Dolls are Indeed where you Find them! The Stuffed Bunny that survived The Holocaust and Robotic Patients on Sunday AM

First, Kudos to our friend Sanra Morris who has maintained a successful blog for at least seven years. Blogging is one of the joys of my life, bad hand and all. I ahve had over 50,000 viewers/readers on my 8 blogs, and I am thrilled and care about all of them. Thanks so much. In part, this blog is a tribute to my friend and pen pal, the late Mary Hillier, who would have been around 96 on April 30th, "almost a May Queen," she used to say. "Dolls are where you find them" was her motto. She helped me a lot in my research on dolls, but also on my dissertation. I miss her everyday, and it is a thrill for me to open a doll book and find one of her articles in it, or to browse again through one of her books. True to form, there were two doll related stories yesterday on Sunday Morning, cbs.com. You can find stories and archives at the site. One was on the use of robotic patients in hosptial to train med students. I thought of the Chase hospital dolls and Resusca Annie that we used in junior high CPR classes. How I'd love to have one of these new robots for the museum! So, in a way, doll like objects are saving peoples' lives and improving their health, again, cf Crash Test Dummies. The second story was poignant. A woman who was a toddler sent to a concentration camp is donating her favorite bunny to the Holocaust Museum in DC. Prisoners in the camp made the bunny for her; it looks like it is made of rags or old socks. It is very poignant and pathetic, and a testament to the need for children to play even in the worst conditions. I have seen pictures of toys little children made in the camps, and drawings of their games. I have also seen piles of dolls in Schindlers List, taken from children sent to die in the gas chambers. The little bunny is headed to the museum because her owner fears after her death, and her children's deaths, the bunny may disappear from history. This way, it is another piece of valuable evidence to prove the horrific events of The Holocaust. Survivors are disappearing themselves every day, and there are those who dare to say it never happened. This little bunny helps to emphasize the battle cry of those who witnessed the horros of WWII, those Holocaust survivors, and survivors of other atrocites commited by other survivors like my late mother, who was trapped as an American child in Occupied Greece. "Never Forget," and this little toy rabbit shouts it out for the million or so children who could not come back.