Salt To The Sea

I’ve been trying to write a post about this book Salt To The Sea, which is set at the end of World War Two in the Baltic.

While the Titanic and Lusitania are both well-documented disasters, the single greatest tragedy in maritime history is the little-known January 30, 1945 sinking in the Baltic Sea by a Soviet submarine of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German cruise liner that was supposed to ferry wartime personnel and refugees to safety from the advancing Red Army. The ship was overcrowded with more than 10,500 passengers — the intended capacity was approximately 1,800 — and more than 9,000 people, including 5,000 children, lost their lives.

Sepetys also says, in her notes at the back of the book, that two other refugee boats were bombed or torpedoed as well as two boats carrying Jewish prisoners of war. All destroyed by either Russian, British or American fire. She says how divers do not like to go near that area because there is a strange atmosphere due to the over 20,000 innocent lives drowned there.

Straight after that I read Slaughterhouse Five another atrocity by the Allies towards the end of WWII which murdered refugees who had fled to Dresden believing it to be the city no one would bomb because it had not strategic value. Over 10,000 people were murdered there! As many as in both atomic bombs in Japan!

I’ve been wanting to write about how these things have been hidden and explore ideas around the so-called-good-guys narrative and why this happens. But I’m afraid on Tuesday morning I was staying in a cheap hotel, put on the TV for the dog to watch whilst I had a shower and saw the news that the British government had passed the atrocious Illegal Migration Bill had been passed.

I spent the morning writing angry poetry that I must edit and do something with and I still can’t quite get my head around it all. So for now I am going to park it safely, not blog any more about it, but work on something to say because I believe, even though you are a smallish audience, I have something to say. But I need to speak clearly.

There maybe other blogs to come on other subjects that drift through my sphere but I will get back to this and will expand more on what I see is the connection to the two books mentioned and what has just been passed by the UK government