Tales to be Told

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL: Sunday morning, we made our way to The Museum of Flight to check out their new exhibit.

The museum is doing a great job of keeping guests safe during the pandemic. Capacity at their (enormous, cavernous) place is 25 percent, and it's a timed entry. Also, we got tickets for just a half hour after opening, so it was still really quiet in the p;ace.

We made a beeline for the WWII wing and the new exhibit there. We were super startled upon entering when the man in the box started speaking to us.

The headless voice was a virtual docent. He was posted up in another part of the museum (presumably a quiet and socially distanced one). He said hello and suggested we look for a few specific things during our tour of the new exhibit. 

One good thing about the sparse crowd is you can get nice shots of planes and stuff without a bunch of people in the photo!

One of the artifacts the virtual docent told us to be on the lookout for was the camera used to take many of the now-famous aerial shots of the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

We read about photographer Lee Embree ... 

and we checked out the Graflex Speed Graphic Camera he used to capture the action at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.1

CJ has this to share about our visit to the museum on Sunday.  

Seventy five years ago this year, World War II came to a conclusion following the signing of a peace treaty between the American and Japanese governments. In commemoration of this, The Museum of Flight just unveiled its Untold Stories: World War II at 75 exhibit, presented for public viewing after months of development. Untold Stories marks the first time in 14 years that there have been any major changes to The Museum of Flight's World War II exhibit.

Despite being advertised as an overhaul of the World War II exhibit, large swathes of the exhibit were identical to its pre-renovation status. However, there were some changes I noticed. The first and most obvious one was more of an emphasis on the personal stories of World War II. It was definitely interesting reading more about the individual accounts of soldiers in the war. There was also more of an emphasis on women's World War II stories, especially in sex-segregated combat units.

One of the most novel additions was the "Virtual Docent" at the entrance to the exhibit. A large screen was set up, where a docent calling in via Zoom could talk to us and perform the functions of a typical museum docent.

There were many items of interest for us to ogle, including these flags used on aircraft carriers.  

We also checked out some noses and tails. 

We read up on helmets and jackets. 
 

Here's what Annabelle had to say about the visit ... 

The Museum of Flight’s World War 2 exhibit in the Personal Courage Wing recently underwent renovations, just reopening this Saturday. They added a number of more personal stories and items from both soldiers and civilians from multiple countries involved in the war. Some of the new items included the Graflex Speed Graphic Camera owned by Lee Embree – the very same camera that took one of the most iconic images of the attack at Pearl Harbor. 

There was also expansions and additions to the section of the wing dedicated to the women that flew in the war, including the American WASPs and ATA (Air Transport Auxiliary, who ferried supplies between factories and bases.) Many of the personal stories of women involved in the war were around the exhibit, many of which I had never heard of before. Examples include Margery Watson, one of the many women who worked on designing and drafting plans for new aircraft with the NAA.

There’s so much information in the exhibit that there’s no way I could digest all of it in one visit. My family and I plan on making many more trips to the museum to get the full experience, and I would highly recommend doing the same if you’re interested in the history of aviation and how it played such a major role in wars.

We appreciated that the museum included lots of information about the important roles women played in World War II.  

Below is as photo of a French curve. Designer Margery Watson used it to draft the under-fuselage of the F-51 Mustang.

One of the things I learned is that many of the women's corps were not official military, and, therefore, they did not qualify for veteran status or benefits after the war.

Fortunately, that wrong was righted by an act of Congress passed in 1977.

Engaging

LATE BLOOMER: The good news is, our pumpkin plant finally has beautiful blossoms. The bad news is, there's no way we're getting a pumpkin out of it this season. Sigh. Another season of pumpkin failure.

ADVENTUROUS: On Thursday afternoon, the kids participated in a three-hour workshop from MoPop (the Museum of Pop Culture). 

Annabelle has taken a couple of homeschool classes at MoPOP before, so we thought we'd give this one a go, and this time CJ participated, as well. He can tell you more about it. 

Even during the pandemic, the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) has found ways to keep visitors engaged. One of these is by hosting digital workshops for students in the Seattle area.

On September 17, MoPOP hosted a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Workshop, led by author Rebecca A. Demarest. Each participant was provided with a PDF, to make a choose-your-own-adventure story with. During the meeting, Demarest gave us all advice (and even some "writing cues") on how to write CYOA stories, and how to go from "Point A to Point B."

I wrote a brief story about a librarian who (literally) gets sucked into the world of a fantasy book. During the three hours I was given to work on the story, I incorporated four endings: One where the librarian starts a farm and lives in the fantasy world, one where the librarian passes out after waiting for help for several hours but doesn't wake up, one where the librarian gets lost in a cave, and, lastly, one where the librarian escapes the fantasy world with the help of a wizard.

While the event was enjoyable and a pleasant use of three hours, it was still a tad underwhelming.

Annabelle was supposed to send me a recap, but it seems to be missing from my inbox. I'll have to hit her up again.

SHOCKING STORY: Last week, we turned in to a live, online presentation sponsored by The Museum of Flight. It was a 90-minute talk by museum docent Peter Metzelaar.

The story we heard him tell was horrific and inspiring, terrifying and enlightening. 

In 1942, Nazis seized Metzelaar's entire family in Amsterdam except for his mother and him. For the next few harrowing years, Metaelaar and his mother struggled to stay hidden throughout the war. It was a fascinating first-person account. Here's what CJ has to say about it. ... 

For the year 2020, The Museum of Flight is hosting a commemoration titled Untold Stories: World War II at 75, dedicated to exploring the history of World War II. On September 16, The Museum hosted a virtual event where visitors were invited to listen to Peter Metzelaar, an 85-year-old Museum docent and Holocaust survivor, share his story of surviving as a Jewish child in Europe during the Holocaust.

After the event started at 6:30 P.M., Metzelaar began talking about his early life, and how, starting at age seven, he had to live in secret in the Netherlands for years on end. To quote the event's page on The Museum's website, "Aided by the Dutch Underground and his mother’s ingenuity, [Metzelaar] managed to stay hidden throughout the war."

Needless to say, Metzelaar's account of surviving a genocide in secret was harrowing. Having to, at age seven, live in secret on your relatives' barn in the rural Netherlands while there are Nazi thugs in jackboots literally looking to kill you, sounds utterly horrific.

After the end of his talk, visitors were invited to ask questions. I do recall that he was asked about his advice for children living in quarantine and isolation right now, but the fear that he had while living in isolation was obviously very different from modern day children quarantining. Unfortunately, I don't quite recall his answer to the question, but I do think the talk was worth listening to.

Here's what Annabelle had to say about the program. ...

Recently, the Museum of Flight held a virtual presentation titled “Hidden Child of the Holocaust,” hosted by Peter Metzelaar. At the beginning of the war, Peter was a 7-year-old Jewish boy in the Netherlands. When his family began disappearing one by one, leaving him with no relatives but his mother, the two of them had to go into hiding to avoid being captured by Nazi forces. They spent years hiding in the farmhouse of a Catholic couple that helped them avoid detection during raids. After spending so much time there, they had another volunteer take them into the city to live in an apartment that was much less susceptible to unannounced raids from Nazi soldiers.

Peter went to public school under the alias “Peter Pelt,” where he pretended to be of Catholic fate so as not to be discovered. He recounted stories of finding shrapnel from air raids on the streets and trading pieces with other children like trading cards. He once even found an explosive that was still live, which he chucked away just in time for it to not explode in his arms. Life in the city was dangerous, but much less so than life at the farm.

One night, he woke before the sun rose and saw his mother sewing a fake Red Cross nurse's uniform. When she finished, she explained to Peter that they were leaving to take a truck to Amsterdam. Since all of the trucks in the area were owned by Nazi soldiers, she had to use that disguise and claim that Peter had been orphaned by friendly fire and she was with the Red Cross, escorting him to an orphanage in Amsterdam. The plan somehow worked, and the two made it to the city of Amsterdam while surrounded by troops that would’ve killed them on site had they known Peter and his mother were Jewish.

Peter’s story was fascinating and terrifying. He endured so much at such a young age, and the fact that he’s still alive to tell the story is a monumental feat considering how easily he could have been killed. It was incredibly brave of him to tell us about all of this when it must have been so scary for him.

You can read more about his story on the Holocaust Center for Humanity's site: https://www.holocaustcenterseattle.org/peter-metzelaar

There's a one hour interview with him on YouTube: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XMDHF--8Oyw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Coincidentally, within an hour of watching the presentation, this headline popped up in my Facebook: Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6ma(illion) Jews killed in the Holocaust

The first three paragraphs of the article are shocking. 

Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.

According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.

Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.

What's equally shocking is Sunday morning waking up to headlines that the current President of the United States was at a campaign rally in Minnesota on Saturday, and there, to an almost entirely white audience, he  trumpeted a popular eugenics theory. “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory," he declared. 

It strikes me that words like that coming from a cult-of-personality figurehead are exactly how the Holocaust was allowed to happen.