Chapter 891 Life in a Bottle

There are often street performers in the squares and streets of Rome's non-famous attractions.

Some of these people painted for others, and some played musical instruments. There was a violinist playing in the square outside the window of the office window of John Paul II's private secretary.

On the other side of the square, a person is drawing a 3D painting, which is the hot lava under the cracked earth, and many people are watching.

This small square is located outside the Vatican. Although there are some entertainers in the city, no one is allowed to graffiti on those ancient and holy buildings.

Many people in this world remember Schindler, but few people know Elena Sendler. She used to work as a nurse in Warsaw. Clothes, food and medicines.

However, three years later the situation suddenly became drastically worse, and thousands of Jews were sent to death camps every day.

She immediately set up a "network" with her companions to help Jewish children escape, and entered the Jewish quarter as a social worker.

Yet many Jewish parents are afraid to let them take their children away. The first question they ask is: What guarantees are there that the child will survive?

She could only answer truthfully: no. Because even she herself didn't know if she could leave the quarantine area alive today.

She hid more than 2,500 Jewish children under stretchers, suitcases, and body bags, and even pretended that some children had infectious diseases, and took them out of the isolation area by ambulance and sent them to the Catholic Church.

Even the children who were lucky enough to be rescued still faced the threat of death at all times, because everyone in Warsaw at that time was in danger, there were ruthless informers everywhere, and the Gestapo searched for Jews who escaped from the quarantine area every day.

In order to keep these rescued children, Elena and her companions rushed to produce 3,000 forged documents in a few days and nights, including Catholic birth certificates signed by priests and ID cards signed by senior officials.

Jews don't believe in Catholicism, so they don't know prayers. This is also a way to judge whether a child is a Jewish child. Elena teaches children prayers to protect them.

At that time, hiding Jews in Warsaw was a capital crime, and even family members would be implicated and executed, which was even more serious than printing "reactionary newspapers", transporting weapons, and attempting to overthrow Germany.

It was in such a high-pressure and harsh environment that Elena was found and arrested in 1943. The Gestapo tortured her, but did not get any valuable information from her mouth.

Extremely angry, the police decided to execute her. Fortunately, the Polish underground organization paid a lot of money to pay the execution soldiers to rescue her.

However, the rescued Elena did not stop there. She continued to rescue the Jews incognito, and recorded the details of the saved children in jars and buried them under the apple tree of the neighbor's house, so that they could be with their parents after the war. reunion.

It is a pity that almost all parents have been killed or disappeared, and only a few children have found their parents.

In the 54 years since then, she has lived a life like an ordinary person and has never told anyone about the heroic deeds of saving more than 2,500 children.

It was not until 1999 that Elena's dusty past was brought back to the world after the hard work of middle school students in four rural schools in Kansas, USA.

At that time, the four girls were collecting information and participating in the school's historical theme activities. In a brief report in a newspaper "Other Schindler", a name was mentioned: Elena Sendler, and the introduction was only a short sentence. "During World War II, she rescued more than 2,500 children from the Jewish blockade."

The four students couldn't believe the report, thinking it was a printing error, they printed 250 instead of 2500, and Schindler only saved 1100 Jews, so they hurriedly asked the teacher for help.

The teacher also suspected that this was a typographical error, but the teacher who always encouraged students to think independently was not in a hurry to deny the children's discoveries. He encouraged the children to take the initiative to explore the truth of the matter.

With the teacher's affirmation, the four children immediately searched for Elena Sendler on the Internet, but to their disappointment, there were only two entries about her on the Internet, and they all came from the same website: Jewish Justice Foundation.

Several children sent emails non-stop to ask the foundation, and finally confirmed that the number of 2,500 was correct, but there was no other information about Elena.

In the next few months, the four middle school students used the time after school, weekends, and vacations to go back and forth to archives and libraries to search for various World War II materials.

They even checked all the lists of World War II monuments one by one, hoping to find Elena's final resting place, but in the end they still found nothing.

Perhaps it was the perseverance of the children in pursuit that moved the heavens. When they were desperate, the Jewish Justice Foundation sent a message that Elena was still alive. She now lives in Warsaw, Poland, and is 90 years old.

These four girls finally won the national championship of that historical theme competition by virtue of excavating this story of Elena.

They were invited to give lecture tours in Kansas, and in the end, they simply arranged the heroic deeds of Grandma Elena into a drama "Life Hidden in a Jar", which toured in Kansas.

While the girls were doing drama performances, they also prepared a big bottle and put all the proceeds from the performances into it, preparing to use it to support Grandma Elena in the future; at the same time, they started selling lollipops to raise money, preparing to save enough travel expenses to visit Poland Grandma Elena.

However, before they could save enough travel expenses, things took a turn for the better. A wealthy businessman named John Schuzart was deeply moved after hearing their stories, and immediately decided to sponsor them to go to Poland.

The mustard seed comes smaller than all the others, but when it falls into the plowed soil it grows into a great tree, which becomes a refuge for all the birds of the sky.

The twilight hero also received various long-overdue honors. The President of Poland and his wife went to the nursing home to see Elena in person.

Pope Paul II personally wrote to Elena, praising her for her extraordinary efforts during the war.

Now, there is also a letter on the secretary's desk. It was written by a child. Her handwriting is very large, and there are graffiti in various colors. If he has a grandson, he will also draw the same picture as her.

Here's what she wrote in the letter:

Hi, my name is Erica Esposito and I am five years old. Our family lives in Naples, my parents are company employees, they are usually very busy, they took me to the zoo last week, but there are no pandas in the zoo, John Pope, I think you can talk to the president of China to let the pandas in China When I came to Italy, I was afraid that one day I would not be able to see it, because I was seriously ill and my parents had to work to pay for my hospitalization. Not sure why pandas can't come to Italy, can you tell me why? looking forward to your reply. The signature is a panda holding a little girl.

The personal secretary of the Holy See put down the letter from the little girl and sighed deeply.

After the death of a pope, during the transition period between the old and new popes, all power is temporarily and automatically transferred to the personal assistant of the previous pope, the Pope's servant.

However, John Paul II did not die, but his throat was intubated and he could not speak.

The current pope election has become an internal affair of the Holy See, and the governments of all countries regard the pope as a mascot. The pope's influence is not as good as that of an ordinary star.

Besides, he didn't know how to answer the little girl's question.

Because the Chinese fever caused by pandas is sweeping the west, that country does not have creation myths, they believe that the world is not created by the creator god, but by nature itself, transformed by a giant named Pangu.

Maybe the pope and the panda are both messengers of peace, but they still have differences, but who can refuse the last wish of a terminally ill child?

Scotland and England are splitting, and the question of who owns the pandas at the Edinburgh Zoo is no longer a problem.

Zoologists say that pandas are ferocious beasts, so why is the furry "bamboo eater" rolling all over the ground so fierce?

The Pope's servant laughed unconsciously.

At this moment, the phone on his desk rang, and the secretary told him that the person he had met had arrived, so he put the letter in the drawer.

It was an ordinary secular youth who came in.

Counting from the day when the first test-tube baby was born, many such "artificial" babies have been born. Although this does not conform to the creation order established by God, these children cannot be excluded.

It is not the first time in the history of science that male scientists "steal" the results of female scientists. Watson and Crick stole the data of Rosalind Franklin and discovered the DNA double helix; Pulsars, but it was her mentor Xiu Weishi who won the Nobel Prize in the end.

In 1862, the British doctor John Langton Down noticed that among those babies who were "born idiots", some children had a common feature: broad faces, small eyes, and slanting upwards. By the beginning of the 20th century, people have realized that this is a relatively common congenital disease, with an incidence rate of about one in a thousand. At that time, in many countries, children with children were usually taken in by specialized institutions, but there was almost no decent treatment. Most of the patients died very early, and few of them lived to the age of 20.

A young woman doctor named Marthe Gautier returned to Paris after a year of pediatrics training at Harvard. She got a clinical position at a local hospital. Raymond Turpan, director of pediatrics at the hospital, was very interested in Down syndrome. He suspected that it might be related to chromosomal abnormalities many years ago, but didn't have time to delve deeper. When Turpin complained one day that his conjecture was being ignored, Gautier, remembering his Harvard training, volunteered to take on the study.

The hospital allocated her an abandoned laboratory with a refrigerator, a centrifuge and a poor-quality microscope. No funding. She bought glassware out of her own pocket, kept a rooster as a source of serum, and used her own if she needed a human blood sample.

Turpan himself never visited her laboratory during this period, but one of Turpin's students, Jerome Lejeune, often visited. One day Gautier talked about her troubles of not being able to take pictures, and Le Gennes offered to take her slides to another laboratory to help her take pictures. Gautier never saw the slides again until two months later, at the International Genetics Congress in Montreal, when Le Genne announced to the world that he had discovered the cause of Down syndrome, using photographs that were It's these slides. In the submitted paper, Le Gennes is the first author, Turpin is the corresponding author, and Gautier, who has no knowledge, is placed in the obscure middle position. According to the description of the paper, her contribution is mainly "from America brought back a new method of tissue culture".

Under the blow, Gautier decided to say goodbye to scientific research and return to clinical and teaching positions. But Le Genne became famous not only because he discovered that the cause of Down syndrome is an extra chromosome 21, but also found a principle of prevention: when the baby is not born, you don't know his Looks and intelligence, but his/her chromosomes can be sampled. If genetic diagnosis can be carried out in early pregnancy and there is a problem with chromosome 21, then abortion and pregnancy can avoid tragedy?

But Le Gennes is a Catholic, and Catholics are against abortion. He believes that even a child with Down syndrome has the right to live from the moment of conception. Medicine can only improve his/her quality of life, and even if it cannot improve, abortion cannot "solve" the problem.

Should a child with Down syndrome be born?

Abortion is not a simple ethical issue, but mixed with countless political and religious factors, the situation is intricate. For China, children with Down syndrome will choose to fall without hesitation, which will reduce the burden on parents and children.

In 1994, Le Gennes died of lung cancer, and the Jérôme Le Gennes Foundation was established in his memory. This foundation has a triple mission: research, care, and advocacy. The first two are very good, but the third part puts a lot of energy into pro-abortion.

While alive, Le Gennes downplayed Gautier's importance, but at least did not deny that she played a role. But since this foundation has Le Gennes as its spiritual leader, it cannot tolerate such "defamation". In the profile of Le Gennes on the foundation's website, all the achievements are attributed to Le Gennes, and nothing is mentioned about Gautier. The "Learn More" link at the end of the page leads to an organization called the "Association of Friends of Professor Le Gennes", which aims to win the posthumous beatification of Le Gennes by the Catholic Church, which requires at least one Certified miracle.

"I have a task for you," said the Pope's chamberlain. "You promise, can you swear to keep it secret, child?"

"What task?" asked the young man.

"Use your expertise to sneak into the hospital." The servant said, "You want to ensure that the samples used by the Pope to treat diseases will not become materials for other people's papers. Can you do this?"