So It Goes

Kristallnacht: The Other Anniversary

HOW INTERESTING THAT TODAY, NOVEMBER 9, is the anniversary of one of the most exhilarating moments of happiness in 20th century history and one of the most terrifying: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Kristallnacht in 1938. One is a celebration of liberation, the other a solemn remembrance of how a people became enemies of their own country overnight.

I don't mean to dim the bright light of elation we should all feel about the fall of the Berlin Wall, to make any comparisons or to suggest that one was linked to the other -- though for those in the East the dark cloud of dehumanization that appeared in 1930s Germany and Austria hovered for another 50 years.

For some reason, it just seemed appropriate to think for at least a few minutes about what was a pivotal moment in the war against the Jews in Europe. For Jews in Germany and Austria who had hoped the ominous depredations imposed on them by the Nazis would either level off or go away, Kristallnacht was a clear message that they were in serious danger. It shook and frightened them, hastening their efforts to find refuge elsewhere. Some got out, many didn't because many governments around the world, including the U.S., were unwilling to be burdened by them.

For those not familiar, Kristallnacht was a Nazi government-inspired pogrom against German and Austrian Jews. The pretext for the pogrom was a Jew's assassination of a government official in the Germany Embassy in Paris. That incident set off a flurry of violent attacks on Jews and their personal and communal property.

In his 1985 historical book "The Holocaust," Sir Martin Gilbert described the toll:

"Bonfires were lit in every neighbourhood where Jews lived. On them were thrown prayer books, Torah scrolls, and countless volumnes of philosophy, history and poetry. In thousands of streets, Jews were chased, reviled and beaten up.

"In twenty-four hours of street violence, ninety-one Jews were killed. More than thirty thousand -- and one in ten of those who remained -- were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Before most of them were released two to three months later, as many as a thousand had been murdered, 244 of them in Buchenwald. A further eight thousand Jews were evicted from Berlin: children from orphanages, patients from hospitals, old people from old peoples' homes. There were many suicides....

"During the night, as well as breaking into tens of thousands of shops and homes, the Stormtroops set fire to one hundred and ninety-one synagogues.... The destruction of the synagogues led the Nazis to call that night Kristallnacht, or 'night of the broken glass'; words chosen deliberately to mock and belittle."

For a more personal reflection from a surviver of that terrifying time and for some images of the destruction, click here.

As I sit here in the quiet of my house in a country where I move freely and fearlessly, it's hard to imagine what it must be like to witness this sudden and furious spasm of violence aimed at everything that sustains me -- to have, as the survivor in the video relates, neighbors break down my door and run through the house destroying everything in sight. And, knowing now what would happen over the next several years, it is terrifying to think how quickly the tide can turn. And, finally, it is unfathomable to understand how desperate it must have felt to be trapped inside this hostile land with few options to leave.

It is almost like being buried alive. Indeed, that's exactly what it was.

Jeff

Photo above: A synagogue burns in Siegen, Germany, on November, 10 1938. [Photo Credit: The Pictorial History of the Holocaust, ed. Yitzhak Arad. New York: Macmillan, 1990.]

Coney Island With My Own Eyes

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, I have heard from my father about Coney Island, Brooklyn, his birthplace and childhood home, but I had never been there. So, of course, it took on this rather mythic quality in my mind. That's because it was a myth to me, a sort of sacred but unverifiable narrative that explains my father, to some extent.

Seeing it with my own eyes, as I did with my father on July 5, 2006, was a bit of a let down. Not that I was expecting the Garden of Eden. I knew that, even before Coney Island fell on hard times, it did not fall far. It was almost always a place of poverty, whether the people realized it or not (as the late humorist Sam Levinson once said, even though he grew up dirt poor, he never knew it until he got older because everyone around him was too.) I didn't think it would be more glamourous than it was because the closest Coney Island ever came to glamour, from what I can tell, was bright amusement lights, freak shows and Vaudevillian acts of its earlier days.

It's just when you see something that you have conjured in your mind for some time, it's never exactly what you imagined -- for the same reason that people are often let down by movie versions of books they've read, even if, on their own terms, the movies are pretty good.

Mermaid Avenue is the spine of the neighborhood where my dad lived. It runs generally north and south, just about parallel to and about two or three blocks from where all amusement park attractions ran along the boardwalk and the ocean. As he and I walked the neighborhood, I realized that nearly all his world ran for about two to four blocks on either side of Mermaid between West 14th Street or Stillwell Avenue (where the elevated train still spills people onto the approach to the boardwalk, right where Nathan's made a fortune selling hot dogs for five cents, half what his former employer charged) to maybe West 37th Street at the farthest. In other words, that's about 23 blocks by about maybe eight blocks.

Everything they needed -- or at least could afford -- was there. There was the obligatory drug store on the corner of my dad's street at West 23rd and Mermaid, where the pharmacist was more of a primary physician than the primary physicans, diagnosing and treating minor ailments, and where my dad and his friends would hover in hopes of getting tapped to tell someone in an apartment nearby that there was a phone call for them at the drug store. For that he could count on a five cent tip. (Everything, ite seemed, was a nickel: a hot dog, admission to a movie, a tip for helping someone with groceries.)

The drug store is gone now, as are most of the physical, let alone communal, remnants of the neighborhood of his time, which was mostly during the Depression years. A couple of blocks away was his elementary school. Judging from the vintage and the wear of the houses that are now standing on the site of that building, it looks like it was torn down (probably under the policy of "urban renewal") close to 50 years ago. Another block or two from there, on a corner on Mermaid Avenue, is the site of his former synagogue. It is now a police station that looks like it could have been built in the 1980s, suggesting that the synagogue building (if not its use as a synagogue) may have held on for a while.

Strangely, if maybe providentially, at least one momument to his youth remained. As we turned the corner from Mermaid onto West 23rd Street, we were on the lookout for the site of the one apartment (of the three or four) in which he and his family spent their most time while in Coney Island. "What was the address of the building?" Without any hesitation, he answered, "2875." We walked another 25 yards and found that the only surviving three-flat apartment building on that side of the street was -- 2875 W. 23rd St.

We were really kind of flabbergasted. Because so much of what he remembered was no longer there,  and seeing as how this was the only remaining building of the era on that street (albeit, it looked pretty "rustic"), it almost seemed cosmic that it would still be there. If there were some reason for that being something more than a coincidence, then why? Is my dad somehow a chosen person and was that a sign from God? If so, what should he do about that? Wrestle with an angel, lead enslaved people from bondage, or take his only son (that would be me) to the top of a mountain, bind and slash him and then offer him up in sacrifice to God? It didn't come to that (thank goodness), but I have to say it was almost that kind of a moment.

This was the first time my father had been back to this neighborhood in exactly 60 years to the month. That's when he returned from the Army and told his mother (who had been a widow since her husband, my grandfather, died while she was pregnant with my father), that he didn't want to stay in New York. It was too busy and chaotic for him. He wanted to give Indiana a try. He had lived his high school years in Indianapolis when the whole family followed his brother-in-law during the war to work in an airplane engine factory. He has been in Indiana ever since, and the only vestige of his being a Brooklynite is his tendency to say "bidness," instead of "business" (biz-niss).

We were there a day after the great annual hot dog-eating contest at Nathan's, an event that attracted tens of thousands of fans and serious ESPN play-by-play coverage (aired opposite the World Cup final game, alas). In the wake of the crowd, the place was still a mess. Also, it was raining off and on that day, and the light was a little gloomy.

It was hard not to feel that way, too. That's not to say that everything must stay in a perpetual and pristine condition, waiting for everyone who ever lived there to make a sudden pilgramage. But it is still a living community. Indeed, there is a new minor league baseball park, which I'm told is packed every game, and there has been a true revitalization of the amusement parks there and the boardwalk. The crime and violence of only a decade or so ago are apparently rare now. And you can still get a good hot dog.

What's more, there are many families in Coney Island now, from many parts of the world, especially Russia, who are reliving the life my father and his family lived. The place looks different now, but not that different.

Jeff

July 1864 and Today

A STONE OBELISK erected to the memory of 17 unknown fallen Confederate soldiers stands in a small church graveyard about a half mile from my house. Planted in the ground beneath it is a small Confederate flag.

It’s an odd sight for someone like me, who grew up in a northern state, where there are no such firsthand reminders of the Civil War. I still find it fascinating to see the actual ground where all this terrible history occurred and even more amazing that it is only a short distance from my own home.

And it’s a bit stranger to see a Confederate flag rippling in the breeze beside the obelisk – a fairly new flag, obviously planted by someone recently, perhaps for this Memorial Day – in Maryland, only a mile or so north of the District of Columbia border.

Marylanders were ambivalent about the Civil War. Confederate and Union sympathizers alike lived here. But it was technically a Union state. And given its current cultural and ideological landscape, I’m surprised that the presence of a Confederate flag in Maryland soil (highly visible from the very edge of a busy arterial street, no less) hasn’t stirred up some opposition. Even in southern states, where the site of Confederate flags is much more common, some great public debates have accompanied their presence in recent years.

Because it is Memorial Day weekend, I decided that I would devote some of my time yesterday to thinking about what the holiday stands for. So I got on my bike and made a few stops: one at the small cemetery near my house, another at the site of Ft. Stevens, about three miles away, and another at the small National Cemetery that bears the remains of some 40 Union soldiers who fought at Ft.Stevens in defense of the national capital. Along the way, I passed the gates of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as I do many times a week, and where the casualties of today’s great conflict go to repair the battered bodies.

In July 1864, Confederate General Jubal Early led his 15,000 troops up the Shenandoah Valley north to Hagerstown, Md., and then east to Washington through Fredrick. Early’s forces met with little or no resistance as they made their way to the capital. Their objective was to distract the Union from its growing military pressure on Richmond by applying pressure of its own on Washington, D.C.

Ft. Stevens, which stood near the northern point of Washington, D.C. was “defended by a meager force of convalescents, quartermaster employees and 100 day militia volunteers,” according to a historic market on its present-day site. Apparently, even after several years of bloody humiliations by the Confederate, the Union still found it difficult to believe its capital was at all vulnerable, surely not from the north.

On July 11, Early’s soldiers came within 150 yards of Ft. Stevens (after sacking and burning the houses of Francis Preston Blair, Sr., a prominent counselor to President Abraham Lincoln, and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring, Md.) and attacked. The “meager” Union force repelled the attack before receiving reinforcements on July 12.

In addition to this being the closest the capital city came to capture by the Confederacy, it was notably the closest Lincoln ever came to being shot by in the line of fire. As David Herbert Donald described in his Lincoln biography, “Lincoln was in the fort when it was first attacked. Having driven out from Washington in his carriage, he mounted to the front parapet. He borrowed a field glass from the signal officer Asa Townshend Abbott and looked out over the field where the Confederates were advancing. ‘He stood there with a long frock coat and plug hat on, making a very conspicuous figure,’ Abbott recalled. When the Confederates came within shooting distance, an officer twice cautioned Lincoln to get down, but he paid no attention. Then a man standing near him was shot in the leg, and a soldier roughly order the President to get down or he would have his head knocked off. He coolly descended, got into his carriage, and was driven back to the city….”

The President returned to the fort with his wife the next day. Again, he mounted the parapet. “After a surgeon standing near him was shot, [General Horatio G.] Wright ordered the parapet cleared and asked the President to step down. Lincoln insisted on remaining until the general said he would have him forcibly removed.”

(I don't know if you can see it well in the photo above, but the vertical-ish stone at the left edge of the image is supposedly where Lincoln stood on the parapet. Click the photo and you can see a larger version of it.)

On one level, it seems somewhat admirable that the Commander-in-Chief would allow himself even a brief sampling of the horrible events over which he presided, if only to give him a regular reminder of the consequences his decisions might cause. (I don’t know whether Winston Churchill came as close to the heat of battles during World War II. But it’s remarkable that, after being humiliated and demoted from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty following the devastating failure of the 1915 Dardanelles campaign, which conceived and promoted, Churchill suited up as a Colonel and went to the trenches of France and Belgium, where he led a battalion soldiers in battle. Not something many high-ranking political leaders, who are responsible for putting boys into battle, have done, certainly not today.)

On another level, it’s hard to believe  Lincoln would be so reckless. He had to know that even a minor wound would be an enormous symbol of the Confederacy’s strength and surely disabling to the Union. But maybe there was something else going on with the war-weary President. As Herbert writes, only a few days before the Ft. Stevens attack, “a visitor found Lincoln deeply depressed, ‘indeed quite paralyzed and wilted down.’” Not that he had a death wish, but maybe he wasn’t quite as clear-eyed as he should have been. Who really knows?

The remains of Union soldiers killed at  Ft. Stevens in July 1864 lay in a small national battle cemetery about a quarter of a mile away. It is maybe an acre and a half of well-kept land, surrounded by an ornate iron fence and tucked between rather run-down apartment buildings and retail shops along the same well-traveled street that passes the Confederate memorial near my house. (The 17 remembered there died in the same battle of Ft. Stevens.) In it are several large monuments memorializing various regiments from different northern states. At the center of the cemetary, is a flagpole, surrounded by circle of small headstones, many with names too worn by weather to read. (The design of the cemetery reminds one of the much larger and more famous cemetery at Gettysburg, which, if you read Garry Wills’ excellent book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, is no accident. It reflects a revolution of cemetery design at the time.)

Remembering the people whose remains lay in this place – and even in the ground under the Confederate memorial ­­– is the least we owe them and the many others Americans killed and wounded in battle. Especially on Memorial Day, when doing so is little more than an afterthought for most of us.

But it’s also good for us, the living, to remember. Lincoln famously declared in his First Inaugural Address that the “mystic chords of memory, stre[t]ching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Memory is what binds us together as Americans, though the necessary debates about what is the true memory can divide us as well.

We also owe a lot to the men and women convalescing at Walter Reed, which sits along the busy three-mile stretch between the Union and Confederate monuments to the battle of Ft. Stevens. Our media and many other organizations do a lot to remember what they and their colleagues have done in this war. But I still feel we are too removed from them. Many of our national political leaders on the one hand apparently want to remind us of why the war in Iraq is important and justified. But on the other hand, they don’t want it to intrude too much on the daily lives of Americans, lest that depress the morale of the nation. And we don’t seem to want to be reminded. We don’t want these terrible memories to interfere with our own desire for normalcy.

Even if the lives of many soldiers and their families are far from normal. The physically and mentally ravaged put their lives back together on the bucolic Walter Reed campus. I occasionally see a few of them, with missing limbs, at a mall near our house and the hospital. Just as I can’t imagine what it must have been like to march in ranks into enemy fire during the Civil War, I can’t imagine what today’s war casualties and their families are going through. I hope their sorrows will have been worth it, though I unfortunately suspect they have not.

So let us take at least a few minutes out of the holiday celebrations to truly remember and give them thanks.

Jeff

(To see photos of Ft. Stevens and memorials to the Confederate and Union soldiers killed in battle there, go to the photo album on the righthand sidebar.)