Back to the Future

 

“Is this your first time in Austria? 

“No, my second … I was born here”.

That was a frequent Q & A exchange as I met various government officials and colleagues of our host. But what drew me back now, and why were so many Austrians eager to meet me? 

My father and me

Braunau DP camp 

Austria 1947

Chapter I

The story begins one evening at the turn of the 21st Century when my father was sitting in his den exchanging email jokes with friends on his internet enabled dial-up device, a.k.a., WebTV. Out of the blue, he received an email from Karl Ramsmaier, an Austrian academic in the city of Steyr researching history of forced labor from the notorious concentration camp, KZ Mauthausen. Steyr was home to one of Mauthausen’s complex of forty-nine labor sub-camps and where my father tasted freedom for the first time after his years of Nazi imprisonment. US forces liberated the camp in May 1945. 

 

Karl and his wife Woltraud

While conducting his research in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum archives, Karl came across photos my father took following liberation and wanted to connect for more info. 

My dad could NOT believe that someone from across the world found him through that little WebTV set top box! Being too excited to handle the discussions, he handed the mission over to me. That began more than twenty years of cyber exchanges with Karl, and more recently with Martin Hagmayr, a young historian and museum curator from Steyr.  

Martin and I reviewing additional photos at my home 

during his research visit to Boston, Washington, and NY last fall. 

The Leica camera my dad used during his documentation of life in the post war Displaced Persons camps rests on the table.

Culling from my family’s archive, I’ve supplied Martin with a host of additional images, documents, and answers to a long list of questions about my parents’ experiences. He was happy to report that with support of the Austrian government, construction is underway for a Learning Center in the former Lenort Synagogue of Steyr, the synagogue my father helped re-establish after the war. The Center will be dedicated to never forgetting the atrocities of the Holocaust and to preventing fascism from ever creeping back into the country.

    The Austrian government has a checkered past during the Holocaust, so this is huge. Initially it claimed that Anschluss, Nazi Germany’s 1938 annexation, indicated Austrians, not Jews, were the first victims. However, images of über enthusiastic ‘seig heiling’ crowds welcoming Der Führer as he triumphantly strode down Vienna’s boulevards in his Mercedes staff car debunks that version of history. 

    The Center, currently on schedule for an official opening in early 2027, will also be home for a permanent exhibition of Jewish life in Steyr. My dad’s photos will be prominently featured. 

In May of this year the official announcement of the Center took place. Knowing that it had government backing, the governor of Upper Austria and the Mayor of Steyr wanted to be at the press conference where Martin Hagmayr presented the plan for creating the Learning Center.  

In Martin's presentation he shows a 1946 image of the Lenort Synagogue
with some of the group members working to re-establish it after the war.
My father is third from the left.

As the son of a survivor of the Mauthausen camp and a contributor of archival material, I was invited to participate in the official broadcast announcements and speak about my father. They all considered me a celebrity!  

Martin, me, Governor of Upper Austria Thomas Stelzer, and Steyr Mayor Markus Vogl at the press conference. Simultaneous German translation was provided for me. In the foreground is a Hanukkah menorah crafted by my father which my family was donating to the Center's exhibit.

That’s why I am here now.

But that’s hardly the only reason I made the journey. More of that story will unfold in Chapter II.

Stay tuned …… 

Order Out of Chaos

Finding personal order 

amidst Planet Earth’s inevitable chaos 

What’s the prescription for how we can cope with the continuous turmoil engulfing our times? Consider the following stories and a suggested MO …….

Passover 2026 (or year 5786 if measuring time on the Hebrew calendar) is now history. It’s late at night and our last Seder guests have just left. Seder means order. The ritual Seder meal provides structure for annually recounting the Exodus story which Jews are obligated to pass down from generation to generation. 

Wearily strolling back from the front door, I momentarily held my breath when catching sight of the kitchen sink brimming with dirty dishes and adjacent counters piled high with the overflow. It was a balagan*! Cleaning up those towering cairns of Seder residue and restoring order in the kitchen was destined to be a big time job. 

But I wasn’t phased at all! 

Making order out of chaos has long been my MO. 

Let me offer two examples.  

The setting for the first was at Harvard’s School of Dental Medicine in 1971. I’m in the third year of the program and the pull of pursuing post-doctoral specialty training has descended upon me. The option of a public health residency with the Indian Health Service topped my list of interests. That program provided an opportunity, arm in arm with physicians, to serve a population with considerable health care challenges. I would be rendering sorely needed care for folks presenting with a multiplicity of advanced dental afflictions while gaining valuable experience to sharpen my operative skills. The residency would be a sweet spot for making order out of dental chaos. 

A win-win.

 

a simple before and after case 

of a patient with a common problem 

who at least still had most of his teeth

As it turned out, later on in my third year the magnetic pull of another dental discipline became even stronger. I ended up pursuing advanced training in periodontology, the foundational basis for all dental care. It more perfectly blended my bent towards artistry and surgery and was a true ‘dental chaos busting’ discipline.

Now let’s move on to another ‘making order out of chaos’ example. For this one, the scene shifts almost 6,000 miles to the east. I’m now on an IDF (Israel Defense Forces) base in Israel about to fulfill a volunteer stint providing civilian services in support of base operations.

 

One of my tours of duty was right after the 2014 war against Hamas in Gaza. Positioned just outside the northeastern border of the Gaza Envelope, the base served as a staging area for mobilized troops. Arriving reservists camped there before moving on to the front. After deployment, these soldiers hastily dropped off their gear in helter-skelter fashion before anxiously returning home. What remained was another balagan for base crews to sort through and organize for the next time. Sadly, a next time always seemed to come to pass. So, along with a cadre of fellow volunteers from all over the world, we set out to make new order out of the disarray left behind.

  

vests, helmets, field mattresses, etc, needed to be sorted 

and tents to be repaired and stored

Are you seeing the connection yet? In both cases I was fulfilling my MO, making order out of chaos.

Circling back now to Passover 2026 ... prior to the first Seder my rabbi challenged the congregation with this question, similar to what I posed at the start of this Photo-blog: 

How can we find personal order 

with the world on fire and engulfed in chaos 

as we wish one another a ‘Happy Passover’?

 

not my rabbi but a rabbi nonetheless

posing a question 

Far Rockaway, NY

His suggestion was to find something that provided structure in your life, something you can turn to every day. The repeated routine can ground you, leaving you with positive energy to offset the chaos of our times. 

As you can see, I’m always trying to ‘make order out of chaos’. Perhaps that pension for order can be a universal MO for these times. 

consider order in the kitchen restored

* Balagan is a Hebrew slang term, borrowed from Yiddish/Slavic, meaning a state of complete chaos, mess, disorder, or a fiasco. It is commonly used in Israel to describe messy situations, disorganized places, or unruly scenes. It often carries a tone of exasperation or humor.

The Promise

 

It was just before Valentine’s Day 2026 as I was mulling over all the amorous words I might soon bestow on my beloved partner in life and best friend forever. Fortuitously both happen to be the same person, my wife Carol. Suddenly the spell was broken - I had a flashback to a particularly fraught episode in our lives! Where did that memory come from and why now? It concerned consuming bugs and a solemn promise I made about gasoline.

You must be thinking - WHAT/WHY! Or thinking, rather than bugs, what mushrooms is this guy eating. Not to keep you in the dark about my gastronomic pica for arthropods and ‘The Promise’, here’s the prequel.

Our destination was Joshua Tree National Park, a junction point of the Mojave and Colorado deserts in southeastern California. The park is vast, with a barren moon-like landscape covering almost a million acres. It rests among the top tier of our largest national parks. Once inside, there’s no cell service, no fuel, no food, nor any other amenity. You enter and you are on your own.  

Foolishly, and a bit lazily I assumed Joshua Tree would be like Acadia, a park we previously visited, one rubbing shoulders with our smaller parks - easy in, easy out, and close to civilization.

Turns out it wasn’t, not by a long shot.

Before setting out for our thirty minute plus highway drive to Joshua Tree, Carol asked if we had enough gas. The fuel gauge of our rented Jeep was close to half full. Even with the Jeep’s non stellar fuel economy, figuring on a seventy mile round trip, I confidently responded, “no problem, more than enough”.“But there’s a station right here, why not do it now?” she replied. Carol is typically right 98% of the time and I’m usually wrong the other 2% yet somehow I keep forgetting that. So much to her chagrin, off we went without fueling up.  

Carol and the Wrangler

Soon while cruising to the park on Interstate 10, I felt a slight chill as the fuel gauge started dropping to ‘E” much faster than expected. Not having done  my homework, I didn’t know about Joshua Tree’s, ‘once you enter, you are on your own’ admonition. Not to be deterred, I soldiered on thinking, ‘worse comes to worse, I could get directly to the north entrance, fill up outside the park, then resume our planned in-the-park itinerary. Of course I also didn’t know that once in, the north gateway still remained an hour away. 

That’s when I recalled learning about desert survival skills and bugs. 

In an earlier journey Carol and I were in Israel on a water mission learning about Israel’s magic with water.  

In the Negev Desert

Among those feats was converting seawater into potable H2O with a surplus sufficient for export to neighboring states. Gray and recycled water irrigated crops and literally made the desert bloom. Given the harsh terrain, that was  miraculous. 

One morning while still in the Negev desert region, we opted to take a sunrise ride to a nearby natural wonder - the immense 40 km long Ramon Crater. Omar was our guide and driver. Bouncing along in his jeep, which had plenty of gas, Omar recalled the desert survival course of his IDF service.  

Omar is in the middle

It was an eye opener to learn that if stranded and out of supplies, soldiers were supposed to seek out and eat bugs for their protein content and NOT eat green vegetation. 

Q: Why, aren’t greens good for you? 

A: Since some plants are poisonous, even if consuming won’t kill you, you’ll get sick, perhaps violently and then compromised.

Now back to Joshua Tree, and well into the park’s no man’s land. 

Joshua Tree Desert and thinking the worse case scenario

My gut was now officially in a tight square knot, it was decision time. I pulled over to a culvert, stopped and turned to Carol who was visibly not a happy camper. Guilty as charged for passing up fueling fiascos, I took a knee and begged forgiveness. Then I solemnly made ‘The Promise’ - “When you tell me to fill up, I will!” 

In my mind I was thinking about my friend Kevin who once mentioned, “When I turned 50, I never passed a men’s room without paying a visit”.

I would now apply that crisis avoidance approach to gas stations whenever Carol recommends fueling up sooner than later. 

Not all men’s rooms have such interesting decor

With my flashback of the desert drama over, I refocused and finished composing my Valentine’s Day words, then looked forward to soon going out for a romantic dinner. Fuel would not be a concern as the restaurant was just a short walk away.