Futility Closet - 027-The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz

Episode Date: September 22, 2014

In September 1940 Polish army captain Witold Pilecki volunteered to be imprisoned at Auschwitz. His reports first alerted the Allies to the horrors at the camp and helped to warn the world that a holocaust was taking place. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow Pilecki into the camp, hear his reports of the atrocities he witnessed, and learn why his name isn't better known today. We'll also meet the elusive Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and puzzle over how hitting a target could save thousands of lives. Sources for our segment on Polish army captain Witold Pilecki: The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery. By Witold Pilecki, translated by Jarek Garlinski, 2012. Timothy Snyder, "Were We All People?", New York Times, June 22, 2012. "Meet The Man Who Sneaked Into Auschwitz," National Public Radio, Sept. 18, 2010. Listener mail: The hoax site on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus was created by these researchers at the University of Connecticut. (Thanks to listener David Brooks for telling us about this story.) This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener David White. Related links (warning: these spoil the puzzle) are here, here, and here. You can listen using the player above, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to episode 27. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll meet Witold Poletski, a Polish army captain who volunteered to enter Auschwitz in 1940, learn about the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, and puzzle over how hitting a target could save thousands of lives. One quick bit of business before we get started today.

We are finally planning to try to establish social media accounts for Futility Closet. After years and years. But we could use a little help. We're kind of really newbies at this. So if anybody would be interested in trying to help us set up a business Facebook page for Futility Closet, we'd appreciate hearing from you. Yes. You can write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And do please keep spreading the word about Futility Closet. We really appreciate when people do that for us. I've been reading this week about a Polish army captain named Witold Pilecki, who is, I think probably it's safe to say, one of the bravest people in the 20th century. But his name isn't very widely known, which is a real shame and is only

turning around now. What he did was volunteer, unbelievably, to go into Auschwitz in 1940 to learn more about the camp and to see what had happened to a couple of his comrades who'd gone in there and wound up spending almost three years there organizing the people there and sneaking out reports to get to the Allies. It was Pilecki's efforts that really let people know about what was happening in Auschwitz and more broadly about the reality of the Holocaust. But people don't know his name now because after he was killed, the communist government in Poland suppressed, systematically suppressed his name for 40 years until the wall came down. So it's really, his story is only coming out now, and it's an amazing story. He was a cavalry officer, a captain in the Polish army,

who in the late 30s, Poland was really under a huge amount of pressure. It was basically split in half. Nazi Germany claimed the western half, and the Soviet Union claimed the eastern half. And so there was a whole lot of upheaval in the country, and Pilecki founded a resistance group that went underground when all this happened. It was just a time of enormous strain all throughout that part of Europe, actually. strain all throughout that part of Europe, actually. And a couple of his comrades had been taken in the first transport from Warsaw to Auschwitz in August 1940. At the time, no one knew quite what the new camp was. It had started actually as a camp for Polish political prisoners and then only gradually devolved into a death camp for European Jews. But at the time this was happening,

all he knew was that a couple of his friends had been taken and he wanted to find out more about it. So he volunteered, actually, to find a way in there. The way he did this was to, his superiors gave him a faked ID card and there was a street uprising at one point in Warsaw and he knew that the people who were arrested there would be sent by train to Auschwitz, and so he just sort of quietly inserted himself into the crowd there and was arrested along with everyone else, and they did take him by train into

the camp. As I say, there was very little known about the camp at the time. It was thought to be either a prison or an internment camp, but he didn't know much more than that going in. This is the first excerpt I want to read from his writings. Basically, he got in and then spent, in the ensuing three years, sent out a succession of reports about what he was seeing inside. The excerpts I'll read are from a longer report he'd written in 1945. So this is him writing in 45, looking back on his arrival at the camp. Around 10 p.m., the train stopped somewhere and went no further. We could hear shouting and yelling, the cars being opened up, and the baying of dogs.

I consider this place in my story to be the moment when I bade farewell to everything I had hitherto known on this earth and entered something seemingly no longer of it. This is how it was. SS rifle butts, but also by something far greater. Our concepts of law and order and of what was normal, all those ideas to which we had become accustomed on this earth, were given a brutal kicking. Everything came to an end. We approached a gate in a wire fence over which could be seen the sign Arbeit macht frei, which means work liberates you. It was only later that we learned to understand it properly, meaning he realized later that could be taken to mean this is hell on earth and the only way out is to work yourself literally to death. It was that bad. The thing to note about that passage is that it's very strong, but it's not hyperbolic.

He's not exaggerating. And the terrible thing about his story is that he kept sending these reports out from the camp, hoping that they would be sent to the Polish government in exile, which was in London, and that they could organize some sort of attack on the camp. He was organizing the inmates within so that they could help to organize a mass escape, but they couldn't do that on their own. They needed the allies and they needed someone on the outside to attack the camp from the outside and he kept waiting for that attack to come and it never did but as the reports he was sending out reached the allies one reason they didn't attack is that they thought these reports were exaggerated i mean they couldn't believe what they were reading so he was increasingly desperate as especially his conditions in the camp got worse and worse to convince people on the outside to do something about it.

How do you convey that? How do you convey how bad it is without making people think you're just exaggerating? Yeah. But what's amazing, really, if you read the book, I mean, I'll read pieces of it here, but if you read the whole book, the things that strike you are, one, he never expresses any concern for his own safety or even his life. And second, there's no exaggeration. I mean, the events are just appalling and shocking on their own merits, but he's not playing them up at all.

He came in quite early. He was prisoner number 4859, so just a bit less than the 5,000th prisoner to come in. One year later, the numbers had risen into the 15,000. So there were a lot of people coming into the camp. He was put on hard labor carrying rocks in a wheelbarrow and quickly came to see what he was in for, and everyone was. He said one early indication to him of the camp's purpose was the diet. It was deliberately set up so that people would live for six weeks. That's all. He said, if you bid to live longer than that, then you're put in a special unit with arduous conditions that

were designed to cause a mental breakdown. So the whole camp was just designed to kill people, just degrade them and kill them. He himself got pneumonia and survived it, but began organizing. And it's astounding what he accomplished there. His goals were to improve morale, to provide news, to distribute extra food and clothing, to set up intelligence networks, and to train these detachments to take over the camp if there were an attack from the outside. And he did all of that. In fact, they even just organized, using smuggled parts, they set up a radio receiver receiver i mean they it's amazing within that environment what they were able to accomplish was somebody smuggling food into him is that how he was able to distribute extra food no he actually denied himself some food this is hard even to believe

that he um he was just he had enormous apparently personal resources and I guess you'd have to call it resilience, but he didn't have any special, you know, lines in or any, he was under the same conditions as everyone else. He was just a remarkable man. Also, I should point out, he was in some great personal danger. You wouldn't really know it from reading the book because he's so fearless, But Auschwitz was set up originally as a camp for political prisoners from Poland. By the time the war was over, Hungarian and Polish Jews were the largest groups of victims there, but the Poles were third. He wasn't Jewish, but he was Polish. And in fact, during the first year there, Poles made up most of the prisoners and most of the victims. So he wasn't just sort of an onlooker. He himself was in great personal danger.

He just didn't seem to, you know. That just didn't register with him. Right. It's amazing. But he came to recognize, as it turned explicitly into a death camp for European Jews, he saw that the killing of the Jews was a different order of atrocity. Here's another excerpt from what he was seeing there. Punishments in Auschwitz were graded as follows. The lightest punishment was a bench beating.

It took place in public in the presence of all blocks at roll call. The execution block was prepared, a bench with slots for the hands and legs on both sides. Two SS thugs stood there, and one was beaten on the naked body so as not to spoil one's clothes. One was beaten with a whip or sometimes a heavy cane. After a dozen strokes, the body was badly cut. Blood spurted, and the remaining blows were on raw meat. I witnessed this on several occasions. Men sometimes got 50 strokes, even 75. One day, when the punishment was 100 strokes, the halfling, meaning the inmate, some poor wretch expired at around the 90th stroke. If the victim was still alive, he was then meant to stand up, do a few squats to restore the blood

flow, and, standing at attention, say thank you for the just punishment. So this is what he was beginning to see, just things got worse and worse. He smuggled out brief reports, for instance, in dirty clothes that were carried to laundries and things like that. He smuggled out reports in 1940, 41, and 42, and actually wrote a couple of shorter reports after his escape later on. And as I say, these were forwarded to London and received by the Allies, but they just couldn't believe, literally couldn't believe what they were reading. And also some reports went to the underground Polish army to describe the execution and interrogation methods.

So he's sort of stuck now. All he could do was just keep feeding information up the line, and he did that for two and a half years, but this attack he kept hoping for never did come. And meanwhile, things in the camp were getting much worse. I've got, I guess, a couple more excerpts here from his 1945 writings. Here's one. There in the enclosed yard, the executioner, Gerhard Palich, a handsome lad who never beat anyone in the camp, that was not his style, was the principal director of terrifying scenes. The condemned in a row, having undressed and now naked, stood one after the other by the

wall of tears while he would put a small caliber pistol to the back of their head and end their life. He would sometimes employ the kind of bolt used to kill cattle. The spring-loaded bolt would pierce the skull in the brain and kill. Sometimes a group of civilians who had been tortured and interrogated in the cellars and who had now been handed over to Pollich for some fun would be let out. Pollich would order the girls to undress and run in a circle around the enclosed yard. Standing in the middle of the yard, he would take his time picking a victim. Then he would aim, shoot, and kill them all one by one. None of them knew who would die next or who would live for a few more moments or who might be taken back for further interrogation.

He improved his aim. These scenes were witnessed from Block 12 by several block supervisors standing guard to prevent a halfling from approaching the window. The windows were covered in wire netting, but not thoroughly enough, so everything was visible. Another time, a family standing in the yard by the Wall of Tears was seen from Block 12. First of all, Pollitt shot the father, killing him before the eyes of his wife and two children. Then he killed the little girl who was gripping her pale mother's hand.

Then he grabbed the small child, which the unfortunate woman was cuddling to her breast. He grasped it by the legs and smashed its little head against the wall. Finally, he killed the mother, semi-conscious from grief. This scene was recounted to me so precisely and so identically by a number of friends who had witnessed it that I have no doubt that that is what happened. That's another example of, it's horrifying, but he's not, he's just reporting what he saw and what he heard and thinks is reliably acceptable as the truth. You know, he's not. Not embellishing in any way. You can understand why the allies would find this hard to believe, but you can also see that he's not doing anything

more than reporting the facts. Right. One more excerpt. This is really nightmare now. It's hard to describe this with any other word. One of the ways that they were dispatching prisoners was by injecting phenol directly into their hearts, which would kill them. And this was done systematically, in particular by an SS man whose name was Clare. Clare murdered with the needle with great concentration, a deranged expression on his face, and a sadistic smile, making a tick on the wall after every murder. In my time there, he extended the list of those killed by him to 14,000 and daily boasted about this with great satisfaction, like a hunter describing his successes. An inmate, to his eternal shame, volunteered to give his fellows injections into the heart

and killed quite a few less, about 4,000. Claire had an incident. One day, after taking care of everyone in the queue for an injection, he entered, as usual, the toilet where the dying halflings were dumped to admire his handiwork for the day. When one of the corpses came to life, there must have been an error and he had received too little phenol, stood up and started to stagger over the other corpses like a drunk towards Claire saying, you didn't give me enough, let me have a little more. Claire went white, but not panicking, rushed at him, the executioner's apparently cultured mask slipping, pulled out his pistol, and without shooting, not wishing to make a noise, he finished off his victim by hitting him over the head with the butt.

So that's, I mean, you can't imagine worse than that. This was after maybe a couple years of waiting for an attack to come, and it became increasingly clear that the Allies weren't going to attack. Also, the Gestapo was aware of the network that he had organized within the camp and were increasingly investigating to find out if they could discover who the members were and had actually killed a couple of them. So finally, Pilecki decided to escape himself. He had been given a night shift at a bakery outside the wall of the camp. And one night, he and two comrades, they were guarded by an SS man, but they overpowered him, cut the phone line and made off, actually managed to steal some documents from the Germans as they went.

He rejoined the Home Army, the Polish Home Army, in August 1944 and then participated in the Warsaw Uprising, which was an uprising in the Polish capital. It was still held by the Germans, but the Soviets were approaching. He was captured during that and basically spent the rest of the year in a German POW camp. And at the end of the war, he was released, liberated from the camp and rejoined the Polish army in Italy, where he wrote this book. The book, by the way, is called, it was released in 2012. If you want to read his writings from 1945, you can get them now. It's published as the title is The Auschwitz Volunteer, which is where I'm getting these excerpts from. And that's the last of his writings before he disappeared, I'm sorry to say. He just never stopped fighting.

After the war, Poland was taken over by the communists, and he was eventually sent back there to learn more about that, and was captured by them, given a show trial, and shot, and then unceremoniously dumped. We don't know to this day where his body is. And that, finally, is why no one's heard of Witold Pilecki. The Polish government, communist government, after killing him and dumping his body, systematically expunged his name from history. They just wiped it from all the records. So these great sacrifices and contributions he'd made were systematically suppressed until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, which is why, I mean, in the years since then, he certainly is well known as a national hero within Poland, but more and more increasingly,

I think awareness is spreading in the West about his gigantic personal contribution to helping spread awareness of the Holocaust, especially in the early days. I mean, he was sending these reports out as early as 1941. As I say, he's a great national hero in Poland. There's a street named after him in Warsaw. In 2006, he received the Order of the White Eagle, which is the highest Polish decoration. And the Polish ambassador to the US described him as the highest example of Polish patriotism. But I think I'd recommend the book if you want to know anything about this. As I said in the beginning, I think he's got to be one of the bravest people, certainly in the 20th century.

In fact, there's a Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder who says that volunteering for Auschwitz and remaining there for three years was, quote, perhaps one of the most courageous things anyone has ever done. If you've been enjoying the offbeat trivia that we talk about in these podcasts, you'll want to check out our book, Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements, which contains hundreds of bite-sized oddities, as well as wordplay, paradoxes, and other intriguing amusements and conundrums. Look for it on Amazon or iTunes, and discover why other readers have called it

a wonderful collection of fascinating nonsense and the most useless book you absolutely need to own. In our last episode, our lateral thinking puzzle involved a rather unfortunate octopus that had ended up in a tree. Indeed. Yeah. And this prompted David Brooks to write in to let us know about the Pacific Northwest tree octopus. This arboreal cephalopod makes its home in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America. The tree octopus, or octopus Pax arbolus,

is reported to be a rather intelligent and inquisitive creature with the largest brain-to-body ratio of any mollusk. And if you haven't heard of the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, that's because it doesn't actually exist. Ah. Ah. It is really a hoax that was dreamed up by a team of education researchers. Researchers at the University of Connecticut created actually a rather comprehensive website

about this reportedly endangered creature. The website describes the life cycle and behaviors of this supposedly rare species and includes photos and testimonials and even a section on what the animal is called in several different languages, including Esperanto, Sasquatch, and Yeti. The researchers then showed this website to seventh graders throughout Connecticut, and these were supposed to be students who were identified as being their school's most proficient online readers. But they found that all of the kids believed that the website was real, and even after they were told of the hoax some of the students still vehemently insisted

that the pacific northwest tree octopus actually existed that's concerning so they set up this fake site just to see if kids would would buy it yeah and it's very comprehensive website with like links out to all kinds of other websites and you know with this plea to help save this endangered species and um i mean so it was very comprehensively done. But they did try to sprinkle in clues that would have helped the kids discern that it really was a hoax. Yeah, and that would be, obviously, the only site on the web that contends that these things exist, you know? So a kid who wanted to find multiple sources would quickly discover that there aren't any, you know what I mean? I suppose, yeah.

Or so you'd hope. One thing that caught my attention about the research was that even after the kids were told that the whole thing was fabricated, they still found it really hard to come up with clues that should have tipped them off to the hoax. Like when they were asked to go back through the website and look for clues that should have tipped them off, they found it very hard to produce these. So I went looking through it myself to see like what could have tipped you off if you were looking. And there were a few references to Sasquatch, which was a supposed natural predator of the tree octopus. And I thought that might be a hint. But I thought that another big clue was

the explanation for why the tree octopus population was at such critically low levels. And that's because of the rage for tree octopus hats in the early 20th century. And the site includes a picture of a 1923 magazine cover, the Cascadia Evening Post, showing a woman wearing a tree octopus hat. I want to see that. evening post showing a woman wearing a tree octopus hat i don't want to see that so does that mean does that mean that the kids were sort of sort of taken in attached no but attached to the idea that it was valid that they were blind to i don't know you know they didn't say in the article describing the research like why the kids had such a hard time believing or understanding this was a hoax even after they were told um but i mean it's a really rather rather well done website with a lot of you know technical

scientific terms and a lot of like thought that went into it it's kind of convincing although there are these references to sasquatch and yeti and trioptopus hats and things like that it's one thing to to suppose that it's true when you first come across it, but if you're told it's a deliberate hoax and still to insist that it's... And still believe, no, this is really... I mean, there are photos, but of course you can make photos of almost anything you want these days, you know. There's even a shaky, poor quality video, supposedly, if somebody managed to capture

on their phone, I think, of a tree octopus. But yeah, you know. The point of the research was to show that classroom instruction in online reading and other new literacies is, in the words of the lead researcher, woefully lacking. Wow. But I bet that's a good... I bet that a good number of adults would probably be taken in by such a hoax, too.

I think that most of us probably know someone who has credulously believed something they've seen or read on the Internet, and then they pass it along believing it to be true without fact-checking or thinking very critically about it. I bet there are some adults who've run across that site. Yeah, well, that's a possibility, too, and who are now out there believing in this poor, endangered species that needs help. I don't know if anybody's done similar research on adults, but I think that would be really interesting to see. Yeah, yeah. We'll have links in our show notes to the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website, which really is rather comprehensive. And it even includes links to the Cascadia Bureau of Sasquatch Affairs.

Oh, good. And there'll also be a link to the page describing the research project on this. Thanks to David for letting us know about the tree octopus. We always appreciate hearing from our listeners. And if you have any questions or comments, you can leave them in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com or send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. In our lateral thinking puzzle segment this week, Greg's going to be asking me a puzzle, and I'm going to have to try to solve it using only yes or no questions.

Ready? I hope so. This was submitted by listener David White White who says it has the added benefit of being a true story. A man in uniform aims carefully and takes a shot. He hits the target and in so doing saves the lives of thousands of people, including

many who are angry with him. How? Okay. A man in uniform. Yes. Police officer? No. Member of the armed services? No. A profession where you would normally be expected to fire a gun? No. Do I need to ascertain the profession that he is?

Something in the entertainment field? Sort of. Sort of in the entertainment field. By uniform, is this closer to costume than uniform? I wouldn't say so. No. Uniform. Uniform. Uniform. Are there multiple members of a group that he's one of? Yes. actors of some sort? No. Singers? No.

Artists of some sort? No. Circus? No. I don't want to mislead you with entertainment. Okay. That's not quite the right... Okay.

Does it matter what time period this is? Not really. Not really? Does it matter where this takes place? Yes, but I don't want to mislead you. Okay. Does it matter where this takes place in terms of the country that it's in? You're making all kinds of faces at me.

I'm trying really hard not to mislead you. Is this on Earth? Yes. Okay. So he's not an astronaut in uniform? No. Right. Okay.

So this is on Earth. Does it matter something about the topography of where it is? Or, you know, whether it's like on a mountain or a lake or anything like that? No. No. Okay. Okay. So the time period sort of doesn't matter and the place maybe kind of matters, but like

the type of place it's at, like a shopping mall or a... Yes. Oh, oh, oh! He's a sports person! Jeez. Where'd you get that? He's an athlete! Yes. Yes! Um, uh, baseball player. No. Football player. No. Basketball player. Yes. Basketball player. Basketball player.

So he... He aims a basketball at a basketball hoop. Right. And somehow he saves the lives at a basketball hoop. Right. And somehow he saves the lives of thousands of people. And in so doing, saves the lives of thousands of people, including many who are angry with him. Wow. Okay, now that's even trickier. Basketball player.

You got this far a lot faster than I thought you would. Basketball player saves the lives of thousands of people, human beings. Yes. Saves the lives. And this really happened. Yes. Oh, I forgot about that part. Does it matter the political regime of the country, like it's a communist country or a dictatorship or something like that?

No. Okay. Oh, I could think of all kinds of interesting plots there where he's still like, you know, he's going to free the people from a concentration camp if he can make one free throw. Okay. Basketball player saves the lives of thousands of people. Does he do it by earning money for some cause? No.

Okay. Do I need to know earning money for some cause? No. Okay. Do I need to know what team he plays for? No. Like the Harlem Globetrotter? No. Like that doesn't matter. Okay. And you said it doesn't really matter what country this takes place in?

Is it in the U.S.? Yes. It's in the U.S.? Yeah. Does it matter what city or where in the U.S.? More specifically in the U.S.? Well, to the extent that it really happened, I know where it happened, but it's not essential. But it's not essential to the plot.

Okay. He saved the lives of thousands of people. Are these people that would have died immediately if he hadn't made his shot? Like, I don't even know where to go here. No. Okay. Is he on land? Yes.

Like, he's in a regular sports arena? Yes. Okay. There's nothing else about where he is that I need to ascertain to make sense of this? No. Okay. Do I need to know what the people would have died of? Yes.

That would help. That would help. Disease? No. Explosion? No. Fire? No.

No. Octopus is being in trees. No. They were going gonna be executed in some way they were gonna die of natural causes i'll say yes but it depends what you mean by that they were gonna asphyxiate no not like that um they were gonna this is so confusing to me by die do you mean that they would have been alive and that they will stop being alive? Yes. That is what I mean.

Okay. Just checking. Well, you started off by saying he took a shot and it turns out to be a basketball shot. You should check everything. No. You're right. Okay. So there are thousands of people who might have died, become dead, if he had missed this shot. Yes. And I need to know what they would have died become dead if he had missed this shot.

Yes. And I need to know what they would have died of. It doesn't matter what kind of people they were. Did these people all have some characteristic in common that I need to know about? No. No, just a random group of people. Yes. The people who were at the arena?

Yes. The people who were at the arena would have died if he had missed a shot. That's right. All of them would have died? Perhaps. Most of them would have died. Certainly some of them. Was this a basketball that he put through a basketball hoop?

Yes. A regular basketball? Yes. Through a regular basketball hoop? Yes. Okay. Was there some natural disaster happening? Yes. An earthquake?

No. A hurricane? No. A flood? No. A fire? No. A fire?

Natural disaster? Some kind of weather-related event? Yes. A blizzard? No. A tornado? Yes. There's a tornado occurring, and there's a basketball game going on during this tornado.

No. Close. There was, okay, was there a basketball game going on? Yes. And then a tornado started? Yes. Um, and somehow his putting, was his putting the basketball in the hoop, did that give people some kind of alert or warning about the tornado?

No. He's going to somehow save these people from being killed somehow by a tornado. Yes. Did he know this when he made the shot? No, he didn't. No. He ended the game. No.

He didn't end the game. Oh, oh, oh, because the game didn't end. Everybody stayed in the arena. I can't believe you got that. And then the stadium, and then they were saved, and they would have been killed otherwise. Yes, this is David White submitted. Here's his write-up. This is the true

story of McCall Riley and the 2008 SEC tournament game between Alabama State and Mississippi. The game was played on March 14, 2008 in the Georgia Dome, and at the end of regulation time, with two seconds left on the clock, Alabama was trailing 59-56. McCall Riley received a throw-in,

turned, and launched a three-point shot. He hit it and put the game into overtime, so he tied the score with that shot. Eight minutes later, a tornado hit the Georgia Dome. It caused serious structural damage to the facility, but no one was injured. But if McCall Riley had not hit his three-pointer, the game would have ended a few minutes earlier and fans would have been pouring out into the streets just as the tornado touched down. His shot put the game into overtime, kept the fans in the seats, and probably saved probably saved many lives that's really interesting and he did a really good job writing that up read the read the puzzle again a man in uniform aims carefully and takes a shot he hits the target

and in so doing saves the lives of thousands of people including many who are angry with him that's that was very clever that was very that was very cleverly done and he he did, I've got to say, a beautiful job. He wrote out hints and everything. Thank you, David, for doing such a good job in putting this together. Yeah, that was really terrific. And he included, too, some links to stories about the game and the storm, and I'll put those in the show notes. Excellent.

If you'd like to send in a puzzle for us to try to use on the show, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another episode for us. We want to thank everyone who has been helping to spread the word about Futility Closet. It's really a big help to us. And if you want to help support our show and haven't yet, please take a moment to recommend us to anyone that you think might enjoy our show. You can also help us out by clicking the donate button in the sidebar of the website. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, check out our book on amazon.com or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample over 8,000 captivating diversions, perfect for filling five minutes or 50. You can see our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com where you

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