German refugees aboard the St. Louis in Cuba. Photo made available Wikimedia Commons.
She was three, going on four when the family was evicted, tagged like steer, and put on a boat headed to an encampment in the Ukraine. Crossing the river, her father dropped his coat overboard. It was crowded, the coat was cumbersome and he was hot. She held steadfast to her doll, refusing to give it up even if it were to lessen the load. At the camp her dad contracted typhus and died.
There was no work, nothing to do there; nowhere to go. Several years passed, yet she had barely grown. She left in the same clothes, alone –age six, going on seven. Her mother disavowed her, claiming she was an orphan in order to set her free. She had heard that orphans were being shipped to Palestine from Romania. On route to a shipyard in Istanbul, the girl latched onto the care of a family also embarking for Palestine. At the docks in Turkey, passengers were assigned to one of three vessels. She was told to get on the boat for the orphans. She refused and broke down crying. She wanted to stay with the kindly family. She made such a scene screaming that officials relented and let her take a spot on the other ship. After all, she was small and everyone was headed to the same destination…. Relieved and exhausted, that night she fell into a deep sleep. It spared her from witnessing the sinking of the orphan ship which had been struck down by a torpedo.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Grant us peace.
—Agnus Dei
When she was eight, she was reunited with her mother in New York City where she still resides. She was thirty-three going on thirty-four when she received a Master’s Degree from Pratt Institute, by then a mother herself. Her field was Art History and Library Science. In the 1980s one of her sons developed schizophrenia. He had been brilliant. She eagerly followed recommendations of New York State Mental Health Office and nonprofit organizations that included use of an antipsychotic drug, clozapine (Clozaril) to treat schizophrenia. After several years on the treatment, her son died suddenly. She learned that he suffered an adverse reaction to the drug called ‘neuroleptic malignant syndrome’. When the State tried to alter the cause of death on the death certificate to cover-up the connection with Clozaril, she realized that she had been gravely deceived.
As a scholar, she had researched the matter in an attempt to provide utmost care. As a mother, she had placed her trust in the mental health professionals who reassured her they were doing the right thing. Now she would abandon her chosen profession for a vocation to serve as watchdog. She would channel her grief, fury, and intellect into activism.
When she was 63 going on 64, she founded a nonprofit, Alliance for Human Research Protection. At the time, Manhattan had suffered the blow of 9/11. The CDC was busy reassuring New Yorkers that they were closely monitoring the air quality at Ground Zero and the zone was safe for first responders and residents…
She soon learned the NIH was funding medical experiments on orphans held in foster care. A 2005 exposé by journalist, Liam Scheff brought this sad saga to light. The experiments violated the Nuremberg Code’s invocation for voluntary informed consent. Black and Latino children in the care of New York’s Incarnation Children’s Center were forced to participate in the trials which were performed by reputable scientists for Genentech, Bristol–Myers Squibb, and GlaxoSmithKline.
The experiments had overridden legislation (National Research Act of 1974) and guidelines for the protection of human subjects in regards to biomedical and behavioral research (The Belmont Report, 1976), issued in the wake of the CDC’s confession to having conducted secret medical research on 600 Black men over the course of four decades (The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, 1932-72).
It was not the first time the Belmont Report guidelines were ignored. In 1994, she had been astonished to discover a 1987 experiment by physicians at Mt. Sinai, a New York hospital. A drug, L-Dopa was given to veterans whose schizophrenia had gone into remission. The drug was administered in order to study the rate and condition that the drug would cause them to relapse into illness. She needed to confirm her understanding of the paper with a professional, as she could hardly fathom that American doctors would be doing such things (to veteran,s no less).
Eighty-three going on eighty-four, it was unlikely that she was surprised when Governor Cuomo urged extreme medical measures to treat Covid—intubation and sedation—later found to be lethal. Or when he mandated that infected patients be accommodated at nursing homes, also later determined to be lethal. It was equally unlikely that she was surprised when President Trump locked down the country and gave the green flag for “warp speed” production of genetic vaccines. A New York real-estate magnate and media mogul whose name is stamped on Chase Manhattan Bank, the epicenter of Wall Street since its establishment as the Bank of Manhattan Trust by Aaron Burr, one shouldn’t be surprised by his plutocratic platform. [Yes, Donald Trump—whose depth of character was disclosed by the superficial gesture of mocking a disabled New York Times journalist—is the landlord of 40 Wall Street, one of the nation’s oldest banks.]
She might have held out hope in 2021 that New York City’s newly elected mayor would right the injustice of militant pandemic countermeasures, including medical protocols and segregation of the non-compliant. Lockdown of schools, barriers to education, transport, travel, and public places including museums—not to mention forced masking and vaccination. They had caused undue harm, especially to minority children and first responders (including 9/11 heroes). Black, and a former police officer, Eric Adams might have had their backs. He had butt up against the medical establishment himself. As a diabetic, he was told that he would suffer amputation and death unless he took a prescribed ‘cocktail’ in perpetuity. Refusing to accept such fate, Mayor Adams researched alternatives and with modification of lifestyle and diet, rid himself of affliction.
One imagines that she was not disappointed by Adams having maintained the status quo nor surprised this week when New York’s Governor—Kathy Hochul, Cuomo’s replacement who was reelected this year—appealed a court decision in a bid to retain extraordinary powers for the State. The Governor seeks State control over personal freedoms in the name of biosecurity such that children might be removed from their homes and withheld from school unless they undertake medical treatments deemed appropriate by the Government. The State’s case argues for indefinite detention—encampment or quarantine for unspecified periods—of citizens who refuse compliance with medical diktats. In addition, the Governor announced yesterday that she won’t allow the overturned Covid vaccine mandate for healthcare workers to result in unvaccinated individuals regaining their jobs.
These shameful policies are redolent of the discriminatory authoritarian governance of yesteryear when Japanese Americans were forced into camps during World War II –when a bigoted President Truman sanctioned Operation Paperclip—the secret operation providing asylum for Nazi scientists—while ignoring the pleas of five-star generals not to drop nuclear bombs on the Japanese people (which he did not once but twice)…
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Grant us peace.
—Agnus Dei
The New York Times failed to report on the Holocaust. It did not print a word on Stalin’s purges including the deliberate Great Famine (Holodomor) in the Ukraine that killed approximately 5 million people during 1932, the year that its Moscow bureau chief received the Pulitzer Prize. The Grey Lady did not alert the public to the travesty of America’s refusal to receive nearly 1000 asylum-seekers from Germany, almost all of whom were Jewish. They were turned away on the ocean liner, the St. Louis from a port in Miami. More than a quarter of them died in the Holocaust.
The Times did publish an article on the Nazi extermination camps, "The Nightmare That Is a Reality," by Arthur Koestler. If ever there were front page news! Yet, it appeared in the Sunday Magazine section January 1944, two years after the Final Solution had been orchestrated at the Wannsee Conference.
One of the best podcasts from the pandemic addressed the madness encountered by Koestler as he attempted to convince the world of the atrocities at the camps.
Before NY State’s bid for quarantine camps was struck down, our heroine—who by now, you may have guessed is the indomitable, Vera Sharav—traveled to Germany to speak on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Code. She discussed the Nazi mindset that weaponized the medical industry in the name of eugenics –the Darwinist program to evolve a ‘master race’. She warned that the inclination of technocrats to view people—especially the mentally ill and disabled—as disposable was not exclusive to a particular elite or era, but one that thrives internationally today in a world driven by avarice and corrupted by public–private partnerships.
The day after her speech, a German newspaper—located in the same edifice that once headquartered Der Stürmer—published an article of malinformation, deceptive for what it intimated and didn’t say. The article painted a portrait of Sharav as an untrustworthy gypsy who was trivializing the Holocaust. The article made no mention that she was Jewish, an American, a survivor…. Allegedly, a group of German Jews filed a criminal complaint against her for ‘relativizing the Holocaust’, an offense punishable by imprisonment.
Excerpts from Sharav’s speech are presented at the introduction of this compelling interview January 26, 2023 with Del Bigtree (The Highwire, Episode 304, “Never Again”).
The speech was discussed in the a previous essay which explained that the field of bioethics pertains to various topics that attempt to assess the quality of life in utilitarian terms: abortion; birth control; in vitro fertilization; surrogacy; sterilization; convalescent care; end-of-life planning; euthanasia; and rationing or denying of medical care. The essay explained that eugenics outfits such as New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have morphed into today’s biotech and life sciences research institutes.
The essay relayed the grief of fathers from various countries, saddened and infuriated by what has been done to children in the name of the global biosecurity state. An American man lost his daughter with Down syndrome to euthanasia in a hospital. She entered (unvaccinated) with Covid with the understanding that she would be treated with oxygen and steroids for 3-4 days. Instead, she was separated from her parents and put on a feeding tube. When she had had regained 98% oxygen saturation level, the doctor assured the parents that she would be released. A sister was permitted to stay by her side during the day. One day—her last—the sister returned from a brief trip home to discover her chained to the bed and growing blue. Apparently, she had tried to go to the bathroom and that was deemed unsafe. Medical records indicate she was systematically administrated Precedex, Lorazepam, and Morphine during this time, resulting in Acute Respiratory Failure with Hypoxemia.
The place was Freedom, WI. The girl was Grace. She was 19 years old. Her signature carried the phrase, “God is love,” [John 4:8]. Grace had a witty sense of humor and became quite the joke teller. She was adored.
The father was Scott Schara. He has partnered with Vera Sharav to deliver lectures and interviews warning people of the inclination to regard people with disabilities, mental illness, and the elderly as expendable. Some of their joint-interviews can be accessed via the foundation site, “Our Amazing Grace”. The site discusses aspects of what Schara and Sharav perceive to be a genocidal culture, drawing comparison to the Nazis. Mr. Schara views the near-absence of Down syndrome in industrialized countries as reflective of a Godless disregard for the sanctity of life which Christians understand begins at conception.
In response to German accusers who ran her out of the country, at 86, Sharav has directed a five-part documentary film, “Never Again Is Now Global,” which will air free on CHD TV, Monday, Jan 30–Feb 3, 7pm EST | 4pm PST | 6pm CST. See the trailer.
In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul spoke of life and death as a struggle within each of us, one in which spirit triumphs in the end. The question then becomes not how not to die, but instead how to live. Many believe that the answers were brought to us by Moses in the form of commandments. According to St. Paul, it is not enough to obey the law. One needs to love the law –to do the right thing not because we are told to, but because it is what our heart and conscience insist upon. This view undergirded Kant’s theory on ethics.
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a Ukranian-American with terminal cancer who for a crucial time period overcame his disability to treat thousands of patients suffering from Covid in a Hasidic community near Monroe, New York. Dr. Zelenko relied on his protocol to overcome his own bout with Covid. His success suggested the cocktail was safe and effective. When the protocol was commended by President Trump, the doctor was harassed to the extent that he had to shutter his business and relocate his family from New York State.
As an immigrant from the Soviet Union, he relished the freedom that he found in America. Dr. Zelenko established the Zelenko Freedom Foundation before his death from lung cancer approaching the July 4th holiday.
In the short period in which he had yet to live he became a new father. His business was creating and sustaining life. His obituary in The New York Times painted him as a simpleton –a country doctor who drew brief notoriety for an ineffective drug protocol.
Thanks for reading. Please feel free to comment and share.
Peace and love,
Poppy