Posted by Pamela Arnsberger on Aug 24, 2017
Announcements and Reminders
August 24th
Sign up with Rich for the beach clean-up on Sept 16th. It will be at 9:00 AM at Beer Can Beach.
CASA’s Imagine Event will be Sunday September 10th. We have two $150 tickets available to our members for free! If you wish to go, speak to Michelle.
September 2nd is the Rotary Abbott Square event. It is at 5:30. If you can help set up or take down, please sign up on the sheet.
RotaCare thanked the club for a $3802 donation for last year. Remember those RotaCare buckets!
The Diversity Center fundraiser will be on Oct 21st. If interested see Michelle.
Dr. Art said he will be offering flu vaccines in October.

           Bee introduced our speaker, Gisela Zebroski, an author who survived the Soviet Union invasion into Latvia. Her family fled west to Germany in 1945 where her father was killed in battle and the family fled to Austria.  She emigrated to California with her husband where she graduated from college.  She is the author ofThe Baroness and Mephisto Waltz.
 
         She spoke about the Berlin Airlift in 1948 when Stalin blocked all land access routes to Berlin.  Berlin was divided into 4 zones in the heart of Soviet East Germany so Berlin was truly cut off. There was an overall American and Western Europe force of 80,000 up against two and half million Russians. In essence Stalin was inviting the West to invade so he could start the next war. Truman refused to invade but also refused to leave but there was no food for the population of Berlin. The air corridors which had been ratified in writing were used to deliver not just food but coal and whatever was necessary to survive. 
      Everything had to be shipped from the United States, a long journey by ship to Germany then trucks and trains were loaded and finally in Frankfurt everything was packed in sacks then stuffed into the airplanes. Amazingly after a chaotic first month, it only took 3 weeks to get it all properly organized. They used German mechanics to fix and maintain the planes and German Frauleins to entice the pilots to stay committed. Berliners survived the winter barely on 1200 calories a day, almost no heat and two hours of electricity. 4.6 billion pounds of food were eventually delivered. By the following May it was over without a single shot being fired.       
Ms Zebroski finished by telling us the wonderful story about the ‘candy bomber’. Her books are available at amazon.com and her website is giselaz@comcast.net.