Class Based...

                                                                                                                                                            There's one big addition to this Valley since Natureman's kids grew up here and that's the air presence of  cable  TV.  Last night this TV brought us a PBS documentary  THe House I live In...  Even though we are secluded here in the Valley we cannot escape the fact that we are part of  a society that has an enemy that is poor and racialized. We blame them for the immiseration we created and the social  pathologies of poverty.

Ironically this week around the world we commemorate the Holocaust, a dark time when Germany chose their 'enemies' as the Jews. Our Catholic University, Viterbo, will hold their annual Teaching the Holocaust Workshop for Educators and in conjunction, there will be a free and open to the public presentation sponsored also by the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics on Thursday, April 11 in the Fine Arts Center Main Theatre at 7pm. We will be there because we must remember. ZAHOR. We all need to remember...

"LA CROSSE, Wis. – Sam Harris, a child survivor of the Holocaust, will share his incredible story.

Harris was born Szlamek Rzeznik in Deblin, Poland. He was four years old when World War II began with the German invasion of his native country in 1939. Soon overcrowding, lack of food and medicine, and disease in the Deblin ghetto caused men, women, and children to die in the streets.

In 1942, Harris and his family were selected for deportation. During the chaos of the round up, Harris’ father pushed him out of line and told him to run and hide. Harris watched his family march to the railcars. He never saw them again.

The Deblin ghetto was converted to a concentration camp where Harris miraculously survived. Too young to work, he hid from the guards in the darkness of the barracks. 
In 1944, as the war approached, the Nazis moved the Jewish workers to the Czestochowa concentration camp. Upon arrival in the main camp, Sammy was lifted up, kissed and hugged, and passed overhead from hand to hand by each prisoner. The prisoners, many of whom had lost their own children, were overjoyed at seeing a child. 

Harris was liberated by the Russian army on Jan. 16, 1945. He eventually made his way to the United States and lived in a foster home in Chicago. He was adopted by Dr. Ellis and Harriett Harris in Northbrook, Ill. in 1948.

Today, Sam serves as president of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois and is leading the efforts to build a new Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. He continues to speak extensively on the local and state level about the lessons of the Holocaust and his experiences, which he described in his memoir Sammy: A Child Survivor of the Holocaust.