User:SlimVirgin/FA2
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The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910. It was triggered by allegations, vigorously denied, that Dr. William Bayliss of University College, London had performed an illegal dissection on a brown terrier dog — anaesthetized according to Bayliss, conscious according to the Swedish activists. A statue erected by antivivisectionists in memory of the dog led to violent protests by London's medical students, who saw the memorial and its provocative plaque — "Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?" — as an assault on the entire medical profession. The unrest culminated in rioting in Trafalgar Square on December 10, 1907, when 1,000 students marched down the Strand, clashing with 400 police officers, in what became known as the Brown Dog riots. (more...)
Rudolf Vrba was Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia in Canada. In April 1944, Vrba and his friend Alfréd Wetzler became the second and third of only five Jews to escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp and pass information to the Allies about the mass murder that was taking place there. The 32 pages of information that the men dictated to horrified Jewish officials in Slovakia became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report. It is regarded as one of the most important documents of the 20th century, because it was the first detailed information about the death camp to reach the Allies that they accepted as credible. Although the report's release to the public was controversially delayed until after the mass transport of 437,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz had begun on May 15, 1944, it is nevertheless credited with having saved many lives. Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has called Vrba "one of the Heroes of the Holocaust." (more...)
Night is a work by Elie Wiesel based on his experience, as a young Orthodox Jew, of being sent with his family to the German death camp at Auschwitz, and later to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Wiesel was 16 years old when Buchenwald was liberated in April 1945. Having lost his faith in God and humanity, he vowed not to speak about his experience for ten years, at the end of which he wrote his story. Fifty years later, the 109-page volume, described as devastating in its simplicity, ranks alongside Primo Levi's If This is a Man and Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature. Night is the first book in a trilogy — Night, Dawn, and Day — reflecting Wiesel's state of mind during and after the Holocaust. The titles mark his transition from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of counting the beginning of a new day from nightfall. "In Night," Wiesel said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end — man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night." (more...)
Joel Brand (April 25 1906–July 13, 1964) was a Hungarian Jew who played a prominent role in trying to save the Hungarian Jewish community during the Holocaust from deportation to the German death camp at Auschwitz. Described by historian Yehuda Bauer as a brave adventurer who felt at home in "underground conspiracies and card-playing circles," [1] Brand teamed up with fellow Zionists in Hungary to form the Aid and Rescue Committee, a small group dedicated to helping Jewish refugees escape to Hungary. Shortly after Hungary fell too, Brand was asked by SS officer Adolf Eichmann to broker a deal between the SS and the U.S. or UK to exchange up to one million Hungarian Jews for 10,000 trucks, as well as soap, tea, and coffee. The deal was thwarted by the British government and the Jewish Agency, to Brand's great distress. He said later: "Rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, I have cursed Jewry's official leaders ever since. All these things shall haunt me until my dying day. It is much more than a man can bear." (more...)
Sir Bernard Williams was an English moral philosopher, widely cited as the most important British moral philosopher of his time. Williams spent over 50 years seeking answers to one question: "What does it mean to live well?" and became known internationally for his attempt to return the study of that question to its foundations: to history and culture, politics and psychology, and, in particular, to the Greeks. He became known as a great supporter of women in academia, seeing in women the possibility of the synthesis of reason and emotion that he felt eluded analytic philosophy. The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum said he was "as close to being a feminist as a powerful man of his generation could be." (more...)
