Eduardo Galeano - Mirrors - Stories of Almost Everyone

With others still he tried to change their voices by operating on their vocal chords: they died mute.

To beautify the species, he injected blue dye into the eyes of dark-eyed twins: they died blind.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is imprisoned in the concentration camp at Flossenbürg.

The guards make all the prisoners watch the execution of three condemned men.

Someone standing next to Bonhoeffer whispers:

“So, where is God?”

And Bonhoeffer, who is a theologian, points to the hanged men swinging in the dawn light:

“There.”

A few days later, it is his turn.

Adolf Hitler’s friends have lousy memories, but the Nazi enterprise would not have been possible without their help.

Like his colleagues Mussolini and Franco, Hitler got approval early on from the Catholic Church.

Hugo Boss dressed his troops.

Bertelsmann published the training manuals for his officers.

His airplanes flew thanks to fuel from Standard Oil, and his soldiers traveled in Ford trucks and jeeps.

The maker of those vehicles and author of The International Jew, Henry Ford, was his muse. Hitler thanked him with a medal.

He also decorated the president of IBM, the company that made it possible to track and identify Jews.

The Rockefeller Foundation financed Nazi medicine’s racial and racist research.

Joe Kennedy, father of the president, was the U.S. ambassador in London, but might as well have been the German one. And Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of presidents, was an associate of Fritz Thyssen, who used his fortune to further Hitler’s cause.

Deutsche Bank financed the construction of the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

IG Farben, the giant chemical conglomerate, which later on changed its name to Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst, used concentration camp prisoners as guinea pigs and workers. These slave laborers made everything, even the gas that killed them.

The prisoners also worked for other companies, like Krupp, Thyssen, Siemens, VARTA, Bosch, Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, and BMW, which provided an economic foundation for the Nazi madness.

Swiss banks made a killing buying the gold jewelry and teeth of Hitler’s victims. The gold crossed the border with astonishing ease, while the gates remained hermetically sealed to flesh and blood trying to escape.

Coca-Cola came up with Fanta for the German market smack in the middle of the war. During that period, Unilever, Westinghouse, and General Electric also boosted their investments and profits in the country. When the war ended, ITT received a multimillion-dollar settlement for damages to its factories in Germany caused by Allied bombing.

Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, February 1945.

Six Marines plant the flag of the United States at the summit of the volcano they have taken after a bitterly fought battle with the Japanese.

The photograph by Joe Rosenthal will become a symbol of the victorious homeland in this war and wars to follow, and will be reproduced by the millions on posters and postage stamps and even on Treasury bonds.

In reality, it shows the second flag of the day. The first, much smaller and hardly appropriate for an epic image, was planted a few hours earlier without any showmanship. And the moment it records as victory occurs when the battle is not yet over; in fact it is just beginning. Three of the six soldiers in the picture will not come out alive, and seven thousand more Marines will die on this minuscule island in the South Pacific.

Yalta, Crimean Coast, February 1945.

The victors of the Second World War meet.

Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin sign secret agreements. The great powers decide the fate of several countries, whose people will not learn of it for two years. Some will remain capitalist and others will become communist, as if such a tremendous historic leap could be achieved by a name change decided from outside and from above.

Three people draw a new world map, establish the United Nations, and give themselves veto power, which guarantees they will remain in charge.

Richard Sarno’s and Robert Hopkins’s cameras record Churchill’s impassive smile, Roosevelt’s face already visited by death, and Stalin’s shrewd eyes.

Stalin is still Uncle Joe, but in a movie soon to be released, called The Cold War, he will take on the role of the villain.

Reichstag, Berlin, May 1945.

Two soldiers raise the flag of the Soviet Union over the pinnacle of German power.

This photograph by Yevgeny Khaldei portrays the triumph of the nation that lost more sons in the war than any other.

The news agency TASS distributes the picture. But before doing so, it makes a correction. The Russian soldier wearing two wristwatches now has only one. The warriors of the proletariat do not loot dead bodies.

He made light of his own fame. Alexander Fleming said penicillin was invented by a microbe that took advantage of the chaos in his laboratory to sneak into a different culture. And he said that the honors for antibiotics should go not to him but to the researchers who turned a scientific curiosity into a useful medicine.

With the help of the interloping microbe, Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. No one paid any attention. It was developed years later, a daughter of the Second World War. More people were dying from infections than from bombs, and the Germans were a step ahead ever since Gerhard Domagk invented sulfa drugs. For the Allies, producing penicillin was a matter of urgency. The chemical industry, converted to military production, was obliged to save lives as well as destroy them.

Antonio Vivaldi and Ezra Pound left indelible footprints in their passage through time. The world would be a much less livable place if it weren’t for the music of one and the poetry of the other.

But Vivaldi lay silent for two centuries.

Pound brought him back. The strains the world had forgotten opened and closed the poet’s radio show from Italy, which broadcast Fascist propaganda in English.

The program earned Mussolini few if any sympathizers. But the Venetian musician gained worldwide adoration.

When Fascism collapsed, officers from the United States put Pound in a barbed-wire cage outdoors so that people would lob coins at him and balls of spit, and later on they sent him to an asylum for the insane.

Sky over Hiroshima, August 1945.

The B-29 is called Enola Gay, after the pilot’s mother.

Enola Gay has a baby in her belly. The infant, named Little Boy, is ten feet long and weighs more than four tons.

At a quarter past eight in the morning, it drops. It takes a minute to reach the ground. The explosion is equivalent to forty million sticks of dynamite.