Down at the coal mine,
then a memorial ceremony
for a few Holocaust victims
For all the readers following this blog (hopefully lots of you!), Part 3 has been delayed a bit by how busy Bonnie and I have been since leaving Berlin -- spending three days with friends in Rosbach, then moving on to visit an iStock photographer in a little town near Dortmund. We've been doing what you'd expect -- photography. Wednesday, for example, we toured an old coal mine industrial complex, Zollvererin, that is now a tourist attraction -- and I (believe it or not) modeled for photos suggestive of dying industry.
Part 3, now partly written, will focus on a concentration camp that doesn't get as much press as the big names like Auschwitz and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. You just can't escape the horrors that emanated from Germany seven decades ago, as bits of that history turn up everywhere -- even when you are not seeking them.
Late this afternoon, for example, returning to our host Sylvia's apartment building in suburban Frondenberg, we heard music from a small park just below. It was a dedication ceremony for an improved memorial to the few Holocaust victims of the community. There were few Jewish people in this part of town in the Nazi era, but those who were here and perished are remembered.
Soon to come -- a photo of the dedication ceremony, and then Part 3 with the truly terrible story of the place near Berlin where killing techniques were designed and practiced, and future Nazi concentration camp commandants were trained.
Although this blog has slowed a bit, Bonnie has been posting pictures and short accounts in her Journeys blog. We collaborated there as I wrote the narrative captions for nearly a dozen photos from just one rainy day's adventures. Check them out at http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2009/09/baths-rain-hully-gully-and-wine.html
Showing posts with label U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Holocaust memories
Attack in D.C. brings to mind
another sad day at the museum
The murderous attack Wednesday at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by a crazy octogenarian American nazi brought to mind my last journey there, at the behest of a houseguest who had been a child in Germany during World War II – and a victim of sorts.
Leo, our visitor, shared a few of his time-dimmed memories – the first of them being Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938, when Hitler’s thugs began in earnest the genocide that would claim some 6 million European Jews and untold millions of others.
Among the thousands of homes and businesses ransacked as Jews were rounded up, and thousands deported to concentration camps, was a neighborhood confectionery. Leo’s memory was of his asking his parents why the candy store had been destroyed, and not getting much of an answer.
Eventually, Leo said, his family had to move to a town in Poland.
His father – a Nazi official – had been appointed as its de-facto mayor.
Leo’s next shared memory, a little more vivid, comes from late in the war: His mother hurriedly packing the car, and big guns firing in the distance that heralded a Russian advance. His family fled back to Germany, and survived. Leo said his father was sent to some sort of re-education camp, and subsequently came home – and did not speak of his role as a Nazi before dying in the 1950s.
But Leo, as he grew up, learned what happened in the war and eventually moved to America. A retired physician in his early 70s, Leo wanted to visit the Holocaust museum to see firsthand the evidence that so much cruelty and murder had left behind – walk through a rail car that had carried the victims to death camps, see the room filled with their shoes, see the pictures of people who vanished into gas chambers and ovens and mass graves, mothers, fathers, children.
Leo wept. It was the legacy of his father: Guilt and overwhelming sorrow for horrors that had surrounded his childhood.
And I, who grew up Jewish in Northwest Baltimore, put an arm around him offering consolation.
Maybe 88-year-old James W. von Brunn is also a victim. He is, after all, afflicted with a disease all too common in the United States: Hatred. And after voicing it for years, von Brunn, a convicted felon, stepped out of his car and into the museum Wednesday carrying a rifle. In the ensuing exchange of gunfire, von Brunn was critically wounded and a security guard was killed.
Accounts of the event describe von Brunn as, among other things, a white supremacist. His victim Wednesday, Stephen T. Johns, who had worked at the museum for six years, was an African American – and, with the other guards whose quick action protected a crowd of visiting schoolchildren and tourists from injury, a hero.
The slain security guard likely was on duty the day that Leo and I took our sad walk back through time.
To see a few photos from that day, check out Bonnie's Journeys blog at http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2009/06/we-must-remember.html
another sad day at the museum
The murderous attack Wednesday at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by a crazy octogenarian American nazi brought to mind my last journey there, at the behest of a houseguest who had been a child in Germany during World War II – and a victim of sorts.
Leo, our visitor, shared a few of his time-dimmed memories – the first of them being Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938, when Hitler’s thugs began in earnest the genocide that would claim some 6 million European Jews and untold millions of others.
Among the thousands of homes and businesses ransacked as Jews were rounded up, and thousands deported to concentration camps, was a neighborhood confectionery. Leo’s memory was of his asking his parents why the candy store had been destroyed, and not getting much of an answer.
Eventually, Leo said, his family had to move to a town in Poland.
His father – a Nazi official – had been appointed as its de-facto mayor.
Leo’s next shared memory, a little more vivid, comes from late in the war: His mother hurriedly packing the car, and big guns firing in the distance that heralded a Russian advance. His family fled back to Germany, and survived. Leo said his father was sent to some sort of re-education camp, and subsequently came home – and did not speak of his role as a Nazi before dying in the 1950s.
But Leo, as he grew up, learned what happened in the war and eventually moved to America. A retired physician in his early 70s, Leo wanted to visit the Holocaust museum to see firsthand the evidence that so much cruelty and murder had left behind – walk through a rail car that had carried the victims to death camps, see the room filled with their shoes, see the pictures of people who vanished into gas chambers and ovens and mass graves, mothers, fathers, children.
Leo wept. It was the legacy of his father: Guilt and overwhelming sorrow for horrors that had surrounded his childhood.
And I, who grew up Jewish in Northwest Baltimore, put an arm around him offering consolation.
Maybe 88-year-old James W. von Brunn is also a victim. He is, after all, afflicted with a disease all too common in the United States: Hatred. And after voicing it for years, von Brunn, a convicted felon, stepped out of his car and into the museum Wednesday carrying a rifle. In the ensuing exchange of gunfire, von Brunn was critically wounded and a security guard was killed.
Accounts of the event describe von Brunn as, among other things, a white supremacist. His victim Wednesday, Stephen T. Johns, who had worked at the museum for six years, was an African American – and, with the other guards whose quick action protected a crowd of visiting schoolchildren and tourists from injury, a hero.
The slain security guard likely was on duty the day that Leo and I took our sad walk back through time.
To see a few photos from that day, check out Bonnie's Journeys blog at http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2009/06/we-must-remember.html
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