“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.”
― Anthony Bourdain 22 44 66 …
118 years after Salome in Graz
The title of my new novel, Salome in Graz, refers to the 16 May 1906 Austrian premiere of the Richard Strauss opera -- 118 years ago today !
Commemorate the occasion by reading my book !
Back in my teens we were exposed to many stories of Czechoslovak Oscar Schindler, captured by Thomas Keneally, however, no one captured the story of Russian Zinaida Portnova in a book 📖 or film 🎥 yet
The story of Zinaida Portnova, the 16 year old girl who took the lives of more than 100 Nazis by poisoning their food. She was captured by the Gestapo, and while being interrogated, she disarmed the Nazi detective and shot him in the head. In her attempt to escape, she executed two more Nazis. A seventh-grade student at the 385th school in Leningrad, Zinaida became member of the local underground Komsomol organization, named Young Avengers, during the German invasion. She became employed as a kitchen aide in Obol. In August, she poisoned the food meant for the Nazi garrison stationed there. Immediately falling suspect, she said she was innocent and ate some of the food in front of the Nazis to prove it was not poisoned. After she did not fall ill immediately, they released her. Portnova became sick afterwards, vomiting heavily but eventually recovering from the poison after drinking much whey. After she did not return to work, the Germans realized she had been the culprit and started searching for her. When she was captured in 1943, during the Gestapo interrogation, she took the investigator's pistol off the table, then shot and killed him. When two German soldiers entered after hearing the gunshots, she shot them as well. She then attempted to escape the compound and ran into the woods, where she was caught near the banks of a river. She was executed in 1944.
“Kant saw reason’s potential as a tool for liberation” — Susan Neiman (Einstein Forum) in the NYT on why we should celebrate Kant
THIS IS THE WAY 1968 ENDS
"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed."
"When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago."
"What was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son."
"The worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself, Jozef "
"If you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria."
"In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche died at 56 (1844-1900)
Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)