[[File:Walkyrien by Emil Doepler.jpg|thumb|Walkyrien by Emil Doepler]]
To entertain ourselves while waiting at the DMV, Daughter Dear told me about a Tom Cruise movie she watched last night.
I had never heard of it. What? I missed a Tom Cruise movie? When I looked up Tom Cruise movies, I found I had missed several. However, the one I’m talking about is Valkyrie.
It isn’t a movie I would choose by its title, for I didn’t know what Valkyrie meant.
It means “choose of the slain” and is typically depicted by a female hero, so I wondered what they were saying. As best I can understand, Valkyries are female figures who guide the souls of fallen warriors into Valhalla, a magnificent hall where fallen warriors live in bliss.
Daughter Dear warned me that the movie doesn’t end well, but then we would have known if a Nazi attempt to assassinate Hitler had worked.
If the Germans had destroyed the wicked regime from within, it could have changed history. The Germans would have been heroes instead of vanquished. Perhaps the bomb wouldn’t have been dropped, and the Berlin Wall wouldn’t have been built. It was a gallant try. Unfortunately, it failed and is true.
So the story goes:
Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) sees that Hitler is about to destroy his country. So with time running out for Germany and the rest of Europe, von Stauffenberg joins a group of like-minded, high-ranking men who want to overthrow the Nazi regime from within, with Col. von Stauffenberg becoming the trigger man in a plot to assassinate the evil dictator.
Daughter Dear and I had been discussing how people generally do as they are told, follow directions, and are a part of the herd. However, out of the many come one who rises like cream to the top of milk. Those are to be celebrated.
I once read and hoped it was true that a woman walked out of a concentration camp, and no one saw her. I’ve heard stories of a family who escaped Germany in a hot air balloon they built. One a man carried his wife out of Germany in a suitcase. He was a professor who carried books across the border so often that the guards stopped examining his suitcase, and thus he got his wife out. (And he had built up the strength to do it.)
I loved hearing a discussion between Oprah Winfrey and Jean Huston where Huston said, “We are made for these times, and we are up to it.”
Let’s prove her right.