Samuel Adamson

What was an American family doing in Bialystock, Poland, in 1939? Six years earlier, Samuel Adamson sat on his farm porch in Texas, reading the newspaper. Samuel sure looked like a farmed. He was a wiry-framed 5’ 9”with a body that already showed signed of the outdoors. The hot southern sun had left him tanned with an earthy-look, as he leaned forward with interest and what he was reading. His pipe sat as stationary in his mouth as he sat stationary in an old wooden chair.  It was September of 1933. On the home-front Robert A. Chesebrough had died. He was the chemist who invented Vaseline. The 96‑year‑old attributed his long life to eating a spoonful of the sticky substance each day. Samuel raised an eyebrow and whispered,

    "Probably choked to death. "  

It was also the year that prohibition in the United States came to a jubilant end.

    Overseas, the largest political party in Germany, Adolf Hitler's Nazi party, announced a new program of voluntary sterilization. The program was for people who were "idiots or schizophrenics or if they suffer from depression, epilepsy or if they have physical weaknesses, like deafness or blindness."

            Samuel had followed the political life of Hitler since the early the last 20s’.  Not that he sought out what the man was doing, but because whatever he did was news. Adolf Hitler had joined the German Workers' Party in 1919 at age 30, and the very first time he spoke impressed his hearers with his oratory skills. He recounted the experience in Mein Kemf.

"I spoke for thirty minutes, and what before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak! After thirty minutes the people in the small room were electrified and the enthusiasm was first expressed by the fact that my appeal to the self-sacrifice of those present led to the donation of three hundred marks."

The German Workers' Party began to promote Hitler as their main attraction. He spoke passionately against the Treaty of Versailles with anti-Semitic outbursts, blaming the Jews for almost all of Germany's problems. Many empathized with his message and joined the German Workers' Party. 

To be continued.