Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
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“You could beat him to death,” said Sylvia, “and he wouldn’t say ‘ouch’ or cry.” He just put his hands in front of his face and took it.
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In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics
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“Louie would give away anything, whether it was his or not.”
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If Louie were recognized for doing something right, Pete argued, he’d turn his life around.
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Bright wouldn’t have another shot at the Olympics, but he would run for the rest of his life, setting masters records in his old age. Eventually he went blind, but he kept right on running, holding the end of a rope while a guide held the other. “The only problem was that most guides couldn’t run as fast as my brother, even when he was in his late seventies,” wrote his sister Georgie Bright Kunkel. “In his eighties his grandnephews would walk with him around his care center as he timed the walk on his stopwatch.”
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A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain. Louie thought: Let go.
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Louie was led into the führer’s section. Hitler bent from his box, smiled, and offered his hand. Louie, standing below, had to reach far up. Their fingers
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barely touched. Hitler said something in German. An interpreter translated. “Ah, you’re the boy with the fast finish.”
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Historians estimate that the Japanese military murdered between 200,000 and 430,000 Chinese, including the 90,000 POWs, in what became known as the Rape of Nanking.
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Charlie Pratte became the first pilot to stop a B-24 with parachutes.
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“It was awful, awful, awful,” he said through tears sixty years later. “… If you dig into it, it comes back to you. That’s the way war is.”
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On the sixth day without water, the men recognized that they weren’t going to last much longer. Mac was failing especially quickly. They bowed their heads together as Louie prayed. If God would quench their thirst, he vowed, he’d dedicate his life to him. The next day, by divine intervention or the fickle humors of the tropics, the sky broke open and rain poured down. Twice more the water ran out, twice more they prayed, and twice more the rain came. The showers gave them just enough water to last a short while longer. If only a plane would come.
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In 1942, Poon Lim survived for 133 days alone on a raft after his ship was sunk by a German submarine. Lim’s feat was a record, but his vessel was a large, wood-and-metal “Carley float boat” raft, equipped with ten gallons of water, a fair amount of food, an electric torch, and other supplies.
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They had drifted two thousand miles.
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All I see, he thought, is a dead body breathing.
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Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.
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“I was literally becoming a lesser human being.”
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All over their captured territories, the Japanese were using at least ten thousand POWs and civilians, including infants, as test subjects for experiments in biological and chemical warfare. Thousands died.
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For every Allied soldier killed, four were captured; for every 120 Japanese soldiers killed, one was captured.