{"id":524,"date":"2009-05-29T13:11:25","date_gmt":"2009-05-29T18:11:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=524"},"modified":"2009-05-29T13:11:25","modified_gmt":"2009-05-29T18:11:25","slug":"unkindest-cut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=524","title":{"rendered":"Unkindest Cut: Dementia and Auschwitz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m reading, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Day-War-Ended-Victory-Europe\/dp\/0805075275\/\">The Day the War Ended<\/a>, by Martin Gilbert. It&#8217;s a bunch of personal accounts of the days leading up to, and after, V-E day.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s filling in some blanks in my knowledge of those days, though there&#8217;s a lot of repetition (and sometimes the details are too narrow to be interesting to me. I mean, letters about brothers and sisters and reminiscences).<\/p>\n<p>Of course, there are stories of the liberation of the camps. How outraged Americans killed every single guard in one camp, for example.<\/p>\n<p>This reminded me of a story I heard a while back about the aged survivors of the camps. 40% of people experience some form of dementia by the time they turn 80, and the survivors are no different.<\/p>\n<p>Dementia is heartbreaking, but I think theirs is the worst imaginable. Some of them think they&#8217;re still in Auschwitz. Others are forever looking for their families among the rubble of Europe. They may hoard food and keep it in drawers.<\/p>\n<p>The good news, as such, is that some of the &#8220;old-aged homes&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baycrest.org\/If_Not_Now\/Volume_4_Fall_2003\/default_7169.asp\">recognize the issue and work to mitigate it<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m reading, The Day the War Ended, by Martin Gilbert. It&#8217;s a bunch of personal accounts of the days leading up to, and after, V-E day. It&#8217;s filling in some blanks in my knowledge of those days, though there&#8217;s a lot of repetition (and sometimes the details are too narrow to be interesting to me. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}