blue divide is an artifact of our two party system which requires people of quite diverse opinion to band together against a single political opponent. Were our two party system to be transformed into a multi-party democracy, the importance of the two family models might quickly disappear.
In contrast, Frank's work distinguishes three political groupings: moderate Republicans, conservative Republicans, and liberals. Mostly, Frank examines the two Republican groups. Frank's thesis is that the working class population of Kansas has become hopelessly distracted by hot button social issues and has been fooled into voting for moderate Republican politicians who are undermining their economic interests. Working class conservatives are trading away their economic future in exchange for lip service from moderate Republicans on social issues. While there is something to this argument, it fails to understand economic issues from the conservative's perspective. Frank clearly is viewing the question from a liberal perspective, i.e., that one's attitude toward the legal framework regulating economic activity should be based on how well-off that framework will make you. I suspect that this view may not be shared by the great majority of working class, conservative Kansans. Instead, they are – true to their words – "values voters," but not simply in the sense of caring about abortion, "traditional" marriage, and prayer in school. They also bring their values to economic questions, particularly, the values of personal responsibility, self-sufficiency, respect for fair play, and most of all meritocracy.
Republican doctrine has long opposed taxes and regulation. They are seen as alien impositions on the main business of America which is, on this view, business. Taxes and regulations are merely ways by which the productive members of society are made to support and defend politically powerful, but unproductive, members. If one sees the main activity of life as making a living within the constraints of a fair system of rules, then such a point of view may seem not unreasonable. Surely, many if not most working class people in Kansas find making a living an all-consuming activity. This is particularly true of people who are self-employed or sell their labor job to job. For them, taxes (no matter how progressive) are an obstacle to getting ahead or even just staying afloat. Furthermore, regulations on businesses limit the kind of economic activity that they believe is necessary to remain in business or simply remain employed.
In addition to this, the ideology of individualism, personal responsibility, and fair play can seem to trump government assistance for the disadvantaged. Material well-being may certainly be an important value for the conservative working class, but if earning what you acquire is a greater value, then taxation, regulation, and social programs can be seen as undermining this more important meritocratic value. Living in a meritocracy might mean that one is not made as well-off as one might otherwise be, but getting what you deserve and only what you deserve seems to be important to the ideology of the working class conservative.
Of course, what liberals will find missing in this analysis is the importance of equal opportunity. A libertarian economic order provides only the legal pretense of an equal starting point for economic success. It does not recognize the unequalizing effects of such things as sex, gender, and racial prejudices, and especially class privileges; but in the case of the Kansas working class, the degree of inequality of opportunity may not seem so great as to justify liberal programs like affirmative action, housing assistance, publically financed health insurance, and food stamps. They may find their own situation is too close to the beneficiaries of public assistance to be sympathetic to transferring any of their wealth or opportunity to the least well-off. To speak productively with the working class conservatives, one might do well to speak in meritocratic terms, but to emphasize how the accidents of birth undermine meritocratic values. The liberal needs to make clear and convincing that what is preventing the working class from realizing the deserved benefits of their own efforts is not transfers of wealth to the least-well off, but systemic advantages accruing to the richest of the rich in our society. The liberal must make the case that these advantages distort meritocracy much more than social programs for the least well-off and that social programs are a way to rectify distortion of a meritocracy.
Chinni and Gimpel's Our Patchwork Nation is motivated by the desire to avoid the Red-Blue dichotomy that Lakoff examines. Instead, Chinni and Gimpel divide the electorate into twelve distinct communities, and maps them onto the nation county by county. Hence, one county may be part of "Tractor Country" while the neighboring county is part of "Immigration Nation." Very much is gained by this nuanced analysis, but even here, there is a tendency to disregard minority populations within counties or even majority populations. For example, "Immigration Nation" is composed of counties that have a large Hispanic population: on average, 44% of the people who live there are from Spanish-speaking backgrounds. This, of course, is enough to make these counties significantly different from others that do not have such a high percent of Hispanics, but labeling the county part of "Immigration Nation" masks the other 56%. Counties in "Evangelical Epicenter" are composed significantly of white fundamentalist Christians, but they sometimes contain a significant number of African-Americans who are the essential (though seldom the majority) element of "Minority Central" counties. All of this is simply to say that the demographic constitution of Chinni and Gimpel's twelve communities are more complex than their labels can allow and that much more must be considered to understand adequately the electorate. In all fairness, though, a single work can only do so much. Theory can never completely describe reality, but theorize we must.
After reading Lakoff, Frank, and Chinni and Gimpel, I am led to think that Mannheim's investigation into "styles of thought" and other sociological studies of its kind must be handled with care. The best of them might reveal some subset of features of an electorate, but they are more likely to lead one into the trap of thinking that one's theory about political ideologies is more accurate and stable than it is. Political groupings in the U.S. may have much less to do with a shared political ideology or "styles of thought" and much more to do with a two party system that requires uneasy alliances. Applying these insights to our patron populations can help keep us from falling into the trap of serving a cardboard cutout of a patron. Instead, it may remind us to serve the patron who actually stands before us.
Filed under: Essays,Theory by — Alan Mattlage @ 10:14 am
Karl Mannheim on "conservative thought"
I ran across this essay by Karl Mannheim while looking into ideas on "styles of thought" in relation to philosophy and politics. Mannheim was one of the founders of the "sociology of knowledge," which is an area of inquiry that some in LIS have said constitutes a good theoretical underpinning for what we do. The field of sociology of knowledge is a little too relativistic about knowledge for my taste, but this essay on "conservative thought" by Mannheim, one of his most famous, really floats my boat. I would recommend it to anyone who ponders what "conservative" and "liberal" really mean, in our time and historically. Mannheim describes the conservative mode of thought and its historical genesis through the lens of an intellectual history of Europe. Useful reading for our times.
Filed under: Essays,History,Non Library,People In Focus,Theory by — Rory Litwin @ 1:12 pm
Repressive Tolerance (link to essay by Marcuse) and a comment on information literacy
For those who have noted, along with Jon Stewart, that in the Fox News era the media treats facts in a relative way, as a matter of political taste… This phenomenon was first described by Frankfurt School critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, in his 1965 essay, "Repressive Tolerance." According to Marcuse, it is a problem of the media system itself. Whatever ideas it communicates, as radical as they may be, become an entertainment commodity that audiences consume. It is a pessimistic standpoint, but it does clarify the fact that there is a way to stand outside the mass media system.
I would like to use this point of Marcuse to challenge librarians to reflect on their own understanding of information literacy and how we teach about it to our students. Are you teaching students to be outside of the world of media messages as thinkers and doers? I think that critical thinking, which is the heart of information literacy, is not possible without that ability.
Filed under: Essays,Information Literacy,Intellectual Freedom,People In Focus,Public Sphere,Theory by — Rory Litwin @ 10:21 am
My problem with Banned Books Week
Some of my colleagues in the Progressive Librarians Guild used to complain that Banned Books Week was an unfortunate distraction from the greater problem of a propagandistic media system. I shared that view and still do, but it is not the objection that I want to explain today.
My problem with Banned Books Week is one that is probably shared by some conservatives, and it has to do with the loose definition of what a "banned book" is, and what a "challenged book" is. Over time, as I have come to understand my own politics better, I have realized that what I care about is rational discourse as the basis for a democratic society. In rational discourse, as I see it, it is important to be clear about what you are actually saying, to ask critical questions with a patience for detail, and to reject strategic communication and to minimize rhetoric. The Banned Books Week project, well-intended as it may be, is a propaganda exercise that fails to model good standards for democratic communication.
Here is what I mean.
The history of book banning is a history of inspiring stories, stories of mass suppression of ideas, copies of books collected so that they can be burned, publishers incarcerated, often ultimately to no avail as the power of an idea proved greater than the power of the state or of a fascistic party. Book banning, good people agree, should be fought against, and is a source of inspiration to fight for what is right. Banned Books Week taps into people's response to these historical narratives and aims to prevent the suppression of ideas from recurring. A noble intention and a narrative resource.
The problem that I see with Banned Books Week is that what counts as a "banned book" is actually a "challenged book," and what counts as a challenged book is something quite different from an effort to prevent a book from being published, sold, or even made available in a library. Most of the cases of challenged books that are reported as a part of Banned Books Week are cases where a parent of a child objects to a book being a part of their child's school curriculum, or at other times in the school's library, on the grounds of "age appropriateness." Defenders of intellectual freedom, to my dismay, have an unwritten policy of never addressing the question of age appropriateness, leaving it as an unstated assumption that anything selected for the curriculum by educators as opposed to by parents is automatically age-appropriate, as though educators are incapable of error.
School districts have policies in place for reviewing challenges to books on the basis of age-appropriateness. Challenged books are reviewed and evaluated by committees that are charged with that responsibility, and then the school district makes an official decision regarding the book. Regardless of what the school's decision turns out to be, regardless of its reasonableness or unreasonableness, and regardless of the objectivity or bias within the decision-making process in a specific case, all challenges to a book by a parent get counted as an attempt at book banning.
Personally, I agree with intellectual freedom orthodoxy that says that one family should not have the right to determine what other students are taught, and this is part of what public education is. But when a book is challenged and reviewed on the grounds of age-appropriateness, it is ultimately not the family that brought the challenge that makes the decision. The decision is made by the educational institution itself. We can hope that more often than not these decisions are well-informed and based more on educational psychology than they are on pressure from an ideological community group. They may not always be. But the decision about whether a book should remain a part of the curriculum or not is ultimately made by the public institution that put the book in the curriculum in the first place, which means that book challenges happen as a part of a process that the institution puts in place in order to get feedback from the community on the curriculum. (In some other areas, we on the left are fighting for more opportunities to influence local policies to meet local needs.)
What I want to emphasize about this is that the "book banning" that is the subject of Banned Books Week is not book banning as we understand it historically but part of the cultural fight over the school curriculum. Now, I am prepared to fight hard to keep rationality and science and humanism in the school curriculum, against the theocrats who seem to be making incredible progress in rolling back not only 20th century liberalism but the values behind the Constitution itself (i.e. secular democracy). But in fighting that fight over the curriculum, what I am ultimately fighting for is rational discourse as opposed to irrationality. If I give up basic standards of rational discourse and resort to strategic communication and propaganda… well, as we said about Al Qaida during the debate over the PATRIOT Act: "They have won."
Filed under: American Library Association,Disinformation,Essays,Information Ethics,Intellectual Freedom,Public Sphere,Writings by Rory Litwin by — Rory Litwin @ 3:47 pm
Some links for you…
I haven't been posting much, but I do have some links to share:
By Steve Coll, in the New York Review of Books : The Internet: For Better or for Worse, a review of two books skeptical of the idea of the internet as a force for liberation.
By Richard Dorment, also in the NYRB : What Andy Warhol Did, about an interesting legal dispute over the authenticity of one of his works, and the systems and actors involved.
Brian Christian writes in the Atlantic Monthly about how the push for more advanced artificial intelligence can help us understand what it is to be human (a favorite topic of mine): Mind vs. Machine…
In The Chronicle Review , an article about Sherry Turkle's recent work on our use of computers for social networking, taking a more worried tone than she is known for: Programmed for Love…
Words for Daniel Bell, the sociologist and public intellectual who died this January, from Morris Dickstein, Russell K. Nieli, Michael Aronson, and Lindsay Waters.
Gautam Naik writes in the Wall Street Journal about enthusiasts of a new spiritual technique for the information age: Boredom Enthusiasts Discover the Pleasures of Understimulation…
Avi Steinberg, author of Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian , writes briefly of his experience in the Boston Globe : Escape route.
Filed under: Essays,Information Ethics,Information Policy,Non Library,People In Focus,Technology by — Rory Litwin @ 5:55 am
Good summary of librarians' discussion of Wikileaks to date
I recommend a post by James Jacobs on the freegovinfo.info site and the comments following it for a good summary of the debate over Wikileaks within the library community.
Filed under: Archives,Essays,Government Information,Information Ethics by — Rory Litwin @ 12:54 pm
Adam Gopnik on books about the internet age
Adam Gopnik, frequent contributor to the New Yorker , has an article in the new issue called, "The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us." It's actually a really good bibliographic essay to recommend to someone wanting an overview of this literature.
The scale of the transformation is such that an ever-expanding literature has emerged to censure or celebrate it. A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible, yet there they are, and they come in the typical flavors: the eulogistic, the alarmed, the sober, and the gleeful. When the electric toaster was invented, there were, no doubt, books that said that the toaster would open up horizons for breakfast undreamed of in the days of burning bread over an open flame; books that told you that the toaster would bring an end to the days of creative breakfast, since our children, growing up with uniformly sliced bread, made to fit a single opening, would never know what a loaf of their own was like; and books that told you that sometimes the toaster would make breakfast better and sometimes it would make breakfast worse, and that the cost for finding this out would be the price of the book you'd just bought.
All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we're on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don't. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One's hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one's head with the Ever-Wasers; and one's heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one's heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.
Filed under: Books,Essays,Print Culture,Technology,Theory by — Rory Litwin @ 10:52 am
Progressive Librarian in full text
Folks at the Progressive Librarians Guild have put the full text of back issues of their journal, Progressive Librarian , online. Coverage goes back to issue number one, from 1990. I was on the editorial board of Progressive Librarian for a number of years, and consider them an important venue for library literature that works to strengthen the ties between the profession of librarianship and the left political philosophies that are akin to it. Back issues have been available through Proquest and Ebsco for some time, but their accessibility on the web will give a new level of exposure to the ideas there. Check it out.
Filed under: Calls for Papers,Essays,Information Ethics,Information Policy,International,Labor Issues,Librarians' Resources,PLG,Public Sphere,The Profession by — Rory Litwin @ 6:33 am
Library, Inc. (Chronicle Review)
"Library, Inc., by David Goldstein, in the new Chronicle Review , begins:
From industry-backed research to CEO-style executive salaries and perquisites, the influence of corporate America on universities has been the subject of much popular and scholarly scrutiny. University libraries have largely escaped that attention. Yet libraries, the intellectual heart of universities, have become perhaps the most commercialized academic area within universities, with troubling implications for the future of higher education. …[More].
Filed under: Essays,Higher Ed,Information Ethics,Public Sphere,The Profession by — Rory Litwin @ 4:19 pm
Inaccuracy in Adbusters article
I am not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I want to point out an inaccuracy in an article on the Adbuster's website (and maybe in the magazine as well, I can't tell) titled, "Google's Flaw," written by Micah White. I'm not unsympathetic with White's point about Google, but I have to come to the defense of Sanford Berman and the "leftist librarians of the 70s." What he wrote will be quite funny who know the people he is talking about:
The idea that search engines can, or should, be neutral can be traced back to a movement of leftist librarians in the 1970s. Led by Sanford Berman, one of the first to bring social rebellion into the library, radical librarians argued that the system used to organize books was inherently biased and racist because it reflected a Western perspective. At that time, and to this day in nearly all public and academic libraries, books were organized in subject hierarchies. Berman believed that this system was deeply problematic. He wrote that, "western chauvinism permeates the [library's organizational] scheme". And called for a "disinterested scheme for the arrangement of books and knowledge". In so doing, he paved the way for search engines.
Berman, and his generation of radical librarians, placed their faith in technology. They assumed that the automation of indexing, what we now call search engines, would provide a "disinterested scheme". And we see today in the actions of the Texas attorney general, the same flawed assumption that search engines can be "neutral" or "disinterested".
What Micah doesn't realize is that in his concern over the commercialization of knowledge he is writing in the same tradition as the radical librarians who first set to work in the late 60s. Yes, Berman was concerned about the bias in Library of Congress Subject Headings, but his position was not to reject controlled subject vocabularies across the board. He was a cataloger, not a computer scientist, and spent his career cataloging books according to a hierarchical subject headings list that was an improvement upon LC, according to his views. Berman and others' criticism of the idea of neutrality in LC subject headings eventually extended to a criticism of the possibility of neutrality in any system, including libraries as institutions, and supposedly neutral systems such as the Google search engine. What search engines as neutral tools can be traced back to is the positivist basis of information science itself, which had its birth during WWII and continued to be developed within a corporate/government setting. This history couldn't be more thoroughly documented. Berman and his fellow radical librarians did not, as Micah has it, place their faith in technology (aside from a few). On the contrary, their group has been the group within librarianship that since the 1980s has offered the criticisms of our over-reliance on technology that Micah White ought to familiarize himself with, often with a focus on the problem of positivistic assumptions underlying our use of technological tools. To assert that not only were they, as a group, supportive of the technological methods that led to systems like Google but that they were the originators of those systems flies in the face of a whole body of work on the history of technology. Yes, it is true that many in the 60s generation were enthusiastic about technology, and went on to found The Well and such, but it was also obvious – at that time – that computer technology was a part of the military industrial complex and that the push for automation in libraries had a huge amount of government funding behind it. If Micah White wants to maintain his claim, he is going to have to supply a lot of evidence, because he is going against a large body of historical work.
I am posting this after contacting White and receiving a reply in which he stuck to his guns about Sandy Berman et al. being the origin of search engines as neutral tools. Perhaps it would be better for me to ignore this, but Adbuster's is a magazine that I have always enjoyed. I subscribed to it in the 90s and still find their project interesting. But I found their anti-leftist turn less than half-baked when it originally appeared, and still do. This article distorts history in order to take a cheap shot at the library left.
Filed under: Disinformation,Essays,History,People In Focus,Technology,Writings by Rory Litwin by — Rory Litwin @ 11:17 am


Huddersfield and District Model Aircraft Club was formed in 1946 and in a typical year has over 130 members interested in designing, building and flying all types of model aircraft, ranging from ultra-lightweight indoor models to slope and thermal soaring, electric flight, I.C. powered models, helicopters and ducted fan and gas turbine models.
Membership is open to people of all ages from Juniors to Senior Citizens and all levels of ability from beginners to the highly experienced competition flyers who are always ready to assist the new and less experienced members. The Club welcomes beginners and has several designated instructors who are available to teach them how to fly their model in a safe and proficient manner and achieve the BMFA A Certificate which is required to fly solo.
The Club bought and owns a flying field known as The Whams situated at Upper Cumberworth in open countryside with planning permission for flying all types of model aircraft at most times of the day, seven days a week, and situated about a kilometre from the nearest habitation.
A large off-road car park is available adjacent to the flying area.
We have also recently been given kind permission by the landowners to fly slope soaring models from hillsides called Hullock Bank, Royd Moor and Whitley Edge.
The Club is proud to be affiliated to our National Governing Body, the BMFA, and we are also a founder member and affiliated to the Marsden Moor Soaring Association (MMSA) which permits club members to fly slope soaring models on National Trust Property in this area and also on other recognised NT sites throughout the country by arrangement with the local model clubs.
To find out more about HDMAC on this website please use the links down the side.


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the changes have not been fully tested.
> I have about 2G physical memory. However, if changed the file name and loaded it as a text file ("ta aaa") then there was no problem.
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