By Gentle Powers

I did not know there was an English version of this song / poem as well. While listening to it, please keep in mind that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when he wrote this poem for his family, fiancée and friends, was in a Nazi prison and already knew that they would kill him – which they eventually did in April 1945, just weeks before the war was over.

Today I dedicate this song to Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani who is waiting for his execution in an Iranian prison. His only “crime” is that he became a Christian.

Crime Time

I’m a great fan of criminal stories – both as books and films. One of my favourite crime series at the moment is “Criminal Minds”. This is mainly because of two special characters, Dr. Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler) and Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness). Both are hyper smart and have special gifts – Reid has got an eidetic memory, for example. Here are some scenes of the series with both of them:



There are other crime series with freaks and nerds (when I use these expressions, I always mean this in a positive sense), like Navy CIS (McGee and Abby), Psych (Shawn) and of course Numb3rs (Professor Charlie Eppes a.k.a. David Krumholtz):



I think I like them, because all of them – regardless how big the difference is – are closer to my own self than any of the “normal” characters :)

A Tragic Story

I read through this book almost without putting it down. It is the beautiful but sad memoir by Turkish human rights lawyer Fethiye Çetin on her grandmother.

Here is the description from the cover:

When Fethiye Çetin was growing up in the small Turkish town of Maden, she knew her grandmother as a happy and universally respected Muslim housewife. It would be decades before her grandmother told her the truth: that she was by birth a Christian and an Armenian, that her name was not Seher but Heranuş, that most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915, that she, along with most of the women and children, had been sent on a death march. She had been saved (and torn from her mother’s arms) by the Turkish gendarme captain who went on to adopt her. But she knew she still had family in America. Could Fethiye help her find her lost relations before she died?

There are an estimated two million Turks whose grandparents could tell them similar stories. But in a country that maintains the Armenian massacres never happened, such talk can be dangerous. In her heart-wrenching memoir, Fethiye Çetin breaks the silence.

Vacation

We had a great time on our trip to East Frisia, it was a very relaxing vacation :)

Talking about vacation, I know the summer season is almost over, but I would like to introduce to you this campaign below, in which we take part (we sent pictures from around our home town and from Armenia). I think it is a very nice thing which a father is doing for his murdered son and it is also a campaign to condemn terrorism which kills so many innocent people each year: