On Holocaust Remembrance Day, I think of my in-laws.
Jerzy Soltan, “spindly and peppery ex-cavalry officer who … spent the war as a [Polish prisoner of the] Germans,” and his wife Hanka, who, with her parents, in their apartment near the Warsaw ghetto, hid a little Jewish boy until the war was over.
(“Borucinski, Michal and his wife Zofia and their daughter Hanna Soltan“)
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It was George Patton’s 3rd Army that liberated Jerzy’s camp, Murnau.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
January 29th, 2022 at 1:07PM
It appears that the camp was an army barracks or some similar government building. I have not identified the elements of Third Army that came that way. It is likely, given the date of liberation, 29 April, that the camp was incidental to the push toward Berchtesgaden and Salzburg to secure the Alpine Redoubt, which Army Intelligence suggested was where what remained of the Nazi leadership was going to hole up, along with the true believers, and conduct a Tito-style campaign up in those hills.
January 29th, 2022 at 3:14PM
Stephen: What Jerzy told me was that Patton peeled off a few troops (I have no idea how many) and sent them to the camp — but yes, it was incidental to the big push toward those more important places. “The saviors were a unit of the 101st Cavalry, part of Patton’s 3rd Army.” This account matches what Jerzy describes, without the detail of his amazement (he was at the front gate and watched the firefight) at the sight of an elegantly dressed Nazi officer’s uniform suddenly turning dark red from top to bottom. It took Jerzy a few moments to realize that this magic trick happened because the officer had been shot to pieces.
January 29th, 2022 at 6:59PM
Those showplace camps with prominent prisoners turned out to be real, fortunately for your father in law (and for Pastor Bonhoeffer, who was at another such camp) and detailing the 110 CAV and the like to check them out more productive than looking for that redoubt, which turned out to be an intelligence estimate gone wrong. I’m not surprised that after overruning Ohrdruf and Dachau the Cav might have had little patience with spiffy looking officers.
January 29th, 2022 at 10:11PM
Jerzy’s son corrects my rendering of the bloody uniform moment. The German was wearing a gray uniform; Jerzy looked at him and suddenly saw two vertical red lines on his chest and his first thought was “He’s been promoted!”
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One other story:
The prisoners were allowed to put on a play. It was by George Bernard Shaw, but K. can’t remember which play of his.
Afterwards, the German who commanded the camp, who attended the performance with his son, said to the prisoner who directed the play: “Thank you. This is the only place in Germany where my son and I can see a Shaw play.”
January 30th, 2022 at 5:12PM
First they came for the theaters, and the Kommandant was too much the careerist to speak up? And at war’s end arranged himself a prison billet and hopes that he’d be captured by the Western Allies?