April 12, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
Submachine Gun used in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Babi Yar and Rumbula
Not only were the hapless victims of Nazi
genocide made to descend down the fairly deep dug up pits but then were made to
lie down with their bellies and faces facing the earth.
By the very nature of the serial killings
that was performed it was far more likely that these people would be lying face
down over dead bodies freshly shot dead in front of their very eyes than on moist
soil.
Remember that we are talking about November
and December months in Ukraine and Poland where it gets very cold – cold beyond
the imagination of most people living in tropical and even temperate climate
zones – such that one shivers even with warm clothes on as I have for years.
Being a tropical person my body in all
sense and ways is climatically adapted to withstand prolonged hot and humid
summers rather than cold and dark winters wherein even the reduced hours of
sunlight during the long winters would affect me negatively
psychologically.
A shooter (in all probability a single one
in coherence to the brute efficient policies that Germany so proudly associates
itself with as it does today and must have done then) would be posted at the
head side of each pit armed with a Soviet made submachine gun.
The most widely used Soviet submachine gun
during World War II was the PPSh-41 or the pistolet-pulemyot Shpagina named
after its Russian designer Georgy Shpagin.
In Russian language adding the letter “a”
at the end of a noun (it has to be a male noun and the ending must be a
consonant such as in this case) shows possession and in grammar is known as the
genitive case.
Genitive case is also known as the second
case is one of the six grammatical cases of the Russian language (Sanskrit has
eight of them, Malayalam has seven of them whereas the English language has
largely lost its inflected case system) that links one noun with the other and
shows possession.
Therefore pistolet Shpagina means the
pistol of Shpagin or Shpagin’s pistol.
The word “pulemyot” stands for machine gun
and linking machine gun with a pistol designates that it is not a full-fledged
machine gun but a submachine gun.
Georgy Shpagin was actually an ordinary
carpenter who was drafted into the Russian Army during the World War I to fight
on the eastern Front.
The Eastern front of the World War I was
not somewhere in Asia as you might wrongly assume but that arena of war front
where the Russian Empire and Romania one side were pitted against the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria on
the other side.
Russia or the Soviet Union has always been
the East for Europeans and North Americans.
This battle front stretched all the way
from the Baltic Sea in the north to the black Sea in the south involving most
of the Central Europe.
Following this he was assigned to the
artillery repair workshop where working with other Russian weapon designers and
engineers Shpagin created this legendary submachine gun.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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