Windham Free Library

06/01/2026

Happy birthday (belated) Betty Williams

Nickelback's latest album, The Best of Nickelback, Volume 1 is avai...

06/01/2026

Happy (belated) birthday Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

06/01/2026

Happy (belated) birthday Albrecht Dürer

06/01/2026

“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.'”
Roald Dahl - Matilda, 1988.

Jessie Willcox Smith - The Bed-Time Book, 1907.

05/30/2026

05/26/2026

Susan Sontag -

https://www.instagram.com/p/DVyh8q7gvec/

05/25/2026

A Wehrmacht officer aimed his own army's rifles at the SS to stop a Holocaust deportation.
He had no authority to do it.
He did it anyway.
July 26, 1942. Przemyśl, occupied Poland. The Jewish quarter had been sealed behind barbed wire for months. The SS was preparing what they called a "resettlement" — the word everyone in 1942 already knew meant the death camps.
Albert Battel was 49. A lawyer in civilian life. Second-in-command of the local Wehrmacht garrison. The kind of officer who had spent the war keeping his head down and following orders.
That morning he stopped.
When the SS convoy approached the bridge over the San River, Battel ordered it blocked. His Wehrmacht soldiers lowered the barrier and loaded their rifles.
The SS commander demanded passage.
"On whose authority?" he shouted.
"Mine," said Battel.
Wehrmacht rifles pointed at SS rifles. German soldiers aimed at German soldiers. The convoy idled on the bridge while everyone calculated.
"Any man who tries to cross will be arrested," Battel said quietly.
The SS turned around.
Then Battel did something even more reckless.
He climbed into a Wehrmacht truck and drove INTO the ghetto. Into the heart of the place his own government had marked for elimination.
He started knocking on doors.
"Get in the truck. Now."
He loaded grandparents who could barely walk. Mothers carrying babies. Children clutching toys. About 80 Jewish families total — moved out of the Przemyśl ghetto under the cover of "military necessity" by an officer who had no orders to do any of it.
He drove them to the Wehrmacht barracks. Fed them. Posted his own soldiers as armed guards around them.
He could have been shot for any one of those decisions. He kept making them. For hours.
By nightfall, dozens of people who had been hours away from a death train were sleeping in German army beds instead.
The news reached Berlin within days.
Heinrich Himmler personally wrote Albert Battel's name into his files. Called his actions "inexcusable fraternization with Jews." Ordered him blacklisted from the N**i Party. Started court-martial proceedings.
Battel never apologized. Not once.
Illness eventually forced him out of active duty before they could prosecute him. He went home to his wrecked career and waited out the war in silence.
Germany surrendered in 1945. The death camps were opened. The full scale of what the SS had been doing on the other side of bridges like the one at Przemyśl became impossible to deny.
Battel said nothing.
He never wrote a book. Never gave an interview. Never sought a medal. Never told the story.
He died of a heart attack in 1952. A failed lawyer in a country that wanted to forget everyone who had worn that uniform.
But the people he saved had not forgotten.
They started telling historians. The officer who blocked the bridge. The German who said no. Quietly at first. Then more widely. Then to Yad Vashem.
In 1981 — twenty-nine years after his death — the State of Israel formally recognized Albert Battel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. The highest honor Israel gives to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jewish lives.
His name was carved into the wall at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
It sits in the same hall as Oskar Schindler's.
The roughly 80 people he saved that day had children. Those children had children. The descendants of one bridge stand-off are alive somewhere in the world right now — walking through their morning, drinking their coffee, going to work — because in July 1942 a 49-year-old Wehrmacht officer looked at an SS convoy and said no.
The man in the photograph above looks exactly like what you would expect a Wehrmacht officer to look like in 1942.
He is the reason 80 Jewish families lived.
One bridge.
One officer.
One word.
No.
Tag the friend who needs to be reminded that one person can still matter.

~Weird But True

05/23/2026

thegaze_art and royalacademyarts ❤️

I’m so happy the is paying tribute to Michaelina Wautier.

👩🏻‍🎨 Active in Brussels in the middle of the 17th century, Wautier challenged the limits imposed on female artists at the time, by working on an unusually varied range of subjects: from flowers and portraits to grand history paintings (a format usually reserved for her male counterparts).

🍇 In her most famous painting, The Triumph of Bacchus, she painted herself as a pagan bacchante in monumental scale, looking squarely at the viewer and confidently asserting her position as the maker.

🖼️ Although Wautier was hugely successful in her time, her breathtaking paintings and her place in art history were almost lost in the 18th century.

👀 The RA’s exhibition puts Wautier back in her rightful place as one of Europe’s most important artists, and establishes her as “the greatest artistic rediscovery of the century”

👩🏻‍🎨 Michaelina Wautier, the exhibition
📍 The Royal Academy of Arts, London
🕰️ From March 27 through Juni 21 2026

Featured paintings by Wautier:
The Triumph of Bacchus, 1650-1656. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Sight, 1650. Rose-Marie and Eijk Van Otterloo Collection
Smell, 1650. Rose-Marie and Eijk Van Otterloo Collection
Taste, 1650. Rose-Marie and Eijk Van Otterloo Collection
Touch, 1650. Rose-Marie and Eijk Van Otterloo Collection
Portrait of a Military Commander, 1646. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, inv. 297
Boy with a White Cravat, c. 1650–55. The Kremer Collection
Flower Garland with a Dragonfly, 1652. Private collection, Connecticut, USA
Portrait of a Man as the Biblical Jacob, c. 1655. Private collection, Alkmaar
Saint John the Evangelist, c. 1656–59. Private collection
https://www.instagram.com/p/DYhWCycKGac/