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America votes
the world takes note
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Sir Martin's November Books
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Churchill and America
Churchill's relationship with the United States and her leaders
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Jewish History Atlas
Jews, impacted and affected by the world in which they live
For ebook discount, enter DC 360
at checkout.
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“a lasting union”
excerpt from Churchill and America
525 words/2 1/2 minute read
In 1944, as victory came closer, Churchill saw a bolder and brighter future for the Anglo-American relationship than victory alone. In a speech in London at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 November 1944, in celebration of American Thanksgiving Day, he spoke of how “in three or four years the United States has in sober fact become the greatest military, naval, and air power in the world – that, I say to you in this time of war, is itself the subject for profound thanksgiving.” But he also spoke of “a greater Thanksgiving Day, which still shines ahead, which beckons the bold and loyal and warm-hearted.” (CONTINUE READING)
Churchill meets Roosevelt at Quebec before the start of the first Quebec conference,
16 August 1943. Imperial War Museum photograph
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 From Esther Gilbert
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The Holocaust and “Freedom Fighters”
600 words/3 minute read
Witold Pilecki in a colourised pre-1939 photo.
(T.Bor komorowski "Armia podziemna" Warsaw,1990, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Jack Fairweather's book The Volunteer, the story of Witold Pilecki, has what may be to many readers a confusing twist. Pilecki, a fighter with the Polish Resistance during the Second World War, volunteered to be incarcerated in Auschwitz in September 1940. It was part of a plan to report conditions and organise resistance within the camp. He did not realise what he was getting into; he barely escaped with his life, in April 1943. His story is an important one, a life dedicated to Poland, to seeing it a free country, free of external and internal oppression. Tragically, Stalin and the Polish Communists had other plans for post-war Poland. Pilecki was executed in 1947 by his own Polish countrymen.
The twist is that Pilecki's story and his imprisonment in Auschwitz reminds us that Auschwitz is as much a Polish story as it is a Jewish one. The two wars Nazi German waged against the peoples of Europe, Jews and non-Jews, were separate, but connected by ideology and economics. (CONTINUE READING)
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So, who is this “harlot … in the street” anyway?
In December 1944, when democracy was under grave threat in liberated Greece in the form of a civil war, Churchill flew personally to Athens, to persuade the warring Greek factions to accept a unified, parliamentary-based government. In justifying his personal intervention, he told the House of Commons: “Democracy is not harlot to be picked up in the street by a man with a Tommy gun. I trust the people, the mass of the people, in almost any country, but I like to make sure that it is the people and not a gang of bandits from the mountains or from the countryside who think that by violence they can overturn constituted authority, in some cases ancient Parliaments, Governments and States.” (CONTINUE READING)
Churchill, in his constituency, electioneering with his wife, 26 May 1945
For the reasons why Churchill lost the election, and his response, see
The Will of the People |
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The Baltimore Sun, https://www.baltimoresun.com/obituaries/bs-md-ob-herbert-friedman-20201010-s44g7krgybczrokxxpnqewyo7m-story.html, “Herbert Friedman, who escaped the Holocaust and later became a successful pharmacist, dies,” posted 12 October 2020:
“My mother then asked me to run down the street (we lived on the fourth floor) to intercept my brother and tell him not to come home but to stay with a friend,” the elder Mr. Friedman told author Martin Gilbert for his book, “Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction.”
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Please share, connect, keep well
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Come Zoom with us!
Shirli Gilbert
Professor of Modern Jewish History, UCL
Academic Director of the Centre
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