On Valor and Virtue

                                                                                              

• 
  

                                                            

• Public DomainFile:Sugihara b.jpg  Created: before 1945 date

 

If you're not familiar with Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese  diplomat posted in Lithuania during World War II who saved 6,000 lives by issuing visas to Jews, you can learn about him and find references to look up here: ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/chiune-sugihara.

For the sake of this post, I'd just like to quote what he said about his own heroism in reply to the question the author of Pepper, Silk & Ivory: Amazing Stories about Jews and the Far East (p. 189) asked about it:
"Everyone in life as an opportunity to do a good deed. Do it and leave it alone. Don't write about it or publicize it; don't make money from it. Just do what's right because it's right."


The book also recounts that he had no way of knowing at the time if the visas would accomplish his aim of saving lives. Sugihara's son Hiroki reported that when his father found out how successful his rescue efforts proved, he said, "This is the happiest day of my life."                                                                   

Thoughts on WW II Posters

 

eriklarsonbooks.com/book/the-splendid-and-the-vile/

I'm now reading The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson. As I remember from reading Dead Wake and Devil in the White City, Larson's style infuses the feel of a novel on  straight history (though he's not quite as much fun to read as the somewhat fictionalized Kopp Sisters series). 

One thing that struck me early on (p. 75) was why Churchill so valued Frederick Lindemann  AKA The Prof, as summed up in one brief observation:

 The Prof delighted in coming up with ideas that turned conventional beliefs upside down. Once, as he walking with a colleague, Donald MacDougall, he saw a poster that admonished, "Stop that dripping tap," an exhortation meant to conserve water and thereby save the coal that fueled the water-distribution system. As he walked, the Prof began calculating the cost in energy, wood pulp, and shipping needed to produce the paper for the poster. "and Of course," MacDougall recalled, "Prof was right in his initial suspicions that it all added up to enormously more than was going to be saved by the posters' advice being followed."

Yet, those who put up the poster feel they are fulfilling a patriotic duty and would delight in castigating the waste of others. We see that over 75 years later, we repeat the same exact error. If anything, we've gotten worse at elevating virtue-signaling that actually takes up more resources than the ones that are saved by the recommended actions.

Related: Hopping Around History

A Novel Series for Women's History Month and Beyond

 A novel series I highly recommend is one based on a set of real-life sisters and their amazing accomplishments. If you have not yet discovered Amy Stewart's Kopp sisters series, allow me to introduce you to it.  When you read the books, always take time to read the author's notes at the end about the historical figures featured in the novels and and where the fiction deviates from facts for dramatic effect or because there is no detailed record to work off for certain aspects. You can also learn about the characters' history on her site. 

Girl Waits with Gun is the first of the series. Set in 1914, it introduces Constance Kopp, as the main heroine who foils those who threaten the sisters' household that includes the irascible Normal and the somewhat flighty but very talented Fleurette.

Lady Cop Makes Trouble  continues their story, focusing on the trials and tribulations Constance faces as one of the few female deputies in the United States in 1915, and the only one in her NJ neighborhood.  

Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions takes us into 1916 with Constance working through new challenges with her career as a deputy and dealing with Fleurette's desire to spread her own wings. Speaking of wings, Norma's interest in homing pigeons (a bit of fiction, the author admits) takes on increasing importance.

Miss Kopp Just Wont't Quit keeps the story going in 1916 with Constance's adventures and unrelenting pursuit of justice. Fleurette also won't give up on her dreams of being on the stage.

Kopp Sisters on the March*  takes place in 1917 and has World War I bring the sisters in contact with new characters and new situations as they get an opportunity to support the war effort and challenge the assumption of feminine limits in new ways.  Much of this novel centers around a real historical  character named of Beulah Binford, a notorious female in her day.

*Another historical novel I just finished reading relates to what the Kopp sisters series touches on -- the young American women who paid their own way to go to France and contribute to the war effort. I recommend Lauren Willig's Band of Sisters. Like Stewart does in the pages following the story, Willig  clarifies her sources and the inspiration for certain characters and events in the novel.

Set in 1918, Dear Miss Kopp is an epistolary novel, a deviation in format from the omniscient third-person narrative form used for the previous five novels, as well as the one that follows it. With one sister in Washington, another in France, and a third travelling around to entertain troops stationed at various camps in the United States, they keep in touch by letter. New characters are also introduced and contribute to the letter-writing or serve as the recipients of letters that Fleurette does not share with her sisters.

Beginning shortly after the war's end in 1919, Miss Kopp Investigates allows Fleurette to come into her own as an investigator. You see that she's really grown up in this book. The sisters also have to come together to help out their widowed sister-in-law and hit on a tremendous plan at the end that is actually based on what they did in real life.

I can't wait for the next installment in the series that should be out toward the end of the year -- if the author keeps up her pace. Each novel is engaging in terms of events, character development, and the insight into the ways in which women had to overcome obstacles to blaze new paths that defined the 20th Century.

Related: To Boldly Go Beyond Barriers