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Julie Andrews said she literally could "feel the evil" when visiting the Von Trapp house

The story behind the movie might be more interesting than the movie itself.

Image via Wikicommons

Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music

Sometimes the story behind the movie is more interesting than the story in the movie.

In her autobiography, Home Work, Julie Andrews shared some of her experiences filming The Sound of Music. Andrews spoke with BuzzFeed News about her book, revealing her thoughts on the actual von Trapp family house. The movie musical, which is based on a section of the real-life Maria von Trapp's book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, was shot in a Hollywood studio.

The classic scene of Julie Andrews spinning in a meadow was shot in Bavaria, and the exteriors of the von Trapp house were filmed at a different house entirely.


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Andrews did visit the von Trapp house in Salzburg, Austria later on in her life.

"It wasn't until much later that I happened to visit the real villa where they actually lived," she told BuzzFeed News. During her visit, Andrews said she could "feel the evil that once permeated those walls." The evil Andrews refers to is, of course, the Nazis. "Because after they fled the country, which they had to do, as in the film, [Heinrich] Himmler took over that villa, and the atrocities there were just terrible," she continued.

The story behind the von Trapp house is much darker than what's touched on in the splashy Hollywood musical. The actual von Trapp family lived in the house from 1923 until they fled Austria in 1938. In 1938, the Nazis annexed Austria, making life hard for the singing family. Georg von Trapp refused to fly the Nazi flag on his house, and declined a request to sing at Hilter's birthday party. There was fear their neighbors would spy on them and their children would become brainwashed by Nazi politics. Even though the family was offered fame, they decided to stay true to their principals and leave Austria.

Julie Andrews, The Sound of Music, musicals, Germany, World War 2, Nazi Germany, Von TrappChristopher Plummer and Julie Andrews on location in Salzburg, 1964upload.wikimedia.org

Not one year later, the house was occupied by Nazis. Heinrich Himmler used the house as his summer residence until 1945.

Himmler was the second most powerful man of the Third Reich. Himmler set up and ran the Nazi concentration camps. The house was surrounded by armed guards and barbed wires. A barracks for the SS was built in the garden. Himmler also built the white wall around the house using slave labor. After the wall was completed, he had those who constructed the wall shot. Very monstrous.

Now, the von Trapp house is a more peaceful place. In 1947, the property was purchased from the von Trapp family by the Missionaries of the Precious Blood. In 2008, it opened to the public as a hotel.


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While the house has a heavy history, the previous residents of the property took satisfaction in knowing the von Trapps resisted the Nazi party. "What Himmler did here is a heavy weight on the house," Precious Blood Fr. Andreas Hasenburger, the rector of the Kolleg St. Josef, told the National Catholic Reporter. "But we are also proud to live in the von Trapp house, the house of the man who said no to the Führer."

It takes a lot of guts to stand up for what you believe in, especially when you're pressured to forfeit your integrity. Knowing that the family gave up their life to stay true to their principals makes The Sound of Music so much better.

This article originally appeared five years ago.

Children in a Jewish ghetoo in POland during World War II.

Maxwell Smart, born Oziac Fromm, was 9 when World War II began in 1939, turning his life upside down. He was from a Jewish family in Buczacz, a small city in Poland, now part of Ukraine.

The Nazis occupied the region in July 1941, and one day, a notice was given for all Jewish men ages 18 to 50 to register for labor camps. They were separated into professionals (teachers, doctors, lawyers) and tradespeople. The professionals, including Smart’s father, were taken to a nearby hill and shot to death.

The rest of Smart’s family was forced into a ghetto and in 1943, when it was cleared, they were violently loaded onto a truck, but his mother wouldn’t let him join them. Instead, she urged him to run.

“I was angry. I said: ‘What do you mean you don’t want to take me? You are my mother,’” Smart told The Guardian. “This saved my life,” he said. Smart removed his Star of David armband and went to find his aunt and uncle, but a German officer stopped him before he could reach them.


“He takes out the gun, points it at my head and he says to me: ‘Tell me the truth, are you a Jew?’” Smart denied that he was Jewish and somehow, the officer believed him. His aunt and uncle paid a local farmer, Jasko Rudnicki, to hide Maxwell in the forest with his wife and 2 boys at their mud hut in the forest. But after his aunt and uncle were killed and authorities began to question Rudnicki, Maxwell was forced to live in the woods.

Before Maxwell went into hiding, the farmer taught him basic survival skills, such as what to eat, how to build a fire and trap a rabbit. Rudnicki allowed him to sleep in his barn at night when it was cold. “I built a bunker in the woods but was very lonely,” he told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Maxwell lived off of tree bark, half-eaten rabbit corpses and worms to survive. Occasionally, he would stop by Rudnicki’s hut for some milk or a piece of bread. He was 13 years old, alone and hiding in the woods from Ukrainians and Nazis searching for Jews. The only time he felt safe was when it was raining.

“It was a sport to kill a Jew,” he told The Guardian. “[Your typical Nazi] is not going to go in the mud and get dirty and filthy; he is doing it for happiness, for enjoyment. So when it was raining, I knew I was safe.”

Eventually, Maxwell found a friend in Janek, a boy of around 10, who had been hiding in the woods with his parents before they both disappeared. The boys became friends and lived in the bunker together. "He shared my sorrows, he shared my problems," he told the BBC.

However, their friendship was short-lived. One day, the boys heard gunshots and after they investigated, found the bodies of several Jewish people on the other side of a river. They saw something moving amongst the dead bodies and after crossing the river, found a baby in a dead woman’s arms.

Soon after, they found the baby’s aunt in the woods, who took the baby into her care. Smart would later be reunited with the baby, Tova, in a TV special, “Cheating Hitler.” Sadly, after crossing the cold river, Janek became sick and died. "That was the biggest loss of my life. This young little boy was such a help to me to survive the war. My mother was gone, my sister was gone, my father was gone. I somehow accepted it. I still cannot accept Janek's death,” Smart told the BBC.

A few months after Janek’s death, Smart visited Rudnicki and learned that the Nazi occupation was over and that he was free. “It was April 1944, I was almost 14 years old and I finally felt no fear. I was a human being once again,” he told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

In 1944, he successfully joined a group of Soviet soldiers, accompanying them through Romania and Hungary. In 1948, he relocated to Canada via the War Orphans Project, a refugee resettlement program overseen by the Canadian Jewish Congress. After relocating to Canada, he changed his name to Maxwell Smart to leave his tragic past behind him and focus on his new life. He chose the name years before it was popularized in the 1960’s James Bond parody, “Get Smart.”

He would build a successful real estate career while pursuing his lifelong passion for art.

After 70-plus years of keeping his harrowing experiences during the war to himself, Smart shared his story in the book “Chaos to Canvas” published in 2018 by the Azrieli Foundation. In 2019, he appeared in the documentary “Cheating Hitler: Surviving the Holocaust,” which ran on the Discovery Channel.

Smart’s story of survival was recently made into a film, “The Boy in the Woods.”

Education

Only one foreign pilot has ever bombed the U.S. mainland. His redemption arc is epic.

An Oregon town he tried to destroy in WWII even made him an honorary citizen.

Courtesy of Chetco County Community Library

Nobuo Fujita was a Japanese naval pilot in WWII.

About 16 miles east of Brookings, Oregon, stands a unique coastal redwood tree. It has been growing there since 1992, when the Japanese pilot who had dropped bombs on that very spot 50 years before planted it with his own hands.

Nobuo Fujita remains to this day the only foreign pilot to ever bomb the U.S. mainland. On September 9, 1942, Fujita flew a seaplane, launched from a floating catapult on a Japanese submarine in the Pacific, over the woodlands of southern Oregon. Along with the 30-year-old pilot and the bombs he was ordered to drop, the aircraft also carried a 400-year-old samurai sword—a prized family heirloom Fujita took with him on every flight.

Fujita was a bit disappointed with this bombing mission. He had wanted to bomb San Francisco or Los Angeles to take revenge on the U.S. for dropping bombs on targets in Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya and Kobe in the Doolittle Raid just a few months before. Instead, this mission was to use incendary bombs to start a forest fire that would engulf nearby towns like Brookings, divert resources and instill terror into the hearts of U.S. citizens.


But as anyone who has gone camping on the Oregon Coast can attest, starting a fire there isn't easy, especially just after it has rained. The bombs Fujita deployed basically fizzled after hitting the ground, only starting small fires and creating enough smoke for the forest service to see them and act quickly to snuff them out.

Fujita returned home to train other pilots, and three years later, World War II ended after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

War and forgiveness make strange bedfellows, but they always seem to find one another eventually. And for Fujita and the town of Brookings, "eventually" came in a fairly swift and dramatic fashion.

In 1962, less than 20 years after the war ended, a group of Jaycees in Brookings had the idea to invite Fujita and his family to be an honored guest at the town's Azalea Festival as an act of goodwill and reconciliation. Not everyone was thrilled with this idea, however. Townspeople argued bitterly over it. Over 100 residents signed onto an op-ed opposing the idea, which read in part, "Why stop with Fujita? Why not assemble the ashes of Judas Iscariot, the corpse of Atilla the Hun, a shovel full of dirt from the spot where Hitler died…." For many, it probably have felt too soon, especially since many of the town's citizens had fought in the war.

But the Jaycees were undeterred and admant that it was the right thing to do.

For his part, Fujita was worried he might be attacked, pelted with eggs or even put on trial for war crimes after he arrived, and he was prepared to end his life with his samurai sword if it came down to it. Instead, the day after he and his wife and son arrived in Brookings and found a warm welcome, Fujita presented his precious family heirloom to the city as a peace offering.

nobuo fujita presenting samurai sword to town of Brookings, Oregon

Nobuo Fujita gifted Brookings, Oregon, his family's 400-year-old samurai sword as a peace offering.

Photo courtesy of Chetco County Community Library

Brenda Jacques, a retired reference librarian, told Oregon Public Broadcasting about the significance of that Fujita giving the city his sword. "Would I be able to give something that had been that important to my family away?" she said. "It was a tremendous act of contrition."

Fujita was presented with a key to the city and was given the opportunity to fly a plane over the bombing site. But the mutual goodwill didn't end there.

Nobuo and Akayo Fujita

Nobuo Fujita and his wife Akayo standing in front of an azalea bush in Oregon

Photo courtesy of Chetco County Community Library

Fujita would spend the rest of his life nurturing a friendship with the Oregon town he had once tried to burn to the ground. He and his employees donated thousands of dollars for a multicultural book collection at the Chetco County Community Public Library in Brookings. He organized a group of high school students to come to Japan for a cultural exchange.

In 1992, Fujita returned to Brookings and planted the coastal redwood tree—which he called "a symbol of friendship and peace"—where he had dropped bombs five decades before.

Just a few days before his death in 1997, the city of Brookings made Nobuo Fujita an honorary citizen.

The following year, his daughter came to fulfill his last request—to have some of his ashes buried at the bombing site.

Nobuo Fujita's story is a moving reminder that the people charged with killing and terrorizing one another in wartime are never truly enemies, and that we all have the potential to be peacemakers if we choose to.

And hopefully, stories like this one will help humanity learn to avoid the war part altogether and jump straight to the goodwill and sharing of friendship across cultures part that we all love to see.

Popular

102-year-old woman discovers that she's a surviving member of special WWII unit

Crescensia Garcia is getting the recognition she deserves.

CBS Mornings/YouTube

A 102-year-old woman's family learned something about her past military service thanks to Twitter.

You never know when you have a legend in your family. Two years ago, a woman named Tara Garcia reached out to "CBS Mornings" correspondent David Begnaud to share a story. Her grandmother, Crescensia Garcia, had just turned 100 and had recently survived COVID-19, only having to briefly use oxygen. Begnaud shared the story of the elder Ms. Garcia with his followers on Twitter, including some pictures Tara had sent him. Little did they know, a bigger story was about to unfold.


Edna Cummings, a retired Army colonel, saw Begnaud's tweet. One of the pictures Tara had sent him was of her grandmother in her military uniform. Cummings told "CBS Mornings" that seeing the photo of Crescensia "was like being in a casino and hitting the jackpot." Why? Turns out Crescensia was part of a very special military unit during World War II.

Cummings needed to know Crescensia's dog tag numbers to confirm her suspicions, so she reached out to Tara. After receiving them, Cummings was able to confirm that Crescensia was part of a burn unit located near Birmingham, England, which treated wounded soldiers due to a shortage of people in the area who could perform those procedures. She may not have thought much of it at the time (it was her military duty after all), but Crescensia Garcia was part of something special.

The SixTripleEight was an 855-member unit that was all Black and all women. Of course, the unit was segregated, but that didn't stop the members from serving their country. Crescensia Garcia, who is now 102 years old, is one of only six surviving members of the unit. And her family had no idea.

"They're the only military women's unit to receive a congressional gold medal," Cummings told "CBS Mornings." "They are part of an elite group of less than 200 recipients. The first being General George Washington." In addition to receiving the congressional gold medal, the family learned that Crescensia's name is on a World War II monument along with other veterans, in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

When Tara Garcia found out this information, "I looked at my parents and said, 'I think we just opened Pandora's box here,'" she said. The revelation certainly led to some very cool opportunities, including meeting first lady Dr. Jill Biden.

Both Crescensia and Tara Garcia sat down with David Begnaud on "CBS Mornings" to talk about their family and it was truly the sweetest thing. Although she's beginning to show signs of her age, Crescensia is still pretty sharp and a truly beautiful soul.

Crescensia was born in Puerto Rico in April 1920, before women even had the right to vote. At that time, a loaf of bread was less than 20 cents! She moved to New York City in her youth, and at the age of 24 she enlisted in the Army because the bombing of Pearl Harbor made her so enraged that she felt it was her civic duty to serve and protect. She was immediately put in an all-Black unit for her basic training in Texas.

"They put me in the Black section and there is a White section. That's America to you. See? That's America to you and it's very sad, very sad," she told Begnaud. After the segment, he explained to the news desk that the reason she was able to become a medic was due to her light skin color. She was able to "pass" as white, which earned her privilege.

Social media post helps woman discover her grandmother's World War II past

Much like others who have served in war, Crescensia doesn't seem to think her time in the Army was anything special. She told Begnaud that she was "just" a medic and was only doing her job tending to the injured.

"I am proud to be an American," she said.

After the war, she went back to New York City, settling in the Bronx and getting married and having three children. She became a seamstress, working in Manhattan's Garment District. Now, she is living her best life and sharing her story with the world.

During their interview, Begnaud explained that he had a surprise for both women. He had gotten in touch with the White House and arranged for Dr. Jill Biden to call and FaceTime with them.

"You are one incredible woman and I can't thank you enough for all your service to our country," Dr. Biden said warmly.

"And I salute you. Keep it up. Keep up the good work," Crescensia said, raising her hand to salute the first lady.

At 102, her memory isn't what it used to be, but, according to Tara, her presence of mind during the interview and conversation with the first lady is something neither of them will forget.

"The fact that she knew who that was. Yeah, and she felt that acknowledgment just now. That's all I needed. That's all I needed. I just want her to remember, that's all," Tara said.

We salute Crescensia Garcia and thank her for being who she is.