Gutenberg- Meet George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan of Arc

Let's read what is written about Saint Joan of Arc and recognize her supernatural uniqueness, described by the dramatist George Bernard Shaw, who published in 1924, Saint Joan A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1924). 

Learn about her leadership by reading Shaw's insightful Preface.

The enclosed photograph was taken at the Saint Joan of Arc shrine in Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris and the date on the inscription is, 1909.


I'm a fan of Saint Joan of Arc. In a genealogical sense, one of my husband's family's ancestral lines can be traced to her brother, but no DNA test can prove it. Regardless of any myth about a distant familial connection, her life, death and the history she made has transcended time. Her memory and legacy are as alive today because of her bravery, heroism and the tragic circumstances that led to her untimely execution by fire.

I believe it's not a coincidence that a transcript of the trial of Saint Joan survived. Transcript is at this Fordham University site here. Rather, I believe the transcript exists as a lasting testament to her inspired accomplishments. 

Therefore, I was delighted to find the play by George Bernard Shaw is now in the public domain and published on Gutenberg! 

In my opinion, Shaw's introduction to Joan demonstrates his respect for Saint Joan. Obviously, she was, in a modern sense, a 15th century trail blazing feminist, even though he wrote about her attributes during an era when women had only begun to exercise voting rights.

Perface http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200811h.html

So writes George Bernard Shaw:

JOAN THE ORIGINAL AND PRESUMPTUOUS

"Joan of Arc, a village girl from the Vosges, was born about 1412; burnt for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in 1431; rehabilitated after a fashion in 1456; designated Venerable in 1904; declared Blessed in 1908; and finally canonized in 1920. She is the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a professed and most pious Catholic, and the projector of a Crusade against the Husites, she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs. She was also one of the first apostles of Nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare as distinguished from the sporting ransom-gambling chivalry of her time. She was the pioneer of rational dressing for women, and, like Queen Christina of Sweden two centuries later, to say nothing of Catalina de Erauso and innumerable obscure heroines who have disguised themselves as men to serve as soldiers and sailors, she refused to accept the specific woman's lot, and dressed and fought and lived as men did.

As she contrived to assert herself in all these ways with such force that she was famous throughout western Europe before she was out of her teens (indeed she never got out of them), it is hardly surprising that she was judicially burnt, ostensibly for a number of capital crimes which we no longer punish as such, but essentially for what we call unwomanly and insufferable presumption. At eighteen Joan's pretensions were beyond those of the proudest Pope or the haughtiest emperor. She claimed to be the ambassador and plenipotentiary of God, and to be, in effect, a member of the Church Triumphant whilst still in the flesh on earth. She patronized her own king, and summoned the English king to repentance and obedience to her commands. She lectured, talked down, and overruled statesmen and prelates. She pooh-poohed the plans of generals, leading their troops to victory on plans of her own. She had an unbounded and quite unconcealed contempt for official opinion, judgment, and authority, and for War Office tactics and strategy. Had she been a sage and monarch in whom the most venerable hierarchy and the most illustrious dynasty converged, her pretensions and proceedings would have been as trying to the official mind as the pretensions of Caesar were to Cassius. As her actual condition was pure upstart, there were only two opinions about her. One was that she was miraculous: the other that she was unbearable."

And....Shaw continues....

JOAN AND SOCRATES

"If Joan had been malicious, selfish, cowardly, or stupid, she would have been one of the most odious persons known to history instead of one of the most attractive. If she had been old enough to know the effect she was producing on the men whom she humiliated by being right when they were wrong, and had learned to flatter and manage them, she might have lived as long as Queen Elizabeth."

"But she was too young and rustical and inexperienced to have any such arts. When she was thwarted by men whom she thought fools, she made no secret of her opinion of them or her impatience with their folly; and she was naïve enough to expect them to be obliged to her for setting them right and keeping them out of mischief. Now it is always hard for superior wits to understand the fury roused by their exposures of the stupidities of comparative dullards."

And....in the section of Shaw's narrative titled, Evolutionary Appetite,  he writes a run-on sentence, that I translate to believe meaning Shaw accuses the men who tried and convicted Saint Joan, were driven to do so in order to prove their superiority over her humbleness and success....

"But that there are forces at work which use individuals for purposes far transcending the purpose of keeping these individuals alive and prosperous and respectable and safe and happy in the middle station in life, which is all any good bourgeois can reasonably require, is established by the fact that men will, in the pursuit of knowledge and of social readjustments for which they will not be a penny the better, and are indeed often many pence the worse, face poverty, infamy, exile, imprisonment, dreadful hardship, and death. Even the selfish pursuit of personal power does not nerve men to the efforts and sacrifices which are eagerly made in pursuit of extensions of our power over nature, though these extensions may not touch the personal life of the seeker at any point. There is no more mystery about this appetite for knowledge and power than about the appetite for food: both are known as facts and as facts only, the difference between them being that the appetite for food is necessary to the life of the hungry man and is therefore a personal appetite, whereas the other is an appetite for evolution, and therefore a superpersonal need."

Indeed, Saint Joan of Arc live a very short life but she had to have been divinely inspired to accomplish her historic success.  I believe she remains a role model for our times.  

Here is a timeline description about her life and death:

1412: ·Joan of Arc born and baptized in Domremy

1425: ·Joan begins to hear voices

1428: ·Joan travels to Vaucouleurs (prompted by voices), and asks to join the Dauphin but is turned away.

1429: ·Joan journeys again to Vaucouleurs to ask to join the Dauphin's forces; this time she is accepted.

February 13, 1429: ·Joan leaves Vaucouleurs dressed in men's clothing and heads to Chinon, where the Dauphin is staying. Once there, she asks to help France fight the English and the Burgundians; Charles orders her interrogation by Churchmen for the next three weeks.

April 1429: ·Dauphin gives Joan command of a small force.

April 27, 1429: ·Joan and her troops set out from Blois to relieve French forces at the Siege of Orleans

April 29, 1429: ·Joan and La Hire reach Orleans, where they are told to wait for reinforcements.

May 4, 1429: ·After a sudden inspiration, Joan leads an attack on the English.

May 7, 1429: ·Wounded, Joan nonetheless leads a battle at Les Tourelles.

May 9, 1429: ·Joan travels to Tours, where she asks the Dauphin to go immediately to Reims for a coronation ceremony.

June 18, 1429: ·Battle of Patay

July 16, 1429: ·Dauphin's army reaches Reims

July 17, 1429: ·The Dauphin is crowned King of France

July 20, 1429: ·Charles leaves Reims and parades around region

August 2, 1429: ·Charles retreats to Loire

August 14, 1429: ·French and English forces skirmish at Senlis

August 28, 1429: ·Burgundy and France sign a four-month truce

September 8, 1429: ·Assault on Paris begins

December 1429: ·Charles raises Joan, her parents, and her brothers to nobility status

May 14, 1430: ·Joan reaches Compiegne

May 25, 1430: ·Paris learns of Joan's capture

January 3, 1431: ·Joan transferred to Bishop Pierre Cauchon's control for interrogation.

January 13, 1431: ·Joan's trial begins

May 24, 1431: ·Upon the reading of her sentence, Joan, frightened, signs a last- minute abjuration

May 29, 1431: ·After rescinding her abjuration, Joan is transferred from ecclesiastic to secular authority.

May 30, 1431: ·Joan is burned at the stake

1450: ·Charles VII orders an investigation into Joan of Arc's trial

May 16, 1920: ·Pope Benedict XV makes Joan of Arc a saint

Leica and the Jews - a Holocaust history and a camera

Let's read! "The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train," by Frank Dabba Smith, a California-born Rabbi currently living in England.

Through their writing and artwork, teens tell the compelling story of a a successful businessman, Dr. Ernst Leitz II, who helped hundreds of Jews escape death in Nazi Germany. His business manufactured cameras and photography equipment and he sent Jewish employees to safety, sometimes with heir entire families. Jewish employees received training and permits that allowed them to travel abroad as sales agents for Leica products. Their boss organized and paid for travel to England, USA, Brazil, and Hong Kong. In addition, he gave them a Leica camera, which could easily be sold and paid their expenses until they could find employment in their new home.

The Leica is the pioneer 35mm camera. It is a German product... precise, minimalist, and utterly efficient.

Leica Camera AG is a German company that manufactures cameras, lenses, binoculars, rifle scopes, microscopes and ophthalmic lenses. The company was founded by Ernst Leitz in 1869. The name Leica is derived from the first three letters of his surname and the first two of the word camera: lei-ca. Wikipedia

Behind its worldwide acceptance as a creative tool was a family-owned, socially oriented firm that, during the Nazi era, acted with uncommon grace, generosity and modesty. 

E. Leitz Inc., designer and manufacturer of Germany's most famous photographic product, saved its Jews.

And Ernst Leitz II, the steely-eyed Protestant patriarch who headed the closely held firm as the Holocaust loomed across Europe, acted in such a way as to earn the title, "the photography industry's Schindler."

The Leica Freedom Train was a rescue effort in which hundreds of Jews were smuggled out of Nazi Germany before the Holocaust by Ernst Leitz II of the Leica Camera company, and his daughter Elsie Kuehn-Leitz

As soon as Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ernst Leitz II began receiving frantic calls from Jewish associates, asking for his help in getting them and their families out of the country. As Christians, Leitz and his family were immune to Nazi Germany's Nuremberg laws, which restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities.

To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz quietly established what has become known among historians of the Holocaust as "the Leica Freedom Train," a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being assigned overseas.

Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were "assigned" to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong and the United States, Leitz's activities intensified after the Kristallnacht of November 1938, during which synagogues and Jewish shops were burned across Germany.

Before long, German "employees" were disembarking from the ocean liner Bremen at a New York pier and making their way to the Manhattan office of Leitz Inc., where executives quickly found them jobs in the photographic industry.

Each new arrival had around his or her neck the symbol of freedom... a new Leica camera.

The refugees were paid a stipend until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers and writers for the photographic press.

Keeping the story quiet, The "Leica Freedom Train" was at its height in 1938 and early 1939, delivering groups of refugees to New York every few weeks. Then, with the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany closed its borders.

By that time, hundreds of endangered Jews had escaped to America, thanks to the Leitzes' efforts. How did Ernst Leitz II and his staff get away with it?

Leitz, Inc. was an internationally recognized brand that reflected credit on the newly resurgent Reich. The company produced cameras, range-finders and other optical systems for the German military. Also, the Nazi government desperately needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz's single biggest market for optical goods was the United States.

Even so, members of the Leitz family and firm suffered for their good works. A top executive, Alfred Turk, was jailed for working to help Jews and freed only after the payment of a large bribe.

Leitz's daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, was imprisoned by the Gestapo after she was caught at the border, helping Jewish women cross into Switzerland . She eventually was freed but endured rough treatment in the course of questioning. She also fell under suspicion when she attempted to improve the living conditions of 700 to 800 Ukrainian slave laborers, all of them women, who had been assigned to work in the plant during the 1940's.

After the war, Kuhn-Leitz received numerous honors for her humanitarian efforts, among them the Officier d'honneur des Palms Academic from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the European Academy in the 1970's.

Why has no one told this story until now? According to the late Norman Lipton, a freelance writer and editor, the Leitz family wanted no publicity for its heroic efforts. Only after the last member of the Leitz family was dead did the "Leica Freedom Train" finally come to light.

It is now the subject of a book, "The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train," by Frank Dabba Smith, a California-born Rabbi currently living in England.

Thank you for reading the above, and if you feel inclined as I did to pass it along to others, please do so. It only takes a few minutes.

Memories of the righteous should live on.

Maine Writer post script, "Let's write",  more about the Holocaust, especially because, we must never allow people to deny that the pogrom against Jews ever happened!