Three Vienna Monuments

The Holocaust Memorial Day just passed by, and I decided to put on paper some thoughts that echo in my head every time we visit Vienna.

When I am reading, I am usually looking between the lines for a hidden meaning. On the contrary, when I am writing, I'm trying to “put my heart on my sleeve” and be brutally honest. In my stories, I am trying not to judge - I am just asking questions.

This story, you are about to read, is one very long question, and by the end of it, you will find the answer. I certainly hope that you will.

1. The first encounter.

We lived in Vienna for a few weeks after escaping from the “soviet paradise” nearly half a century ago. For the first time in our lives, we were in a free country where the government didn't try to control its citizens' minds. But at the same time, it was the very same country that gave the world a fascist monster, creating the horror of the Holocaust.

While in Vienna, we lived in the charity's hostel for Jewish refugees from the USSR. Surprisingly, the hostel manager was an older man, originally native from Riga, Latvia. I was able to talk to him in Latvian. He understood a little russian as well. Since we were the only family from Riga, he assigned us to a nicer room. It had walls covered in old yellow wallpaper, a round wood-burning stove that didn’t work, in one corner, and an open shower stall in another. It was summer, and we didn't need the stove. The shower water was rusty, and we were afraid to use it.

Nevertheless, I had the opportunity to ask my new friend-manager many questions.

At the time, it was two generations since World War II, but there was no Holocaust memorial in Vienna. In fact, there wasn't any public display against fascism or a monument to its victims.

There was a huge monument to the Red Soviet Army that liberated Vienna from the fascists on April 14th, 1945. It was easy for me to remember the date. I was born on that day, seven years later. Our new friends, whom we met in the hostel, took us to see the monument. It was a giant Roman-style colonnade with a tall figure of the Russian soldier-liberator. He held a soviet flag in his right hand and a golden emblem of the USSR in the left. There was a submachine gun on his chest. He was the liberator. I read that it was built to please Stalin.

I didn't care for that effigy at all. It was just a few days ago when a Soviet soldier put his submachine gun to the chest of my little son as we were leaving the country of soviet paradise for good. I wrote about it before in my novel and in my immigrant stories. Obviously, we survived that incident and were able to cross the border. I however like to mention that if people had cellphones and digital cameras back then in 1980, we would definitely have made the cover of Time magazine.

I asked my new Austrian friend why there are no monuments to the victims of fascism, and he replied that in Austria, they preferred not to talk about it, but helped Jewish people at that time.

The elephant was in the room.

Vienna Memorial to the Victims of Fascism

We returned to Vienna as American tourists a decade later, in early 1990. At that time, Vienna erected a memorial to the victims of fascism in the city center. A tour guide explained the symbolism of the sculptures representing different groups persecuted by Hitler's followers. It took the Austrian people 45 years to decide to build this memorial.

I personally found the message a bit controversial and impersonal, but who am I to say…

This memorial has a complicated history. There was an old, large, and classy apartment building, The Philipphof, in the Vienna city center.

Just before the Russian Army forced German troops out of the city, British-American aviation bombed everything heavily to allow for the russian army's advance. The Philliphof building had a large basement, and people used it as a bomb shelter. One day during the bombardment, all six stories of the building caught on fire, collapsed, and buried alive everybody who was in the building and under it. Almost no one survived. Afterward, people from the neighborhood pulled about 200 bodies from under the Philliphof rubble and then stopped. They understood that there were no survivors. It was an indescribable horror. Men, women, children, and the elderly were all buried under the rubble. They were all dead. At the time of the bombing, they didn't have a choice in the matter. They became a circumstance of the war that was started by the man most of them applauded to.

Inadvertently, Austrians loved russians for ending the war and hated Americans for bombing the city.

After the war, the ruins of the Philliphof building were cleaned, and the leftover space was finally chosen for the memorial against the war.

This memorial is a conglomeration of several distinct sculptures, each with a different symbolic meaning. Altogether, it carries the message of sorrow for the different groups of people who vanished in the violence of fascism without mentioning those groups in particular.

I chose the word "violence" not at random, but because the first centerpiece of the memorial, called in English - “The Gate of Violence”.

In German, it is “Tor der Gewalt”, which is generally translated as “Gates of Violence” or “Gates of Power”. That is what my tour guide book suggested.

 I don’t know the German language, but in Yiddish, the word “Gewalt” means “Horror”. I think that would be a better interpretation of the sculpture.

Remarkable, but all of the stones for the memorial were brought from the “The Steps of Hell” quarry in the Mauthausen Concentration camp.

The “Gate of Horror” has two parts. One side represents the horrors of victims of the repressive actions under the Nazi regime. The other honors all casualties of the war, both military and civilian.

On the same side is an upside-down image of a faceless nude woman giving birth to a child. This image, however disturbing, is supposed to represent the rebirth of Austria into a new, democratic, and peaceful society.

On the same stone, you can see images of different body parts scuffling with one another.

The sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka was famous in Austria and was chosen to create the memorial by a city leadership committee. He was a devoted communist, however he left the party as a protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Yet, he remained intellectually connected to the soviet post-war modernism in art. The entire memorial was created in that style.

Coming through the "Gate of Horror", between the two gruesome stone images, we stumbled on another really disturbing image. According to the name, it was a “Kneeling Jew”. This is the only piece made out of bronze, and not from the Mauthausen marble. It depicts an old, small, gnome-like Jewish man crawling on the ground with a broom in his arm. His bearded face showed large, frightened eyes squeezed by an unimaginable fear.

If you are familiar with Austria's history, you would know that during the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany, Hitler came to the city intending to commemorate this political event officially. He delivered a grandiose speech that was met with applause from many Austrians. This took place in "Heroes' Plaza" in the center of Vienna. Before Hitler's speech, Austrian authorities ordered wealthy and prominent Jewish individuals from Vienna to wash the cobblestones of the streets on their knees, using brooms without handles as a form of humiliation. However, not many people were aware of this story, and many did not understand the significance of its symbolism.

Many tourists used this statue as a bench. There is a very popular hot dog stand near the site, but there are no benches to sit and enjoy this very tasty treat.  

I have to admit that the hot dogs sold on the streets of Vienna are the best. The fresh, delicious bread comes pre-drilled with a hole to fit a sausage inside, available in various types, including the beef-only ones, which is important for me. You can request sauerkraut and mustard to be added to the bread before the sausage is inserted. This combination creates a tasty meal for you to enjoy. I never miss the opportunity to have one.

I remember we were in Vienna, soon after the memorial was opened, and I saw people sitting on the statue resting and eating those tasty Vienna hot dogs. It was disturbing, but they didn’t know better. They clearly didn't understand the meaning of the statue.

I read that somebody once painted that statue in gold as an antisemitic act, showing that the jews got all the world's gold to themselves. That was a permitted act of artistic expression. The police observed the incident, and the man responsible for this so-called artistic expression was eventually arrested.

This act, imagine that, had an official name - “ZAHN-GOLD-ZEIT-GOLD”, it is a German term that appears relating specifically to the context of Nazi-era gold confiscation from Jewish people.

The statue of the Kneeling Jew was removed for a while and then reinstalled. The gold paint was washed away and removed.

The sculptor corrected his creation and wrapped the statue in burbwire. Nobody could sit on it anymore. But the burbwire made the image even less understandable in my opinion.

Behind the “Kneeling Jew”, there is another stone statue. It is named "The Orpheus".

Once again, you need a lot of imagination as well as knowledge of Greek mythology to understand the metaphorical meaning of the statue. But even if you learn all Greek mythology in school, as I did, that image was coming across as very questionable. 

It shows a nude man’s body walking into the stone. His head and the right side of his torso are inside the rock. You only see his left arm and his nude behind.

Greek legendary hero Orpheus was a handsome poet and singer. His songs were opening all doors, even the doors of the underworld. He was even able to go there and bring his wife back from the dead. He obviously failed to bring back thousands of innocent people who were killed in the war started by Hitler’s Vienna speech.

And finally, behind the Orpheus, there is another, and the closing piece of the monument, “The stone of the Republic”. The stone surface is covered with writing. It is part of the Austrian Declaration of Independence, and the names of the men who wrote and signed that historical document.

That is all, four marble statues and one bronze. No names, no faces except for a humiliated Jew.

The monument is a reflection of the Stalin/Tito-created and Churchill-approved idea of Austrian collective responsibility. Until the 1980s, Austrian society professed the "victim doctrine", according to which Austria was the first victim of Nazism.

In Austria, everyone was regarded as a guilty one. The one who made a mistake and acknowledged it. Meanwhile, life continues, and no one needs to be punished. All we needed to do was to thank the Red Army for our liberation—that was all.

On our last visit to Vienna, a tour guide was an Austrian woman about my age, and she said to us jokingly, "We, Austrian people, are probably the best PR professionals in the world. We were able to persuade everyone that Austrians had nothing to do with fascism and that Hitler was born in Germany..." That joke had a bitter truth in it.

To me, this perspective is very disturbing, but I promised at the beginning of the story not to judge...

There is another smaller rock on the side of the monument complex. On that stone, you can read in English about the general meaning of the memorial and a tribute to the Soviet Red Army for its liberation. I don't remember if the text mentioned the American and British armies. I actually got a bit upset while reading and didn't finish that propaganda piece to the end. I didn't take a photo of that rock either.

I wasn't the only one who found this memorial a disturbing piece of art that failed to deliver an anti-fascist message as it was intended to do.

Many people, Jewish especially, understood that the memorial expression of good intentions failed to deliver a well-intended message.

Many protested the monument. I read there was a Jewish activist from South Africa, Steven Cohen. He was a famous provocative street artist. He posed in front of the monument semi-nude in a bird carnival head mask. He covered his genitalia with a military gas mask, and he had a disposable water bottle in his nude behind. Wearing a very high red platform ladies' shoes, he pretended to wash the street with a giant red toothbrush.

He wasn't arrested in Vienna, but when he did the same act in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, he ended up in jail. In Paris, he was covering his genitelia with a live lobster, though.

By no means do I applaud or even less support silly and vulgar acts like that one. Yet silly, provocative, and disturbing acts can often be bad and questionable, yet they may sometimes lead to the creation of something good. Pictures of the memorial have made for the pages of all newspapers of the world. All people, not only Jews, started to pay attention.

Even some years before Steven Cohen's bizarre street performances, the Jewish people, led by Simon Wiesenthal, decided that Vienna should have a Holocaust memorial commemorating the actual 65,000 Jewish people who were brutally murdered by Nazi collaborators.

Austrians rarely murder themselves. They hire volunteers from other countries to murder Jewish people. Austrians kept their hands clean.

Austrian packed innocent Jewish people into railroad cattle cars and sent them away to the countries where people didn’t speak German to be killed by foreign volunteers.

That was how 5 thousand Austrian jews were murdered in my hometown in Riga, Latvia, by Latvian volunteers who were ordered to do this dirty work for the Nazi bosses. And, as I read, they did that willingly and diligently.

Most of the 65 thousand ended up in the Auschwitz crematoriums.

    The Vienna Holocaust Memorial.

In January of 2001, we came to Vienna to see that beautiful town under the snow. Walking through the old part of town, we stumbled on a stone sculpture that we never seen before. It was a Vienna Holocaust memorial. It was unveiled in 2000. The opening of the memorial was planned to happen earlier in 1996, on November 9th, the 58th anniversary of Kristallnacht. The four-year delay happened because an archaeological excavation found something extraordinary.

At the time of our visit in 2001, we didn't know about it.

All we saw was a stone cube with the sides resembling a bookshelf. Only the books were put in backwards, therefore the book titles were inwards and not visible. The titles of the books were to remain unknown.

The shelves of the memorial held endless copies of the same book that represented the empty spaces left by the souls of the “People of the Book” who had vanished in the horror of the Holocaust. The front side of that library had double doors.

The doors had neither hinges nor handles.

 No one could enter, and no one could leave.

The metaphorical library resembles a military bunker leftover from the past war, creating a sharp contrast with the beautiful old Baroque buildings that surround the Jewish Square.

When this memorial was unveiled, Simon Wiesenthal famously said, “This monument shouldn't be beautiful, it must hurt”.

And it does, especially when you read on the ground a stone writing - In memory of more than 65 thousand Austrian Jews who were killed by Nazis between 1938 and 1945. It's written in three languages: German, Hebrew, and English.

Remarkably, the artist who created this memorial refused to paint it with anti-graffiti paint. Rachel Whiteread said, “If someone sprays a swastika on it, we can try to scrub it off, but a few daubed swastikas would really make people think about what's happening in their society.”

This monument, however humble, carries a very powerful message.

Last year, when we visited Vienna again, I finally learned why the construction of the Holocaust memorial was delayed and what was discovered by archeologists under the plaza where the monument is located.

The Holocaust memorial is located in the middle of the old city plaza named Jewish (Judenplatz). Many years ago, it was the center of Jewish life in Vienna. Jewish people started to settle in these parts as early as the 11th century. By the beginning of the 1400s, there were about a thousand Jews there. At the time, it was about 5% of the Vienna population, as I read. Most were merchants, and everybody liked to visit a Jewish bazaar that was located on the square. At the center of the square, a very big synagogue was built. It was the largest synagogue in the Habsburg hereditary lands within the Holy Roman Empire.

Some years were good for Jewish people, and others not so much, but life was going on relatively well until Duke Albrecht came to power in Vienna. In 1440, a new ruler decreed that the Jews in Vienna would no longer be welcome. The rich Jewish people lost all their possessions and were ordered forcefully convert to Christianity. Poor Jewish people were ordered to leave the city altogether.

The persecution of Jews reached a barbaric peak in the autumn of 1420 and continued into 1421. It began with widespread incarcerations, which were followed by enforced starvation, torture, and ultimately executions. Children were deprived of their families and tricked into eating forbidden, unclean foods. Those who showed disobedience faced being sold into slavery and were all forcibly baptized against their will.

The few Jews still living in the city took refuge in the beautiful Or-Sarua Synagogue at Judenplatz. It evolved into a three-day siege, leading to an unprecedented action of collective suicide.

They barricaded all windows and doors from the inside and began to daven. (To "daven" in Judaism is to recite liturgical prayers.)

Rabbi Jonah set the Synagogue on fire from the inside, and jews of the Or-Sarua Synagogue at Old Vienna Judenplatz all died as martyrs.

At the command of Duke Albrecht V, the two hundred remaining survivors of the Jewish community were accused of crimes such as dealing arms to the enemies of the church. On March 12, 1421, all remaining Jewish people were burned alive at the stake.

That execution was set at the goose pasture in the Erdnerg district. Now it's an eastern area of Vienna frequently visited by tourists and locals alike, not knowing that a gruesome murder happened here all those many years ago.

The Duke decided at that time that no more Jews would be allowed in Austria hereafter. The properties that were left behind were confiscated, the houses were sold or given away, and the stones of the synagogue were taken for the building of the old Viennese university.

Let this sink for a minute or two… Three hundred people burned themself in the act of despair...Two hundred others burned alive… Jewish people were prosecuted and expelled from the city where they dwelled for more than 300 years...

And please note that an outrageous crime happened fifty years before Queen Isabella I of Castile started the expulsion of Jews from Spain. Therefore, she wasn’t the initiator of the Jewish tragedy in Europe. She was a consequence of the process started years ago when Christianity took its initial wrong turn at the First Council of Nicaea.

We learned about this 1441 tragedy in Vienna only on our last visit to that city, but I noted this historical probability in many of my Spanish and Portuguese stories.

There is a memorial plaque about it on Jewish Plaza nowadays. A building at the end of the plaza is a Jewish museum. From its basement, you can walk to the remains of the foundation left from the old, beautiful Or-Sarua Synagogue under the Jewish plaza.

Inadvertently, the Holocaust memorial in Vienna reminds us about two tragedies that happened 500 years apart and opens our eyes to the multiple historical injustices that Jewish people lived through over the years of our history.

On the opposite side of the Jewish Plaza stands an old statue. It's Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) who furthered the Enlightenment movement in Europe. He wasn't Jewish, but he became a lifelong friend of Jewish people. His beliefs in religious tolerance became an overtone of all his stories and theatre plays. He is known for his profound, lifelong friendship with the Jewish-German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

The famous quote, “There cannot be ‘the true’ religion since all religions have their origin in God. Peaceful, tolerant coexistence is needed,” belongs to him and comes to us throughout the history of time.

Nevertheless, reflecting on everything I written here so far, you may notice that the Holocaust memorial on Jewish plaza is just as nameless as a Vienna memorial to the victims of fascism.

   4. The Wall

The full admission of responsibility for the crimes against humanity by the Austrians is a very hard topic to discuss.

It took years, many years, more than 80 years after the horrors of the Holocaust, to finally see the evidence of guilt recognition for crimes committed by Austrians during the Second World War. The wind of repentance finally came across the city.

In 2021, the "Shoah Wall of Names" memorial was unveiled in the Ostarrichi Park not far from the city center.

This memorial consists of 200m of wall inscribed with the names of over 65,000 Jewish men, women, and children from Austria murdered by Nazis and fascist collaborators.

Those names are written in three languages: German, English, and Hebrew. The inscriptions in English, German, and Hebrew at the entrance talk accurately of those who were “murdered” and note the participation in the atrocities of “countless Austrians”.

The writing on the wall is honest and straightforward, and it is almous surprising. I have never expected from Austria a true admission of complicity rather than mere words of sympathy that we heard so many times before.

Outside the memorial, there stands a stone that commemorates the suffering of other groups persecuted, tortured, and killed in Austria by the Nazis and their supporters.

Perhaps the recognition of the responsibility came late, but nevertheless, it did come.

This is the story of the three memorials in Vienna that my wife, Lily, and I visited over the last fifty years. I believe this story is very important. We no longer have any actual witnesses to the Holocaust, except for three women who were miraculously born in the Mauthausen death camp. I recently watched their story in a special edition of 60 Minutes. Maybe another few survivors are still alive, but the time when all witnesses are gone is coming. Our lives are finite, and soon, all those who experienced these events will be gone. The memorials made of stone serve as a reminder for future generations to know and remember what happened in the past. Hopefully, that knowledge will help prevent them from repeating the mistakes made by previous generations.

   5. Epilogue.

This Epilogue became a tale by itself. Some stories that I write are written in a way that lets my thoughts spiral through the paths of time and content before lining up in a clear and fully understandable sequence. That is why sometimes my stories are hard to follow. I am asking you to trust me, to be patient, and keep reading to come to the meaningful point that I am leading you to.

 Writing about the three Vienna memorials, I meant to ask several questions metaphorically, mainly about our own relationship with the memory of the Holocaust. The evolving story about three memorials in Vienna is just my way of asking that.

There is an old-looking statue at the end of Jewish Square in the Old City of Vienna. When I noticed it, I thought it should mean something architecturally meaningful, and to balance itself with the Holocaust memorial, yet I didn't know how it was.

I read the signage. It said “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781)”. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn't remember who he was or why I suddenly remembered that name.

I looked him up. It’s so easy these days with the all-knowing internet.

I found online that he was an Austrian playwright and philosopher who lived during the Enlightenment. He wasn’t a Jew, but his ideas promoted religious tolerance among all three Abrahamic religions. His best friend was the famous Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. It was Mendelssohn's ideas that inspired “Nathan the Wise”, a Lessing’s play that was initially banned by the Catholic Church and denounced strongly by antisemites of the day.

It certainly was good information, but it didn’t click. I couldn't remember where I heard that name.

It was then that I decided to read his famous play. Instantly, my memory took me back to my childhood.

My grandpa, Isaak, used to take me for a walk almost every night, and I really enjoyed those evenings. They were filled with fascinating stories. As we strolled by the Riga Opera Theater, grandpa mentioned that there is another opera theater in the city of Vienna, which he claimed is even more beautiful than ours.

He told me that Vienna itself is more beautiful than our city, Riga. At that time, I considered Riga, the capital of Latvia, to be the most beautiful city in the world because it was my birthplace. That was also when grandpa shared a story that suddenly came back to my memory now, when I was standing in the middle of the Jewish Square in Vienna.

“ Once upon a time, there was an old man. That man had a very valuable ring, the ring that came from God himself. That ring could make a person who wears it loved by everyone. The old man had two sons, and he couldn’t choose who to leave the magic ring to. He went to a jeweler and ordered an exact copy. The time went by, and the old man passed away, leaving both rings to his two sons, but he didn’t tell them which one was the magic one. He told them to do only good deeds, and to try never do anything wrong, and then everybody will like them. The sons promised to do just that to their father, and tried to follow his covenant, yet a jealous rivalry took over, and they ended up fighting one another. One brother was Jewish, and another was Christian.”

I was incredibly moved by that story. Everywhere in school and on the streets, there was an invisible wall between my Jewish friends and the other ones. Even when the dislike for the Jewish kids was not obvious, the bitter strain in relationships was always present. That was true for the boys and for the girls equally. That was very upsetting for me. There was a girl in school I liked very much, but she wasn't Jewish, and I knew she wouldn't like me.

 At home, I secretly crafted an amulet from an old button belonging to my grandmother. It featured a Star of David with a Christian cross in the center. I carried it with me as a lucky charm, but I kept it hidden because religious symbols were punished by the authorities and wouldn’t be understood by my friends, whether they were Jewish or not.

Back then, I didn’t know that the symbol wasn’t my invention. It was created in Vienna by a movement called the Union of Christian and Jews.

Only now have I learned that this movement erected the statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing on the Jewish Plaza in Vienna in 1934. The statue, however, was short-lived. It was taken down and destroyed by the Nazi collaborators in 1938.

23 years after the end of WWII, the statue was recreated, but it was installed in its original place at the Jewish Plaza only in 1981, a year after our family came to Vienna as refugees from the country of the “communist paradise for all”.

A generation is typically defined as a span of 20 to 25 years. It took two generations for this monument to return to its original location. While I am glad that it has finally happened, I can't help but feel a bit bitter about how long it took.

Only now I realized that my grandpa’s story about two rings for two brothers was his interpretation of the original story by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Nathan the Wise”. However, in the original, it was three brothers, a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim, and the end of the story was a good and a happy one.

Now I understand why my grandpa changed this story for me. He lived through the time of the Holocaust and survived that horrible time as he joined the Soviet Army fighting Hitler's Nazi forces. Therefore, he wasn't in the occupied territory when the fascist army took over. His parents, aunts, uncles, and many cousins ended up in the ghetto and were killed there. His brother was arrested three times by Stalin’s NKVD, eventually sent to a GULAG labor camp, and died there just before the war. At the time of this story, I was about 11 years old. It was the time when, because of the snitch letter to the Communist Party Committee, both my grandparents were accused of Zionism and anti-Russian bigotry. Both my grandparents were demoted at their jobs and fined. The same happened with my parents.

Understandably, my grandfather felt bitter, so he dwelt in the past and saw only glumness in his future. That is why his version of Lessing’s tale didn’t have a happy ending.

Of course, he and the rest of the family did their best to protect me from knowing of the family troubles. Yet, I was a very curious kid and learned how to quietly listen to our family's secret night discussions by pretending to sleep, as we all lived in one room, my parents and I.

I heard, and I knew it all in my childish imaginings.

Nowadays, as I reflect on my family history years later, I do not feel sadness or pity for the difficulties I've encountered. I wish my grandparents and parents had experienced a better life, but for my own, I feel nothing but gratitude for the many lessons I've learned. This is the generational difference between my grandparents and me. They were dwelling in the past. I choose to remember, but move to a better future, no matter how difficult that might be.

There are things we do not see, yet we know if it’s there. Those might be love and hate, guilt and repentance. We know because we choose to understand their presence, and for that, we need time.

Inadvertently, it is my way to look at the horror of the Holocaust.

I choose not to dwell in the past, but remember it and move to the future. That is how I understand the meaning of the statement, - Never Again!

Reflecting on the history of the three memorials in Vienna, I am not complaining about their slow development. Instead, I choose to celebrate their existence today and commend the efforts of the people in Austria who are working to protect their future.

I hope that after reading this story, you will visit the Jewish Square in the Old City of Vienna and appreciate the unique balance between the Holocaust Memorial on one side and the statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing on the other, just as I do.

I hope that this story will help you to understand the complexity of the post-Holocaust history of this magnificent city and its people.

I will tell this story to our children and grandchildren.

Would you do the same?

AlexM©️

P.S. I decided not to include any illustrations in this article because I want my readers to focus solely on the text instead of flipping through pictures. However, if you’d like to see my photographs of the three monuments from our recent visit to Vienna, please follow the link to my Facebook post. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Auj8rCYQU/?mibextid=wwXIfrI

P.S.S. It’s remarkable, I finished writing this story on the day when the ugly blob of russian war machine celebrated the fourth anniversary of its Ukrainian invasion. There is a new Hitler who is crunching his cracked fingers. He is not in Berlin, but in Moscow this time around. Russian leaders of today didn't learn from history, and just as Hitler played on the political inspiration of jealousy of the people of Germany after losing in WWI, Putin played on the russian obsession with the dissolution of the myth of the soviet superiority. How many more years should it take to stop these brutal killings of the innocent?

Please consider supporting the people of Ukraine as they resist this aggression. Please do not turn your back on any attempt to stop these senseless killings, no matter what the cost.

Febfuary 24th, 2026