🚀 go-pugleaf

"Fabrikant" <benny_patrick7@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1127049491.942790.204280@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>I watched TV reporter, amazed and surprised, praising to heaven heroism
> of a woman, who had invited total strangers - evacuees from New Orleans
> to stay in her house.  Our generation 64 years ago, back in the Soviet
> Union, had experienced a much bigger calamity.  Not thousand and not
> hundred thousand, tens of millions of evacuees were running from
> invading Hitler.  Everybody was in panic, there were no helicopters, no
> National Guard to help anyone.  And guess what, nobody was placed in a
> stadium, nobody was placed in a public shelter or a refugee camp.
> Everybody was placed in the strangers' homes and nobody called it
> heroism.  It was so obvious to everyone that nobody even questioned it:
> the evacuees lost everything, they are homeless and they can not be
> left out in the street, so they should be let in, no matter how crowded
> the apartment becomes.
>
> My mother ran with me (18 months) and my brother (7 years old) till
> Tataria.  She had a lot of help from strangers all the way and, of
> course, there has never been a case of one evacuee raping another one.
> She was given a room, a job and rations of food.  Everybody had a job
> and a ration and nobody was in the street.  Soviet Union was never
> famous for extra living accommodations, nevertheless, everybody had a
> roof over the head.  Unlike US, Soviet Union was not famous for surplus
> of food either, nevertheless, nobody was dying of hunger, except for
> Leningrad, but it was because Hitler blockaded the city and it was
> extremely difficult to get food there.  Even in this extreme situation,
> people dying of cold and hunger, year after year, there were no rapes.
> Can you imagine, how would Americans behave in this situation?
>
> It was not just Russians accepting Russians in their homes - hundreds
> of thousands were evacuated to Asian republics, and everywhere they
> were accepted, without any problem.  Oprah said to be dismayed by the
> level of disrespect among evacuees towards elderly.  Here I also have
> to say that during my 39 years of life in the USSR, I have never heard
> of a single case of a young man knocking out an elderly lady in order
> to get her purse.  USSR had a lot of crime, they could rob me, but they
> would not touch an elderly woman.  My mother lived alone in her old
> years and I never worried about her safety and she was indeed safe till
> her death.
>
> It seems like Americans can learn a thing or two about morals from a
> very technologically backward people of the old USSR.
>
> Fabrikant
>
Never thought I'd agree with Fabrikant!
This sounds exactly like Great Britain where I grew up as a child during 
WWII of the 1940s. We lived in a small city/town  about 60 miles from the 
centre of London, England.
There would be a bad German bombing raid and the word would go out that "Two 
thousand evacuees would be coming into our town to be billeted with us". 
Arriving by buses and trains and lorries (trucks), this happened all over 
the country "Under the direction of the local authorities".
There was rarely if ever a week that we didn't have strangers living in our 
house from 1940 to 1943. Some arrived with little more than what they stood 
up with, some had more, including their gas masks!
Some evacuees I remember were; wife and children of a bombed out dry 
cleaning/laundry company, an elderly Austrian Jewish lady with little 
English, some munitions factory workers who had been evacuated from a bombed 
industrial town, two Polish officer cadets in training, etc. In fact a whole 
school of several hundreds of pupils was evacuated to our town and shared 
the local grammar school with us. A couple of soldiers who had escaped at 
Dunkirk, one of them telling me he had dropped his rifle when he had to swim 
off the beaches to be rescued!
The whole evacuation plan thing seemed to work quite well despite the 
cramped conditions, rationing, shortages of everything and ongoing bombing 
of the more heavily populated and industrial areas of the UK during the 
earlier stages of the war. Nothing like the bombing Germany received from 
the Allies later of course.
Later, in 1943, our family moved to into a northern UK port city which had 
been heavily bombed, living accommodation was scarce and cramped so we had 
no further evacuees with us.
I'm sure there were evacuation problems that I didn't, as child, know about. 
But it was well enough organized that it seemed a quite normal way of life. 
I'm not sure if my parents or the evacuees received any kind of an 
'allowance' for the accommodations provided. I know money was never 
mentioned either at the time or afterwards; I do recall the whole concern at 
the time was "Where can we put them?" My father got quite good at making 
beds out of almost anything. Fortunately he was capable, himself, of 
sleeping on almost anything including a table, an old door, etc.
Also a few amusing incidents, such as when the two munitions factory workers 
were leaving us. Packing their belongings into a box they discovered a 
trapped mouse and were terrified of it!  So my mother caught it, by hand and 
showed it to them, tail sticking out and twitching between her fingers!  Oh 
yes; one of the munitions workers also used to play the electric organ at a 
local cinema (movie theatre) his theme music was "Country Gardens".
Thanks for the memories. Terry