BERLIN — The German president has marked the 70th anniversary of a conference in which plans were coordinated for the genocide of European Jews with the message that Germany must never forget its responsibility for the Holocaust.

President Christian Wulff said Friday that so much time has passed since the Jan. 20, 1942 Wannsee Conference — at which senior Nazis and bureaucrats coordinated plans for the Holocaust — that it has become increasingly hard to fathom how genocide became the country’s official policy.

“Therefore it is important and a national task to keep the memory alive,” he told an audience at a villa on Berlin’s Wannsee lake where the conference was held.

“We cannot be allowed to forget that this — the unbelievable and unimaginable — actually happened.”

The villa is now a museum, memorial and education site focused on the six million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II.

The conference was once thought to be the point at which the Nazis chose to stop deporting and randomly killing Jews — instead deciding to industrialize their murder. Most historians now agree, however, that the decision was made some months earlier by Adolf Hitler himself, even though no written order from him has ever been found.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been murdered by the time the 15 civil servants, SS and party officials met at Wannsee. It is now believed by many that Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Security Service and Security Police head, called the meeting to make sure everybody knew what Hitler wanted done and to establish SS oversight of the process.

“This place and the name ‘Wannsee’ has become a symbol for the bureaucratically organized decision between life worth living and life not worth living, for state-organized extermination, for the planned and official systematic killing of Europe’s Jews,” Wulff said.

“This place became a place of cold cruelty, a trigger for carrying out systematic genocide, a place of German shame.”

Dieter Graumann, president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, warned in an op-ed piece in the top-selling Bild newspaper Friday that “there are still people who pay homage to the insane doctrine of the Third Reich,” pointing out that the far-right National Democratic Party has seats in two state legislatures, though it remains marginalized at the national level.

“Anti-Semitism and xenophobia still poison too many people today,” he wrote. “A day like this shows us where the intoxication of racism can lead, with all the consequences.”

Wulff noted that a small group of neo-Nazis killed nine members of ethnic minorities between 2000 and 2006 and a policewoman in 2007 before police finally caught up with them last year after a botched bank robbery.

He said the killing spree was also something that authorities didn’t believe to have been possible in this day and age.

“It fills us with shame and anger,” Wulff said. “We will do everything to ensure that terror and the murderous hatred of others never finds a place in Germany again.”

For most of the 28 years that Shoichi Yokoi, a lance corporal in the Japanese Army of world War II, was hiding in the jungles of Guam, he firmly believed his former comrades would one day return for him.

And even when he was eventually discovered by local hunters on the Pacific island, on 24 January 1972, the 57-year-old former soldier still clung to the notion that his life was in danger.

“He really panicked,” says Omi Hatashin, Yokoi’s nephew.

Startled by the sight of other humans after so many years on his own, Yokoi tried to grab one of the hunter’s rifles, but weakened by years of poor diet, he was no match for the local men.

Continue reading the main story
Shoichi’s story

Born in 1915 and conscripted in 1941 to serve in Manchuria, before being sent to Guam in 1944

On his return to Japan he expressed embarrassment at having returned alive, rather than dying in the service of the emperor

Japan had changed utterly during his three-decade absence – some found his stoicism and loyalty inspiring, others found it absurd

He married in 1972, within months of his return and died in 1997, aged 82
He longed to meet Emperor Hirohito – in the end he was granted an audience with Emperor Akihito in 1991

“He feared they would take him as a prisoner of war – that would have been the greatest shame for a Japanese soldier and for his family back home,” Hatashin says.

As they led him away through the jungle’s tall foxtail grass, Yokoi cried for them to kill him there and then.

Using Yokoi’s own memoirs, published in Japanese two years after his discovery, as well as the testimony of those who found him that day, Hatashin spent years piecing together his uncle’s dramatic story.

His book, Private Yokoi’s War and Life on Guam, 1944-1972, was published in English in 2009.

“I am very proud of him. He was a shy and quiet person, but with a great presence,” he says.

Underground shelter
Yokoi’s long ordeal began in July 1944 when US forces stormed Guam as part of their offensive against the Japanese in the Pacific.

Yokoi’s eel trap was one of his prize possessions

The fighting was fierce, casualties were high on both sides, but once the Japanese command was disrupted, soldiers such as Yokoi and others in his platoon were left to fend for themselves.

“From the outset they took enormous care not to be detected, erasing their footprints as they moved through the undergrowth,” Hatashin said.

In the early years the Japanese soldiers, soon reduced to a few dozen in number, caught and killed local cattle to feed off.

Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda led a guerrilla task force on the Philippine island of Lubang for many years after the end of the war. He doggedly refused to lay down his arms until formally ordered to surrender. Repatriated March 1974.

Private Teruo Nakamura, a conscript from Taiwan, was found growing crops alone on the Indonesian island of Morotai in December 1974. He was repatriated to Taiwan where he died in 1979.

But fearing detection from US patrols and later from local hunters, they gradually withdrew deeper into the jungle.

There they ate venomous toads, river eels and rats.

Yokoi made a trap from wild reeds for catching eels. He also dug himself an underground shelter, supported by strong bamboo canes.

“He was an extremely resourceful man,” Hatashin says.

Keeping himself busy also kept him from thinking too much about his predicament, or his family back home, his nephew said.

Return to Guam
Yokoi’s own memoirs of his time in hiding reveal his desperation not to give up hope, especially in the last eight years when he was totally alone – his last two surviving companions died in floods in 1964.

Yokoi demonstrating the handmade loom he used in the jungle
Turning his thoughts to his ageing mother back home, he at one point wrote: “It was pointless to cause my heart pain by dwelling on such things.”

And of another occasion, when he was desperately sick in the jungle, he wrote: “No! I cannot die here. I cannot expose my corpse to the enemy. I must go back to my hole to die. I have so far managed to survive but all is coming to nothing now.”

Two weeks after his discovery in the jungle, Yokoi returned home to Japan to a hero’s welcome.

He was besieged by the media, interviewed on radio and television, and was regularly invited to speak at universities and in schools across the country.

Omi Hatashin was interviewed for the BBC World Service programme Witness
Witness airs every weekday, and tells history through the eyes of the people who were there

Hatashin, who was six when Yokoi married his aunt, said that the former soldier never really settled back into life in modern Japan.

He was unimpressed by the country’s rapid post-war economic development and once commented on seeing a new 10,000 yen bank note that the currency had now become “valueless”.

According to Hatashin, his uncle grew increasingly nostalgic about the past as he grew older, and before his death in 1997 he went back to Guam on several occasions with his wife.

Some of his prize possessions from those years in the jungle, including his eel traps, are still on show in a small museum on the island.

A federal law that essentially bans any more construction on the National Mall might prevent an attempt to “nationalize” the District of Columbia World War I Memorial, a National Park Service official said Tuesday.

The Commemorative Works Act passed in 2003 prohibits the construction of new memorials — including a tribute to veterans of the “great war” — leaving the District’s site, about halfway between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, as an apt vehicle for a national World War I Memorial.

Yet the law may also prevent any changes to the city’s memorial, as contemplated in a House resolution to rededicate the site as the “District of Columbia and National World War I Memorial,” according to Peter May, associate regional director for Lands, Resources, and Planning with the National Capital Region of the Park Service.

“For these reasons the department has serious concerns with [the bill] and would like to work with the committee to address those concerns,” Mr. May told a House Natural Resources subcommittee on behalf of the Department of the Interior.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Ted Poe, Texas Republican, and a companion bill by Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia Democrat, also would rededicate the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City as the National World War I Museum and Memorial.

“The United States has done little, if anything, to recognize that Americans fought in World War I,” Mr. Poe told the subcommittee. “The worst casualty of war is to be forgotten.”

Mr. Poe noted there are national memorials on the Mall to those who fought in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

“But there is no memorial for all who served in the great World War I,” he said.

Supporters of the bill say a national memorial would respect the integrity of the original city memorial with minimal physical adornments. It would also increase its visibility, prompting more tourists to learn about the war, they say.

But D.C. officials are vehemently opposed to any changes to their memorial, which is located north of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in West Potomac Park.

Mayor Vincent C. Gray and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s non-voting member of Congress, say the attempt is an affront to a city that must pay federal taxes and submit its laws and budget to Congress for approval even though its residents do not have full voting rights on Capitol Hill.

The D.C. memorial was dedicated by President Hoover in 1931 to honor the 26,000 city residents who fought in World War I and the 499 who died.

“It’s our memorial,” Nelson Rimensnyder, of the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of D.C., told the subcommittee.

The park service and city officials celebrated the reopening of the memorial in November after a yearlong, $2.3 million project to refurbish the domed, round, columned structure and conduct much-needed landscaping around the site.

Some proponents of a national memorial point to Pershing Park, named for World War I Gen. John J. Pershing and located near the White House, as an alternative location.

Edwin Fountain, a key member of the World War I Foundation pushing the legislation, said the D.C. memorial on the Mall is the most appropriate site to honor all of the war’s veterans, but an alternate location is “better than having no national memorial.”

Mr. Fountain said Mr. May’s testimony presented a rather “lawyerly” view of the act that restricts construction or site changes on the mall.

“I believe that what we’re proposing fits within the act,” he said. “Other than the courts, Congress can interpret its own statute.”

Mr. Fountain said he hopes Congress “does something sooner rather than later” to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the conflict, “or else we’re going to miss the opportunity to do anything in conjunction with the centennial.”

PARIS — The Turkish government and news media castigated France on Tuesday, accusing Parliament of racism and a breach of France’s own free speech principles after the French Senate passed a bill late Monday criminalizing the denial of officially recognized genocides, including the Armenian genocide begun in 1915.

Historians widely believe that about 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered by Ottoman Turks during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in what they deem the 20th century’s first genocide.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, will sign the bill into law within two weeks, an aide confirmed on Tuesday.

The bill has infuriated Turkey, which has long maintained that Armenian deaths were far fewer in number and not the result of systematic killings. Recognizing them as genocide is criminal under Turkish law, as an insult to Turkish identity.

In a speech in Ankara, the capital, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the French bill represented “evident discrimination, racism and massacre of free speech.” He reiterated Turkey’s intention to add penalties against France, though he did not specify what those sanctions might bear upon and also signaled that the government would wait to see the result of possible legal challenges to the bill in France.

“We are going to impose our sanctions step by step with certainty, without hesitations,” he said. “However, for now, we are still in the phase of patience as we watch how this process would shape up.”

After the French Senate vote on Monday night, Turkey’s ambassador to France, Tahsin Burcuoglu, suggested that Turkey might reduce diplomatic ties by calling for his “permanent departure” from Paris.

Headlines in the Turkish news media, regardless of their political affiliations, reflected the level of public frustration in Turkey.

“Arrogant French,” said Milli Gazete, a right-wing newspaper, while Cumhuriyet, a pro-leftist daily with nationalist leanings, called the bill “French Justice” in an ironic tone.

Some newspapers like Sozcu, a widely circulated daily, picked a rougher language. Sozcu likened Mr. Sarkozy to Satan, manipulating a photo of the leader with spiky ears. “French President Sarkozy Sold Out His Ally Turkey in a Devilish Plan! Denial Bill Passed the Senate. Shame on You!” the headline read.

Turkey’s government, led by the Justice and Development Party, briefly recalled Mr. Burcuoglu and suspended bilateral political and military cooperation with the French in late December, after the National Assembly, France’s lower parliamentary house, approved the bill.

The French government has sought to calm diplomatic tensions over the bill, however, concerned with preserving cooperation with Turkey on issues including the violence in Syria and the Iranian nuclear program.

“What I’d like to do today is appeal to our Turkish friends for calm,” said the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, who had openly opposed the legislation, speaking on French television on Tuesday.

“I’m holding out my hand, and I hope it will be taken up one day.”

The Turkish government appeared uninterested.

President Abdullah Gul denounced the legislation, saying, “Our bilateral relations are at a different level from now on.” The opposition Nationalist Movement Party proposed annulment of the Turkish and French friendship parliamentary committee, as party officials lashed out at the legislation, calling it unacceptable.

France’s relations with Turkey, a moderate Muslim democracy and NATO ally, have been strained in recent years as Mr. Sarkozy, along with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, repeatedly expressed opposition to Turkey’s full membership in the European Union.

The government in Ankara argues that Mr. Sarkozy’s opposition to Turkish membership, and his party’s support for the genocide bill, are aimed at appealing to the 500,000 ethnic Armenians in his country leading up to the May presidential elections.

A survey carried out two days before Holocaust Memorial Day shows more than a fifth of young Germans do not know the name of Auschwitz or what happened there.

Twenty one per cent of people aged between 18 and 30 quizzed about the most notorious Nazi extermination camp had not heard of it, the survey revealed.
And almost half of all those canvassed by the Forsa research institute said they had never visited a concentration camp despite the fact Germany has made all of those on its soil permanent memorials to the dead.

Horrors: A survey has revealed one fifth of young Germans have never heard of Auschwitz or the crimes perpetrated there by the Nazis

This Friday is the 67th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945.

By the time Russian soldiers got there, some 1.2million of the six million victims of the Holocaust had been murdered there.

German government officials, camp survivors and Israeli politicians will be among those attending commemorations at the site of the camp built by the Nazis in occupied Poland during World War Two.

The survey, published in Stern magazine, showed that of people over 30, 95 per cent had heard of Auschwitz and the crimes committed there.

Vulnerable: Berlin is concerned that youths ignorant of the crimes of the Nazis are being targeted by a rise in neo-Nazis violence in Germany

But less than 70 per cent could name the country it lies in.

Berlin, which is concerned about a rising tide of neo-Nazi crime and sentiment in Germany, is dismayed by the survey which underwrites the belief that ignorant youth in particular are vulnerable to far-right propaganda that claims the Holocaust is a myth.

The Nazis built six extermination camps – Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek – all of them in occupied Poland.

The murder of prisoners, most of them Jewish, began in 1941 when Nazi officials enacted Hitler’s ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’.

Most of the camps included gas chambers and many victims were then cremated as the Nazi’s attempted to hide evidence of the Holocaust.

KABUL (Reuters) – A cache of ancient Jewish scrolls from northern Afghanistan that has only recently come to light is creating a storm among scholars who say the landmark find could reveal an undiscovered side of medieval Jewry.
The 150 or so documents, dated from the 11th century, were found in Afghanistan’s Samangan province and most likely smuggled out — a sorry but common fate for the impoverished and war-torn country’s antiquities.
Israeli emeritus professor Shaul Shaked, who has examined some of the poems, commercial records and judicial agreements that make up the treasure, said while the existence of ancient Afghan Jewry is known, their culture was still a mystery.

“Here, for the first time, we see evidence and we can actually study the writings of this Jewish community. It’s very exciting,” Shaked told Reuters by telephone from Israel, where he teaches at the Comparative Religion and Iranian Studies department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The hoard is currently being kept by private antique dealers in London, who have been producing a trickle of new documents over the past two years, which is when Shaked believes they were found and pirated out of Afghanistan in a clandestine operation.

It is likely they belonged to Jewish merchants on the Silk Road running across Central Asia, said T. Michael Law, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University’s Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

“They might have been left there by merchants travelling along the way, but they could also come from another nearby area and deposited for a reason we do not yet understand,” Law said.

“SOLD ELSEWHERE FOR TEN TIMES MORE”
Cultural authorities in Kabul had mixed reactions to the find, which scholars say is without a doubt from Afghanistan, arguing that the Judeo-Persian language used on the scrolls is similar to other Afghan Jewish manuscripts.
National Archives director Sakhi Muneer outright denied the find was Afghan, arguing that he would have seen it, but an advisor in the Culture Ministry said it “cannot be confirmed but it is entirely possible.”

“A lot of old documents and sculptures are not brought to us but are sold elsewhere for ten times the price,” said advisor Jalal Norani, explaining that excavators and ordinary people who stumble across finds sell them to middlemen who then auction them off in Iran, Pakistan and Europe.

“Unfortunately, we cannot stop this,” Norani said. The Culture Ministry, he said, pays on average $1,500 for a recovered antique item. The Hebrew University’s Shaked estimated the Jewish documents’ worth at several million dollars.

Thirty years of war and conflict have severely hindered both the collecting and preserving of Afghanistan’s antiquities, and the Culture Ministry said endemic corruption and poverty meant many new discoveries do not even reach them.
Interpol and U.S. officials have also traced looted Afghan antiquities to funding insurgent activities.

In today’s climate of uncertainty, the National Archives in Kabul keep the bulk of its enormous collection of documents — some dating to the fifth century — under lock and key to prevent stealing.

Instead reproductions of gold-framed Pashto poems and early Korans scribed on deer skin, or vellum, are displayed for the public under the ornate ceilings of the Archives, which were the nineteenth century offices of Afghan King Habibullah Khan.

“I am sure Afghanistan, like any country, would like to control their antiquities… But on the other hand, with this kind of interest and importance, as a scholar I can’t say that I would avoid studying them,” said Shaked of the Jewish find.

Steward First Class Carl Clark waited 66 years for this day. It’s been years since the 95-year-old last wore his uniform — which has only been made complete today with the addition of a medal he won when he was 29.

During World War II, black men were allowed to enlist, but the only job available to them in the Navy was as stewards.

“Taking care of officers, feeding them their meals, cleaning their rooms, shining their shoes,” were just a few things that were part of the job, according to Clark.

When the ship was under attack, however, they joined their fellow soldiers, manning their battle stations like the rest of the crew. They did just that on May 3, 1945, near Okinawa on board the USS Aaron Ward.

“Our ship had been hit by nine kamikazes,” Clark said in a film. “All four of the other ships in our station were sunk.”

Clark’s job was to fight the fires on deck and to help the wounded.

“When first plane hit, I was blown against the overhead I broke my collarbone,” he said. ” I was the only survivor of an eight-man damage control team. But two minutes later a second plane came in. I stared at the pilot as he guided his plane toward our ship … the explosion blew me into the air to the other side of the ship.”

Singlehandedly, he kept the fires from reaching the big guns — saving the ship from exploding. They lost 40 men that day, but while his white comrades received medals for bravery, Clark did not, even though the ship’s captain felt he deserved it.

Clark’s story came to the attention of Rep. Anna Eshoo, who pushed the Navy to acknowledge him for his bravery. They were able to finally set it right today with an appropriate ceremony. The secretary of the Navy pinned the medal — the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation for valor — on Clark himself.

Clark didn’t think he’d live to see the day.

“It was a different country then,” he said, sadly understanding the slight. “Things have changed.”

Now, he’s amazed by the attention he’s being paid.

“All these people and the applause — it’s overwhelming,” Clark said.

This was written by Brendan Wolfe, associate editor of Encyclopedia Virginia, a project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities that is the first online reference work about the Commonwealth that aggregates in a single resource information on Virginia history, business, politics, geography, arts, religion, culture, and folklife.

Wolfe writes about an episode in Virginia when state officials approved a fourth-grade textbook that, as it turned out, was riddled with historical errors, a story told by my colleague Kevin Sieff. The textbook was redone to remove the obvious errors, but Wolfe still has problems with it. Here’s a critique he wrote and published on the Encylopedia Virginia’s blog, though he notes that his opinions are his own and not those of the foundation.

By Brendan Wolfe

Last year, upon the release of Five Ponds Press’s fourth-grade textbook, “Our Virginia ,” and its unfavorable write-up in The Washington Post , the history nerds of Virginia — which is to say, pretty much everybody — mobilized into a mass orgy of righteous fact-checking. I was right there with them, of course, shocked to learn that Sir Walter Raleigh had traveled to North Carolina or that Stonewall Jackson had mobilized two battalions of black Confederates.

I was also appalled at how The Post gleefully seized on author Joy Masoff‘s use of the Internet as a research tool, as if that were a bad thing. (Hint, hint.) How does the old saying go? The Internet doesn’t create two battalions of black Confederates. Only textbook authors create two battalions of black Confederates … or something like that.

But now that a new edition of Our Virginia has been approved, with its most egregious factual errors corrected, it’s worth giving Five Ponds some credit. Sir Walter is safely back in London and those thousands of black Confederates have — poof! —magically transformed into “body servants.” The press opened the process up to historians and the result, as one might expect, is a much better book.

But is it good enough? I’m not yet convinced.

I’ve written history and social studies textbooks for third-, fifth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders. I’m familiar with the challenges of communicating with kids who don’t always have the same interest level, let alone the same literacy level. And I know something about the frustrations that come with trying to shape a compelling narrative out of what often are stiff, unforgiving, fact-based state standards. My dad taught middle-school American history for more than thirty years, and he just e-mailed to say that “it’s an enormously difficult subject to teach, perhaps the hardest.”

If he doesn’t have all the answers, then neither do I. But because history is a critical part of our civic discourse — see here and here and here and heck, even here — it’s worth thinking hard about how it’s taught. If, as adults, we can’t speak intelligently about history, then we will have more and more trouble speaking intelligently, period.

So, back to Our Virginia …

One has to start somewhere, so why not with pages 54 and 55: “WHEN WORLDS MET.”

Here the author contrasts the Englishmen who founded Jamestown, represented by John Smith, with the Virginia Indians who already lived there, represented by their paramount chief, Powhatan. The facts are more or less in order, but what about the bigger picture? This is from the text:

Smith described himself as brave and fearless. Many others thought he was obnoxious.
Let’s be fair: he probably was obnoxious. Smith was like that other John , John Adams, in the classic musical 1776: “I’m obnoxious and disliked; you know that, sir!” But little if anything is offered to suggest how he was obnoxious or, more importantly, what the consequences of his personality were. Instead, we are left only with this representative Englishman who’s a boastful and obnoxious soldier of fortune.

So how’s the representative Indian?

Powhatan knew the English settlers were a terrible threat, but he was a ruler of great spiritual, mental, and physical strength.
Hey, wait a minute! Is it fair that the typical Englishman is obnoxious and disliked while the typical Indian resembles nothing if not Mr. Miyagi in Karate Kid : “Look eye! Always look eye!”

Please understand that I am not making a complaint here about political correctness. Instead, I am highlighting one clue to the ways in which this text sometimes fails.

One of the early settlers at Jamestown was a fellow called William Strachey. His “Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia” serves as one of the most important sources we have on that moment “When Worlds Met,” and he paints a more complicated picture of Powhatan. For instance, Strachey tells the story of how the English visited Powhatan at his capital, Werowocomoco, and there noticed an awkward and gruesome sight: a number of human scalps hanging on a line between two trees. By way of explanation, Powhatan apparently told his visitors that he had recently ordered an ambush of the Piankatank people, killing twenty-four of their men, and now he displayed his trophies for all to see. The English never heard why Powhatan had done this — why he had had these men killed — but perhaps that was the point. The paramount chief aimed to instill fear among his English rivals just as he had done with his Indian rivals.

Strachey bravely dismisses the idea — “But, God be praysed, yt wrought not feare but courage in our people” (yeah, right)—but the point seems to be clear: Powhatan did not command tribute from twenty-eight to thirty-two Indians tribes and chiefdoms simply because of his “great spiritual, mental, and physical strength.” He was a man who understood power. And violence.

I imagine him thinking: This is what I did to people who look like me. Imagine what I could do to you!

And no, I don’t think that the author of Our Virginia should have included Strachey’s graphic description of Piankatank warriors being scalped. I do, however, think that an understanding of Powhatan’s relationship to violence is not simply desirable but necessary. Why? Consider the last sentence in this two-page section:

Without the help of Powhatan, his daughter Pocahontas, and the Powhatan Indians, Jamestown might have ended up as another “Lost Colony.”
The astute student is bound to ask: How might they have ended up as another “Lost Colony”? And why? Would they have disappeared without a trace? Would they have disappeared for a lack of help?

Our Virginia doesn’t offer any clues, and as a result these entire two pages, devoted to making sense of how these two alien peoples interacted, end in incoherence.

To help make sense of it, I flip back to page 51 and a two-paragraph section titled “The Lost Colony.” Here, the author mentions the Roanoke colonies — er, I mean colony . In Our Virginia there is no mention of the failed first colony of 1585–1586, the one that ended with Englishmen ambushing and beheading a local weroance , or chief. Why does that particular omission matter? Because when it mentions the so-called Lost Colony, the book finds itself helpless to explain what happened.

When a supply ship returned in 1590, every single settler had vanished. A tree trunk with the word “Cro” and a gatepost with “Croatoan” scratched in it were the only clues to their fate.
Even innocent little fourth-graders deserve something here — some kind of stab at an explanation. To explain, for instance, that fighting may have contributed to the deaths of the English colonists in 1587 may help prepare students for understanding that fighting was also part of the equation in 1607 and later.

How so? I move to pages 56 and 57, devoted to “THE STARVING TIME.” As we all know, the Starving Time occurred during the winter of 1609–1610, when about 240 settlers hunkered down inside James Fort and slowly starved to death. Our friend William Strachey arrived in May 1610—having been cast away on Bermuda for the winter; lucky him!—and what he found was horrifying: only sixty or so skeleton-like figures remained of the original 240, prompting the colony’s new minister to cast up “a zealous and sorrowfull Prayer.” Strachey himself, though, was less interested in grieving than in figuring out what had gone so terribly wrong.

But first, here’s how Our Virginia explains it:

But in their excitement to do well, they [the English colonists] failed to stow away enough food for their own needs. When a shipload of new settlers arrived just before winter, things took a deadly turn. That bitter winter came to be known as the Starving Time .
Students — or at least the ones half paying attention — would at this point wonder what in the world happened to “the help of Powhatan, his daughter Pocahontas, and the Powhatan Indians.” Why hadn’t Pocahontas shown up and, in the book’s words, “bridged the Indian and English worlds, serving as a contact when the Indians brought food to the starving settlers”? I mean, this is the Starving Time , for crying out loud! Our Virginia doesn’t say, which means that, again, these entire two pages, devoted to making sense of an important moment in Virginia history, end in incoherence.

What’s missing, of course, is also what was missing at Roanoke: fighting . Flip a little farther back in the book now, to pages 36 and 37. In this section, called “THE FIRST NATIONS,” the author describes Virginia Indian life prior to 1607:

Many towns dotted the landscape. Most people were well fed and lived in vibrant communities. But all that was about to change when the first ships from Europe began to explore the waters of Chesapeake Bay and cross paths with the Powhatan (POW-uh-tan) Indians.
If the Indians were well fed and vibrant before the Europeans showed up, then presumably what changed is that they soon went hungry. Except how does that square with Pocahontas bringing the starving colonists food? Unless everybody was short of food — with the Indians simply being less short — which was, in fact, the case. Actually, what are the odds that when the English show up in 1607, Virginia would be suffering through its driest spell in 770 years? For that matter, what are the odds that when they showed up at Roanoke a few decades earlier, that area would be suffering through its driest spell in even longer?

All of which is to say that Powhatan’s people weren’t all that well fed, at least not in 1607, and when they helped the English, they didn’t help that much, and when the colonists didn’t get what they needed, they just went ahead and took it anyway. Which, of course, left the Indians even more hungry, which helped lead to … fighting. The First Anglo-Powhatan War to be specific.

It is this context — that they were fighting and what they were fighting over — that is crucial to making sense of the Starving Time and so much else in these sections of Our Virginia . Look at what William Strachey says about what happened during that deadly winter:

… and it is true, the Indian killed as fast without, if our men stirred but beyond the bounds of their Block-house, as Famine and Pestilence did within …
The Indians, in other words, had laid siege to James Fort. (I should say that not all historians subscribe to this terminology, but what does seem clear is that the Indians made it extremely difficult for the English men and women to do anything that winter but starve.) Does this completely explain the Starving Time? No, of course not. But it does help to make comprehensible what is otherwise incomprehensible in Our Virginia .

Remember that Powhatan was a man who understood power. And violence. To make this point early on is to be able to make it again now, when it truly bears on students’ understanding of the material. One gets the sense that the author is almost preoccupied with underscoring the positive in Virginia’s Indians while acknowledging the unwelcome intrusion represented by the English settlement. This is as it should be. But to really give Virginia Indians their due, you have to allow them to be actors in this drama.

Did you notice that at this crucial moment in the history of Jamestown — when the colony had nearly starved to death en masse, then packed up and headed for home, only to be saved by the miracle arrival of English resupply ships — that the Indians have, for all intents and purposes, disappeared? Consider that this is also a crucial moment in their history . The Powhatans had used power and violence in an attempt to expel the foreigners, and it had almost worked! But of course it didn’t work, and they would never again come so close. That is part of the story, too. How could Our Virginia miss it?

Last year’s textbook controversy focused on fuzzy facts and, to a lesser extent, whether you could find quality information online. (You can!) But now that many of those facts have been corrected, we are still left with … just facts. What do they mean? Why do they matter? And how can we put them together so that they begin to make sense? Our Virginia is still not up to that task.

Am I asking too much of a fourth-grade textbook? My dad e-mails: “One thing you know intellectually but can’t possibly understand very well without having experienced it as much as I is that so very many students have only the vaguest notion of what is happening in their subjects. Sometimes I couldn’t assume most of my eighth-graders had any previous knowledge on the subject. I seemed to be starting from an empty slate.”

True enough. But we all know about fighting , and if we don’t all know what it means to be really hungry , then most of us can at least imagine it. These can be starting points for fourth-graders, concepts to build on — from Roanoke to Smith & Powhatan to the Starving Time.

There are other ways to organize this information, of course, and other pedagogical choices that could be made. The point, though, is that a textbook has to make some choice. It’s not enough for it merely to be fact checked. And while we should applaud Five Ponds for making an extra effort to get these facts right, we also should demand even more.

PS: Lest you think that I am merely picking on these few pages, I’ll give you one more, head-scratching example. On pages 68 and 69 you’ll find a paragraph on Bacon’s Rebellion, which, I will be the first to acknowledge, would be awfully difficult to teach to fourth-graders. On the other hand, guess what? It’s not in the state standards!

Anyway, here’s Our Virginia :

In 1676 an angry group of poor, former servants, both black and white, joined a planter named Nathaniel Bacon and set fire to Jamestown. Why? They wanted to expand westward by taking Indian lands, but the governor would not let them. Bacon’s Rebellion soon faded, but the uprising alarmed Virginia’s ruling class. This growing fear helped lead to an end to short-term servitude and to the growth of permanent slavery as an economic choice.
So you’ve got white servants and black. You’ve got Indians. You’ve got a governor who is being contrary but you don’t know why. And now, out of all this, you have the end of indentured servitude and the rise of slavery “as an economic choice.” Even if you were going to read between the lines here—and I don’t imagine that most fourth-graders are going to be able to do this—you’re led to believe that the “growing fear” of the ruling class came from free blacks and whites causing trouble and burning stuff. The elites respond to this social problem by making sure that such hooligans don’t ever again become free. So how is this an “economic choice”?

As you might imagine, Our Virginia does not say.

The British government has acted to protect a crumbling piece of wartime — and computing — history.

The government said Friday that it has given protected status to the derelict Block C at Bletchley Park, the site northwest of London where mathematicians and cryptographers toiled in secret to crack Nazi communications codes.

Historians believe their work shortened the war by as much as two years.

The steel-and-concrete Block C contained high-speed data processing machines that helped the British crack Germany’s Enigma encryption device.

Heritage Minister John Penrose said Friday that Block C “can be viewed as the birthplace of modern information technology.”

Bletchley Park’s guardians are fundraising to restore the site and turn it into a museum.