Archivo etiqueta «II Guerra Mundial»
By Elliot Perlman, the author of, most recently, the novel The Street Sweeper (LOS ANGELES TIMES, 01/02/12):
Some six or seven years ago I happened to see an Academy Award-winning documentary, “The Last Days,” directed by James Moll and with Steven Spielberg as executive producer. It was of interest to me because, like the novel I was then writing, it dealt with the Holocaust and tangentially with the role of African American troops in World War II.
In the film, Paul Parks, an African American WW II veteran and civil rights activist, recounts being one of a number of … Seguir leyendo
By Caroline Moorehead, the author of the book A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship and Resistance in Occupied France (LOS ANGELES TIMES, 27/11/11):
On Jan. 24, 1943, 230 French women who had been arrested for resistance activities were put on a train at Compiegne, outside Paris, and sent to Auschwitz. The youngest had just celebrated her 17th birthday; the oldest was 67. They were teachers and seamstresses, students and farmers’ wives; there was a doctor, a dentist and several editors and chemists. They were to be a lesson to other would-be troublemakers.
The women were … Seguir leyendo
By Peter Schneider, the author of Eduard’s Homecoming. This essay was translated by The Times from the German (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 13/08/11):
By the time I arrived in West Berlin, in 1962, the wall was a year old. The half-city was a hysterical, intellectually exciting place; the wall, whose construction began 50 years ago today, made it more so. From the East and West radio and TV stations you heard competing, mutually exclusive versions of every event. Worldviews counted more than facts. And there were spies everywhere. For fun, a journalist told me, he’d count the intelligence … Seguir leyendo
By Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest and the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (LOS ANGELES TIMES, 12/08/11):
On Saturday, Germany will mark the 50th anniversary of one of the biggest and grimmest construction projects in history — the building of the Berlin Wall. Photographs of the wall, which overnight brutally severed streets, rail lines and families, have been on display in front of Berlin government buildings for several months. On Saturday, the memorial events will last all day and include a wreath-laying ceremony honoring the victims of the … Seguir leyendo
Por Félix de Azúa, escritor (EL PAÍS, 01/03/11):
El nuevo edificio de la Filarmónica de Hamburgo, obra de los suizos Herzog & de Meuron, que abrirá sus puertas dentro de un año, está concebido para ser fotografiado desde el agua. En las simulaciones puede verse la cresta de vidrio y sus puntas en forma de ola rompiente recortadas contra el cielo a 37 metros de altura, pero también reflejadas como fantasma luminoso en el negro espejo del puerto. O, para mayor exactitud, en uno de los remansos acuáticos de HafenCity, que es como se llama la ampliación de la … Seguir leyendo
By Kumiko Makihara, a writer and translator living in Tokyo (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 03/11/10):
I was blown away when my son told me he wanted to do his sixth grade research project on Japan’s human torpedoes, the manned missiles that crashed themselves into enemy ships toward the end of World War II.
Since then I’ve been watching to see if an 11-year-old boy growing up in an officially pacifist country — Japan’s Constitution renounces war and the country only has forces for defense — can fathom a time when thousands of frenzied young men signed up to ride … Seguir leyendo
By Samuel C. Florman, the chairman of a construction company and the author of The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 04/09/10):
On Sept. 1, 1945 — 65 years ago this week — I arrived in Leyte Gulf, the Philippines, aboard a Navy transport ship. Along with other newly commissioned ensigns in the Navy Civil Engineer Corps, I was prepared to join one of the Seabee battalions being mustered for an invasion of the Japanese mainland. However, as we had learned during our voyage across the Pacific, the A-bombs had been dropped and Japan had capitulated. As … Seguir leyendo
Por J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip, crítico literario (EL PAÍS, 26/08/10):
París sufrió un triste verano del 42 y no creo que lo pueda recordar con nostalgia. Se sabe que algunas ciudades del mundo arrastran un infierno colectivo en su memoria. En el Buenos Aires de los años setenta ese infierno existió, pero muchos de sus habitantes no se enteraron o no quisieron enterarse. Madrid y tantas ciudades españolas también lo sufrieron durante la inmediata posguerra. París sin lugar a dudas es dueño de un infierno apenas conocido. Probablemente todavía un infierno secreto para muchos parisienses de nuestros días.
No tengo … Seguir leyendo
Por Jorge Edwards, escritor chileno (EL PAÍS, 19/08/10):
Los prejuicios, los lugares comunes, las reservas y las desconfianzas son invenciones humanas. La Historia, la verdadera, con mayúscula, anda por otro lado. Si usted pasea por el distrito cuarto de París, por la ribera derecha del Sena, frente a las hermosas fachadas, a los imponentes portones de la isla San Luis, encuentra una callejuela y una flecha que indica la cercanía del Museo de la Shoá. No tengo tiempo de entrar al Museo, que exige, me dicen, para la visita, un buen estado de equilibrio nervioso, pero paso y doblo … Seguir leyendo
By F. Sionil Jose, author of the novel is Sherds (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 13/08/10):
While channel surfing the other night, I came across a news report showing a Japanese woman, a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing in August 1945, saying she would never go to America. To this day, even though her country has become the world’s second richest nation with U.S. assistance, she hates the Americans.
But while many Japanese understandably have bitter memories of World War II, many of us throughout Asia, whose countries the Japanese occupied during that war, have our own searing memories.… Seguir leyendo
Por Timothy Garton Ash, catedrático de Estudios Europeos en la Universidad de Oxford e investigador en la Hoover Institution de la Universidad de Stanford. Traducción de María Luisa Rguez. Tapia (EL PAÍS, 21/06/10):
El viernes 18 de junio, Nicolas Sarkozy y David Cameron se reunieron en Londres con veteranos franceses y británicos con el fin de conmemorar el 70º aniversario del histórico llamamiento por radio de Charles de Gaulle a los franceses para que siguieran luchando contra Hitler. El 18 de junio de 1940, el mismo día en el que De Gaulle transmitió su mensaje desde Londres a través … Seguir leyendo
By Andrei Zolotov Jr., the chief editor of Russia Profile (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 14/05/10):
Five years ago, Russia Profile, the English-language, government-funded but editorially independent publication I run, came under attack from an overzealous government official for trying to analyze Victory Day — the sacred Russian holiday that marks the end of World War II in Europe — from several different standpoints.
One of our publication’s presumed sins was that, along with traditional fare such as interviews with veterans, we commissioned a Polish writer to do an article on the resentment in much of Central and Eastern Europe … Seguir leyendo
By Janusz Bugajski, the holder of the Lavrentis Lavrentiadis Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (THE WASHINGTON TIMES, 14/04/10):
The tragic death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, together with dozens of military commanders, politicians and top advisers, has fixed the spotlight on the Katyn massacre of 70 years ago and the context in which it occurred. This will have a sobering effect on Polish-Russian reconciliation unless all the facts about World War II are finally acknowledged by leaders of the Russian Federation – the legal inheritor of the Soviet Union.
While Russian leaders celebrate the 65th … Seguir leyendo
By Samuel Pisar, a lawyer and the author of Of Blood and Hope (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 30/01/10):
Sixty-five years ago this week, the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, while the Americans were approaching Dachau. For a survivor of these two infernos to still be alive and well, with a new family that has resurrected for me the one I had lost, seems almost unreal. When I entered Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele’s gruesome universe at the age of 13, I measured my life expectancy in days, weeks at the most.
In the early winter of 1944, World War II was … Seguir leyendo
By Andrew Baker, a rabbi, director of international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee (THE WASHINGTON POST, 30/01/10):
World leaders, Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans gathered at Auschwitz on Wednesday to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp. Poland has long shouldered responsibility for preserving this tragic site, which has become a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Its gas chambers and crematoria, rail platforms and endless rows of wooden barracks were evidence of the systematic and mechanized murder of European Jews that the Nazis had perfected. The ashes of over a … Seguir leyendo