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The prosecutor who subpoenaed and cross-examined Hitler in 1931 for a murder trial against four brownshirts was a Jewish lawyer named Hans Litten. The three-hour testimony left Hitler so unnerved and humiliated that he forbade anyone speak Litten’s name in his presence, and he was killed in a concentration camp. Today, the German bar association is called the Hans Litten Association, and every year they give out the Hans Litten Award for excellence in the legal profession. That’s how you commemorate history.
this is why old ppl never realize what they’re saying when they say “when i was your age i payed for my tuition all by myself” yeah well sorry susan my tuition is $35,000 a year and i make $7 an hour
Each year millions of visitors walk through the cobbled streets of Prague’s Old Town - without realising, most likely, that many of the stones below their feet have been looted from what was meant to be sacred ground. The BBC’s Rob Cameron only recently learned their secret.
We stood, blocking the pedestrian traffic, on one of the busiest streets in the Czech capital. A steady stream of people pushed by us muttering as they clutched bags of Christmas shopping and souvenirs and we peered at the ground.
In the distance, at the bottom of Wenceslas Square, crowds congregated around street performers and kiosks selling sausages and beer.
“There,” said Leo Pavlat, the owlish, bearded director of the Prague Jewish Museum, pointing at a thin strip of dark, square cobblestones at our feet. “There! You see? All along there.” He looked up, his eyes following the strip as it ran along the short pedestrianised street.
He delved into a plastic bag and brought out two cobblestones. They were almost identical to those embedded in the ground below us. But these ones you could turn over in your fingers, revealing a single smooth side of polished granite that would otherwise have been hidden face down.
One bore fragments of a date, 1895. The other featured three letters of the Hebrew alphabet - he, vav, bet, the gold paint which lined the chiselled inscriptions glinting in the winter sun.
“What does it mean?” I asked. “Is it part of a name?” Leo frowned. “No idea. It’s not enough to tell. Possibly it’s part of a eulogy.”
Leo Pavlat has owned these stones for more than 30 years, ever since he slipped them into his pocket one spring morning some time in the late 1980s.
“It must have been shortly before Gorbachev came, because I remember they redid the cobblestones here especially for his visit,” he said.
Later I looked online and discovered that the Soviet leader first visited Prague in April 1987, and the trip had indeed included an hour-long walkabout at the bottom of Wenceslas Square.
But back to Leo and his cobblestones. On that spring morning just over 30 years ago he was on his way to work in the Albatros children’s publishing house, a short distance from where we now stood. He’d passed a sight that’s still familiar in Prague today - piles of new cobbles waiting to be laid by workers in overalls and kneepads.
Something about them caught his eye, and he bent down for a closer look. They were fragments of Jewish tombstones that had been cut into perfect cubes of granite. Judging by the dates, they’d been taken from a 19th Century cemetery. Shocked, Leo pocketed a few and walked briskly away.
“It wasn’t easy being Jewish back then,” he told me. “I was an active member of the community, though not in the official circles. And I wasn’t a member of the Communist Party.”
Even attending the officially-sanctioned weekly service in one of the few functioning synagogues was enough to prompt a chat with the secret police, he said.
“There were no publications, no education. I think the regime just wanted the Jewish community to slowly die.”
Czechoslovakia’s Jewish population of some 350,000 people before World War Two, was reduced to about 50,000 in 1946 - including the few who had staggered back from the concentration camps.
Official anti-Semitism and voluntary emigration followed during the decades of communism. By the late 1980s, the population barely numbered 8,000.
And across the country, on the edges of villages and towns, some 600 Jewish cemeteries lay untended and forgotten. The Communist authorities - and, it seems, the leaders of the Jewish community too - saw them as repositories of valuable building material that would otherwise go to waste.
Leo Pavlat couldn’t remember where his stones had come from, but directed me to an article he’d written several years before. His cobbles, it seems, were cut from tombstones taken from a Jewish cemetery established in 1864 in the town of Udlice in North Bohemia.
There’d been a Jewish community there since the 17th Century, with a synagogue, yeshiva (a religious school) and two cemeteries. By 1930, the Jewish population of Udlice had fallen to 13. By the 1980s, when its cemetery was looted, it was - presumably - zero…
it’s really weird how all the touted historical examples of “women” who “pretended” to be men seem to fall into two extremes:
1. women who did it for maybe a couple years at most on an extremely limited basis and usually not full time, died as women.
2. people who were men 100% of the time their whole adult lives and made explicit instructions to a trusted person to ensure they were remembered as a man even after death.
gee it’s almost like these two groups were totally separate and have completely different motivations or something. almost like it’s super obvious the 2nd category were all trans men and the only reason they aren’t remembered as men is due to transphobia.
Person on Instagram: *reuploads one of my Figma photographs without crediting*
Me: Ey, can you please credit me? I spent a good hour or two taking pics of these guys.
Person on Instagram: *mentions my name without the “@” symbol in a comment that is bound to get lost.*
Me: Ey thanks, but can you please credit me in the description and not as a comment, and put an “@” symbol in front of my name? That way, my name will be on the top and everyone who sees this will know that it’s mine, and they’ll be able to click on my name and look at my page as well?
Person on Instagram: *removes my comments and blocks me*
Imagine you have a coworker who likes to bake. Every week, they bring in a batch of delicious, homemade cookies and leave them in the break room. Next to the plate of cookies is a sign, “If you like my cookies, could you please just leave me a note and tell me what you like about them? The more feedback you leave about what you like, the more incentive I have to bake.” A hundred coworkers walk by and take a cookie. One person leaves a note. “Great cookies! Bake some more soon!”
The next week, once again there are cookies in the break room with the same sign. Once again a hundred people take a cookie and only one person leaves a note. “Nice! More soon!”
Week Three- Once again, a hundred people take a cookie. No one leaves a note.
Week Four- One hundred people take a cookie. No note.
Week Five- There are no cookies. Someone leaves a note. “Where are the cookies? I loved them. Please, please bake some cookies.”
Week Six- There are no cookies. Ten people leave notes. “I miss your cookies. They were my favorites. I loved the chocolate chips. My friend really liked the way you had almonds in the cranberry ones.”
Week Seven- Motivated by the wonderful notes, the baking coworker stays up late to bake the best batch of cookies they have ever made. That week, a hundred people take a cookie. No one leaves a note.
The co-worker gives up baking for their colleagues.
——————————————–
Please, if you like the fan fiction that you are reading, let your authors know. Stories are abandoned for a myriad of reasons, but it is very, very hard to stay motivated when you receive no positive feedback. If there is a story that you like, whether it is a completed one or a work in progress, please leave an up-lifting comment or review. By doing so, you’re providing that writer with motivation to spend their time and energy creating more stories for you.
Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them.
“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”
“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”
It’s just.
50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.
i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok
One of my professors often tells us about a time he, as and Egyptian Archaeologist, came down upon a ring of bricks one brick high. In the middle of a house. He and his fellow researchers could not fpr the life of them figure out what tf it could possibly have been for. Until he decided to as a laborer, who doesnt even speak English, what it was. The guy gestures for my prof to follow him, and shows him the same ring of bricks in a nearby modern house. Said ring is filled with baby chicks, while momma hen is out in the yard having a snack. The chicks can’t get over the single brick, but mom can step right over. Over 2000 years and their still corraling chicks with brick circles. If it aint broke, dont fix it and always ask the locals.
I read something a while back about how pre-columbian Americans had obsidian blades they stored in the rafters of their houses. The archaeologists who discovered them came to the conclusion that the primitive civilizations believed keeping them closer to the sun would keep the blades sharper.
Then a mother looked at their findings and said “yeah, they stored their knives in the rafters to keep them out of reach of the children.”
weird how I became a much more compassionate and accepting person when I realised that drug addiction is the symptom of a problem and not the problem in itself
you also start to realise just how much the War On Drugs was actually a war against the poor, against survivors, against trans people, against sex workers, against the mentally ill and the disabled, against PoC, against queers, against the homeless. how much of it was a government manufactured ploy to sell violence against the marginalized as violence against addiction, as if addiction was not a symptom of systemic abuse.
If you don’t feel connected to the main a-spectrum narrative of being “broken”, that’s okay. You can still be aromantic. There are lots of ways to discover your aromanticism, and just because one is more common doesn’t mean another is less valid.
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