Let;s write about literary refugees fleeing Nazi occupied Europe. A wonderful book review describes examples of courage

On May 21, 1940, the German Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger took a taxi from his home in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Mediterranean coast, to Les Milles, an internment camp near Aix-en-Provence.

Review of Marseille 1940: The Flight of Litrature* by Uwe Wittstock, published in the New York Review of Books by Maurice Samuels.  

After the fall of France in World War II, many writers and artists fleeing the Nazis ended up in Marseille, desperately seeking a way out of occupied Europe.

From left, Max Ernst, Jacqueline Breton, André Masson, André Breton, and Varian Fry in Fry’s office, Marseille, 1941

It was a last extravagance to ward off reality, because Feuchtwanger knew what awaited him behind the gates. Eight months earlier, during the so-called Drôle de guerre (Phony War) that followed Hitler’s conquest of Poland, France had ordered all Germans and Austrians in the country, including those, like Feuchtwanger, who had fled fascism, to report to camps and detained them briefly. On May 14, four days after the Germans invaded France, an order went out for all “enemy aliens” between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five to turn themselves in once again. This time things were far worse. Even though Les Milles was not a labor or death camp, the conditions were squalid enough to make Feuchtwanger regret not having left for America while there was still time.

Fueled by a new methamphetamine called Pervitin, which it had developed to eliminate the need for sleep, the German army had broken through French defenses and was advancing at a pace that no one thought possible. Eight to ten million people fled in panic, jamming the roads. The situation was particularly dire for the German and Austrian refugees—many of them important writers and artists and many of them Jews—who had sought safety in France following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and found themselves once again at his mercy. The country they had escaped to suddenly became a country they needed to escape from. After the signing of the armistice on June 22, 1940, the Germans occupied the northern part of France, including Paris, as well as the Atlantic coast, while the south became a “free zone,” with its capital in the spa town of Vichy and a collaborationist government led by the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain. 

Many of the refugees converged on Marseille, France’s sole port not in Nazi hands, hoping to find a way out.

In Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature, the German literary critic Uwe Wittstock traces the anguished itineraries of more than a dozen refugee writers and artists and the efforts by a group of courageous Americans—along with many anonymous but no less courageous French people—to rescue them. Told in a series of short, suspenseful vignettes, it is a sequel to his book February 1933: The Winter of Literature, which followed a group of German intellectuals in the days after Hitler came to power.

Some of those whose hasty escape from Germany Wittstock narrated in the first book reappear in the second in even more dire straits. February 1933 struck a chord by charting the shift from denial to panic when Germans suddenly found themselves living in a fascist country, and Marseille 1940 makes another timely intervention: as governments once again shut borders and attempt to turn us against the foreigners in our midst, it helps us understand the plight of those fleeing dangerous or difficult circumstances as well as our responsibility to help them.

Central to the story is Varian Fry, a temperamental American journalist who had witnessed Nazi cruelty toward Jews and other dissidents firsthand while reporting from Berlin in the 1930s and who realized early on the peril that the refugees faced in occupied France. Fry’s story is known to English-speaking readers—less so in Germany—thanks to several historical studies and to Julie Orringer’s novel The Flight Portfolio (2019), which was adapted into the TV miniseries Transatlantic (2023). With the help of associates, including his wife, Eileen, Fry formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), which raised funds to send him to Marseille with a list of two hundred prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals to track down and save. His efforts to obtain American visas for them received an unexpected boost from Eleanor Roosevelt, who remembered meeting Feuchtwanger on a book-signing tour in the 1930s and who was moved when his American publisher sent her a snapshot of the writer in tattered clothing staring out from behind the barbed-wire fence of Les Milles.

During an election year, FDR feared opposition to such efforts from isolationists as well as from those, like Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who claimed that the refugees would pose a threat to the United States. Applicants for entry were forced to prove that they had sufficient financial resources or a guarantor to support them so they would not become a public burden, to provide certification of their morality or good character (including an affirmation that they had never belonged to a Communist organization), and to submit a biographical sketch indicating the danger they faced at the hands of the Nazis. Despite enormous need, the State Department granted very few visas. However, the First Lady was able to apply pressure on her husband to speed the process for the famous names on the ERC’s list.

Even with American visas in hand, Fry had a difficult task. Locating the refugees on the list was the least of his problems: many sought him out after word spread of his presence in Marseille. 

But, getting them out of France was another matter. After the start of the war the only large transatlantic ocean liners departed from Lisbon, which meant that the refugees needed transit permits to cross Franco’s Spain and Portugal. Obtaining an exit visa from Vichy France was even more difficult, particularly for any refugee whose papers were not in order—as was the case for those who had refused to report to a French concentration camp or who had escaped from one. Fry eventually convinced an intrepid couple, the Hungarian-born Jewish antifascist resistance fighter Lisa Fittko and her husband, Hans, to smuggle frightened refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain.

Drawing mainly on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Wittstock follows a wide cast of characters as they struggle to obtain visas and seek passage out of Marseille. Some of the stories end happily. Hannah Arendt, who later drew on her refugee experience to write her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), managed to escape from the French concentration camp of Gurs with forged papers and miraculously reunite with her husband before eventually obtaining an exit visa from France with the help of Fry and American Jewish groups. The writer Anna Seghers (born Annette Reiling), who could not get a US entry visa because of her Communist affiliations, finally secured one to Mexico and found passage, thanks to Fry, on a cargo ship along with the Surrealist impresario André Breton and the young ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. She channeled her experience into the novel Transit (1944).

Other refugees, such as Heinrich Mann, had a harder time. Once considered more successful than his brother and fellow novelist Thomas Mann, he began to lose his grip after fleeing Germany. Nervous and exhausted, he and his alcoholic wife made it to the US with the help of Fry, but he could not adjust to life outside Europe and never managed to regain his former stature. The philosopher Walter Benjamin did not make it out. In late September 1940, as his Spanish and Portuguese transit visas were about to expire and he was unable to obtain an exit visa from France, he presented himself at the doorstep of Fittko, an acquaintance from Paris, having heard that she was smuggling people across the Pyrenees. After being stopped by officials on the Spanish side of the border, Benjamin swallowed a lethal dose of morphine tablets rather than be turned over to the Gestapo. The next day the Spanish authorities, rattled by his death, let the rest of the party through.

Fry went to a great deal of trouble to help two antifascist Weimar politicians, Rudolf Breitscheid and Rudolf Hilferding, both members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany who had fled to France after opposing Hitler’s rise to power. Hilferding faced the added danger of being Jewish. They refused to be smuggled out of France with forged documents provided by Fry because they believed that such an escape was beneath their dignity as German politicians. Eventually the Vichy government granted them exit visas, and Fry helped arrange passage on one of the ships now traveling from Marseille to Martinique, but Breitscheid refused because the only available berth was in a dormitory below deck. It didn’t matter: in early 1941, shortly before the ship was to leave, they were both arrested by the Vichy police and handed to the Gestapo. Hilferding was tortured to death in custody, while Breitscheid perished at Buchenwald in 1944.

Although Wittstock makes readers feel the refugees’ overwhelming anxiety, he also relieves the tension with comedic moments. Feuchtwanger gets smuggled out of Saint Nicolas, another internment camp, by the American consul in Marseille, who gives him women’s clothes and tells him to pretend to be his mother-in-law when stopped by the French police. The novelist Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler-Werfel, travel through France with twelve suitcases, some of them containing the original scores of Alma’s ex-husband, the composer Gustav Mahler, which they hope to sell once they reach America to finance their lives in exile. When the precious suitcases go missing in the chaos of the exodus, Alma convinces a besotted hotel keeper to track them down for her. The couple eventually make it over the Pyrenees in the same group as the Manns, their luggage in tow.

Many of the writers and artists who cross Wittstock’s pages are familiar figures, but this glimpse into their flights reveals them in a new light. Marseille 1940 reads like a nonfiction version of Irène Némirovsky’s novel Suite française, which follows a group of (non-Jewish French) characters as they flee Paris after the Nazi invasion.
Like Némirovsky, Wittstock explores how the extreme pressure of the historical moment functions as a kind of magnifying glass, revealing human characteristics that might never have emerged otherwise. Some of Wittstock’s subjects rise to the occasion. This is true particularly of the rescuers: Fry refused to buckle in the face of attempts by both Vichy officials and his colleagues back in New York to end his mission. The Fittkos risked their lives each time they ferried a group to safety. But it’s also true of many of the refugees, including Arendt and Seghers, who displayed a remarkable sangfroid and ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

Some of them, however, descended into vindictiveness, pettiness, and worse. The catastrophe of France’s fall brought the deep-rooted rivalry between the Mann brothers to the surface and exacerbated tensions among the various Communist exiles. Mahler-Werfel, whose tortured romantic relationships with famous men—not just Mahler and Werfel but also the architect Walter Gropius—have earned her a dubious place in the pantheon of twentieth-century cultural icons, emerges in Wittstock’s account as a Hitler-loving harridan (bossy person) who regrets her marriage to the Jewish Werfel as soon as it puts her in danger. “Now I will have to wander to the ends of the earth with a people alien to me,” she confided to her journal, even as she and her husband engaged in an increasingly madcap folie à deux—lugging their twelve suitcases—through the south of France.

Historians may find fault with certain aspects of Marseille 1940. It lacks footnotes, making it impossible to tell which sources Wittstock used, and the bibliography is far from exhaustive. Some may bristle at the novelistic style. But Wittstock’s narrative method has advantages. By telling the stories of the refugees in the present tense, he forces us to see the world through their eyes. The book is filled with minute details that bring them to life—Feuchtwanger’s taxi to Les Milles, Mahler-Werfel’s suitcases—and allow us to experience the tragedy of France’s fall in a way that more conventional histories do not.

A more serious concern is the book’s focus on a relatively small number of renowned artists and writers. What about all the refugees who did not inspire the sympathy of the American First Lady and did not receive coveted American visas? Wittstock is not oblivious to this criticism. “Alongside every person mentioned in this book stood hundreds or thousands of others who had the same right to be memorialized,” he acknowledges in the epilogue. But the decision by the State Department to grant visas to only a select few is one of the great tragedies of the war, and Wittstock was not obliged to replicate it by keeping his focus so narrow. Aside from his descriptions of the throngs of people on the roads and the long lines at the American consulates, we get little sense of the plight of nonfamous refugees and no access to their inner lives.

Ultimately, though, I discerned a deeper purpose in his decision to focus on a narrow cast of celebrated characters. These are people we already know and care about. Some, like Arendt and Benjamin, are among the best-known intellectuals of our era. By depicting them as impoverished and desperate—denied, as Arendt put it, the “right to have rights”—Wittstock helps us conceive of a kind of suffering that all too often remains abstract when it affects unknown people in faraway lands.

Wittstock is preoccupied with the factors that enabled survival. To be sure, ingenuity and flexibility helped. Seghers turned to Mexico after the US closed its doors to her. Arendt saw an opening and slipped through when the time was right. They survived. Breitscheid and Hilferding refused to bend and did not. But as Wittstock makes clear, chance was a far more important factor. The decision to cross the Pyrenees at one place rather than another meant life or death. Whether refugees fleeing France happened to encounter a hostile border guard or one who was willing to let them through without the proper papers made all the difference: “In the end, whether one ends up with a supporter of Pétain or someone who sympathizes with the adversaries of the Nazis is a matter of luck.”

Even the luckiest refugees, however, would not have survived without a great deal of help from people who took enormous risks. By prolonging his stay in France to continue his work, Fry faced arrest and deportation, along with the dissolution of his marriage. The Fittkos faced certain death for their actions. The fact that Fry and his team—including two intrepid American women, the heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who funded a large part of the operation, and Miriam Davenport, who administered it—were not heralded as heroes after the war is an injustice that has only recently begun to be rectified. Fry published his memoirs in 1945, but as Wittstock points out, “In the euphoria of victory, the American book market was not particularly interested in stories about past wartime suffering,” and many resented Fry’s allegations that the US State Department had made it difficult for Jewish refugees to enter America. He was not recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” until 1994.

And yet, though Fry’s contributions received belated recognition, the contributions of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of French people to saving refugees have received no recognition at all. Over and over Wittstock describes small acts of generosity and quiet heroism by ordinary people who had no idea of the renown of those they were aiding. Vichy’s collaboration with Hitler casts a dark shadow over France in this period, but as Lisa Fittko put it in her memoir:


None of us could have survived without the help of French people in every corner of the country—French men and women whose humanity gave them the courage to take in, to hide, and to feed these displaced strangers.

When Fittko came out of the hospital drained and depleted, a kind butcher gave her an extra ration of meat even though she lacked the proper coupon. When she and her husband were stopped on the street by a French gendarme assigned to arrest foreigners, their landlady vouched that they were her neighbors. “It is astonishing how greatly influenced the populace is by the model set by personages like the prefect or the city’s bishop,” Wittstock writes of the residents of the town of Montauban, who allowed Arendt to live quietly among them. “Their commitment to refugees focuses public attention on how they can be helped, not on how they can be gotten rid of as quickly as possible.”

Wittstock does not explicitly make the connection to the dire circumstances facing refugees in Europe and the United States today, but he doesn’t need to. The parallels are all too apparent. When Fry received notice of his imminent arrest from the Marseille chief of police, he protested that his detention would be a violation of human rights. The Vichy functionary scoffed, “I am aware that they still believe in the antiquated notion of human rights in the United States.” But soon, he predicted, America would jettison such outdated ideas: “We’ve realized that society is more important than the individual. You will also come to understand that.” Now that our leaders are proving that policeman right, the stories of the refugees who flocked to Marseille in 1940 are more essential than ever.

*June 1940: France surrenders to Germany. The Gestapo is searching for Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger and many other writers and artists who had sought asylum in France since 1933. The young American journalist Varian Fry arrives in Marseille with the aim of rescuing as many as possible. This is the harrowing story of their flight from the Nazis under the most dangerous and threatening circumstances.

It is the most dramatic year in German literary history. In Nice, Heinrich Mann listens to the news on Radio London as air-raid sirens wail in the background. Anna Seghers flees Paris on foot with her children. Lion Feuchtwanger is trapped in a French internment camp as the SS units close in. They all end up in Marseille, which they see as a last gateway to freedom. This is where Walter Benjamin writes his final essay to Hannah Arendt before setting off to escape across the Pyrenees. This is where the paths of countless German and Austrian writers, intellectuals and artists cross. And this too is where Varian Fry and his comrades risk life and limb to smuggle those in danger out of the country. This intensely compelling book lays bare the unthinkable courage and utter despair, as well as the hope and human companionship, which surged in the liminal space of Marseille during the darkest days of the twentieth century.

Let's write about World War One and the unknown "doughboys"

"You are not forgotten". 

This historic find reminds me about when my husband and I visited this same area in France when we visited his uncle Napoleon's (Nap) World War I remains, in the very same American Veterans Cemetery where this unknown solider will now be buried with honors. This cemetery is really lovely, but in the sea of headstones, there is hardly anyone alive who goes to visit the graves. Published in The Washington Post reported by Michael E. Ruane.

Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France

Unknown WWI soldier, found a century later, will now be buried with honors. The remains of an American ‘doughboy,’ whose identity is unknown, were accidentally unearthed in a French village last year. On Feb. 8, 2022, a local undertaker, Jean-Paul Feval, was digging a grave in the cemetery at Villers-sur-Fère, a small village in the farm country of northeastern France.

The cemetery was beside a large field at the edge of town, on Rue Saint-Denis, just up the street from the old church of St. John the Baptist. Feval had dug about four feet down when he began to unearth human bones, along with artifacts that would later include pieces of a helmet, a stretcher, a trench knife and a corroded, unreadable dog tag. He had found the remains of an unknown American soldier, killed in July 1918, during fighting that had strewn the landscape around Villers-sur-Fère with hundreds of fallen “doughboys” during World War I.

Next month, more than a century later, the American Battle Monuments Commission plans to rebury the anonymous soldier in its nearby Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, about 70 miles northeast of Paris, where 6,000 of his comrades already rest.

The concealed remains of the World War I soldier lie alongside military artifacts found with them and an American flag. (American Battle Monuments Commission)

It will be the first burial of an unknown American from World War I in 35 years, the commission said, and comes two years after the country marked the centennial of the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

It also comes as the Arlington-based monuments commission celebrates its centennial this year.

World War One U.S. Doughboys

The American Battle Monuments Commission, which was started in 1923, to honor U.S. World War I dead overseas, operates 26 cemeteries on foreign soil where 123,000 service members from World Wars I and II are buried, and thousands of others are memorialized. “It’s a very important message for families of people who are still missing,” he said, and for current and future members of the services.

 “You are not forgotten.”

The soldier’s discovery “is an extraordinarily big deal,” said Mike Knapp, the commission’s director of historical services. “Here we are … 105 years after this guy died and … he’s getting a full honors, military funeral just like some veteran would get today at Arlington” cemetery, Knapp said. “I think that says a great deal.”

“I get choked up saying it,” he said. “But I think it’s really, really true.” The soldier’s grave will be marked with a marble cross that reads: “Here Rests In Honored Glory An American Soldier Known But to God.”

The Army’s chief of staff, Gen. James C. McConville, is scheduled to speak at the June 7 funeral. The commission said the soldier will be buried with a Purple Heart medal.

The Battle:  In late July 1918, the U.S. Army’s 42d Infantry Division was pushing back German forces around the Ourcq River, less than a mile north of Villers-sur-Fère. 

World War I — 1914-1918 — would end about three months later. with the defeat of Germany and its allies by France, Britain, the United States, Russia and their allies. But the closing weeks of the war saw some of the conflict’s most bitter fighting. “It wasn’t people in trenches looking at each other,” Hubert Caloud, superintendent of the American Cemetery, said in a telephone interview. 

“As the Americans came up north, they had to fight for every little village … every little farmhouse … every piece of woods.”

“How did they do that?” he said. “They had to charge across open fields.”

The 42d was called the Rainbow Division because it contained outfits from across the country. Its chief of staff was future World War II hero Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who reportedly gave the division its nickname. 

One of its units was the 165th Infantry Regiment — previously called the “Fighting 69th” regiment — that included many Irish Americans from New York.

Francis Duffy was its chaplain. (A bronze statue of him stands in New York’s Times Square.)

The regiment lost 264 men in the Battle of the Ourcq River, according the New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center.

Joyce Kilmer was killed by a German sniper’s bullet 100 years ago this summer, on July 30, 1918, during the Second Battle of the Marne in World War I. The celebrated writer is best known for his 1913 poem “Trees.”

Among the dead was the poet Joyce Kilmer, author of the poem “Trees.” He was shot in the head by a sniper. “God rest his dear and gallant soul,” Father Duffy wrote after the war. Kilmer is buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery. The newly found soldier was identified as American because of the fragments of American equipment — bullets, uniform buttons, trench knife — that were with his remains, said Caloud, the cemetery superintendent.
“There was no doubt in our minds,” he said.

In 2006, the almost complete skeletal remains of a World War I American soldier, Pvt. Thomas D. Costello, were found by relic hunters in eastern France.

After experts were able to identify him, he was returned to the United States and buried in Arlington Cemetery in 2010. In this recent case, the unknown’s remains consisted only of some vertebrae, ribs and other bones. “I was disappointed that we didn’t find more,” Caloud said. “He was somebody’s son,” he said. “Maybe somebody’s father. Maybe somebody’s husband. We don’t know.” How he was killed is a mystery.

“This is a combat death,” said Caloud, who served in the Marine Corps for 30 years. “He had an ammunition belt on. … It could have been a traumatic explosion, and that’s all that was left of the guy.” Or part of his body was previously removed by accident, he said.
“This is an American soldier who was violently killed, and I wanted him buried,” Caloud said. “I didn’t want him to be a bunch of bones on an aluminum table that no one would ever pay attention to.”
The discovery of part of a stretcher in the grave is evocative. “During the fighting they tried to get rid of the bodies as soon as they could,” Caloud said. “They would roll them up in ponchos. They’d roll them up in blankets. They could carry them on stretchers.”
“My guess is he was dead, and what was left of him was put on a stretcher,” he said. We believe the people buried along that wall were from the 165th Regiment,” Caloud said, although other units were in the area and this man might have been from one of those, too.
The soldier was probably with the Rainbow Division because the village where he was found was in the area where the division fought, the commission said.

And he could well have been with the 165th, which saw intense action around Villers-sur-Fère. More than 30 Americans, including the unknown, were hastily buried by a stone wall that surrounded the village cemetery.

“The town of Villers-sur-Fère was throughout the action a part of the battlefield,” Father Duffy wrote in his postwar memoir, “Father Duffy’s Story.”

“Nearly one-third of those who lost their lives in this action received their death wounds from shell fire in and around Villers-sur-Fère,” he recounted.

One of those killed was Maj. William B. Hudson, a 40-year-old Washington physician, who was serving in the 165th. Hudson was standing in the doorway of a building in the village when he was struck by a fragment from an enemy gas shell. It “hit him full in the chest, killing him instantly,” Duffy wrote. “We buried him sadly by the cemetery wall where already too many of our men were lying in their last long sleep.”Hudson was later exhumed and reburied in Arlington Cemetery. His name is carved on the D.C. War Memorial on the National Mall.

After the war, most of those buried by the wall were probably moved to larger cemeteries, or sent home, said Knapp, the commission historian. Except for this unknown. “The question remains; ‘Was this guy overlooked entirely? Did they think they had him?’” Knapp said. “We’ll never know.”

After Feval discovered the remains, he called the police. The French national veterans office was also called in.

A noted French World War I archaeologist, Yves Desfossés, was summoned. The grave was expanded, and more material was found.
On June 7, plans are for the unknown soldier to be buried in a silver casket, and borne to his grave amid the sounds of an artillery salute and Chopin’s funeral march.

A book introduction mindful of spiritual evolution

Lascaux Cave, France*

Obviously, because my blog identity is "Maine Writer", the title of the book, "Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine", by Alan Lightman, caught my attention, when it was on the "recommended reading", table, at the Topsham Public Library.

This meditative book ponders the transcending human quest to understand our perspective in the universe, from the author's point of view. I am transcribing the short introductory chapter titled "Cave", because the prose succinctly describes the evolving human condition, in relation to our never ending quest to understand, and ponder nature's beauties and civilization's mysteries.

Cave

1979. Smell of damp earth and stone. In the dim light, a small group of people talk in hushed voices as if entering a church, spellbound by the paints on the rock wall: bison and mammoth and horse, colored with red ochre** made from dirt and charcoal and bound with saliva and animal fat. I am without words, another ghost in the primordial cave in southwestern France. Font-de_Gaume it is called. The cave paintings date to 17,000 BC and were discovered by a local schoolmaster century ago. Hand-drawn shapes swerve and flow following the natural contours of the stone walls in one image, a fat horse bends down as if nuzzling a bison with bent head. Elsewhere, a herd of horses gallop across the stone plains, including a large animal with orange torso and black neck, and smaller beasts speckled in black and white. One painting in particular steals my attention - an entire bison drawn from what appears to be a single flowing line.

Clearly, these early humans were consummate artists with a heightened connection to nature. Did they also believe in an ethereal world? Did they believe in the invisible? What did they think of thunder and lightening, wind, stars overhead, their own beginnings and ends? They rarely lived past the age of thirty. 

Clad in the skins of animals they had killed and aware of their own impending demise, they must have looked up toward the unchanging stars with awe, and desire. In the foothills beyond the caves, these ancient people buried their dead in sewn garments and surrounded the prone bodies with tools and food for the next life. Was this time and this place where the longing began?

Nearby, someone strikes a match, against regulations and we all turn in surprise to watch the small fire. Shadows shift on the walls. Then the flame is gone, like these primitive ancestors of eons ago, like all living things, like the material world. 

*A Palaeolithic cave situated in southwestern France, near the village of Montignac in the Dordogne region, which houses some of the most famous examples of prehistoric cave paintings. Close to 600 paintings – mostly of animals - dot the interior walls of the cave in impressive compositions. Horses are the most numerous, but deer, aurochs, ibex, bison, and even some felines can also be found. Besides these paintings, which represent most of the major images, there are also around 1400 engravings of a similar order. The art, dated to c. 17,000 – c. 15,000 BCE, falls within the Upper Palaeolithic period and was created by the clearly skilled hands of humans living in the area at that time. The region seems to be a hotspot; many beautifully decorated caves have been discovered there. The exact meaning of the paintings at Lascaux or any of the other sites is still subject to discussion, but the prevailing view attaches a ritualistic or even spiritual component to them, hinting at the sophistication of their creators. Lascaux was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list in 1979, along with other prehistoric sites in its proximity.

**ocher- a natural clay

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine was published in 1918, by Pantheon Books, New York.

Prayer - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on D-Day

"....the road is long and the desire is great....", FDR

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt- as dawn broke

From the FDR webpage

Text of Radio Address - Prayer on D-Day, June 6, 1944: 

"My fellow Americans: Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest-until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas -- whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them--help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

Many people have urged that I call the Nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

And, O Lord, give us Faith. Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.  Amen.