April 17, 2019 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Reproduction in Riga Ghetto
Having extorted the primacy of reproduction
Lawrence Rifkin went on to add:
“For many adults, not having children is
the right choice, for themselves, the world, the economy, or for their would-be
children.
Socrates, Julius Caesar, Leonardo da Vinci,
George Washington, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale, John Keats, Vincent von
Gogh, Vladimir Lenin, and Steven Pinker as far as we know did not have
biological children.”
I understand that these men and women are
exceptions and for most apes reproduction is synonymous with “meaning in life”
without which they get a dismal feeling of “emptiness” and having led an
“unfulfilled life”.
For me personally understanding the
workings of nature and how those few exceptionally intelligent apes managed to
crack open these mysteries gives my whole life its meaning.
My professional competence or at least the
strive for attaining it forms the purpose on which hinges my whole life.
The good thing about my profession is that
no matter how much experience and knowledge one can gather under his belt (like
his abdominal and love handle fat) one is always left with a sensation that he
can (or rather be forced to) add in more thereby remaining a perpetual student
in a learning mode.
Reproductive drive is obviously an evolved
biological psychological imperative that our brain weaves out for us and those
of us who would lack this (like this story telling chimpanzee) would end up as
dead ends in the evolutionary tree of life.
It is for this reason that even those
emaciated man and women deprived most of their fundamental rights that we take
for granted each day and each moment of our lives did succeed in copulating and
even reproducing even in the harshest of the conditions.
But alas it would be of no use.
These fragile emaciated women in the ghetto
who did manage to get pregnant were forced to abort their fetuses.
In some rare occasions when few women did succeed
in secretly give birth to a child (some children were actually born alive in
the first year of the Riga Ghetto enslavement in 1941) were killed by injection
of poison.
Such were the conditions that prevailed in
Europe in 1940s for millions and yet we cry over our minor social discomforts
and government failures and income inequalities that are reduced to a pale insignificance
in front of these monstrous acts carried out in the Riga Ghetto.
All the wealth and properties of the Jews
were seized and the men were subjected to forced labor and were made to work
till they were emaciated to the state of “living skeletons” and died.
In fact work, or rather forced exploitative
labor, was their only salvation and their ticket to survival.
Frida Michelson, a Latvian Jew who was 35 years
old when she was imprisoned in the Riga Ghetto but managed to survive the
Rumbula massacre by pretending to be dead in the snow wrote a memoir titled ‘I
survived Rumbula’.
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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