(no subject)

'Tis a fine, fine soggy morning, grey with clouds and fog. I've spent enough New Jersey summers waiting for the water conservation regs to be lifted that I welcome weather like this, so long as it doesn't interfere with my driving - I get nervous on slick roads, but I get much more nervous when my visibility's limited. I got to have dinner with cadhla, agrumer, and two of our other friends last night; that was cool, even if I did get a little lost on the way there. No big deal, though. The price I pay for being able to travel from Delaware to Morris County, NJ entirely by . . .

Um. Sorry. Today the Angel of Surrealism has supplied his content early. A semi clearly labeled Big Bad Wolf Trucking just rolled past my window and derailed my train of thought.

Anyway. I get lost the first time I go somewhere. After that, even if I get off the highway at the wrong exit, I can find my way there with very little in the way of a problem. So there we are; I'll be fine on this route next time. And today I get out of work at 3 because of summer hours, so we'll see if the Universe invokes the First Time Rule on the way to Buffycon. Should be interesting to see.

Oh, and the silver wire necklace is nearly finished; I have two more rows to go, then the bind-off. I'm trying to decide if I wanna switch to gold wire for the last few rows, because that would contrast nicely when I go to wrap it around the silver at regular intervals. Trouble is that the only gold wire I brought with me today is 28-gauge and the silver is 26. Meh. We'll see. Knitting with wire is giving me a new appreciation for knitting yarn - there is NOTHING difficult about handling cotton/silk yarn after you spend an hour or two dealing with recalcitrant wire!

"In 1942 my mother and her whole family were sent to Poland..."

We just got a Holocaust tracing call at my chapter.

The International Red Cross was not begun as a disaster relief society. My organization was born on an Italian battlefield as Henri Dunant, a Swiss businessman, saw the terrible aftermath of the Battle of Solferino - one of the bloodiest, ugliest battles of the entire 1800's. Dunant thought that there ought to be some organization that could look after wounded soldiers and other victims of war - not an anti-war group, just a group that would be looked on as neutral and safe. They would be tasked with tending to the wounded and to civilians harmed by warfare, and they would have the responsibility of communicating with the soldiers' families to let them know that they were still alive. It took a long time and a lot of money and lobbying, but ultimately Dunant's dream came true and the Red Cross Society was established. Our name, our services, and our mandate has expanded since then, but we still maintain the old objectives.

One outgrowth of Dunant's original vision has been the Holocaust and War Victims International Tracing Centre. See, since the Red Cross is officially neutral, we get to look after prisoners of war. (We shall not speak of Guantanamo here. The stuff I'd like to say would violate all pretenses of neutrality six ways from Sunday.) We get to look after civilian victims of war. We get to look after war refugees. And we get to look for information on all of them; when someone comes to the Red Cross and says 'my brother / father / son / mother / sister / daughter / whatever was in thus-and-such a war zone and we haven't heard from them in ages, can you help', it's our job to say yes. Even, sometimes, if it's years after the fact.

Even if the war was World War II.

The Red Cross could probably have done better during the Second World War, I will admit. I do not know as much about our performance in the Nazi territories as I would like, but I am reasonably sure that we made asses of ourselves by believing that the Shiny Happy Pretty Prisoners we were shown by the Nazis were for real. We made mistakes then, as a lot of people did, and the end results were horrible. We're sorry for that now, and the American Red Cross is one of the few national Red Cross societies agitating for the Magen David Adom to be accepted into the ICRC as a full member... More importantly, we're also one of the largest organizations working on reuniting Holocaust survivors and their families, and on discovering the fates of those who vanished during those dark years.

When the camps were overturned by the liberating armies, we got many of the records. When the Iron Curtain fell and the Russian Red Cross society was able to communicate freely with the rest of the ICRC, we got a whole lot more of the records - the Red Army did an amazing amount of the initial liberation work and so the records wound up going to Moscow. Most of the records have been converted to microfilm, and those copies are maintained in a Red Cross facility in Germany now. If someone has family who vanished then and has any kind of lead on them at all - 'her name was Greta Wozniak, she lived in Poznan, we last heard from her in 1941' - they can call the Red Cross and ask for help finding out what happened. Their local Red Cross might not be able to do much, but the information will be relayed to Washington, DC. The HWVITC will take what information they can get, search through the archives we have in this country, and contact Germany for help if it isn't enough. If there is an answer in the documents we have available, we'll get it eventually and let the family know.

The service is free. It gets results. Most of the time the results are 'she died at (insert camp name)' or 'he passed away in Lithuania in 1953, sorry', but every once in a while someone turns up alive. My own chapter was responsible for a reunion last year - brother/sister, I think, with the brother having been schlepped off to the Ukraine where he managed to grow up okay and get married.

http://www.redcross.org/services/intl/holotrace/index.html for more information.

They're back.

I think the cedar waxwing I saw yesterday is nesting somewhere nearby. I thought I spotted two of them in the tree yesterday afternoon, but my window's mucky and I couldn't tell for sure. Just now, a waxwing landed in the tree next to my window and started picking at the abandoned robin's nest. After gathering a nice little bundle in its beak it flew off around the corner. I have a feeling the waxwings are nesting in a tree along the other side of the building, or that they're trying it out as a nesting site. I hope so - they're pretty little birds, and if I can't have the robins in this tree then having waxwings stop by is a neat thing too.