Unknown Tragedy (PART 1)

 

Unknown Tragedy (PART 1)

 


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Kato. . . , are you talking about an unknown tragedy?


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Yes, that's right. . . Diane, you don't like it, do you?

Well . . . honestly, I prefer comedy to tragedy.

Yes, yes, yes,... of course, it's understandable.

But, Kato, how come you pick up an unknown tragedy among all other things.

Good question! . . . Actually, a couple of days ago, I read the following passage from the book borrowed at Vancouver Public Library. . .

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What is not well known in Japan is the rape done by the Soviet Union soldiers in the occupied area before arriving in Berlin.
This happened not only in Germany, but also in the countries of Eastern Europe, which lie between the Soviet Union border and Germany.
Thus, the total number of Soviet army rapes rose to a tremendous number.

Naturally, rape didn't stop there because the women resisted, and the soldiers committed war crimes such as assault, injury and murder.

According to one theory, Soviet soldiers killed about 10% of raped women.
Besides, there were other women who committed suicide.
Naturally, sexually transmitted diseases spread among victims, and then transmitted to families as well.

It was even more miserable if the women got pregnant. . . .

The rate of pregnancy by rape done by the Soviet Union soldiers became as high as 20 percent. . . .

It is reported that 11,000 German women became pregnant by the Soviet army's rape after the fall of Berlin, and 1,100 "Russian" children were born because they were not abandoned due to religious or other reasons. . . .

After all, although rape is a war crime that is unforgivable for women, it must be said that it is strange that only Japanese army is criticized in terms of "comfort woman" issue.

 


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(translated by Kato)

２３７-２３８ページ 『こうして歴史問題は捏造される』
著者:　有馬哲夫
２０１７（平成２９）年９月２０日　初版発行
発行所：　株式会社　新潮社

I see. . . As a matter of fact, I once read a story about the Soviet Union army who raped the Japanese women when the Soviet Union army invaded Manchuria.



Oh, did you?

So, the Soviet Union army also raped the women while they advanced along the way to reach Berlin, didn't they?

Yes, you're telling me, Diane. . . In fact, I viewed a movie made based on those historical facts. . .

Did you?

Yes, I borrowed a DVD at Vancouver Public Library last November and watched the following movie. . .

 


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My Comment

November 28, 2018

Directed by Anne Fontaine in 2016 based on the real events, this French drama delves into the aftermath of mass rapes by Soviet soldiers at the convent in Poland.

The pregnant nuns go through an unprecedented crisis of faith.

Though it does not seem easy to watch, its nuanced exploration of the minds of the strict Mother Superior as well as the victimized nuns appears well worth watching.

 

The Innocents

 


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The Innocents, also known as Agnus Dei, is a 2016 French film directed by Anne Fontaine, which features Lou de Laâge, Agata Kulesza, Agata Buzek and Vincent Macaigne in its cast.
The script is by Sabrina B. Karine, Pascal Bonitzer, Anne Fontaine and Alice Vial, after an original idea by Philippe Maynial.
Maynial took inspiration from the experiences of his aunt, Madeleine Pauliac, a French Red Cross doctor who worked in Poland after World War II, dealing with the aftermath of mass rapes by Soviet soldiers.

 


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Producer Eric and Nicola Altmeyer (French version) who knew about the tragic incident that happened in the Polish monastery immediately after World War II from Dr. Pauliac's diary, and the French director Anne Fontine I asked for a production.

Director Fontaine goes to the field with Polish historians to investigate.
And you get confirmation that the incident actually happened in the three abbeys.
Born in a Catholic family, Director Fontine has two nuns aunts.

In order to understand the movements of the nuns, I experienced life as a "practitioner" in a Benedictine abbey similar to a movie.
"Today the war and terrorism have killed the general public all over the world. The most important thing is strong solidarity. It is important to find hope even in a desperate situation," said Fontaine.

 

Summary

In Warsaw, December 1945, a nun known as Sister Maria approaches a young French female student doctor, Mathilde Beaulieu, serving with an army unit. She says there are sick women in need and is not satisfied with a referral to the Polish Red Cross.

Beaulieu decides to go at night to the nun's convent, where one woman has given birth.
The Mother Superior tells her that the nun was thrown out by her family and was taken in out of charity.
Beaulieu tells the Mother Superior (Abbess) that she works for the French Red Cross.

A novice nun at the convent is grieving the death of another nun.
Confined to her cell, she engages in morning prayer.

Later the Abbess discloses to Beaulieu that several nuns at the convent were raped by Russian soldiers, relating that the experience was nightmarish, and they wish to keep this a secret.
Seven of the nuns are pregnant.

Some of the pregnant nuns are reluctant to be examined intimately by the doctor, believing this will violate their vow of chastity.
One of the nuns confesses to Mother Superior that her faith has been deeply shaken by these events.

Soldiers come to the convent believing the nuns are harboring an enemy soldier.
However, Beaulieu convinces them she is there to deal with an emergency outbreak of typhus.

The Mother Superior is badly shaken by the threat of the soldiers, and thanks the doctor for her presence of mind.
Beaulieu realizes that she too was raped.

The Master of Novices tells the doctor that every day she is reminded of these harsh events.
She relates how faith has become more difficult for her but it is the cross she bears.

When Beaulieu returns to headquarters, her boss chastises her for having been away without leave.
He says that the military is a place of order and discipline.

At a later visit at the convent, Beaulieu is present when another novice nun gives birth unexpectedly.
This nun had not realized she was pregnant, and does not seem to know she has given birth.

The Abbess had given orders that she be notified of all births, but Beaulieu requests that she not be notified immediately.
The doctor needs to focus on care for the newborn.
A different nun, Sister Zofia, takes responsibility for the child.

Beaulieu asks the Master of Novices if she ever regrets her life as a nun.
The novice replies, "Faith is 24 hours of doubt with one minute of hope", going on to describe her difficulties with the practice.

Beaulieu returns to the army medical unit, and discovers the unit is going to be transferred out of the area.

Several nuns are about to give birth at once.

 


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Beaulieu returns to the convent with a male Jewish colleague.
She assures the nuns that he will keep their secret.
The doctor visits the baby whose existence has been kept secret from the Abbess.

The Master of Novices plans to take the baby to the Zofia's family, but the baby is discovered by the abbess.
The Abbess is upset that she was lied to and tells the Master of Novices that she has been corrupted by "that French woman", who has brought scandal and disorder to the convent.
The Master of Novices replies, "Forgive me, but scandal and disorder were already here".

The Mother Superior has been telling everyone that she takes the babies to families who have agreed to adopt, but she abandons this baby in front of a crucifix on a country walking path, after baptising it.
Zofia is distraught, knowing the child is missing.
The Mother Superior privately prays that she have the courage to continue on the path she has chosen.

Meanwhile, Sister Zofia commits suicide by jumping from an upper ledge, dying shortly after her wounded body is discovered.

When the Master of Novices goes to Zofia's family to report her death, she discovers that Zofia's mother never knew Zofia had a child, nor that she has been caring for the baby.
The Master of Novices decides to not tell the mother the truth.
This is the Master of Novices' first realization that the Abbess has been dishonest about the fate of the babies.

She confronts the Abbess demanding the truth.
She says she entrusted the child to God, saying "Don't you believe in Providence?"

At the medical base, Beaulieu is getting ready to finally leave the area.
The Master of Novices brings three babies to the base to protect them from the Abbess.
Beaulieu first notices that many orphans living on the street have been helping personnel at the base from time to time.

It occurs to her that the nuns could start raising many of these children and open an orphanage, thus avoiding questions about where the babies are coming from.
One of the nuns decides to leave the convent and raise her own child, and another decides to leave, but allow her baby to be raised by the nuns.

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Source: "The Innocents (2016 film)"
Free encyclopedia Wikipedia

Oh. . . What a heart-wrenching story it is!



Yes, it is. . . Anyway, it is said that Soviet troops rushed to the abbey and raped them one after another. . . Ten months later, many of them would give birth in the last month. . .

 


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It looks like the convent has become a nursery. . .



In other words, Kato, are you defending the Japanese army who was to blame for the so-called "comfort woman" problem?

Oh no, I am NOT. . . But, I'd say that the above tragedy was much worse than the "comfort woman" problem. . . Don't you thin so, Diane?

Well. . . The so-called "comfort woman" problem seems as bad as the above unknown tragedy.

Anyway, I'm NOT defending the Japanese army nor the Soviet Union army who did those bad things, but I'd say that during the war there were so many rapes in any of occupied countries. . . Even now, there has been news that Syrian government forces did "systematic rape".

No kidding!?

If you cannot believe, read the following article.

UN probe accuses Syrian troops

of ‘systematic’ rape

 


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2018/03/16

Syrian troops and government-linked militia have systematically used rape and sexual violence against civilians, atrocities that amount to crimes against humanity, a UN-backed inquiry said Thursday, reports AFP.

Rebel fighters have committed similar violations, amounting to war crimes, but at a rate “considerably less common than rape by government forces and associated militia”, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry for Syria (COI) said in a new report.

The findings, submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council, are based on 454 interviews with sources that include survivors, eye witnesses and medical workers.
The Damascus government has never granted COI investigators access to Syria.

Overall, the report adds to the overwhelming accounts of hellish suffering endured by Syrian civilians during the conflict that has claimed more than 350,000 lives as it enters its eighth year.

A woman from Syria’s third city of Homs told COI investigators that in 2012 “government forces entered her home and raped her daughter in front of her and her husband before shooting the daughter and the father”, the report said.

“The mother was then raped by two soldiers,” it added, in one of many examples of extreme violence.

Checkpoints controlled by the government or its allies, as well as detention centres, were identified as a main areas where sexual violence was perpetrated.

The COI notes that government troops detained “thousands of women and girls” from 2011 to the end of 2017, the period covered in the report.

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SOURCE: Daily-Sun News

So, Kato, you defend the Japanese army because they resorted to "comfort women" so that they didn't have to rape the women in the occupied countries, don't you?



No, I don't. . . I am not admiring the “comfort women system”. . .

So how come you let me know about the rapes of the Soviet Union army in Poland?

Well . . . , even the German troops had raped the Russian women during the Soviet invasion.

Oh really?

Yes, they did. . . Besides, even the American troops had raped the French women during and after the Normandy landing operation.

The Dark Side of Liberation

 


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By Jennifer Schuessler
May 20, 2013

 

The soldiers who landed in Normandy on D-Day were greeted as liberators, but by the time American G.I.’s were headed back home in late 1945, many French citizens viewed them in a very different light.

In the port city of Le Havre, the mayor was bombarded with letters from angry residents complaining about drunkenness, jeep accidents, sexual assault — “a regime of terror,” as one put it, “imposed by bandits in uniform.”

This isn’t the “greatest generation” as it has come to be depicted in popular histories.
But in “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France,” the historian Mary Louise Roberts draws on French archives, American military records, wartime propaganda and other sources to advance a provocative argument: The liberation of France was “sold” to soldiers not as a battle for freedom but as an erotic adventure among oversexed Frenchwomen, stirring up a “tsunami of male lust” that a battered and mistrustful population often saw as a second assault on its sovereignty and dignity.

“I could not believe what I was reading,” Ms. Roberts, a professor of French history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, recalled of the moment she came across the citizen complaints in an obscure archive in Le Havre.
“I took out my little camera and began photographing the pages. I did not go to the bathroom for eight hours.”

“What Soldiers Do,” to be officially published next month by the University of Chicago Press, arrives just as sexual misbehavior inside the military is high on the national agenda, thanks to a recent Pentagon report estimating that some 26,000 service members had been sexually assaulted in 2012, more than a one-third increase since 2010.

While Ms. Roberts’s arguments may be a hard sell to readers used to more purely heroic narratives, her book is winning praise from some scholarly colleagues.
“Our culture has embalmed World War II as ‘the good war,’ and we don’t revisit the corpse very often,” said David M. Kennedy, a historian at Stanford University and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.”

“What Soldiers Do,” he added, is “a breath of fresh air,” providing less of an “aha” than, as he put it, an “of course.”

Mary Louise Roberts has written “What Soldiers Do,” a book about sexual assaults by Americans fighting in France.

Ms. Roberts, whose parents met in 1944 when her father was training as a naval officer, emphasizes that American soldiers’ heroism and sacrifice were very real, and inspired genuine gratitude.
But French sources, she argues, also reveal deep ambivalence on the part of the liberated.

“Struggles between American and French officials over sex,” she writes, “rekindled the unresolved question of who exactly was in charge.”

Sex was certainly on the liberators’ minds.
The book cites military propaganda and press accounts depicting France as “a tremendous brothel inhabited by 40 million hedonists,” as Life magazine put it.
(Sample sentences from a French phrase guide in the newspaper Stars and Stripes: “You are very pretty” and “Are your parents at home?”)

On the ground, however, the grateful kisses captured by photojournalists gave way to something less picturesque.
In the National Archives in College Park, Md., Ms. Roberts found evidence — including one blurry, curling snapshot — supporting long-circulating colorful anecdotes about the Blue and Gray Corral, a brothel set up near the village of St. Renan in September 1944 by Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of the infantry division that landed at Omaha Beach, partly to counter a wave of rape accusations against G.I.’s.
(It was shut down after a mere five hours.)

In France, Ms. Roberts also found a desperate letter from the mayor of Le Havre in August 1945 urging American commanders to set up brothels outside the city, to halt the “scenes contrary to decency” that overran the streets, day and night.
They refused, partly, Ms. Roberts argues, out of concern that condoning prostitution would look bad to “American mothers and sweethearts,” as one soldier put it.

Keeping G.I. sex hidden from the home front, she writes, ensured that it would be on full public view in France: a “two-sided attitude,” she said, that is reflected in the current military sexual abuse crisis.

Ms. Roberts is not the first scholar to bring the sexual side of World War II into clearer view.
The 1990s brought a surge of scholarship on the Soviet Army’s mass rapes on the Eastern front, fed partly by the international campaign to have rape recognized as a war crime after the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
At the same time, gender historians began taking a closer look at “fraternization” by American soldiers, with particular attention to what women thought they were getting out of the bargain.

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SOURCE: NY TIMES article

Besides, although the Nazi Jewish extermination and slaughter operations are notorious and well known to the world, the systematic slaughter that the former Soviet Union did against Ukrainians was hardly known until recently.



Oh . . .? Are you saying, Kato, the high-level executives of the former Soviet Union had systematically slaughtered Ukrainians?

Yes, they did. . . Actually, I didn't even know at all until recently, but I watched the following documentary. . .

 


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My Comment

May 27, 2019

Directed by Yurij Luhovy in 2010, this 76-minute documentary delves into genocide against the Ukrainian nation with declassified rare footage while interviewing survivors and historians.

The Holodomor (killing by starvation) took place in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukraines.

During the Holodomor, millions of people of Ukraine, the majority of who were ethnic ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.

Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.

Amazing, shocking and heart-wrenching!

 

Holodomor

 


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The Holodomor (derived from морити голодом, "to kill by starvation") was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians.
It is also known as the Terror-Famine and Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine or The Ukrainian Genocide of 1932–33.

It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country.
During the Holodomor, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.

Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.

Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly.
According to higher estimates, up to 12 million ethnic Ukrainians were said to have perished as a result of the famine.

A U.N. joint statement signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7–10 million perished.
Research has since narrowed the estimates to between 3.3 and 7.5 million.
According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kiev in 2010, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficits.

Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement.
Using Holodomor in reference to the famine emphasises its man-made aspects, arguing that actions such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs, and restriction of population movement confer intent, defining the famine as genocide; the loss of life has been compared to that of the Holocaust.
The causes are still a subject of academic debate, and some historians dispute its characterization as a genocide.

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Source: "Holodomor"
Free encyclopedia Wikipedia"

Oh. . . How horrible! . . . Four to fourteen million Ukrainians died because they were deprived of livestock and farmland by forced relocation. . . It sounds much worse than the Holocaust by the Nazi, doesn't it?



I suppose so. . . Horodomor is one of the biggest tragedies of the 20th century. . . There were others such as the Armenian massacre, the Holocaust, the Pol Poto massacre, the Rwanda massacre, etc.! . . . In other words, historically, wars and dictators have produced tragedies all over the world

I see. . .

At the time of the Communist Party dictatorship in general, and Mao Zedong in particular, China's "Great Leap Forward" (1958-1962) was a reckless plan, which resulted in 10 million people dead. . . Moreover, even in North Korea, a former BBC reporter, British journalist Jasper Becker, points out based on data from the UN that the population of North Korea was 24 million, but in 2005 it dropped to 19 million. . . That is, five million North Koreans were starved to death in just 10 years. . .

Unbelievable! . . . Both wars and dictators create such horrible tragedies, huh?

Yes, you're telling me.



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