On September 1st, 1939, the Nazi invasion of Poland instigated World War II. This is a picture of me near the Barbican, which forms the north entrance to the Polish city of Krakow. British poet W.H. Auden--who was living in New York that year--wrote about the moment in a poem with the date as its title. Here are the opening and closing stanzas:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return...

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

"What occurred in Linz," of course, was the birth of Adolf Hitler, along with his development into one who imagined himself a victim and blamed others for his failures. He expanded this pernicious trait into an ideology, and millions of others embraced it. The 'victim mentality' is the basis for authoritarian behavior and the source of the most vicious human behavior. Millions continue to embrace it today. It's now also called "fundamentalism."