An animal pack of predators ...

	PART I	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING WAR
	Chapter  1	About Ethical Canons and War
	Chapter  2	Decisions Precipitating War
	Chapter  3	Human Sacrifice
	Chapter  4	Amiriyah Shelter
	PART II	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING EQUALITY
	Chapter  5	Slavery
	Chapter  6	Arens' Atrocity Attribution Theory
	Chapter  7	Genocide of Native Americans
	Chapter  8	Intermarriage
	PART III	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING JUSTICE
	Chapter  9	Incarceration
	Chapter 10	Reemergence of Torture
	Chapter 11	Witchcraft Trials
	Chapter 12	Trials of Heretics
	PART IV	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING RELIGION
	Chapter 13	The New and Old Testaments
	Chapter 14	Transplanted Mentality
	Chapter 15	God and His Messengers
	PART V	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING EMPATHY
	Chapter 16	Karla Tucker and George W. Bush
	Chapter 17	A Girl with the Almond Eyes
	Chapter 18	Beyond Partiality: Building a World of Laughter and Love

A girl with the almond eyes
In the normal course of human affairs, animosity against enemies lessens over the time, and typically, the death, or the end of a generation cohort is the great divide. Romans used to say:

De mortiis, aut bene aut nihil (About the dead, speak well or not at all)

and the Japan’s Samurai warned:

Be careful in choosing your enemies, for you will become one of them.

One has just to observe the Vietnamese, several decades after the war talking with people who used to burn their villages with napalm. This forgetting and forgiving process is necessary for normal functioning of a society. If a society would continuously invoke past injustices, with the passage of time, its cognitive space would fill with hatred. However, this forgetting and forgiving process seldom takes place within a community of people whose hatred is fueled by religious beliefs, people whose hatred does not diminish, but intensifies with the passage of time.

After passing away of Lida Baarova, a Czech actress who started a love affair with Joseph Goebbels long before the Second World War and atrocities associated with that conflict happened, I found an article with statements such as: her Nazi past - she was a Gestapo spy - her involvement with the Nazi elite - her past affiliation with the Nazi party - she rigorously suppressed the guilt of her past - she starred in Nazi films, &c.

Lida Baarova was never a member of the National Socialist Party and was persecuted her whole life because in 1936-1938 she dated a guy whom she viewed as someone who could help her with her movie career. After the war, she and her whole family was hounded down. Her mother died during interrogation by the retribution tribunal and her sister Zorka Janu was driven to suicide. The hate campaign against her did not stop or diminish even after her death. At that time Bohumil Doležal (Události, November 8, 2000) commented on incessant accusations, allegations, and media hate campaigns that were part of Lida Baarova’s life since the end of the World War II that

Structural Differential consists of the Parabolic plane, which represents the world of events. The Spherical plane represents the non-verbal conceptualization of events. The Verbal plane is the static plane of words, giving imperfect account of the fluid reality.

General Semantics movement was founded by Korzybski, an offbeat social scientist, similar in manner of expression and presentation of his unorthodox ideas to Pitirim Sorokin. Korzybski gained notoriety with the publication of Science and Sanity (1958) where he developed his idea around a device called the Structural Differential. His ideas were popularized in the magazine ETC: A Review of General Semantics. The name of the magazine, ETC, was to stress the fundamental theorem of Korzybski that names given to objects do not exhaustively describe the object’s properties. For instance, by giving a person a label describing only a subset of the total set of attributes a person possesses, as, e.g., calling a spouse ‘anal retentive’ is likely to provoke a marital quarrel. Since we can hardly refrain from describing people, the least what we can do is to append to our descriptions the word etc, to indicate that our characteristics of a person is only a subset of the total set of attributes that can be ascribed to that person, as no human being is the personification of the absolute perfection or of an absolute evil. Another of Korzybski's postulates is the 'time binding' axiom, i.e., that when describing or judging a person, the time dimension is important, as tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis (times are changing and we are changing in them). A good example what havoc a violation of this postulate may play with human life is the case of Lida Baarova.

Lida Baarova and Mathias Wieman in 1937.

Lida Baarova got her first movie role when she was 17, likely because her first love affair was with a handsome movie director. People who used to know her reminisce that

she was the most beautiful woman they have ever seen.

and that

her beauty likely infatuated every man she met.

In 1935, after being discovered by talent scouts for the German movie studios, Lida Baarova left Prague for Berlin.

Lída, her fiance, and Joseph Goebbels in 1936.

The road to fame  In Berlin she met Gustav Froehlich, Leonardo DiCaprio of the German cinema, starred in several films with him and received several job offers from the Hollywood studios. She turned them down, as she got engaged to Gustav Froehlich and moved with him to the Schwanenwerder peninsula on the outskirts of Berlin. There their neighbor was Joseph Gobbles, a minister in the Chancellor Hitler's administration with the decisive voice on the German movie production. Lida and Joseph Goebbels started a passionate love affair which caused her breakup with Gustav Froehlich. After Goebbels' wife learned about this affair, she complained to Adolph Hitler. Hitler who himself was not immune to Lida Baarova’s spellbinding beauty and was the godfather of Goebbels' children asked Goebbels to break this affair. Goebbels offered his resignation, wanted to divorce his wife, marry Lida Baarova, and leave Germany with his Liduška, (Czech diminutive of Lida, connoting love), as he affectionately called her, for Japan. However, Hitler did not accept his resignation.
 
On October 15, 1938, Joseph Goebbels attempted suicide. Shortly afterwards Lida Baarova received a call from the German police that she was a persona non grata and was given consilium abeundi, i.e., she was ordered to leave Germany or else. Lida went to Prague and, in 1941, to Italy, where she starred in several movies. After American troops occupied Italy she returned to Prague, where she dated her old friend Hans Albers, another of Germany's movie idols. They roamed the labyrinth of narrow streets of Prague's Old Town and spent romantic evenings dancing in the Trilobite Bar at the Barrandov movie studio, overlooking the Vltava River. In April of 1945, Lida Baarova left Prague to join Hans Albers in his country house at the shores of the Starnberg Lake. On the way she was taken into custody by the American military police, imprisoned in Munich, and later extradited to Czechoslovakia.
 
The post-war years  In Czechoslovakia Lida Baarova faced a death sentence as many public figures who worked with Germans during the war did, but she was able to prove that she worked in Germany before the war and received only a prison sentence. Thus, in a way, her love affair with Joseph Goebbels and subsequent expulsion from Germany saved her life. However, her mother died during the interrogation by the Czech retribution tribunal and her sister, Zorka Janů was expelled from work, ostracized, and committed suicide. The tragic story of her sister was told by Adam Georgiev in his (1998) book Deník sestry Lídy Baarové (Diary of Lída Baarová’s sister).

Lida Baarova was often visited in prison by Jan Kopecký who, like many others, was infatuated by Lida's magic beauty. Jan Kopecký was a close relative of a prominent politician in the post-war government of Czechoslovakia who arranged Lida’s release from prison. Jan Kopecký and Lida Baarova were married in 1949 and formed an itinerant troupe playing marionettes before they escaped to Austria. From there Jan Kopecký immigrated to Argentina, leaving Lida behind. In Austria Lida attempted a comeback, but Anton Walbrook, who was persecuted during the war for his sexual orientation, withdrew from a film where he was cast together with Lida Baarova. To escape the resulting hate media campaign, she left for Argentina where she lived in extreme poverty. She decided to return to Italy, however her husband stayed in Argentina and they were divorced in 1956. Back in Italy, Lida Baarova appeared in several films, including Fellini's Loafers (1953) where (her eyes had an almond shape) she played a Chinese girl. In 1958 she moved to Salzburg, where she performed in a theater and in 1970 she married Kurt Lundwall, a physician 20 years her senior. In the same year Rainer Fassbinder gave her a part in the Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
 
After the fall of the Berlin wall  Lida Baarova reappeared on the cultural scene of the Czech Republic. She published her autobiography and a movie Lida Baarova’s Bittersweet Memories appeared in 1995 and won an award at the 1996 Art Film Festival in Trenčianske Teplice, Slovakia.

Lída Baarová's headstone at Prague's Strašnice cemetery.

Lida Baarova suffered from Parkinson's disease and died in 2000 in Salzburg, while living alone on the estate she inherited after the death of Dr. Lundwall. Her ashes were interred in Prague's Strašnice cemetery, where she rests with her parents and her sister Zorka Janů.

Lida Baarova’s life-long love affair was with movies. Her filmography bears testimony to the courage and determination with which she overcame the overwhelming odds she faced during most of her life.
 
References
· Baarová, L. (1992) Života sladké hořkosti. Ostrava, Czech Republic: Sfinga.
· Frais, J. (1998) Trojhvězdí nesmrtelných. Prague, Czech Republic: Formát.
· Georgiev, A. (1998) Deník sestry Lídy Baarové. Prague, Czech Republic: Petrklic.
· Motl, S. (2002) Prokleti Lidy Baarove. Praha: Rybka Publishers.
· Škvorecký, J. (1983) Útěky: Vlastní životopis Lídy Baarové, jak jej vyprávela Josefu Škvoreckému. Toronto, Canada: Sixty-Eight Publishers.
· Vávra, O. (1996) Podivný život režiséra: Obrazy vzpominek. Praha: Prostor.