Chapter 891 Life in a bottle

Street performers often appear in the squares and streets of Rome's less 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 of John Paul II's personal secretary.

On the other side of the square, there is a man who is drawing a 3D painting. What he is painting is hot lava under the cracked earth. Many people are watching.

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

Many people in the world remember Schindler, but few know Elena Sendler. She used to be a nurse working in Warsaw. During the German occupation, she used her position to cover up and continuously provided urgently needed supplies to the Jews.

Clothing, food and medicine.

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

She immediately established a "network" with her companions to help Jewish children escape, and used her identity as a social worker to enter the Jewish Quarter.

However, many Jewish parents dare not allow them to take their children away. The first question they ask is: What guarantees are there for their children to 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. She even pretended that some children had infectious diseases and took them out of the quarantine area in ambulances and sent them to the Catholic Church.

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

In order to protect these children who had gone through so much trouble to save, Elena and her companions rushed over days and nights to produce 3,000 forged documents, including Catholic birth certificates signed by priests and ID cards signed by senior officials.

Jews do not believe in Catholicism, so they do not know how to pray. This is also a way to determine whether a child is a Jewish child. Elena teaches her 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. It was even more serious than the crime of printing "reactionary newspapers", transporting weapons, and attempting to subvert Germany.

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

The extremely angry police decided to execute her. Fortunately, the Polish underground organization spent a lot of money to buy the execution soldiers and rescued her.

However, the rescued Elena did not stop there. She continued to rescue Jews anonymously. She also put detailed records of the rescued children in jars and buried them under the neighbor's apple tree so that they could be reunited with their parents after the war.

Reunion.

Unfortunately, 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 her heroic deeds of saving more than 2,500 children.

It was not until 1999 that four middle school students from a rural school in Kansas, USA, searched hard for Elena's dusty past to be brought back to the world.

At that time, the four girls were collecting information and participating in the school's history-themed activities. In a brief report in the newspaper "Other Schindlers", a name was mentioned: Elena Sendler. The introduction was only a short sentence.

"During World War II, she rescued more than 2,500 children from the Jewish ghetto."

Four students couldn't believe the report, thinking it was a printing error and printed 250 instead of 2500. Schindler only saved 1,100 Jews, so they quickly asked the teacher for help.

The teacher also suspected that this was a printing error, but the teacher, who always encouraged students to think independently, was not eager to deny the children's findings. 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 online. However, what was disappointing was that there were only two entries about her online, and they were all from the same website: Jewish Foundation for Justice.

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

In the next few months, the four middle school students used their time after school, weekends, and holidays 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 still found nothing.

Perhaps it was the children's persistence in pursuing the case that moved God. 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 in that historical theme competition by digging out Elena's story.

They were invited to give a lecture tour in Kansas, and finally compiled Grandma Elena's heroic deeds into a play "Life Hidden in a Jar", which toured Kansas.

While performing in the drama, the girls also prepared a big bottle and put all the proceeds from the performance into it, planning to use it to support Grandma Elena. 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 Schutzart was deeply moved after hearing their story and immediately decided to sponsor them to go to Poland.

The mustard seed is smaller than all other seeds, but when it falls into the plowed soil, it grows into a huge tree and becomes a refuge for all the birds in the sky.

The late hero also received various belated honors. The President of Poland and his wife personally visited Elena in the nursing home.

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

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

This is what she wrote in the letter:

Hi, my name is Erica Esposito. I am five years old. Our family lives in Naples. My parents are company employees. They are usually very busy. Last week they took me to the zoo, but there were no pandas in the zoo.

, Pope John, I think you can talk to the president of China, let the Chinese pandas come to Italy, I am afraid that one day I will not see them anymore, because I am seriously ill, and my parents have to work to pay for my hospitalization.

They can't stay with me often, and they are not as wise as you. They don't know 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 Pope's personal secretary put down the letter from the little girl and sighed deeply.

After the death of a pope, during the period of transition between the old and new popes, all power is temporarily and automatically transferred to the personal assistant of the previous pope - the papal chamberlain.

However, John Paul II did not die, but a tube was inserted into his throat and he could not speak.

The current papal election has become an internal matter of the Holy See. Governments of various countries also regard the pope as a mascot. The pope's influence is not as much as that of an ordinary star.

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

Because the China craze set off by pandas is sweeping across the West, that country does not have a creation myth. They believe that the world was not created by the hands of a 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 deny the last wish of a terminally ill child?

Scotland and England are divided, and the issue of who owns the pandas at Edinburgh Zoo is no longer a matter of dispute.

Zoologists say that the panda is a ferocious beast, but how ferocious is that furry "bamboo eater" rolling around on the ground?

The Pope's chamberlain laughed unconsciously.

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

What came in was an ordinary secular young man.

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

This is not the first time in the history of science that male scientists have "stealed" the results of female scientists. Watson and Crick stole Rosalind Franklin's data and discovered the DNA double helix; Yoselin Burnell observed and discovered

Pulsar, but it was her mentor Xiuweishi who finally won the Nobel Prize.

In 1862, the British doctor John Langton Down noticed that among the babies who were "born idiots", some children had common characteristics: wide faces, small and upward eyes. By the beginning of the 20th century, people had realized that this

It is a relatively common congenital disease, with an incidence rate of about 1 in 1,000. At that time, in many countries, children were usually admitted to specialized institutions, but there was almost no decent treatment, and most patients would die early.

, not many people can live to be 20 years old.

A young female doctor named Marthe Gautier returned to Paris after a year of further training in pediatrics at Harvard. She got a clinical position in a local hospital. Raymond Turpin, director of pediatrics at the hospital

He is very interested in Down syndrome. Many years ago, he suspected that it might be related to chromosomal abnormalities, but he did not have time to study it in depth. One day Turpin complained that no one paid attention to his suspicion, and Gautier remembered that he was

Harvard had received relevant training and volunteered to take on the research.

The hospital allocated her an abandoned laboratory with a refrigerator, a centrifuge and a poor-quality microscope. There was no funding. She paid for glassware out of her own pocket and raised a rooster as a source of serum. If

If you need a human blood sample, use your own.

During this period, Turpin himself never came to her laboratory, but one of Turpin's students often visited, his name was Jérôme Lejeune. One day Gautier talked about her trouble of being unable to take pictures,

Lejeune suggested that he could take her slides to another laboratory to take pictures for her. After that, Gautier never saw those slides again until 2 months later, at the International Genetics Congress in Montreal.

Genne announced to the world that he had discovered the cause of Down syndrome, using the photos of these slides. In the submitted paper, Lejeune was the first author and Turpin was the corresponding author without knowing it.

Gautier was placed in an inconspicuous middle position. According to the description of the paper, her contribution was mainly "bringing back a new tissue culture method from the United States."

Under the blow, Gautier decided to bid farewell to scientific research and return to clinical and teaching positions. However, Lejeune became famous not only because he discovered that the cause of Down syndrome is an extra chromosome 21, but also found

A principled method of prevention: you don’t know the baby’s appearance or intelligence before he is born, but you can take samples to obtain his/her chromosomes. If genetic diagnosis can be performed early in pregnancy and it is found that there is a problem with chromosome 21, then

Wouldn't tragedy be avoided by having an abortion and getting pregnant again?

But Lejeune is a Catholic, and Catholicism is against abortion. He believes that even children with Down syndrome have the right to live from the moment of pregnancy, and medicine can only improve his/her quality of life, even if it improves

Abortion cannot and cannot be used to "solve" the problem.

Should a child with Down syndrome be born?

Abortion is not a simple ethical issue, but is mixed with numerous political and religious factors, and the situation is complicated. For China, such children with Down syndrome will choose to abort without hesitation, which will alleviate the

The burden on parents and children.

In 1994, Lejeune died of lung cancer. The Jérôme Lejeune Foundation was established in his memory. This foundation has three missions: research, care, and advocacy. The first two are very good, but the third part

Used a lot of energy to oppose abortion.

Although Lejeune belittled Gautier's importance when he was still alive, he at least did not deny that she played a role. However, since the foundation has Lejeune as its spiritual leader, it cannot tolerate such "slander". Foundation website

In Lejeune's personal profile on the Internet, all achievements are attributed to Lejeune and there is no mention of Gautier. The "Learn More" link at the end of the page points to an organization called "Association of Friends of Professor Lejeune"

"The organization's purpose is to obtain the Catholic Church's posthumous beatification ceremony for Lejeune, and the beatification ceremony requires at least one certified miracle.

"I give you a task." The Pope's chamberlain said, "You have to promise. Can you swear to keep it secret? My child?"

"What is the mission?" the young man asked.

"Use your expertise and sneak into the hospital." The chamberlain said, "You have to ensure that the samples used by the Pope to treat diseases do not become the material of other people's papers. Can you do this?"
Chapter completed!