Bassim
VIP Member
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2008
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Bosnian
- Home Country
- Bosnia Herzegovina
- Current Location
- Sweden
Dear people.
Please would you help me and proofread this part of my text.
Since I came here I have been asking myself what is wrong with this place. The city is just as any other urban area with streets, shops, people and vehicles. There are thousands of students, youth, workers and also immigrants from the dozens of different countries. The air is clean, streets without any rubbish and whenever one moves everything is well organised.
But something inside me told me that sunny, spring day when I took a stroll through the streets that something was wrong. I felt a pain in my soul and could not find the reason. I walked and saw very beautiful women enjoying the first sunbeams after the long winter; their blond hair gleamed under the sun and looked like gold. They joked and laughed loudly, their healthy teeth white like pearls. Hundreds of the youths sat on the river bank talking, hugging and kissing. Families with children ate ice creams or simply enjoyed the sun.
It was an idyllic scene, especially for someone who just left behind a prison camp, shooting, bomb explosions and ethnic cleansing. I got my own flat and enough money to live an ordinary life and there was no reason for worries. But something heavy hung over me, heavier then lead.
Once when I was a teenager I visited a prison camp in my home town where hundred of thousands of people were killed during the Second World War, many of them slaughtered like animals. I felt such a pain, although of the former prison camp there were almost no traces, but the suffering still lingered in the air.
And now, many years later, I felt the same. Something terrible happened in this beautiful town; there was injustice done to the innocent. As the time passed, I met a Swedish woman who told me that this place was well known for the executions in the past. She decided to show me the place of execution. We went through the forest following a narrow path which went up the hill about fifty meters and when we reached the top I understood why that place was chosen for executions. One could have looked over the whole town as far as the eye could see. The condemned would have stand under the gallows waiting for the executioner to remove the ladder under him and the last what he saw would have been the town and the sky meeting on the horizon. How many of them were innocent? How many of them were "witches", innocent women who were victims of envy and blind hatred?
A few years later I read a book about Sweden of an English journalist who spent about twenty years in this country and it was the first time I discovered about sterilisation of men and women. The latest was performed in 1975 and I was horrified. More then 63 000 people were victims of the idea that people who are not "suitable" should not have a chance to get a child. It means that many patients in this hospital were among them. Probably, there was a similar bench in the same place where I use to sit, and there a chief of the hospital sat thinking of how many of his patients were going to be sterilised in the following weeks.
I wanted to know where did this idea come from, and using Internet I discovered that already 1922. Sweden became the first country in the world to establish a National Institute for Race Biology. They started to take pictures of the different people and measure their body parts. The idea was to eliminate all "wrong" elements from the Nordic race which they saw as superior to the others. What is interesting is the fact that the university from this city and many German universities had very close cooperation. It is not difficult to understand from where Hitler and his henchmen had taken their inspiration. Although we cannot condemn the professor who had good intentions. He wanted to create absolute beauty,
but the final result was gas chambers of Auschwitz and Holocaust.
Not even Alfred Nobel could have known that dynamite he created would cause so much suffering in the world.
Once I found even more interesting information. Already 1938. students demonstrated against the Jews and wanted to see them expelled from the town! The Second World War had not even started and young men and women who should be progressive behaved instead as narrow minded idiots.
By chance, I met an old Swedish man who was teenager at the beginning of the Second World War and asked him to tell me honestly how people behaved during that time.
"My dear boy," he said,"I have seen them gathering and celebrating Hitler's birthday and singing songs."
"And what about the Jews?" I asked.
"They lived in fear knowing that if Germans ever occupied Sweden they would end up in gas chambers. By the way, there were already plans for a prison camp for about 8000 Jews where they would awaiting transport to Germany."
Nowadays when I walk the streets and meet older men and women I ask myself how many of them loved Hitler and his ideology? How many of them believed in the supremacy of the Aryans? They must boil inside when they see so many black people and other immigrants in the street nowadays. They must regret the old times when everyone was blond and there was no smell of curry and other strange spices on the street.
There was one thing that a stranger notices when he meet a Swedish person. The majority of them have very healthy teeth. I am a person who like to analyse things and wants to scratch the surface and see what is hidden behind and suddenly I found the information about the experiment a group of Swedish dentists conducted in the late forties. They wanted to see how sweets affected teeth. They gave a huge amounts of candies to the group of mental patients who ate them day after day without ever brushing their teeth. The final result was everyone of them got completely destroyed their teeth and Swedish professors were very satisfied with their experiment. What is horrible is the fact that none of the patients got help with their destroyed teeth and one can only imagine the suffering they had been forced to endure for years. There were about 700 persons and probably many of them from this hospital.
I believe that some of the professors sat on this bank, watched this peaceful river and thought what was going to be the next project. Probably they thought to make people blind and deaf to see how they react. They had freedom to do what they wanted, their task was not a simple one; they wanted to create a perfect Swede. Probably they would have succeeded if Mc Donalds and Coca Cola did not come and made their body fat and their teeth rotten.
In the summer, I hear the tourists talking in superlatives, "What a beautiful place! Have you see women? Absolutely splendid! What a beautiful nature..!"
I sit beside them wondering if I would tell them something about the other side which is not so bright. What would happen if I told them that the driver who is so bored waiting for hours in his taxi over there has a PhD in history and never got an interview only because his name is "wrong" or the bus driver who will take them to the airport is an engineer who worked for more then twenty years but now drive the bus and feels depressed. Shell I tell them that a person who sold them a chewing gum at the newsagent's was a professor at the Baghdad university but here can only work as a manual worker?
"No!" I tell myself, "they have come here to spend their money and they deserve not to know the truth. Let them leave Sweden with only nice memories."
Sometimes is better to stay ignorant!
Please would you help me and proofread this part of my text.
Since I came here I have been asking myself what is wrong with this place. The city is just as any other urban area with streets, shops, people and vehicles. There are thousands of students, youth, workers and also immigrants from the dozens of different countries. The air is clean, streets without any rubbish and whenever one moves everything is well organised.
But something inside me told me that sunny, spring day when I took a stroll through the streets that something was wrong. I felt a pain in my soul and could not find the reason. I walked and saw very beautiful women enjoying the first sunbeams after the long winter; their blond hair gleamed under the sun and looked like gold. They joked and laughed loudly, their healthy teeth white like pearls. Hundreds of the youths sat on the river bank talking, hugging and kissing. Families with children ate ice creams or simply enjoyed the sun.
It was an idyllic scene, especially for someone who just left behind a prison camp, shooting, bomb explosions and ethnic cleansing. I got my own flat and enough money to live an ordinary life and there was no reason for worries. But something heavy hung over me, heavier then lead.
Once when I was a teenager I visited a prison camp in my home town where hundred of thousands of people were killed during the Second World War, many of them slaughtered like animals. I felt such a pain, although of the former prison camp there were almost no traces, but the suffering still lingered in the air.
And now, many years later, I felt the same. Something terrible happened in this beautiful town; there was injustice done to the innocent. As the time passed, I met a Swedish woman who told me that this place was well known for the executions in the past. She decided to show me the place of execution. We went through the forest following a narrow path which went up the hill about fifty meters and when we reached the top I understood why that place was chosen for executions. One could have looked over the whole town as far as the eye could see. The condemned would have stand under the gallows waiting for the executioner to remove the ladder under him and the last what he saw would have been the town and the sky meeting on the horizon. How many of them were innocent? How many of them were "witches", innocent women who were victims of envy and blind hatred?
A few years later I read a book about Sweden of an English journalist who spent about twenty years in this country and it was the first time I discovered about sterilisation of men and women. The latest was performed in 1975 and I was horrified. More then 63 000 people were victims of the idea that people who are not "suitable" should not have a chance to get a child. It means that many patients in this hospital were among them. Probably, there was a similar bench in the same place where I use to sit, and there a chief of the hospital sat thinking of how many of his patients were going to be sterilised in the following weeks.
I wanted to know where did this idea come from, and using Internet I discovered that already 1922. Sweden became the first country in the world to establish a National Institute for Race Biology. They started to take pictures of the different people and measure their body parts. The idea was to eliminate all "wrong" elements from the Nordic race which they saw as superior to the others. What is interesting is the fact that the university from this city and many German universities had very close cooperation. It is not difficult to understand from where Hitler and his henchmen had taken their inspiration. Although we cannot condemn the professor who had good intentions. He wanted to create absolute beauty,
but the final result was gas chambers of Auschwitz and Holocaust.
Not even Alfred Nobel could have known that dynamite he created would cause so much suffering in the world.
Once I found even more interesting information. Already 1938. students demonstrated against the Jews and wanted to see them expelled from the town! The Second World War had not even started and young men and women who should be progressive behaved instead as narrow minded idiots.
By chance, I met an old Swedish man who was teenager at the beginning of the Second World War and asked him to tell me honestly how people behaved during that time.
"My dear boy," he said,"I have seen them gathering and celebrating Hitler's birthday and singing songs."
"And what about the Jews?" I asked.
"They lived in fear knowing that if Germans ever occupied Sweden they would end up in gas chambers. By the way, there were already plans for a prison camp for about 8000 Jews where they would awaiting transport to Germany."
Nowadays when I walk the streets and meet older men and women I ask myself how many of them loved Hitler and his ideology? How many of them believed in the supremacy of the Aryans? They must boil inside when they see so many black people and other immigrants in the street nowadays. They must regret the old times when everyone was blond and there was no smell of curry and other strange spices on the street.
There was one thing that a stranger notices when he meet a Swedish person. The majority of them have very healthy teeth. I am a person who like to analyse things and wants to scratch the surface and see what is hidden behind and suddenly I found the information about the experiment a group of Swedish dentists conducted in the late forties. They wanted to see how sweets affected teeth. They gave a huge amounts of candies to the group of mental patients who ate them day after day without ever brushing their teeth. The final result was everyone of them got completely destroyed their teeth and Swedish professors were very satisfied with their experiment. What is horrible is the fact that none of the patients got help with their destroyed teeth and one can only imagine the suffering they had been forced to endure for years. There were about 700 persons and probably many of them from this hospital.
I believe that some of the professors sat on this bank, watched this peaceful river and thought what was going to be the next project. Probably they thought to make people blind and deaf to see how they react. They had freedom to do what they wanted, their task was not a simple one; they wanted to create a perfect Swede. Probably they would have succeeded if Mc Donalds and Coca Cola did not come and made their body fat and their teeth rotten.
In the summer, I hear the tourists talking in superlatives, "What a beautiful place! Have you see women? Absolutely splendid! What a beautiful nature..!"
I sit beside them wondering if I would tell them something about the other side which is not so bright. What would happen if I told them that the driver who is so bored waiting for hours in his taxi over there has a PhD in history and never got an interview only because his name is "wrong" or the bus driver who will take them to the airport is an engineer who worked for more then twenty years but now drive the bus and feels depressed. Shell I tell them that a person who sold them a chewing gum at the newsagent's was a professor at the Baghdad university but here can only work as a manual worker?
"No!" I tell myself, "they have come here to spend their money and they deserve not to know the truth. Let them leave Sweden with only nice memories."
Sometimes is better to stay ignorant!
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