New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
4 October 1942 | Hungarian Jewish boy Miklos Gárdos was born. In July 1944 he was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber.
I'm always cautious to reference posts like this one, as I'm sure the people at Auschwitz Memorial would remind us that man's inhumanity to man isn't restricted to one "side" or another.
Still, for me, it's the reason why I always will consider myself anti-fascist, even if I'm not pro-anything else. Fascism has no intellectual or theoretical foundation, period, apart from the accumulation of raw power. And, by extension, Auschwitz is where an unchecked accumulation of raw power leads.
Kindly spare me your equivocations. If this is something that eludes you, merely adjust your social media settings. Delude yourself if you wish, but I don't need you in my life.
ON THE AVENUES: Dear Holocaust deniers: If you don't like this post, unfriend me now.
"To ask why the Jews have been killed is a question that shows immediately its own obscenity."
-- Claude Lanzmann
Apart from it being unpronounceable by most Americans, the Polish city of Oświęcim (aws-ven-chim) seems innocuous enough until you realize it's known to the wider world by its German name, Auschwitz.
“The Auschwitz concentration camp (Konzentrationslager Auschwitz) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II–Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp built with several gas chambers; Auschwitz III–Monowitz, a labor camp created to staff a factory for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
Auschwitz-Birkenau was one of many camps designed primarily for genocidal extermination: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek and Jasenovac are some of the others. In numerical terms the Jews were killed in horrifically greater numbers, but the Nazis also murdered political opponents, Slavs, Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Soviet POWs, and anyone else who objected to Hitler's new world order.
A Frenchman named Claude Lanzmann (1925 – 2018) somewhat serendipitously came to play an out-sized role in documenting these atrocities by combining the mediums of film and oral history.
Lanzmann was born into a secular Jewish family in Paris, and while they hid during the German occupation of France in World War II, Lanzmann joined the French resistance at 17, smuggling small arms for the fight against the invaders.
After liberation, Lanzmann went to university, studied philosophy, worked (and famously played) with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir, and eventually became a filmmaker. In 1973 he was contacted by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which offered financial backing for a documentary about the Holocaust (a term meaning “burnt offering” which Lanzmann found objectionable).
Nearing 50 years of age, Lanzmann agreed to the proposal and spent the next 11 years crafting the epochal nine-and-a-half-hour-long Shoah (or “catastrophe”). I believe the Israeli financing dried up very quickly, but he persevered. There have since been sequels using the many hours of interviews filmed for the original.
Shoah remains visceral and essential viewing for anyone wishing to understand what happened to Europe’s Jewish population at the hands of the Nazis. It is an unconventional and brutally effective documentary, describing factual historical events without the use of archival footage or tacky reenactments.
The hour is late, and what Lanzmann achieved probably could not be repeated today. The 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation was Monday, January 27, and obviously the number of people with active memories of the period has dwindled considerably. It is reckoned that fewer than 400,000 Holocaust survivors remain with us in 2020. The fact there are even this many given the number of deaths testifies to the sheer scale of their incarceration.
Naturally many more of them were alive in the 1970’s, and so were those ordinary people in places like Poland capable of bearing witness. Lanzmann filmed dignified Jewish survivors, serenely acquiescent Poles and even an entirely unrepentant SS officer, albeit the latter surreptitiously with a hidden camera. They all lived through cataclysmic and unspeakably horrible events that took place primarily in areas of dense pre-war Jewish population, which became saturated with planned centers of systematic slaughter during the Nazi occupation.
To record these memories and recollections, Lanzmann traveled to a dozen or more then-Communist locales in Poland and Eastern Europe. He also made side excursions to Israel, Germany and elsewhere in the world, reflecting the post-war diaspora of victims and perpetrators.
Lanzmann organized their recollections into stories woven together with consummate skill, and as the hours pass, there is an emotional crescendo guaranteed to leave the viewer both drained and fearing for the future of humanity. It’s true that we manage somehow to survive our own seemingly boundless stupidity. It’s unclear how we do it.
At the time Shoah was released, its director was fiercely criticized for including footage that unflinchingly exposed lingering anti-Semite tendencies on the part of ethnic Poles, this coming at a time when Poland -- through the activities of the Solidarity trade union movement and a sitting Pope -- was being lionized by anti-Communists throughout the world as the best extant hope to commence the toppling of the Bloc’s socialist dominoes.
And so they were, but to this very day the arguments about Poland and the Holocaust have not been resolved. They likely never will.
In 2018 the Poles overstepped, passing a law that would have criminalised stating that the Polish people had collaborated in the Holocaust. In fact, while some Christian Poles heroically saved Jews, most did nothing—and others helped kill them. Many Jews saw the law as whitewashing the long history of anti-Semitism in Poland and other European countries besides Germany. The Poles eventually scrapped the law, but Israel showed its own prejudices last year when its foreign minister claimed that Poles “imbibe anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk”.
Lanzmann’s Shoah documentary occupies a place in my consciousness utterly impossible to overstate. I first saw Shoah in its entirety several months after my mother videotaped the film from public television during the summer of 1987, precisely as I was traveling in Europe, including a passage through Poland and a visit to the Auschwitz memorial.
For ten straight days in 1988, I set the alarm an hour early each morning and gradually absorbed the film in bits, pieces and chunks before heading off to work. It may have been the culmination of my free-lance, post-graduate education, voraciously soaking up books and documentaries about European history, culture and any related matters in an effort to achieve greater understanding during my periods of continental travel.
In spite of everything I was sure I knew about life back then, these mornings in front of the tube in 1988 were profoundly uncomfortable. Shoah is about death, and in a manner we’re unaccustomed to considering. I’ll never forget it.
---
My visit to Auschwitz came on July 11, 1987.
I’d been in Krakow with my friend Barrie (who now teaches history at Scribner Middle School) and two fellow travelers from Florida. We’d taken an unscheduled detour from the Soviet/Baltic/Poland youth and student package tour, hopping a Friday afternoon train from Warsaw and learning the dubious (and embarrassing) value of handing the conductor $5 cash for our fare, then watching aghast as he evicted people from their rightful seats for us to sit.
The displaced made no objection whatever, and we rationalized: It was the awful Commie system to blame.
On a Saturday morning, after overnighting in Krakow for $2.50 per person amid aging furniture in a pensioner’s shabby flat, we rustled a few grams of greasy salami and bread, then found the dingy bus station in the city’s crumbling and neglected downtown, joining several dozen Polish weekend trippers on the bumpy, grinding, two-hour journey to Oświęcim.
There were no English speakers around to help, but we managed to guess the correct stop near the entrance to the Auschwitz museum. Once there, we paid our fees and wordlessly passed through the numbing exhibits inside the old brick pre-war Polish army barracks buildings of Auschwitz 1, a strangely bureaucratic and tidy introduction to the supreme horror a few hundred meters away at Birkenau, the epicenter of the assembly line death camp.
You’ve probably read or heard about the rooms filled with abandoned luggage, eye glasses, artificial limbs, shoes, children’s toys – all confiscated from prospective victims as they were paraded from cattle cars to perish within minutes of passing through gates that read, “Arbeit Macht Frei” … or, work will make you free.
Intense? Chilling? Insane? Yes, and so much worse than these or any other inadequate words we might choose, yet only pretending to encapsulate some measure of emotion about a crime scene possessing a degree of industrial aspiration to cold-blooded murder well beyond the imagination of a twenty-something Hoosier bumpkin.
Or the same bumpkin at 60.
After two hours, we’d had enough of it. To get back to Krakow for the return to Warsaw later that evening necessitated a short walk into the center of Oświęcim, where we boarded a train that ran roughly half the distance back to the Krakow before abruptly disgorging us at a rural rail crossing point to change trains.
The day had become hot and sultry, and activity at the station was ploddingly minimal. There was a simple buffet offering plates of mystery meat in gray sauce, but we weren’t so much hungry as thirsty, and not merely thirsty, but fairly desperate for an adult beverage or three to ease the transition from wartime Auschwitz back to dilapidated 1980’s-vintage Poland.
Pivo? Wodka? Vino?
Alas, there was no succor for the bibulous at the teetotal train station. Resigned to temperance, and waiting at the platform, we could see green fields and crops in the distance beyond the tracks. People wearing their best were walking in little groups toward the settlement; surely even in a Polish farming town there’d be something happening on a summertime Saturday night.
Right before the train finally limped to rest, a horse-drawn cart clattered across the weathered cobblestones nearby.
I’d been looking at the older folks among the crowd at the station. With memories of Auschwitz still raw, it’s obvious what I was thinking, and I kept those thoughts to myself. Later, watching Shoah, the parched rail platform reverie and the native Poles populating it came back to me with a vengeance, and wouldn’t let go as the film unspooled over those mornings of otherwise forgotten days, as Lanzmann meticulously peeled away the dusty layers of memory and forced the viewer to think.
What did it all mean?
This is by no means a denunciation of Poland and the Poles, or a doomed attempt at facile erudition with respect to their places in the historical record, only an observation that there are times when very little about anything makes sense, especially when one’s own senses are being burdened with the unsettling melancholy of time.
Or, of time passed.
It has been almost fifty years since Lanzmann’s film went into production, and certainly all the survivors he chronicled are dead. The people I saw in Poland in 1987 are thirty years older, and many of them have died, too.
There was a time when I felt reasonably confident that a majority of readers understand the Holocaust as empirical fact and don’t require daily reminders. Glancing each morning at the endless, repetitive and triumphant Twitter proclamations of American idiots with moth-like attention spans, I’m no longer quite as sure. Sadly, the revisionism extends to Europe, where anti-Semitism continues to poison minds today.
Nature or nurture – or both? We’re classified at birth as human by biological default, but mustn’t we actually learn how to be human? If no one is there to teach us what it means to be human, or if our purported mentors shirk their responsibility, aren’t we condemned to repeating these instances of man's inhumanity to man?
In 2006, a new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night appeared on the paperback bestseller list (Wiesel died in 2016). How many Americans know anything at all about Wiesel, much less can say they’ve read this or other books written by him?
In Shoah, Lanzmann interviews Dr. Franz Grassler, one of the Nazis “administering” the Warsaw Ghetto. A mere quarter-century removed from his duties, Grassler’s memory repeatedly failed him.
Claude Lanzmann: You don't remember those days?
Franz Grassler: Not much. I recall more clearly my pre-war mountaineering trips than the entire war period and those days in Warsaw. All, in all, those were bad times. It's a fact we tend to forget, thank god, the bad times more easily than the good. The bad times are repressed.
Forgetfulness of history to this magnitude is something too many of us have become proud to seize as a birthright. I can't tell you why ignorance always seems to be in fashion. All I can do is promise to denounce it -- and to watch Shoah again in its entirety later this spring.
A disturbing number of my fellow Amerikaners have decided the Holocaust didn't occur. Stupidity or ignorance? Either way, dipshittedness of this magnitude is just about as unimaginable as the fact of the atrocity itself.
A few weeks back I saw that the Auschwitz Memorial page at Twitter is seeking to add followers in the run-up to the 75th anniversary of the death camp's liberation in January.
The material posted by Auschwitz Memorial on a daily basis at Twitter isn't easy or pleasant reading. It's just essential to being a responsible and responsive human being.
Should you be one of the deniers, you're advised to examine your own life with care and precision; if we happen to be acquainted, then get the hell out of my life until yours is placed in the context of reality.
WHAT did “Shoah” mean? After Claude Lanzmann had spent almost 12 years making the film he was most famous for, recording 350 hours of interviews in 14 countries, sitting in his shirtsleeves across the table from greying, cautious, sometimes angry people, unsparingly coaxing out of them their memories of the Holocaust, he often met that question. The simple translation was “destruction”. But as a secular Jew, brought up in central France with no sense of Jewish culture and no Hebrew, he had no idea, at first, what it meant. The word seemed just an utterance, a sound, without associations. It might have been the wind in the trees, or a moan of pain. That suited his purposes, because he wanted to give his work no name at all.
Lanzmann’s technique was compelling because he (some say cruelly) forced his interviewees to remember their most terrible experiences on camera. In the most famous Shoah sequence, Lanzmann asked the former Treblinka barber Abraham Bomba to talk about the cutting of the hair of a fellow barber’s family before they were about to be gassed. This is agony to watch. When questioned as to the morality of making those who suffered reveal their horror on screen, Lanzmann said: “One has to die with them again in order that they didn’t die alone.”
Just last year I was thinking about Claude Lanzmann while writing the narrative of my 1987 summer in Europe. I was aware of Shoah at the time, but didn't view it until the following year. Watching the film for the first time remains an unforgettable experience that contributed so much to my inner being that the effects are incalculable. My eyes are wet just thinking about it.
July 11, 1987. Apart from being unpronounceable at first glance, the Polish city of Oświęcim seems innocuous enough, until you realize that it's known to the world by its German name, Auschwitz. To tell this story, I've gone back into the archives and extracted two previous testimonials, joined together here as one, and edited for clarity.
---
I'm surprised to learn that Claude Lanzmann is still with us, but he is, at the ripe age of 91. In 2012, the English translation of his 2009 autobiography was published, and inside there is a revelation explaining why this elderly Frenchman is so important in explaining the legacy of Auschwitz and death camps like it.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs approached Claude Lanzmann in 1973 and suggested that, with Israel’s backing, he make a documentary film about the murder of the European Jews.
When I'm asked to reveal my "favorite" film, it's always difficult for me to answer. Do documentaries count? If so, how can a work as grueling as Lanzmann's Shoah be considered as "favored" in the intended context of pleasurable entertainment?
Ask me the most "influential" film of my life, and the answer is easier. In retrospect, my initial viewing of Shoah in 1988 was the culmination of a free-lance, post-graduate education.
I was the cliched sponge, voraciously soaking up books and documentaries about European history, culture and any related matters in an effort to achieve greater understanding during periods of continental travel.
Lanzmann's relentless imagery has been with me ever since. Living memories then are academic memories now, making remembrance in whatever form even more imperative.
My last viewing of Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary film Shoah came in 2006, via DVD. It is an oral history of the Holocaust that runs almost ten hours and demands an effort on the part of the viewer that goes somewhat beyond that required to indulge the pablum of the typical Hollywood blockbuster.
However, I first saw Shoah in its entirety in the early spring of 1988, a year or more after videotaping it from public television. For ten solid ten days, I set the alarm an hour early each morning and made my way through the film in bits, pieces and chunks before heading off to work.
While not particularly enjoyable in the conventional sense of entertainment, the Shoah documentary experience has proven visceral as well as essential for my understanding of the Holocaust. It is an unconventional, brutally effective documentary that depicts and describes historical events without the use of archival footage or reenactments.
During the 1970’s, Lanzmann began filming real people – Jewish survivors, serenely acquiescent Poles and even (surreptitiously) an unrepentant SS officer – all of whom had lived through cataclysmic and unspeakably horrible events that primarily took place in areas of dense pre-war Jewish population, which during the Nazi occupation became dotted with planned centers of systematic slaughter.
These memories and recollections were filmed in a dozen or more then-Communist locales in Poland and Eastern Europe, with occasional side excursions to Israel, Germany and elsewhere in the world in conformity with the post-war diaspora of victims (and perpetrators).
The film was organized into stories woven together with consummate skill, and as the hours pass, there is an emotional crescendo guaranteed to leave the viewer both drained and fearing for the future of humanity. It’s true that we manage somehow to survive. It’s unclear how we manage to do it.
At the time Shoah was released, its director was fiercely criticized for including footage that unflinchingly exposed lingering anti-Semite tendencies on the part of ethnic Poles, this coming at a time when Poland – through the activities of the Solidarity trade union movement and a sitting Pope – was being lionized by anti-Communists throughout the world as the best extant hope to commence the toppling of the Bloc’s socialist dominoes.
I’d studied the Holocaust in college and devoured Abba Eban’s Heritage: Civilization and the Jews PBS series. As a philosophy major, debates pertaining to the ethical culpability of ordinary Germans in atrocities committed during the war were certainly familiar to me – but when I watched Shoah in early 1988, it had been only a few months since my first trip through Poland.
This fact made for uncomfortable mornings in front of the tube.
In 1987, I was in Krakow, Poland with my friend Barrie (who’s now a Scribner Middle School history teacher) and two fellow travelers from Florida. We’d taken an unscheduled detour from the Soviet/Baltic/Poland youth and student package tour by hopping a Friday afternoon train from Warsaw, an experience that taught us the dubious (and embarrassing) value of handing the conductor $5 cash and watching him evict people from their seats to make room for us.
We rationalized: It was the system to blame.
On a Saturday morning, after overnighting in Krakow for $2.50 each in a pensioner’s shabby flat, we rustled a few grams of greasy salami and bread, then found the dingy bus station in the city’s crumbling and neglected downtown, joining several dozen Polish weekend trippers on a bumpy, grinding, two-hour SRO journey to Auschwitz.
There were no English speakers around to help, but we managed to guess the correct stop near the entrance to the museum and memorial. Once there, we paid a fee and wordlessly passed through the numbing exhibits inside the old brick barracks buildings of Auschwitz 1, a strangely bureaucratic and tidy introduction to the supreme horror a few hundred meters away at Birkenau, the epicenter of the assembly line death camp.
You’ve probably read or heard about the rooms filled with abandoned luggage, eye glasses, artificial limbs, shoes, children’s toys – all confiscated from prospective victims as they were paraded off cattle cars to perish within the gates that read, “Arbeit Macht Frei” … or, work will make you free.
Intense? Chilling? Insane? Yes, and so much worse than these and any other inadequate words that we have little choice except to pretend might encapsulate some measure of the emotion felt at a crime site with a scale of aspiration well beyond the imagination of a twenty-something Hoosier bumpkin.
After two hours, we’d had enough. To get back to Krakow – and return to Warsaw later that evening – necessitated a short walk into the center of Oświęcim, where we boarded a train that ran roughly half the distance back to the city before abruptly disgorging us to change at a rural crossing point.
The day had become hot and sultry, and activity at the station was minimal. There was a simple buffet offering plates of mystery meat in gray sauce, but we weren’t so much hungry as thirsty – not just thirsty, but fairly desperate for an adult beverage or three to ease the transition from wartime Auschwitz back to shabby 1980’s-vintage Poland.
Pivo? Wodka?
Alas, there was no succor for the bibulous at the train station. Resigned to temperance, and waiting at the platform, there were green fields and crops visible in the distance beyond the tracks. Clean but roughly dressed people were walking in little groups toward the settlement – surely even in a Polish farm town there’d be something happening on Saturday night – and just before the train finally limped in, a horse-drawn cart clattered across the weathered cobblestones nearby.
I’d been looking at the older folks among the crowd. With memories of Auschwitz still raw, It’s obvious what I was thinking … and I kept those thoughts to myself.
Later, watching Shoah, the parched rail platform reverie and the native Poles populating it came back to me with a vengeance, and they wouldn’t let go throughout the remainder of the film over that period of days as Lanzmann meticulously peeled away the dusty layers of memory and forced the viewer to think: What did it all mean?
This is by no means a denunciation of Poland and the Poles, or an attempt at facile erudition with respect to their places in the historical record, only an observation that there are times when very little makes sense, especially when one’s own senses are being burdened with the unsettling melancholy of time.
Or, of time passed.
It has been more than forty years since Lanzmann’s film went into production, and all the survivors he chronicled are dead. The people I saw in Poland in 1987 are thirty years older, and many of them have passed on, too.
While I am reasonably confident that the readers of this blog need not be reminded of what the Holocaust meant, to be honest, I’m not so sure when I look out the window of my office toward the rental properties lining the other side of the street – or toward the streets in parts of Europe where anti-Semitism persists in spite of what happened there more than a half-century before.
(Remember -- this was written 10 years prior to the 2016 election)
Nature or nurture – or both? We’re classified as human by biological default at birth, but mustn’t we learn how to be human? If no one is there to teach us what it means to be human, or shirks the responsibility, aren’t we condemned to repeating these instances of man's inhumanity to man?
In 2006, a new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night appeared on the paperback bestseller list. Wiesel died in 2016. Do you think either Donald Trump or Mike Pence has read it?
Apart from being unpronounceable at first glance, the Polish city of Oświęcim seems innocuous enough, until you realize that it's known to the world by its German name, Auschwitz.
To tell this story, I've gone back into the archives and extracted two previous testimonials, joined together here as one, and edited for clarity.
---
I'm surprised to learn that Claude Lanzmann is still with us, but he is, at the ripe age of 91. In 2012, the English translation of his 2009 autobiography was published, and inside there is a revelation explaining why this elderly Frenchman is so important in explaining the legacy of Auschwitz and death camps like it.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs approached Claude Lanzmann in 1973 and suggested that, with Israel’s backing, he make a documentary film about the murder of the European Jews.
When I'm asked to reveal my "favorite" film, it's always difficult for me to answer. Do documentaries count? If so, how can a work as grueling as Lanzmann's Shoah be considered as "favored" in the intended context of pleasurable entertainment?
Ask me the most "influential" film of my life, and the answer is easier. In retrospect, my initial viewing of Shoah in 1988 was the culmination of a free-lance, post-graduate education.
I was the cliched sponge, voraciously soaking up books and documentaries about European history, culture and any related matters in an effort to achieve greater understanding during periods of continental travel.
Lanzmann's relentless imagery has been with me ever since. Living memories then are academic memories now, making remembrance in whatever form even more imperative.
My last viewing of Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary film Shoah came in 2006, via DVD. It is an oral history of the Holocaust that runs almost ten hours and demands an effort on the part of the viewer that goes somewhat beyond that required to indulge the pablum of the typical Hollywood blockbuster.
However, I first saw Shoah in its entirety in the early spring of 1988, a year or more after videotaping it from public television. For ten solid ten days, I set the alarm an hour early each morning and made my way through the film in bits, pieces and chunks before heading off to work.
While not particularly enjoyable in the conventional sense of entertainment, the Shoah documentary experience has proven visceral as well as essential for my understanding of the Holocaust. It is an unconventional, brutally effective documentary that depicts and describes historical events without the use of archival footage or reenactments.
During the 1970’s, Lanzmann began filming real people – Jewish survivors, serenely acquiescent Poles and even (surreptitiously) an unrepentant SS officer – all of whom had lived through cataclysmic and unspeakably horrible events that primarily took place in areas of dense pre-war Jewish population, which during the Nazi occupation became dotted with planned centers of systematic slaughter.
These memories and recollections were filmed in a dozen or more then-Communist locales in Poland and Eastern Europe, with occasional side excursions to Israel, Germany and elsewhere in the world in conformity with the post-war diaspora of victims (and perpetrators).
The film was organized into stories woven together with consummate skill, and as the hours pass, there is an emotional crescendo guaranteed to leave the viewer both drained and fearing for the future of humanity. It’s true that we manage somehow to survive. It’s unclear how we manage to do it.
At the time Shoah was released, its director was fiercely criticized for including footage that unflinchingly exposed lingering anti-Semite tendencies on the part of ethnic Poles, this coming at a time when Poland – through the activities of the Solidarity trade union movement and a sitting Pope – was being lionized by anti-Communists throughout the world as the best extant hope to commence the toppling of the Bloc’s socialist dominoes.
I’d studied the Holocaust in college and devoured Abba Eban’s Heritage: Civilization and the Jews PBS series. As a philosophy major, debates pertaining to the ethical culpability of ordinary Germans in atrocities committed during the war were certainly familiar to me – but when I watched Shoah in early 1988, it had been only a few months since my first trip through Poland.
This fact made for uncomfortable mornings in front of the tube.
In 1987, I was in Krakow, Poland with my friend Barrie (who’s now a Scribner Middle School history teacher) and two fellow travelers from Florida. We’d taken an unscheduled detour from the Soviet/Baltic/Poland youth and student package tour by hopping a Friday afternoon train from Warsaw, an experience that taught us the dubious (and embarrassing) value of handing the conductor $5 cash and watching him evict people from their seats to make room for us.
We rationalized: It was the system to blame.
On a Saturday morning, after overnighting in Krakow for $2.50 each in a pensioner’s shabby flat, we rustled a few grams of greasy salami and bread, then found the dingy bus station in the city’s crumbling and neglected downtown, joining several dozen Polish weekend trippers on a bumpy, grinding, two-hour SRO journey to Auschwitz.
There were no English speakers around to help, but we managed to guess the correct stop near the entrance to the museum and memorial. Once there, we paid a fee and wordlessly passed through the numbing exhibits inside the old brick barracks buildings of Auschwitz 1, a strangely bureaucratic and tidy introduction to the supreme horror a few hundred meters away at Birkenau, the epicenter of the assembly line death camp.
You’ve probably read or heard about the rooms filled with abandoned luggage, eye glasses, artificial limbs, shoes, children’s toys – all confiscated from prospective victims as they were paraded off cattle cars to perish within the gates that read, “Arbeit Macht Frei” … or, work will make you free.
Intense? Chilling? Insane? Yes, and so much worse than these and any other inadequate words that we have little choice except to pretend might encapsulate some measure of the emotion felt at a crime site with a scale of aspiration well beyond the imagination of a twenty-something Hoosier bumpkin.
After two hours, we’d had enough. To get back to Krakow – and return to Warsaw later that evening – necessitated a short walk into the center of Oświęcim, where we boarded a train that ran roughly half the distance back to the city before abruptly disgorging us to change at a rural crossing point.
The day had become hot and sultry, and activity at the station was minimal. There was a simple buffet offering plates of mystery meat in gray sauce, but we weren’t so much hungry as thirsty – not just thirsty, but fairly desperate for an adult beverage or three to ease the transition from wartime Auschwitz back to shabby 1980’s-vintage Poland.
Pivo? Wodka?
Alas, there was no succor for the bibulous at the train station. Resigned to temperance, and waiting at the platform, there were green fields and crops visible in the distance beyond the tracks. Clean but roughly dressed people were walking in little groups toward the settlement – surely even in a Polish farm town there’d be something happening on Saturday night – and just before the train finally limped in, a horse-drawn cart clattered across the weathered cobblestones nearby.
I’d been looking at the older folks among the crowd. With memories of Auschwitz still raw, It’s obvious what I was thinking … and I kept those thoughts to myself.
Later, watching Shoah, the parched rail platform reverie and the native Poles populating it came back to me with a vengeance, and they wouldn’t let go throughout the remainder of the film over that period of days as Lanzmann meticulously peeled away the dusty layers of memory and forced the viewer to think: What did it all mean?
This is by no means a denunciation of Poland and the Poles, or an attempt at facile erudition with respect to their places in the historical record, only an observation that there are times when very little makes sense, especially when one’s own senses are being burdened with the unsettling melancholy of time.
Or, of time passed.
It has been more than forty years since Lanzmann’s film went into production, and all the survivors he chronicled are dead. The people I saw in Poland in 1987 are thirty years older, and many of them have passed on, too.
While I am reasonably confident that the readers of this blog need not be reminded of what the Holocaust meant, to be honest, I’m not so sure when I look out the window of my office toward the rental properties lining the other side of the street – or toward the streets in parts of Europe where anti-Semitism persists in spite of what happened there more than a half-century before.
(Remember -- this was written 10 years prior to the 2016 election)
Nature or nurture – or both? We’re classified as human by biological default at birth, but mustn’t we learn how to be human? If no one is there to teach us what it means to be human, or shirks the responsibility, aren’t we condemned to repeating these instances of man's inhumanity to man?
In 2006, a new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night appeared on the paperback bestseller list. Wiesel died in 2016. Do you think either Donald Trump or Mike Pence has read it?
The BBC documentary on the life and art of enigmatic novelist Jerzy Kosinski. Through interviews with his second wife Kiki von Fraunhofer-Kosinski, friends and fellow authors, and Polish villagers who knew Kosinski when he was a child hiding from the scourge of Nazism, this program attempts to assess the verity of Kosinski's "autobiographical" fiction, the need for him to maintain a nebulous mystique about his early life, and to understand his obsession with S&M sex clubs in Manhattan during the 1970s and 1980s.
"If you can't stand for the national anthem, get your sorry ass out of this country."
-- Courageous Facebook Lodger
Conscience is a tough concept, isn't it? We're for it, until we aren't. It's absolutely vital to safeguard OUR right to the exercise of conscience, but yours?
Of course -- so long as we agree with each other.
I've seen the photo above many times, and back in 2014, I finally decided to see if there's a story.
There is. The significance to me is that while the circumstances in this instance are ones about which we've long since reached general agreement (Nazism, Hitler, the Holocaust), it is not banal to suggest that non-conformists of many sorts in our own purportedly "free" country can imagine themselves in Landmesser's shoes.
As an atheist, permit me to inform you that it happens all the time. In my reckoning, any time it's the occasion for all of us to perform the same rote act (pray publicly, declare allegiance to the flag) at once, it's time to consider dissenting.
Speaking for myself, I'll always stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance in honor of my father, a World War II veteran of the Marines. But I will not recite the pledge of allegiance aloud, because "under God" has no place in it.
... There is no telling how many men in that crowd were acting out of fear, fully aware that failing to salute the Fuhrer was akin to signing his own death certificate. Knowing that it was, in fact, Hitler standing before the crowd makes the disobedience all the more admirable, but what may seem like an act of justified transgression was at its core a gesture of love. August Landmesser, the man with his arms crossed, was married to a Jewish woman.
Just the other night over beers, I ventured the opinion that another global conflict on the order of the World Wars is inevitable -- not the disruptive but ultimately low intensity of the "war on terrorist Muslims," and not nuclear conflict (losing too many markets is bad for the 1%), but the big conventional kahuna, perhaps with a handy plague or famine to follow.
Cynicism aside, realism informs us that this cycle of pain has been repeated throughout human history, again and again. War becomes attractive, and is viewed as an acceptable alternative to negotiation, once enough people have forgotten what it really means, and with attention spans ever shorter amid the most readily available surplus of useful information in mankind's history, it's hard to come up with a plausible argument for the maintenance of peace.
I might suggest there are effective uses to thoughtful knowledge of the past, but that's thinking, and I'm not sure this notion is of interest at the precise moment when American wheels threaten to skip rails.
I'd suggest that recalling the lessons of the Holocaust, and remembering why we return so often to Eichmann, Arendt and the "banality" of evil, except that so many of our homegrown fascists are yelling so loudly, and the sound of those boots landing on human faces tends to drown out the teaching moment.
... All of which doesn’t make Eichmann any less disturbing. It makes him more so. For what Arendt’s Eichmann did was to demonstrate that ordinariness is no protection against doing great evil. Cesarani too, sees Eichmann as a sort of “everyman”. No, he wasn’t just a travel agent, indifferent to the destination of his passengers. He was personally responsible, a responsibility he blindly denied right to the end. Which is precisely why the moral message of his story remains profoundly unsettling: if ordinary people were capable of such great evil, then, given the right circumstances, so are the rest of us.
My friend Gregg Seidl wrote some very wise words on Facebook.
So Trump is going to rid the country of approximately 14 million people, and, according to him, the move will be quick, "and it won't be pretty."
The only difference between his commentary and that of the past is the last time those plans were spoken in German.
Actually, Joe Stalin uttered similar words in Russian, as pertaining to the Kulaks ... and it was not pretty.
When you reduce people to labels, they're dehumanized. When they're dehumanized, then "ridding" the country of them becomes nothing more than sweeping a floor, or spraying poison on insects.
But that first step remains dehumanizing them.
I realize that some other friends, and readers of this blog, are riding Trump's bandwagon. I believe most of you will dismount of your own accord, absent the need for me to hector you with inconvenient facts. But as an aficionado of history, Gregg sees something very important: When you start bandying phrases like "make us great again," the devil's truly in the details.
Who are we?
And: Who must be made to suffer in order to make "us" great again? Read the history books, folks. Trump is unleashing malevolent genies. The sooner it ends, the better.
So two yahoos from Southie in my hometown of Boston severely beat up a Hispanic homeless guy earlier this week. While being arrested, one of the brothers reportedly told police that "Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported."
When reporters confronted Trump, he hadn't yet heard about the incident. At first, he said, "That would be a shame." But right after, he went on:
"I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that."
This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.
I've been to Auschwitz. It is important to remember that while what one sees there is horrible enough, the most hellish part of the complex at Birkenau was demolished -- and these both were mere cogs in a much larger murderous enterprise.
The Holocaust now has slipped from active, living memory. That's why you should take the time to view the documentary film Shoah. When it was filmed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had been only four decades since war's end.
The drone clip is suitably chilling, It appeared at the BBC on Tuesday, the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation. I decided to wait a few days to post it. A guy needs time to think.
I've seen this photo for a very long time, and finally decided to see if there's a story. There is. The significance to me is that while the circumstances in this instance are ones about which we've long since reached agreement (Nazism, Hitler, the Holocaust), it is not banal to suggest that non-conformists of many sorts in our own purportedly "free" country can imagine themselves in Landmesser's shoes. Any time it's the occasion for all of us to perform the same act (pray publicly, declare allegiance to the flag) at once, it's time to consider dissenting.
The photo above has floated around the internet for a few years now, popular for one of its subjects’ subtle yet profound acts of nonconformity. There is no telling how many men in that crowd were acting out of fear, fully aware that failing to salute the Fuhrer was akin to signing his own death certificate. Knowing that it was, in fact, Hitler standing before the crowd makes the disobedience all the more admirable, but what may seem like an act of justified transgression was at its core a gesture of love. August Landmesser, the man with his arms crossed, was married to a Jewish woman.
In 1941, Charlotte Pommer graduated from medical school at the University of Berlin and went to work for Hermann Stieve, head of the school’s Institute of Anatomy. The daughter of a bookseller, Pommer had grown up in Germany’s capital city as Hitler rose to power. But she didn’t appreciate what the Nazis meant for her chosen field until Dec. 22, 1942. What she saw in Stieve’s laboratory that day changed the course of her life—and led her to a singular act of protest.
Stieve got his “material,” as he called the bodies he used for research, from nearby Plötzensee Prison, where the courts sent defendants for execution after sentencing them to die. In the years following the war, Stieve would claim that he dissected the corpses of only “dangerous criminals.” But on that day, Pommer saw in his laboratory the bodies of political dissidents. She recognized these people. She knew them.
I'm surprised to learn that Claude Lanzmann is still with us, but he is, at the ripe age of 87. The English translation of his 2009 autobiography has been published.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs approached Claude Lanzmann in 1973 and suggested that, with Israel’s backing, he make a documentary film about the murder of the European Jews.
When I'm asked to reveal my "favorite" film, it's always difficult for me to answer. Do documentaries count? If so, how can a work as grueling as Shoah be considered as "favored" in the intended context of pleasurable entertainment?
Ask me the most "influential" film of my life, and the answer is easier.
In retrospect, my initial viewing of Shoah in 1988 was the culmination of my free-lance, post-graduate education. I was the cliched sponge, voraciously soaking up books and documentaries about European history, culture and any related matters in an effort to achieve greater understanding during periods of continental travel. Lanzmann's relentless imagery has been with me ever since.
Living memories then are academic memories now, making remembrance in whatever form even more imperative. I wrote about it in 2006, and the entire essay is reprinted here.
This weekend, the Confidential household probably will begin watching the DVD release of director Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary film Shoah, an oral history of the Holocaust that runs almost ten hours and demands an effort on the part of the viewer that goes somewhat beyond that required to indulge the pablum of the typical Hollywood blockbuster.
I’ve not seen Shoah in its entirety since the early spring of 1988, a year or more after videotaping it from public television. Then, for a solid ten days, I set the alarm an hour early each morning and made my way through the film in bits, pieces and chunks before heading off to work.
While not particularly enjoyable in the conventional sense of entertainment, the Shoah documentary experience proved visceral as well as essential for my understanding of the Holocaust in the context of European countries I’d already been, and other places that were slated for future visits.
I’ve discussed Shoah with Mrs. Confidential on several occasions, and with the videotape long gone (Joe?), she took the initiative to check the appropriate Netflix boxes and kick off the process. It may take a couple of weeks, but surely after all these years it will be worth the effort to view the film a second time.
Shoah is an unconventional, brutally effective documentary that depicts and describes historical events without the use of archival footage or reenactments.
During the 1970’s, Lanzmann began filming real people – Jewish survivors, serenely acquiescent Poles and even (surreptitiously) an unrepentant SS officer – all of whom had lived through cataclysmic and unspeakably horrible events that primarily took place in areas of dense pre-war Jewish population, which during the Nazi occupation became dotted with planned centers of systematic slaughter.
These memories and recollections were filmed in a dozen or more then-Communist locales in Poland and Eastern Europe, with occasional side excursions to Israel, Germany and elsewhere in the world in conformity with the post-war diaspora of victims (and perpetrators), then organized into stories woven together with consummate skill as the hours pass, leading to an emotional crescendo guaranteed to leave the viewer both drained and fearing for the future of humanity.
It’s true that we manage somehow to survive. It’s unclear how we manage to do it.
At the time Shoah was released, its director was fiercely criticized for including footage that unflinchingly exposed lingering anti-Semite tendencies on the part of ethnic Poles, this coming at a time when Poland – through the activities of the Solidarity trade union movement and a sitting Pope – was being lionized by anti-Communists throughout the world as the best extant hope to commence the toppling of the Bloc’s socialist dominoes.
I’d studied the Holocaust in college and devoured Abba Eban’s Heritage: Civilization and the Jews PBS series. As a philosophy major, debates pertaining to the ethical culpability of ordinary Germans in atrocities committed during the war were certainly familiar to me – but when I watched Shoah in early 1988, it had been only a few months since my first trip through Poland.
This fact made for uncomfortable mornings in front of the tube.
----
In 1987, I was in Krakow, Poland with my friend Barrie (who’s now a Scribner Middle School history teacher) and two fellow travelers from Florida. We’d taken an unscheduled detour from the Soviet/Baltic/Poland youth and student package tour by hopping a Friday night train from Warsaw, an experience that taught us the dubious (and embarrassing) value of handing the conductor $5 cash and watching him evict people from their seats to make room for us.
We rationalized: It was the system to blame.
On a Saturday morning, after overnighting in Krakow for $2 each in a pensioner’s shabby flat, we rustled a few grams of greasy salami and bread, then found the dingy bus station in the city’s crumbling and neglected downtown, and joined several dozen Polish weekend trippers on a bumpy, grinding, two-hour SRO journey to Oswiecim – in German, Auschwitz. There were no English speakers around to help, but we managed to guess the correct stop near the entrance to the museum and memorial.
Once there, we paid a fee and wordlessly passed through the numbing exhibits inside the old brick barracks buildings of Auschwitz 1, a strangely bureaucratic and tidy introduction to the supreme horror a few hundred meters away at Birkenau, the epicenter of the assembly line death camp. You’ve probably read or heard about the rooms filled with abandoned luggage, eye glasses, artificial limbs, shoes, children’s toys – all confiscated from prospective victims as they were paraded off cattle cars to perish within the gates that read, “Arbeit Macht Frei” … or, work will make you free.
Intense? Chilling? Insane? Yes, and so much worse than these and any other inadequate words that we have little choice except to pretend might encapsulate some measure of the emotion felt at a crime site with a scale of aspiration well beyond the imagination of a twenty-something Hoosier bumpkin.
After two hours, we’d had enough. To get back to Krakow – and return to Warsaw later that evening – necessitated a short walk into the center of Oswiecim, where we boarded a train that ran roughly half the distance back to the city before abruptly disgorging us to change at a rural crossing point.
The day had become hot and sultry, and activity at the station was minimal. There was a simple buffet offering plates of mystery meat in gray sauce, but we weren’t so much hungry as thirsty – not just thirsty, but fairly desperate for an adult beverage or three to ease the transition from wartime Auschwitz back to shabby 1980’s-vintage Poland.
Pivo? Wodka?
Alas, there was no succor for the bibulous at the train station. Resigned to temperance, and waiting at the platform, there were green fields and crops visible in the distance beyond the tracks. Clean but roughly dressed people were walking in little groups toward the settlement – surely even in a Polish farm town there’d be something happening on Saturday night – and just before the train finally limped in, a horse-drawn cart clattered across the weathered cobblestones nearby.
I’d been looking at the older folks among the crowd. With memories of Auschwitz still raw, It’s obvious what I was thinking … and I kept those thoughts to myself.
Later, watching Shoah, the parched rail platform reverie and the native Poles populating it came back to me with a vengeance, and they wouldn’t let go throughout the remainder of the film over that period of days as Lanzmann meticulously peeled away the dusty layers of memory and forced the viewer to think: What did it all mean?
This is by no means a denunciation of Poland and the Poles, or an attempt at facile erudition with respect to their places in the historical record, only an observation that there are times when very little makes sense, especially when one’s own senses are being burdened with the unsettling melancholy of time.
Or, of time passed.
It has been thirty years since Lanzmann’s film went into production, and certainly all survivors he chronicled are dead. The people I saw in Poland in 1987 are twenty years older, and many of them have passed on, too. While I am reasonably confident that the readers of this blog need not be reminded of what the Holocaust meant, to be honest, I’m not so sure when I look out the window of my office toward the rental properties lining the other side of the street – or toward the streets in parts of Europe where anti-Semitism persists in spite of what happened there more than a half-century before.
Nature or nurture – or both? We’re classified as human by biological default at birth, but mustn’t we learn how to be human? If no one is there to teach us what it means to be human, or shirks the responsibility, aren’t we condemned to repeating these instances of man's inhumanity to man?
I'm told that a new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night is back on the paperback bestseller list. I sincerely hope that’s a good omen.
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