Mr. Stone: Perhaps you’ll read about the Yalta and Pottsdam meetings and agreements and put them in with no spin, into perspective in your film.
In our family, who were survivors of both Hitler’s and Joe Stalin’s armies: we know the story already, lived it in full, but please do not distort it as though there ought be sympathy for Hitler and Stalin or anyone else colluding in slaughter. That would be wrong. And dishonoring of the memory of the Blessed who died so easily and yet so hard.
This is our history, the history of millions of innocents, not anyone else’s to mess with for ‘drama’s sake’. There’s plenty enough drama and horror in the truth. No more can possibly be added.
For the US and Churchill to turn all of Eastern Eu over to ‘Joe, the Butcher Stalin’ was certain murder for over two million people from Masurian, Swabian, Slavic and over 100 other tribal groups throughout Eu. Though these heinous matters were buried by so many during and after the war, this is still our living truth we know too well. And the following…
Many Colluded with “Murderin’ Joe Stalin”
Churchill and US President Roosevelt and then Truman knowingly turned over the fates of millions of innocent people in a huge swath of Central and Eastern Eu. to a known murderer of citizens. Known. This we know.
Joe Stalin, 5 foot-four inches tall and as some in our family said, “he was twice as wide and ten times more cruel than he was tall”. Joe came with a long PUBLIC track record of purposely murdering before WWII, during WWII, and most especially, after WWII. Millions of murders. Millions. Joe Stalin’s fingerprints on every last one.
STALIN SUPPORTS “HIS BROTHER” HITLER: OTHERS PRETEND NOT TO SEE
There is no way to make a film about Hitler without examining the rotted black heart of Joe Stalin who was an early supporter, supplier and provisioner of Hitler. We know that the US and Britain, conveniently forgot Uncle Joe swang both ways depending on how it would benefit his amassing endless slaves and being able to grab land and other people’s treasure, including their women and their children. This we know of these hideous events from eye-witness reports of the generation just passed.
WHATEVER DEVASTATIONS HITLER STARTED, JOE STALIN BECAME HIS CROWN PRINCE WITH SOME OF THE ALLIES’ BLESSINGS
Joe’s Red Army devastated and murdered many of the citizenry whom Hitler somehow missed. This included any person of any ethnic background or religious ideal who stood in the way, including but in no way limited to those of Jewish ancestry or faith– in any way whatsoever– people were shot dead –whether a Nazi bullet or a Red Army bullet– trying to protect a child, trying to protect the women of the family, trying to protect a pregnant mother.
Directly after the war was declared ‘ended’ in Eu, it was not ended. Many who somehow managed to survive the Nazis lived only long enough to be run over by the war-hardened ‘we’ve got nothing to lose-‘ Red army at Joe’s orders. This we know.
FURTHER COLLUSIONS
This issue which may be brought by Stone’s films, is way way beyond debating which group was murdered ‘more’ and why. It is far more an issue of abject evil unleashed in the world and collusion by upstanding Joe Kennedy, Henry Ford, International Business Machines and many others. This we know and have known for decades now.
Their collusion was considered by my father and his bedraggled family as disgusting. The colluders in industry and private persons were grown ups; they DID know that innocents were being maimed and slaughtered, for they knew it was a war. They KNEW what war brings: Death to innocents. Always. They had living memory of WW One. There is no way an educated man from that time can claim he did not know what war is and does to the innocent, whether from the ease of his leather chair or his from his ‘throne.’
THE SURVIVORS AND REFUGEES FLEEING HITLER AND STALIN TELL THE REAL STORY AS THEY LIVED IT; FOR THEM, IT IS NO FILM FANTASY
All this time later, 60 some years, and still many people believe what they read in Life magazine, or the Saturday Evening Post, or the newspapers of the time that helped to ramp up ‘war whoops.’ There are historians who have labored hard to piece together what occurred at the end of WWII.
But very few listened to the masses of living witnesses until far late. My father’s tribal family groups were almost completely wiped out by Hitler’s armies and whomever was left, then dragged off by Stalin, some of them literally sold for a certain amount of money each into death-labor camps and back into the rubble cities as slave labor…
…there are very few families of the Swabian tribal group left worldwide; this group of people of the earth, farmers, weavers, wheelwrights, shepherds, woodcarvers, saddlemakers, horsemen were once nearly one million people strong. They were known as extraordinary hard workers in labor, agriculture and husbandry especially. During and after the war, Yugoslavia’s murderous headman, Tito, with Hitler and Stalin’s accord, killed every Swabian that lived, entire familes of elders, children, husbands, wives, wiped out, until there were none left in Yugoslavia, which once had over 500,000 Swabians.
Of 700,000 of the Swabian minority group in Hungary, by war’s end and in the ensuing ‘after-war,’ and to date, there are only 250,000 left today. In Romania, where before WWII there were 350,000 Swabians, after, there were 20,000 left of that hardworking people filled with such ceremonies and drum and violin music, wherein men danced, and women wore red boots, and all knew how to ride a horse like the wind.
To add more crime to the blood already spilled in the 40,s 50s, 60, and 70,s in communist controlled countries, in the 1980s, the communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, began literally selling human beings, human trafficking the Swabian minority tribal people of Romania to East Germany that was held by the Soviets as communist territory. Each human being sold brought 8000 to 14,000 Deutsche Marks. It was only when Ceaucescu and his wife were overthrown by the Romanian citizens who despised him, and after the dictator and his wife were executed, that the largest slave trade Europe has known in modern times came to a halt. This we know.
ROMANCING A WAR
And that’s only one of the more than one hundred tribal groups devastated by Hitler, then the job finished by Stalin directly ‘after the war.’ Few know. But, we do. It is one of the, if not ‘the’ most repressed and long term horrors that came from WWII. As I said, few know except those of us directly from refugee families. Fewer of the general populace, all these years, have cared to know or want to enter a competitive shouting match over who was done most wrong and why. That cannot be the ground to listen with.
Oliver Stone and other film-makers may want to expose a long-kept propagandized secret, but dont make it a romanticized version of history that dishonors the memory of those who were run down and slaughtered under Hitler AND Stalin, with the clear cut permission and collusion of Winston Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman. Dont take a powderpuff view of Hitler, most of all. Or Stalin. Or Mussolini. They weren’t statesmen acting stupidly. They were career murderers. And they liked it that way. We know.
And Stalin, like Hitler, didnt stop his slaughters as others looked away, as people of the Allies and Axis nation groups tried to piece their lives together whilst burying their dead over and over again, as one does when the young are killed. We know.
Too, as the peple of Allied and Axis powers were war-weary of death and maiming, they didnt watch Joe. After ‘declared peace,’ few wanted to look at Stalin’s acts after the war was declared speciously ‘over.’ It may have been ‘over’ in one way for the troops– especially those who saw combat on the ground– as they came home finally.
But the shooting war continued with most all the citizens of all Central and Ea. European nations having been placed under the boot of Stalin and without strings or restraints from the Aliies or anyone… on his greed and need to kill and feast and crow. This we know far too well.
Stalin died, some say poisoned to death by those who hated him for murdering their own family members and also for refusing to rescue his own son, a POW, showing the ultimate black heart even toward his own. But, as Stalin replaced Hitler, so too other men like Stalin, men with unparallel appetites for power replaced Stalin: talking out of one side of their mouths about communist ‘power to the people,’ while looting unto themselves, all the power and leaving the people wanting, poor, powerless, starved, raped, marched and worked to death or shot or hung by the neck till dead.
As one of our relatives who was in a slave labor camp at the Russian border post WWII told me about: You have not died without dying till you’ve seen a little child hung by the neck, but the weight of their body is so small it was not enough to break the neck, and I will see til the end of my days, the child’s little shoes kicking and kicking. This. we. know.
HITLER MISUNDERSTOOD?
Against such backdrops leading up to, during and after the war… Hitler, misunderstood? It cannot be. Just his orders to annihilate over 60,000 German children in foundling homes and institutions before he ever invaded Poland, before he ever touched a Jew… and that this was carried out… that alone is enough. It is ENOUGH!
More than a momentary discussion about whether Mr. Stone or his film are being persecuted by Jews in media or not, moves the so very needed FULL 100 years’ discussion away from sorting out this gigantic bloody puzzle of WWII and ‘the devastating war after the war’… and what many hidden acts and issues dearly need to be inquired of and understood.. including what Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, US Presidents, Churchill, Mussolini (who Churchill thought was a charming nice man)… did to wipe out entire groups.
ACTUAL ISSUES OF SOUL, RATHER THAN AN ISSUE OF EGO
It’s been more than 60 years. Surely it’s time to listen to many many reports and true stories, and listen even some more to witnesses of WWII — all of them– it’s time to dig up from its mass grave, the hidden but bloody war against human beings in which Stalin killed millions more after the war… even when listening involves ugly truths about one’s own country, and about leaders who are held as icons by whichever nation. These events and those who sent innocent citizenry straight to hell… let’s just put it this way. We know. It was a long time ago, and not long enough ago.
And this questions remains in my generation: first generation after WWII: This time, how will we come to terms with leaders who hold themselves out as being one way in public, who speak good propaganda poetry, ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ ‘and on this hallowed battlefield’…
and yet those same leaders are completely different and opposite in private, leaders who turn their backs on the masses of young and innocent, and instead unleash and call down death on so many? What shall we do to keep old men from taking our young to war for all the years we have been alive. Making it seem that war instead of peacekeeping is the only rite of passage to be a man– or a woman.
In the refugee side of our family of people who barely survived the war, covered in roadmaps of veiny scars from shrapnel, body parts missing from being shot off as punishment, every single woman raped, each witnessing the slaughter of their children before their eyes, dragged from their homes in the night… they have left me with instructions, not to avenge them, but to heal whatever I can of those hurt by war when they are within my reach.
Maybe you reading, maybe you are within my reach. I’d just say this, Oliver Stone film, I will watch it, for I know the real story. Have known it all my life, though it’s been embargoed by most across the world. If the films are not true to the experiences of the people, I will let you know as I see it.
Yet in the meantime, in the spirit of my father’s people who suffered so, and all others who suffered so, no matter who they are nor of which nation, no matter of what time… and the fallen bodies of innocent souls from aggression by others across the world are literally uncountable… I’d leave you with a small doorway that is perhaps more toward understanding…
One day when I was a little child, I was sitting next to my uncle and we were listening to a radio drama wherein an actor playing Winston Churchill, was saying in stentorian tones: “Never, never, never give up.” And the radio audience was cheering as though in a stadium.
My uncle Tovar began to cry. Man-crying, where tears roll without a sound. Suddenly, he stood up, scooped me up into his arms, and raising his fist over his head as high as it would go, punching the air, he shouted at the radio: “Seet des swit chilt en min armz!!?? Nefr! Nefr! Nefr gef un kink un airme!”
He was shouting at the Winston Churchill inside the radio: “See this sweet child in my arms!!?? Never! Never! Never give a king an army!”
dr. clarissa pinkola estés