‘World scientists are working feverishly to develop a vaccine for the Chinese coronavirus, and they are suggesting that it might be available before the end of this year. I don’t mean to be critical, but they haven’t found a vaccine for AIDS after throwing billions of dollars at it for more than 30 years.
And there is no vaccine even for the common cold that’s been around for millennia.
If and when a vaccine is available, there are definite indications that everyone will be required to get it. Virginia has already made that decision. And that is the problem before us. After we live through the pandemic and the arguments about masks and lockdowns, now we face the most dangerous part of the battle—telling the do-gooders what they can do with the vaccine.
Mr. Trump will make the biggest mistake of his presidency if he tries to force every American to accept the jab. Trump declared, “Our military is now being mobilized so at the end of the year we’re going to be able to give it to a lot of people very, very rapidly.” Well, Mr. Trump, to quote Samuel Goldwyn, “include me out.” Forced vaccination for the Chinese coronavirus will be divisive, dangerous, and deadly!
And dumb.
I heard Trump say that the vaccination would not be required, but I don’t trust his health advisors at the federal health agencies. Those agencies are snake pits of corruption run by political hacks with medical degrees. None have ever looked a COVID-19 patient in the eye, and few have ever looked a patient in the eyes.
I wonder if Mr. Trump will assure Americans that we will not experience the following for not getting vaccinated: will we be safe from losing a job; losing our insurance or Medicare; have our children taken from us; or be required to have some identification to permit us to buy or sell?
The World Health Organization (WHO) has an Immunization Agenda 2030, in which they’re planning to vaccinate everyone for everything across the globe: “IA 2030 envisions a world where everyone, everywhere, at every age, fully benefits from vaccines to improve health and well-being.”
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the biggest funder of the WHO, and Gates intends to vaccinate the global population against COVID-19.
Many federal health officials’ eyes glaze over when they think and speak of financial benefits for COVID-19 research and treatment. Hospitals have been making huge profits from Medicare patients, as revealed by Senator Scott Jensen, Republican from Minnesota, on Fox News. He reported that hospitals are paid more if Medicare patients are listed as having the Chinese coronavirus and three times the normal price if they are put on a ventilator. This is what prompted the minor scandal recently when so many hospitals were listing suicide, heart deaths, etc., as COVID-19 deaths. One man died in an auto accident, another died of a heart attack, another died of gunshot wounds, yet all three were listed as having COVID-19.
Follow the money; after all, it’s yours.
However, it is not only local hospitals reaping the profits of death but federal health officials who are embedded with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), and the World Health Organization (WHO). The CDC is the federal agency responsible for directing, developing, and deciding on safety and efficacy. In simple terms: does it work, is it safe, and is it really necessary?
And, in a jaded moment, I will suggest that another prerequisite is that it must be expensive. The history of vaccines and drugs has revealed that safety and effectiveness are sometime disregarded, but they are always expensive.
It is a fact known by all informed people that all drugs and vaccines are not safe for everyone. Many people have died or been harmed for life because of a bad reaction to drugs or vaccines. No health expert on earth will guarantee you that you will be safe by getting a vaccination. Drug and vaccine manufacturing companies are protected by law from being held legally accountable for any harmful reactions. Wonder why that is true if they are safe. A firm that needs such protection does not overwhelm me with confidence.
Moderna has been developing a COVID-19 vaccine with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of help from the federal government. Moderna received a $483 million award from U.S. taxpayers in April, and the award could eventually be “worth about a billion.”
There is already a safe and effective treatment for the Chinese coronavirus, specifically, Hydroxychloroquine known as HCQ combined with azithromycin and zinc. To be effective, the patients must be in the early stage of the disease. Many physicians have treated hundreds of patients, many of them with additional health problems, with outstanding success. One Texas doctor has treated almost 400 patients with HCQ and has not lost a patient! Another physician has treated more than 700 patients and only lost one patient. The drug is sold over the counter in some nations and has been used safely for more than 65 years.
So, why isn’t every physician prescribing HCQ to COVID-19 patients? Dr. Fauci says that it has not had supervised clinical trials. Wait a minute. Many doctors who deal with dying patients are using it successfully. Well, yes, but the CDC doesn’t have a patent on the drug. Could that be the motive for Dr. Fauci to ridicule it at every opportunity? Moreover, Dr. Fauci and other critics have never treated a Chinese coronavirus patient.
Fauci has recommended the very expensive remdesivir drug owned by Gilead Sciences. It is declared that Fauci and the CDC have no financial interests in that company, and that may be true. However, could Fauci and the CDC downplay other drugs because they have put everything on the expected vaccine? And will any federal health agency or person have any financial benefit from its sale? Wow, that could be billions of dollars; and maybe as important, a Nobel Prize for Dr. Fauci.
The global vaccine market is showing some escalating growth, and it is expected that it will reach total revenues of nearly 60 billion U.S. dollars this year. Some of that will reach the hands of federal health officials who sit in judgment as to whether it is safe and effective! In 2016, the CDC made 137.8 million from royalty income. In total, 56 individual patents were found to be owned or shared by one or more members of the committees within the CDC. I believe that is called a conflict of interest.
If force is used to vaccinated everyone, it will make criminals out of Trump’s best supporters and may put some of us in jail. One of my readers said if Trump’s federal troops try to force him to be injected with mercury, he will inject the injecter with lead. Both mercury and lead are lethal. Forced vaccinations mean many will be shot, really shot!
Since I believe the vaccine may be worse than the disease, I will refuse to be vaccinated, although I’m convinced Trump’s advisors will recommend draconian measures to force me (in a free society) to capitulate. I would not even consider getting vaccinated if I were given the right answers to these questions: does the vaccine contain mercury, formaldehyde, or any human cells? What evidence is available that it will work? What proof is there to know it is safe? What are the full results of the tests? If you have a negative reaction such as being paralyzed, who pays, and how much? Why can’t we have religious objections since they are available in other matters?
Two Australian journalists recently fled China due to the possibility of being jailed. ‘The prospect that the Australian Financial Review’s Mike Smith and the ABC’s Bill Birtles were going to spend months in China’s notorious black jails, being interrogated and having no access to lawyers, drove them to seek Australian diplomatic protection and a negotiated exit from China. As Smith put it, ‘I feared being disappeared.’ That was a very real prospect given the arrest of another Australian journalist, Cheng Lei, on 14 August, apparently for ‘endangering national security’.
We’re wrong if we think these incidents are primarily about the Australia–China relationship, although reactions from various commentators have largely taken the approach of centring things on ‘the relationship’ and it ‘hitting rock bottom’, with figures like former foreign minister Bob Carr blaming the deterioration on the lack of nuance in diplomatic messaging by Australia. It’s partly about the bilateral relationship, but it’s more about the direction in which Xi Jinping is taking China domestically and internationally—and the collisions this is causing with other nations and their citizens.
If it’s true that Australian government officials searched the homes of Xinhua journalists in June, no doubt Beijing will tell us this explains its treatment of Birtles and Smith. That’s a false equivalence, though: any Xinhua staff were at zero risk of detention in a black site in Australia where they would be interrogated daily for months without access to a lawyer or consular support. But that was a likely prospect for Birtles and Smith. That stark difference was captured in Birtles’s simple words on landing in Australia: ‘It’s a relief to be back in a country with a genuine rule of law.’
Xi is closing China to external voices. The Great Firewall that stops the broad flow of information into and out of China is not new, but the level of intimidation of foreign journalists and the restrictions on their travel and access to officials are greater than before. Similar, tighter restrictions are in place for foreign embassy officials.
China is also intimidating and expelling foreigners whose governments act against Beijing’s interests—14 journalists (including two Australians) from the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal were expelled earlier this year. Two Canadians have been in detention in China now for some 20 months and both were charged in July with the improbable offence of ‘spying on national secrets’.
Xi is simultaneously intimidating and arresting his own people because he fears dissenting voices. This year, at least five Chinese activists and citizen journalists have been forcibly disappeared ‘for reporting independently on the pandemic’, joining some 48 Chinese journalists arrested by the regime in 2019.
Xi has also just begun an internal purge of the very people who knocked on the doors of Birtles and Smith—his internal security apparatus in the form of the Ministry of Public Security and the People’s Armed Police. His reason is that ‘two-faced people’ (those who pretend to obey but secretly resist) and those who are ‘straddling the fence without showing the flag’ need to be ‘thoroughly removed’. Even China’s internal security agencies and staff are at risk of detention, arrest and jail if they do anything other than implement Xi’s will.
So, there’s a pattern here about the tighter, more ruthless control that the Chinese Communist Party under Xi is exercising over anyone who lives in its jurisdiction—citizen or foreigner—particularly those who report on the regime or who say anything that’s not supportive of it. All are facing greater risk of detention and arrest on broad, opaque grounds. Australia and Australians are part of this pattern, and likely higher priority targets because of our successful influencing of international debates on issues like 5G, foreign interference and an inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic that are important to the government in Beijing.
What do we do from here?
First, we must stop pretending it’s primarily about how our government is ‘managing the relationship’ and how much nuance and sophistication we can bring to sneakily marketing decisions that we must make in our national interests.
Our policy and action from here must be to work in partnership with other governments and societies that are also profoundly challenged by the direction China is taking and are facing the same risks. As a start, that’s a broad set of partners from Tokyo to Delhi and Washington, and from Brussels to Taipei, Paris and Berlin. We’ve also got to consider whether continuing to give Chinese state media free access to our own societies so that they can spread propaganda makes sense given China is closing itself to our own reporters.
Even more immediately, every business and organisation with Australian employees living and working in China must reassess their need to do so in light of the high and growing risk to their personal safety. Beyond the immediate safety risk, fundamental business strategies about access to the Chinese market must be reassessed, because the assumptions they were based on just a year ago have now fundamentally changed.
The China Virus known as Covid-19 has a senior Chinese diplomat delivering ‘…a speech claiming it was not “fair” for Australian politicians to claim the coronavirus originated in Wuhan. In response to a question about allegations China has been involved in “economic coercion” against Australia, Chinese Embassy Representative Wang Xining said politicians were trying to “shirk responsibility” for outbreaks in Australia by blaming China for the killer coronavirus. He lashed out at Australia for calling for an independent review into the virus because “we believe this proposal was targeted against China alone”. “During that time Australian ministers claimed that the virus originated from Wuhan, China, they did not point to add — any other places as a source. We were singled out, we don’t think it is fair. “We believe the most authoritative and Institute is WHO, and it was criticised by Australian politicians. “And there was blame on China for their failure to control the spread of the disease, and the sharp rise in cases, and try to shirk responsibility.” China covered up evidence of coronavirus outbreaks in the early days of the crisis resulting in significantly more deaths and infections across the globe. It supplied false figures to the WHO which delayed the declaration of a global pandemic and calls for travel bans.’https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6184560248001?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Sky%20News%20Australia%20%20Newsletter&utm_content=Daily%20Sky%20News%20Australia%20%20Newsletter+CID_096a6803687b36d5ab7fbba24bf13b76&utm_source=Daily%20newsletter&utm_term=China%20claims%20it%20is%20not%20fair%20to%20say%20coronavirus%20originated%20in%20Wuhan
While the West fights the China virus with economic self-destruction China continues its merry way to world dominance. Now, would a communist lie? ‘The Chinese Communist Party authorities told us (and they told us a lot of things back in those pre-pandemic days) that the virus originated in a bat eaten by a human at a nearby wet market.
The WIV, which has been the recipient of grants from the Obama administration in the US (by the way), just so happened to be studying coronaviruses at the time.
In bats.
It has been widely believed among American intelligence agencies that the virus likely leaked from the WIV, because, well, common sense. And plenty of intelligence as well.
Now, however, the director of the notorious lab is complaining that they were made scapegoats for the pandemic.
Newswars reports:
In an interview with NBC news Monday, the level 4 bio lab’s director Wang Yany and vice director Yuan Zhiming said that the lab has been unfairly made the centre of dangerous ‘conspiracy theories’, following US intelligence suggestions that it could have been the origin for the viral spread.
“It is unfortunate that we have been targeted as a scapegoat for the origin of the virus,” Wang said, adding that “Any person would inevitably feel very angry or misunderstood being subject to unwarranted or malicious accusations while carrying out research and related work in the fight against the virus.”
“I have repeatedly emphasized that it was on Dec. 30 that we got contact with the samples of SARS-like pneumonia or pneumonia of unknown cause sent from the hospital,” Yuan added.
“We have not encountered the novel coronavirus before that, and without this virus, there is no way that it is leaked from the lab,” the scientist claimed.
It had emerged previously that the lab had a coronavirus sample that was 96.2% similar to COVID-19 for almost a decade. This is what prompted speculation for the origins of the virus.
Reports have also suggested that the WIV took a shipment of some of the deadliest pathogens in the world just weeks before the coronavirus outbreak.
Newswars also notes that the lab was purportedly trying to manipulate natural pathogens to make them deadlier.
Intelligence officials and scientists alike around the world have called for an investigation into the WIV.
Chinese virologists recently fled Hong Kong and effectively defected to the West with evidence against the Chinese Communist Party concerning its role in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The WHO previously complained that it had ‘not been invited’ by China to investigate the outbreak, and has continually been criticised for propping up Communist Party talking points.
Revelation 16:12 And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared.
Our Internet has been down for almost a week so that is the main reason you have not heard from me. Well, we are back up and running. Now, this article by Don Boys just might be a little controversial to some, however, it will make you think; I hope!
‘Is it right to do one monstrous wrong in order to produce a world-changing positive impact on all deprived, desperate, deformed, diseased, and dying people of the world? The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in perhaps the world’s greatest novel The Brothers Karamazov, seeks to answer that question.
The character Ivan Karamazov, a flaming atheist, blames God for permitting the innocent to suffer. (Don’t they all?) Then Ivan asks his brother Alyosha, a professed believer, if he would do a bad act if it resulted in the eternal happiness of mankind. His required act would be to torture an innocent child after which this eternal happiness would come into existence.
Ivan asks, “Would you consent to be the architect under those conditions? Tell me honestly!”
“No, I wouldn’t agree,” said Alyosha quietly.
Neither would I. The basic premise doing evil that good may come of it is flawed.
It is tempting to do one act of cruelty that would give sight to every blind person, permit the crippled to walk, and eliminate all deadly diseases in the world. However, my refusal would not be a lack of concern for others but because of personal honor, responsibility, and accountability. Every person on earth must give an account for his or her own actions.
I am not responsible for decisions made by world leaders; however, I must give a personal account for what I do and my motives for doing it. Even if doing wrong would result in much good, I cannot do it—no matter how strong my altruistic desires may be.
That now brings me to a very practical, personal, and problematic decision made in time of war. What are my obligations before God for actions in time of a national emergency?
I have often silently questioned the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (neither was a vital military target) to end WWII and restore relative peace, permanency, and prosperity to the world. After much thought, I would not have dropped those bombs nor done the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden!
It has been long recognized that bombing of enemy barracks, communication centers, railroads, airports, and fuel depots was acceptable, but never targeting civilians. Churchill changed that followed by Hitler’s nightly bombing of London.
No, I am not a pacifist. I believe in personal defense and I believe a nation must defend itself. Japan attacked us; we had to respond. Roosevelt had cut off Japan’s oil supply, basically a death blow to an oil-starved nation, so the Japanese leaders retaliated; however, they did attack us. But was there justification for dropping the atomic bombs killing 185,000 innocent civilians?
The experts told us that up to a million American lives would be lost if an invasion of Japan were launched. Moreover, the argument was made that in killing so many people in nuclear blasts, it would drive Japan to the negotiating table; however, Japan had been willing to surrender but not “unconditionally” as required by the Allied Powers. That is what continued the war.
If I had been a soldier during WWII, I suppose I would have been a pilot since I later became one and a plane owner. I would have had no problem being a fighter pilot since that is a one-on-one fight between two soldiers in defense of their nation’s objectives. However, if I had flown over Hamburg with a load of bombs knowing there were thousands of innocent people below that had nothing to do with the war, I could not have pushed a button and released the bombs on innocent people. From 42,000 to 45,000 people died in the destruction of Hamburg with more people dying in that bombing alone than in the entire German bombing campaign against England!
Many would call my refusal to bomb German civilians treason to my country but I’m convinced it is faithfulness to God; however, this is one time I must not be too hard on my critics. I might be, notice I said, I might be wrong; but my Bible-based conscience says I’m right.
During the closing stages of the war in 1945, Churchill reveled in bombing the German populace and refugees as they tried to escape from Germany. He knew terror worked. Churchill revealed his desire to use terror bombing in a memorandum in November 1942 in which he declared that “all the industrial cities should be attacked in an intense fashion, every effort being made to terrorise and paralyse the population.” Yes, Churchill was a terrorist, but he was “our” terrorist and President Roosevelt agreed with his decision to terrorize and kill civilians. Stalin was delighted.
Dresden was an old city with few military targets (and not one anti-aircraft gun) and was crowded with refugees from Breslau fleeing the Russian advance into Germany. Breslau had experienced a killing field that cost the lives of 170,000 civilians. The refuges and Dresden citizens, thinking they were relatively safe were shocked on the night of February 13, 1945 to see 800 RAF bombers drop more than 1,400 tons of bombs and more than 1,100 tons of incendiaries over the city creating a massive firestorm that incinerated an estimated 25,000 to over 300,000 civilian deaths!
The Dresden bombing was the most controversial and tragic bombing of the war. Even a certified butcher would have difficulty defending it.
About six months later, President Truman decided to end the war by using the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but contrary to what most people think, it was not a universally approved decision. However, it was a popular decision in America at the time.
Under Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bird, General Curtis LeMay, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, former President Herbert Hoover, and President Truman’s chief of staff Admiral William Leahy had voiced protests about using the bomb but their protests had no impact on Truman’s decision.
The President, no doubt thinking it was the wise decision, ordered the Japanese cities to be bombed in August of 1945. In 1946, Truman ordered a U.S. Bombing Survey to be done a few months after the two Japanese cities were bombed, and it decided, “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
The use of nuclear bombs killing 185,000 innocent people within a few days and injuring 135,000 more was unnecessary, and the nuclear genie was released from the bottle.
It was discovered years later that many famous, powerful American officials disagreed with the decision to use the Bomb.
Norman Cousins, a famous author, editor, and aide to General MacArthur, asked the general about dropping the bomb and “He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”
General Eisenhower confessed, “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing” (Newsweek, 11/11/63).
Soon after the bombing of Japan, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was publicly quoted as stating that the atomic bomb was used because the scientists had a “toy and they wanted to try it out…The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment…It was a mistake to ever drop it.”
Concerning the war in Europe, Hitler said, “Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.” The definition of terrorism is “the targeting of innocent civilians to achieve a political goal.” Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin used terror against a German terrorist with a bad haircut and funny mustache who had grandiose military ambitions.
The Allies, ostensibly taking the high ground in all matters, decided to become temporary terrorists!
Only God requires and deserves unqualified obedience. However, to quote Alyosha, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers, “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” But God is not dead. He’s not even sick. And it is He to whom each person is responsible.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Japan and the unnecessary bombing of civilians was wrong; but then only a fool or fanatic says military leaders always make the right decisions.
With Marxism and Islam growing worldwide be assured the following story will be repeated again just as spoken of in the Word of God! Mark 13:14 But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains
‘Tibor Spitz, a retired chemical engineer turned renowned artist and educator, spoke to Aish.com about the extraordinary events of his life before, during and after the Holocaust.
Born in 1929, Tibor Spitz grew up in the small town of Dolny Kubin, nestled in a picturesque mountainous region of Orava, Slovakia, shouldering the country’s border with Poland. “It was a very beautiful place to grow up, but it wasn’t in my parents plans to live in Slovakia at all,” Spitz explains. “Several years earlier they had moved to the Land of Israel but had to return to Europe.”
Tibor Spitz, one year old, in 1930
Tibor’s parents Yosef Tzvi and Shoshana Spitz had realized their dream to settle in the Land of Israel in 1920, living in what was then the small town of Bnei Brak. “It was there that my oldest sister Esther Spitz was born, but she died at a young age from illness.” The couple’s fortunes continued to decline when Yosef Tzvi was shot by Arab marauders. Suffering from an infection to the wound, and with Shoshana pregnant, they were advised to return to Europe to receive medical care.
The Spitz family in 1936. Tibor is on the left
Back in Slovakia, the Spitz’s had three children, Ernest, Chava and Tibor. “It was more or less a happy childhood. Living in the mountains made us tough, there was snow on the ground for around eight or ten months of the year and we became strong and healthy.”
“My father had the most beautiful voice. Before moving to Israel, he had trained as an opera singer in Vienna and he had mixed with so many well-known composers.“ In Slovakia he found work as a chazan. “My father was angelic person, and his voice was a healer.”
“Music was a basic part of my life, our home was filled with singing. My father often played music on a gramophone, and aside from leading services, he taught Hebrew and would give talks about living in the Land of Israel.” Tibor’s father also acted as the shochet (ritual slaughterer). “He did everything except circumcisions, and I was like the rabbi’s son.”
The Jewish community of Dolny Kubin numbered just 100 families. “We were not big enough to have a cheder, (Jewish school) so I along with the other Jewish children went to public school. Despite the small size of the community, it was rich in its diversity.”
Tibor was ten years old when the Nazis began their conquest of Europe.
Anti-Semitic measures
In March 1939, Slovakia aligned itself as an ally to the Nazis, with Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest turned politician, introducing harsh anti-Jewish measures. (After the war in 1947, Tiso would be tried and executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity).
One day Tibor returned home with tears in his eyes. “As the only Jewish boy in a large elementary class, I asked my mother what I should do, as I was being cursed for being Jewish. She gave me this advice, ‘You better live the way that people would have reasons to envy you rather than feel sorry for you.’ It was then that I learned in any situation to try to remain a mensch, a decent human being.”
“In 1940, we were kicked out of public school and overnight my mother became a teacher to the town’s 24 Jewish children aged 6 to 16.”
Josef Tiso meeting Adolph Hitler. Slovakia aligned itself as a Nazi client state
In 1941, the Jews of Slovakia were forced to wear a star, and in the same year, the Slovak government negotiated with Nazi Germany for the mass deportation of Jews to German-occupied Poland. By 1942 deportations had begun. By the end of the war, around 69,000 of the country’s estimated 90,000 Jews had been murdered, although the deportations were staggered and typically shrouded in false promises.
“I used to ask myself: why they didn’t just deport all of the Jews straight away? But I realized, of course, that we would have tried to run away.”
“Tiso announced that the country would remain civilized, but each week or two, another measure was introduced against us. They took our property, musical equipment, eventually also our fur coats, jewelry and our money but life somehow just seemed to carry on.”
It was all a ruse; we were being sent to our deaths.
“When deportation orders were given, they told us to learn a manual trade for our new lives in the East, and they even provided workshops.” Tibor learned to be a bricklayer, while his father learned glass making. “It was all a ruse; we were being sent to our deaths. They turned up the heat of the water little by little until we were too weak and were trapped.”
On the last train
After the deportations began, some Jews were left to run some confiscated businesses, pharmacies, essential services including the cemetery. “Part of my father’s duties had been to officiate at the Jewish funerals. My brother and I also helped with the manual cemetery work.” Yosef Zvi was told that his family would be deported on the last train.
“We didn’t trust the authorities and every time there was a deportation, we went into hiding.”
In 1943 Germans began to lose ground against the Russians on the Eastern front. “By that time, almost all Jews were gone and only some remained in either Slovak Labor camps or waiting in limbo, as we did.”
This situation continued until 1944 when part of the Slovak army along with many civilians joined partisans and started an uprising against the Slovak fascist government. The Red Army was already in neighboring Ukraine in the east and in Poland across the northern border, so the rebels expected a quick victory. But the Germans crushed the uprising and took over the entire territory of Slovakia.
Escape to the forest
Amid aerial bombardment and mortar fire, the Nazi invasion had seen many Slovaks leave the cities to seek refuge in the outlying villages. “One night, accompanied by my grandfather who had been staying with us, we collected our things and left, pretending to be refugees. It was chaos.
“The Germans put up posters – ‘Come back to your homes, even Jews! You will have rights.’” The Spitz family was not convinced. “My parents said we would be crazy to go back to our homes.”
Briefly renting a room in a nearby village but knowing it still might take the Red Army months to break through on the Eastern front, Tibor’s brother Ernest came up with a plan.
“The Nazis were on every corner looking at documents. We were thinking of hiding under the ground in a forest for several months before my brother Ernest thought it over to the smallest detail. He said we needed to find a stream that would give us a water supply, in a steep valley far enough off the beaten track that no one would pass through.”
Ernest’s plan was to cut a triangle out of the slope near to the floor of the valley, which would provide the family with cover from the rain and shade from the sun.
“With neither pen, nor ink or paper to draw on, he used charcoal from the brick stove to draw a plan on the wall of the apartment we were hiding in, and we tried to remember every detail.”
After Ernest had located a steep valley that closely matched their needs, they began to prepare for their escape.
“During the day we would stay in the village, pretending to be war refugees helping the villagers with their harvest, but at nights we would build our shelter. We had neither tools, nor nails or ropes. Just a small military trench shovel we found, a small hatchet, and our bare hands.
“It was extremely difficult to dig the ground in a pristine forest, pull out boulders and rocks, cut roots, and move the dirt. Our hands were bloody. To make a hole to squeeze six people into the side of a steep hill took days. We improvised, used fallen tree trunks and branches and then camouflaged the area so that nothing would reveal any human presence.”
After completing the shelter and camouflaging the area the family disappeared into the forest.
Illustration by Spitz of how the family built their forest hideout
Surviving
“Not all Slovaks were fanatical believers in the Nazi victory, and the German Army was close to collapse, so it did not even cross our minds that we would have to spent such a long time in the snow-covered mountain. Also nobody forecast that 1944 would be the coldest winter of the century.
“We hid for 200 days, and every day was the longest I have ever experienced. As patrols on horseback and foot searched the forests, each day could have been our last.
“Under the ground, we didn’t feel the cold so much, and we also had three layers of clothes. I vividly remember that the hole was smaller than we needed and we could not stretch or lie out. We were squeezed into uncomfortable positions.
A painting by Spitz of the family’s underground hideout. Patrols were a common threat
“We lived like animals, like foxes, instinctively, surviving from one minute to the next. We ate berries, we knew the mushrooms that we could eat, and sucked the water from the snow and ice to stay alive. The forests and the wild nature felt like friends helping us to hide from the human predators and murderers.
“When I would go to find food, I would fill in my footprints with snow to prevent anyone discovering our whereabouts.”
“It was just a biological level of survival. That’s all.” Spitz says, “On the most basic level that you could imagine, nothing else mattered.”
Brush with death
In February 1944, just over two months into hiding, Ukrainian partisans assisting the Red Army and operating in the forest discovered the Spitz family.
“They lined us up, one of them guarded us while the other went through our things. My mother said we should pray, but my father just wanted it to be over with, they began arguing. ‘We are not your enemies,’ my mother pleaded with them. ‘It’s not worth it, Hitler wants to kill us all,’ my father interrupted her. Meanwhile, the soldiers began laughing watching them argue it out.”
The end of family, by Spitz
Amid the scene, Tibor hedged his bets and ran away, returning hours later after he hadn’t heard any shots.
“It turned out that they had been under strict orders not to kill civilians, but they had taken all of our clothes and the primitive food supply we had. It was a miracle to not be killed, but that winter was the coldest of the century and it was practically a death sentence.”
That night, the family wondered whether they should risk going to a nearby village to ask for help, or stay where they were and freeze or starve to death. “The SS Gestapo was absolutely desperate to kill us; we had witnessed enough of their crimes to know how much money they put on Jewish heads.”
Miracle
“As we were freezing, something incredible happened to us that I look at as a miracle. We were so cold, and from nowhere, there erupted a warm spring of water with a strong smell of sulphur. It warmed our tiny hole in the valley. It was such a healer and raised our spirits.”
With renewed hope, Tibor’s mother took the risk of asking for help. “These villages were stricken with poverty. Eventually she found partisans who also had very little but they were sympathetic to our family’s needs.”
Menorah, by Tibor Spitz, a message of hope
“If you are alive come out”
In April 1945 news of the end of the war reached the Spitz family hiding in the forest. Tibor was 14 years old. “One day peasants came through the forests calling out, ‘If you are alive, come out.’ This was our liberation.”
“At first, we went back to my grandfather’s home where he and our grandmother had raised their seven children.” The grandfather had suffered from the physical and emotional strain of the war. “Aside from us, all of his other children and grandchildren were wiped out. He was broken by the loss, and lasted just three months before he died.”
In July, 1945 the family returned to Dolny Kubin. “People looked at us like we were ghosts, and were even coming up to us and touching us. Because of all that had happened, we couldn’t have been real people.
“Life was so unpleasant, yet we tried to continue our lives. At the end of that summer, in September we went back to school. I had lost a year of studies and it was not easy.”
Later, the Spitz family moved to another town, Liptovsky Mikulas, 50km away, where Yosef Zvi once again took on the role of rabbi and cantor for the Jews that remained there. Later Tibor and Ernest headed to Prague to complete high school and then university. “I went on to study chemistry while my brother studied art.
“Prague was the best place to be as a chemistry student.” He scored the highest grades in his school. Meanwhile, Ernest was making a reputation as a talented artist.
“He was outspoken in fighting against the communist regime for artists’ expression. He opened a gallery, and shared messages through his paintings and murals promoting human rights.” Sadly, he died a young man aged 33. “I don’t have the proof, but I think the authorities were behind his death.”
Self portrait by Ernest Spitz, 1955, five years before his death aged 33
Judaism seen as a hostile ideology
“When I look back now, what motivates me to tell my story is my forced silence while living in communist Czechoslovakia. Judaism was considered a hostile, subversive ideology and Jewish suffering and the subject of the Holocaust became practically forbidden in politics, cultural life, art and literature alike.
“There was no outlet for either healing or reducing the pain. To the contrary, we were constantly reminded and suspected of having connections to democratic Israel that was oriented towards the West and became an adversary to the USSR. Religious institutions were persecuted but the accumulated traditional hatred and hostility against the Jewish religion became specifically intense. Judaism, with its wisdom and promotion of freedom, particularly irritated the dictators who considered the Jews to be subversive enemies.”
Tibor’s family
During his time in Prague, Tibor’s father also passed away. “He was taken to hospital with something trivial and never came out. He was not even 60.”
His sister Chava cared for their mother who died in Slovakia in 1986. “Chava later moved to Kfar Saba in Israel and was married and had children but died just ten years later.”
In 1967, aged 38, after graduating with a PhD in chemistry, Spitz was encouraged to meet Noemi, a daughter of the head of the Jewish community of Bratislava, and also a survivor of the Holocaust.
“I was raised deeply as a Jew, and so after the war it was absolutely essential to me that I could only marry a Jew. I was a good catch,” he laughs. “As a husband, I had everything a girl could imagine, I was educated, and had job prospects, but for years I resisted marriage as I felt a built-in conflict. Life was still far from normal, where a person could just walk up to you and call you a dirty Jew.”
Tibor and Noemi met and their second meeting was their wedding – a private ceremony in Prague City Hall.
Escaping communist rule
“God gives us the strength to survive.” Tibor says. “Survival is not only about dodging the bullets, God gave us a ‘seichel’ a brain, and we are given all the tools we need.”
Accepting a work contract in Cuba, Tibor and Noemi left Prague. Nine months later, they made a successful attempt to escape from a refueling Cuban airplane and became political refugees living in Canada. “At home the courts sentenced us to 15 years in prison.”
After nine years in Canada, they settled in the US in Kingston, where Tibor worked for a company pioneering magnetic recording heads.
Holocaust education
Over the years, Spitz has taken a prominent role in Holocaust education and is a regular speaker at universities, high schools and embassies in the US. Last year, he gave 26 lectures alone.
Delivering a lecture in May 2019 to Baruch College, NYC
“Jewish collective ignorance, disbelief in unlimited cruelty and lack of unity before and during the Nazi era cost us the lives of a third of all Jews on this planet. No other nation or country would have survived such impact, yet three years after it ended, the Jews proclaimed the existence of the State of Israel on the territory of their ancestors.
“I have visited Israel many times. It is a 2,000-year-old dream. It is a miracle and we live in a generation when it is happening before our eyes. We need to be proud of who we are.
“To be a Jew, for me, is to live with an uncompromising moral fight for justice. I was raised to be proud as a Jew and I still feel that. Every holiday is my favorite holiday, they each teach such important lessons with unprecedented wisdom. But now, I think to myself, I am alive and I see every day as a holiday.”
World leaders have also been guests at his lectures, especially from Slovakia of whom he has been invited to meet successive presidents.
“I stress the importance of seeing world events truthfully without adjusting them to be either more pleasant or harmless, to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others and to eliminate fear as an emotion.
“We should also remember that Western civilizations based their values on Jewish Scriptures connected to pursuing peace, cooperation and tolerance, including the Jewish principle ‘Do not do to others you do not want done to you.’”
Together with his wife, Noemi and former Slovakian President Andrej Kiska
Revisiting Dolny Kubin
In 2002, Tibor was invited by a film crew to try to relocate their hideout. “An old woman who remembered our family from the war times explained that for many years villagers had visited our hiding place to commemorate the superhuman endurance of a Jewish family hiding in their forest.
“After more than seven decades it was not easy to find the remnants of an underground place covering just a few square yards. Topography of the area had changed significantly as the forest wood was harvested and the areas covered by trees have significantly changed.
At the site in the forest of what remains of the hideout
Five years ago, an annual ‘Peace March’ began, with hundreds of people walking from the nearest village to the hideout, with Tibor and his wife participating as an eyewitness giving public lectures and interviews for local and national TV and radio.
“Revisiting brought memories of the terrible times and so many victims, too many of them children, my cousins, and schoolmates – one of them shot dead while also hiding in the forest. I also felt celebration for freedom and life as well. I was filled with an awareness of breathing, feeling, loving, and the ability to perceive colors, shapes and sounds to listen to music and human speech. Not to be hungry to the level of counting the last drop of energy before your body shuts down and to be in the presence of people you do not have to be afraid of.”
Artwork
Over the last few decades, Tibor Spitz’s artwork has been displayed in the US, Canada and Europe. His artwork shares a variety of themes, not only the Holocaust, but also Kabballah, Jewish heritage and identity. He paints, sculpts and works with ceramic, wood among other artforms.
The March to Eternity, artwork by Tibor Spitz
“In 2002 I received an offer to exhibit my Holocaust paintings in Bratislava, Slovakia. Slovak President Schuster sponsored the event, and arrived there personally together with other government representatives.”
Several additional exhibitions of Tibor’s artwork have also been held in the country since. The last was held in August 2019 in Dolny Kubin on the occasion of Tibor’s 90th birthday.
The Spitz’s living room is adorned with 50 of his own works. One of his latest creations was a wood carving shaped into a horse with a rider, in honor of a local bar mitzvah boy. “This piece of wood had a hole in it, he says. I found a good use for it.” He adds, showing how it became the horse’s eye. “I say, don’t cry over spilt milk, you can turn everything in life into a positive. You have to stay positive; if not, you live your life in disharmony.”’https://www.aish.com/ho/p/Hiding-from-Nazis.html?s=ss2
The following is not a surprise to anyone who is even a little discerning of Hollywood, communism and totalitarian governments.
‘This report examines the ways in which Beijing’s censors have affected and influenced Hollywood and the global filmmaking industry. Stories shape the way people think, and the stories told by Hollywood reach billions. As an anti-censorship organization dedicated to the celebration of open cultural and artistic expression, PEN America has sought to understand how one of the world’s most censorious regimes is extending its influence over the global locus for filmmaking here in the United States, shaping what is perhaps the world’s most influential artistic and cultural medium.
PEN America defends and celebrates freedom of expression in the United States and globally. Our work has included a decades-long advocacy engagement on China, where dozens of members of our sister PEN organization—the Independent Chinese PEN Center—have been imprisoned or persecuted by Beijing. The most influential of those colleagues was Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, who was serving an 11-year prison sentence for his writings when he died of liver cancer.2 Our work has involved advocacy campaigns, detailed research reports, literary exchanges, and other efforts aimed at pushing back against Beijing’s censorship policies and its criminalization of dissent.
Over the last decade or more, as Beijing has expanded its global role as a world power, leading trade partner, sovereign investor, and cultural influence, these domestic patterns of censorship and control have extended beyond China’s borders. Beijing’s rising global influence has meant that the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) approach to censorship is making itself felt by publishers, authors, scholars, writers, journalists, and others who address topics of interest to China, regardless of their citizenship or where they are based. In 2015, PEN America documented Chinese publishers’ censorship of Chinese-language translations of foreign authors in our report Censorship and Conscience: Foreign Authors and the Challenge of Chinese Censorship. In 2016, we analyzed the CCP’s efforts to affect foreign media’s coverage of the country in Darkened Screen: Constraints on Foreign Journalists in China, and its enforced disappearance of five publishers (including two with foreign citizenship) connected to a Hong Kong bookstore in Writing on the Wall: Disappeared Booksellers and Free Expression in Hong Kong. In 2018, our research on social media censorship in China for Forbidden Feeds: Government Controls on Social Media in China included an analysis of how Beijing’s digital censorship affected users of Chinese digital platforms even when they were outside the country.
We have seen this exportation of censorious pressure elsewhere, so much so that there is a long—and growing longer—list of examples from the last few years alone: the major academic publisher Cambridge University Press attempting to pull titles from access by Chinese audience due to fear of CCP retaliation; the consistent degradation of press freedoms and civil liberties in Hong Kong; New Zealand publishers finding their books censored by Chinese printers; academics and students across the globe facing intimidation when they speak out on issues the CCP considers sensitive; and global brands forced to apologize simply for printing the words “Taiwan” or “the Dalai Lama.”
Increasingly, Beijing’s economic clout has allowed it to insist that others comply with its censorship strictures—or has led others to voluntarily internalize these strictures, even without being asked—as a prerequisite to doing business with or in the country. While individual compromises may seem minor or worthwhile in exchange for the opportunity to engage with China’s population, the collective global implications of playing by Beijing’s rules need to be recognized and understood before acquiescence to Chinese censorship becomes a new normal in countries that have prided themselves for their staunch free speech protections.
Hollywood is an important bellwether. The Chinese government, under Xi Jinping especially, has heavily emphasized its desire to ensure that Hollywood filmmakers—to use their preferred phrase—“tell China’s story well.”8 Within the pages of this report, we detail how Hollywood decision-makers and other filmmaking professionals are increasingly making decisions about their films—the content, casting, plot, dialogue, and settings—based on an effort to avoid antagonizing Chinese officials who control whether their films gain access to the booming Chinese market.
As U.S. film studios compete for the opportunity to access Chinese audiences, many are making difficult and troubling compromises on free expression: changing the content of films intended for international—including American—audiences; engaging in self-censorship; agreeing to provide a censored version of a movie for screening in China; and in some instances directly inviting Chinese government censors onto their film sets to advise them on how to avoid tripping the censors’ wires. These concessions to the power of the Chinese market have happened mostly quietly, with little attention and, often, little debate. Steadily, a new set of mores has taken hold in Hollywood, one in which appeasing Chinese government investors and gatekeepers has simply become a way of doing business.’ For the full report go to https://pen.org/report/made-in-hollywood-censored-by-beijing/
Freedom isn’t lost in just one act. It usually takes several acts of government to erode the freedoms that were once taken for granted. Is the China virus one of those ‘things’ that has set the clock for government to erode more of the people’s liberty?
This video is scary in that there are ways for the police to get information concerning drivers without smashing windows. For instance, there is a state register of car owners and their address kept on file by the government and that information is only a call away. But, why do that when we can intimidate the person?
In the Australian state of Victoria nothing should come as a surprise. The state Premier Daniel Andrews, according to reports, has signed the state up to China CCP’s belt and road initiative supposedly without the knowledge of the opposition. Now, with the China virus hitting the socialist republic of Victoria, the hardest of all the Australian states, Andrews is using Communist police methods on Victorian citizens. Rather than calling in for owner information on an automobile Victorian police will smash your window and forcibly drag you out and force that information out of you! If that isn’t communist Marxist tactics what is? Therefore we are not surprised to read that the Victorian ‘Police have been forced into the extraordinary measure of smashing car windows to get Victorians to comply with second wave COVID-19 restrictions in Victoria. “On at least three or four occasions in the past week we’ve had to smash the windows of people in cars and pull them out of there so they could provide us their details because they weren’t telling us where they were going, they weren’t adhering to the chief health officer guidelines, they weren’t providing their name and their address,” Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton said. Mr Patton said the discretion period for COVID-19 rules in Victoria had “virtually closed” and more than 1500 patrolling officers and PSOs would enforce the restrictions every day. “It will only be in an exceptional circumstance – in an exceptional circumstance – that Victoria Police will be using discretion because we just have to stop this movement,” he said. “In the last week we’ve seen a trend, an emergence if you like, of groups of people, small groups, but nonetheless concerning groups who classify themselves as sovereign citizens – whatever that might mean – people who don’t think the law applies to them. “We’ve seen them at checkpoints baiting police, not providing their name and address. “There are consequences for your actions, and if you’re not doing the right thing we will not hesitate to issue infringements, to arrest you, to detail you where it’s appropriate.”’https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6177862528001
Tibor Spitz, one year old, in 1930
The Spitz family in 1936. Tibor is on the left
Josef Tiso meeting Adolph Hitler. Slovakia aligned itself as a Nazi client state
Illustration by Spitz of how the family built their forest hideout
A painting by Spitz of the family’s underground hideout. Patrols were a common threat
The end of family, by Spitz
Menorah, by Tibor Spitz, a message of hope
Self portrait by Ernest Spitz, 1955, five years before his death aged 33
Delivering a lecture in May 2019 to Baruch College, NYC
Together with his wife, Noemi and former Slovakian President Andrej Kiska
At the site in the forest of what remains of the hideout
The March to Eternity, artwork by Tibor Spitz
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