A Beacon of Hope and Memory

 

towering column of the New England Holocaust Memorial

                                                     

What is the role of memorials?

     How should they be constructed? 

     Where should they be situated? 

All memorials are not created equal. Some are extremely graphic, others are abstract and cerebral evoking contemplation. Some are prominent in the landscape/cityscape, others may blend into their settings too often passed unnoticed and not respected for what they represent. Despite diversity in design and placement, all memorials should be on the same page - helping us remember and understand the past. But without accompanying background material, either text, audio, video, or that provided by a docent, the experience of engaging a memorial may be devoid of context and unfortunately somewhat sterile.

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The New England Holocaust Memorial (NEHM), rising up from a section of Boston's historic Freedom Trail is a stunning construct: six glass towers, each representing one million Jews murdered during the Holocaust years and each named at the base for a death camp. It was a time of complete breakdown in democratic and moral society.

Jews were systematically deprived of their rights and ultimately their humanity. In effect they were reduced to a sequence of digits - numbers that are now etched into the glass panels of the towers.

The numbers serve as silent witnesses while vapors of steam, recalling victims' last breaths and crematoria smoke of their incinerated bodies, continuously float upward from the cauldrons at the base of each tower. Those darkest of times leave an indelible stain on the twentieth century.

But passersby often walk through the memorial seeing it as a pathway to and from a nearby T-station and not as sacred space for reflection, remembrance, grieving, or call for pro-action. In this way the memorial's message is frequently missed.

This cannot stand. This should not stand. And now twenty-five years after the memorial was dedicated, it will not. In a twist of logic, a swastika spray painted on a public space became the engine of change.

*****

The incident shocked a local community - illicit hate graffiti had defaced a high school wall. A young man, let's call him John, who painted the swastika was apprehended. The crime warranted prosecution in court, but if so, its record would have shadowed John for the rest of his life. Town officials chose a different path, one of restorative justice. It was comprised of community service, letters of apology, counseling, and other means for John to fully understand the hurt he inflicted. He would also experience a visit to the New England Holocaust Memorial guided by a member of the town's Human Rights Commission, someone whose family was decimated by the Holocaust. Restorative justice is a process to create light out of darkness, helping an individual become a better person, one who would make better decisions and stand up to hate. It foregoes a prosecutorial path and criminal record.

Months later when the program came to a close, John was a changed man. At the outset he was a reckless, frightened boy. He emerged an educated, responsible man empowered to confront and oppose hate. John's guided engagement with the Memorial played an outsized role in his transformation. Wouldn't it be a major accomplishment if all visitors could experience the full impact of the message the Memorial is designed to convey? Now with backing from Facing History and Ourselves, Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies and Jewish Community Relations Council, twenty-five years after the Memorial's dedication it can.

New digital technology enables anyone to learn from the Memorial without a personal docent. A tour is accessible either at the site via QR code and smartphone, or virtually anywhere in the world from the NEHM web site. Embedded in the tour is factual history, both narrated and textual, complemented by survivor stories & videos frozen in time so the accounts will never be lost.

The tour ends with a call to action for visitors to forcefully counter bigotry and hatred, and with an aspiration that all visitors, even those previously inclined to whiz by on their way to the T-station will now pause, stay longer, think deeply and carry those messages back to their own circles. If successful, our world will be a better place. 

*****

Addendum: If you take the tour, pause at Stop 5. An important piece of Holocaust history is revealed, one that is very personal to our family legacy. My photographs also appear throughout the tour and on the Memorial's new web site.  

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 blog images ©David Greenfield

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An Enduring Thunderbolt

Untitled, Ervin Abadi ©1945

from the collection - US Holocaust Memorial Museum

This post commemorates Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins in the evening of April 7, 2021

The setting was Boston's Beth Israel Hospital. The time, spring 1975. That's when I sensed tremors of past thunder, thunder which originally struck decades earlier. 

I was closeted in a lobby phone booth frantically searching for coins to make an important call - can you even remember those pre-cellular days? My hands, usually surgeon steady, were jittery. The mounting tension could be measured by beads of perspiration populating my forehead. An event I can only describe as cosmic had occurred a few minutes before and I had to reach my parents with the news, the good news, the thunderous news.

A fortnight earlier, my wife Carol was thinking about soon starting her maternity leave roughly timed two weeks before her due date. We were expecting our firstborn and feeling confident all the pre-partum 'I's had been dotted and the 'T's crossed. Little did Carol know her colleagues back at the office were prepped to fete her that Monday morning with a maternity leave surprise party. They would have the party, but without her as our son Josh, healthy with ten fingers and ten toes, had just been born. When it became clear that morning the for-real contractions signaled this would be The Day, we mobilized to get to the hospital. Carol bemoaned missing a chance to neaten up her office before her leave, but I realized this day was destined to be even more special than I ever imagined. 

That's why now, with sounds of silence from the Holocaust's lost six million voices whispering in my ear, I was losing it in that phone booth.

Now back to the thunder .... 

The first clap struck on May 5th 1945 when the US 11th Armored Division, aka Thunderbolt, liberated the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in the waning days of World War II. 

After landing in Normandy during the winter of 1944, the division marched across Europe initially fighting in the Battle of the Bulge before advancing east to the German Rhineland. It reached Linz, Austria in May. On the 5th, the troops entered Mauthausen and liberated the camp. My dad was among the prisoners freed that day. From then on with a new lease on life and feeling reborn, he always considered May 5th another birthday.

Long after I left home and could not help celebrate the day in person, I never missed making a call to wish him well (see previous blog post, He's the Only Left to Call (http://davidsfotovisions.blogspot.com/2016/10/leo-remembers.html).

So, when contractions began in earnest on the morning of May 5th, 1975, I knew our family was about to receive not only the gift of new life but also a message about survival, generation to generation continuity, Jewish legacy, optimism, and hope. 

The thunderbolt that was Josh's birth, thirty years to the day of my dad's rebirth, continues to reverberate in my head and heart. Grandfather and grandson are linked together in a fashion few pairs can match. I believe I will always try to fully process those events. 

And the thunder rolls.

 

Grandpa Joe and Josh 

1976  and 1999

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Addenda: 1

    Although my dad lived to reach old age, his creativity, energy, and inquisitiveness kept him from ever becoming an old man. Eventually he did lose his short but turbulent battle with cancer. Afterward, my sister and I knew his memorial headstone somehow had to incorporate the events of the 5th of May. Now etched in granite, just above his patriarchal attributes and favorite rabbinical guiding expression, are dates he entered and left our physical world bookending the day of his liberation and rebirth.

Addenda: 2

   The Thunderbolt Division was recognized as a liberating unit by the US Army's Center of Military History and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1985.

Addenda: 3

Ervin Abadi, a Budapest Jew, was a young aspiring artist when World War II began. In the 1940's he was drafted into the Hungarian labor service from which he managed to escape only to be recaptured and deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration Camp. When the camp was liberated, he was hospitalized and during his convalescence created dozens of works of art illustrating what he had witnessed during the Holocaust. 

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The Fruit that Changed the World

'Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today'

songwriters: Frank Silver and Irving Conn

As a song lyric, that's a catchy line, but I wouldn't want to hear it from a vendor when I'm intent on buying a bunch of my favorite fruit. Today there may be no bananas, but it is a good day for a more lighthearted posting. 

Since 2016 my posts focused on hot-button issues gnawing at me, none lighthearted: US immigration policy, Covid-19, food insecurity, and the small matter of the pending 2020 election, billed to be the most critical and contentious one of our times. But as November's results unfolded, I felt uplifted, then ecstatic. Despite POTUS 45's continued flailing and failing attempts to undermine the expressed will of the majority, and regardless that less than ten percent of GOP congresspersons have publicly acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden's win or have even called to congratulate him, Joe will be installed as forty-sixth president on January 20, 2021. A breath of fresh air is poised to take the uptown express to Washington. Granted, reason for grave concern remains. The pandemic's tentacles hold us in a tight grip. The choke hold will become even tighter as winter drives everyone indoors, but vaccines are arriving signaling the glow of a flickering light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Ergo, spinning this tale about my favorite fruit, the banana, no longer has to wait for a brighter day.

Banana, a favorite fruit? You may snicker but aside from my taste preference, there's a great story here. Did you know Eve's 'apple' might actually have been a banana? Or that Central American 'banana republics' rose and fell over the crop, and companies now known as Chiquita and Dole were like Apple and Google of their time? Then there's America's Banana King, Samuel Zemurray - his is a saga of intrigue à la James Bond creator Ian Fleming. The plot weaves together CIA covert operations, Guatemala's civil war, mercenaries, Fidel Castro, US power brokers such as Richard Nixon and CIA operative Howard Hunt, and the deciding vote cast at the UN in 1947 partitioning Palestine into two states. Lastly, there's the race from the jungles of Costa Rica to high-tech labs to save banana plantations across the globe threatened by a blight with no cure in sight.

Out of that whirlwind, I can draw a straight line from dinner at a basketball buddy's house in Framingham to the checkout line at BJs in Stoughton.

Here's the linkage ...

"What'll you have to drink?", my buddy Marc queried as he stood behind his impressive wet bar, a nice little amenity in his newly acquired home. 

    So I'm thinking a Malbec or Sauvignon Blanc, or maybe going straight for my go-to hopped brew, an IPA. That thought bubble quickly popped. Instead of bottles to uncork or de-cap, from under the counter Marc pulled assorted plastic baggies of cut up fruit, some ice, and a juicer. As savvy as I was about his perimeter jump-shooting accuracy, little did I know Marc was a teetotaler; he was also into health food. 

    "Do you want red, blue, or yellow (strawberry, blueberry, or pineapple), or a combination?", he asked. Realizing when in Rome, do as the Romans, I went with the flow and opted for blue. Then out from the freezer came the pièce de résistance, a gallon bag of peeled, ripe, frozen bananas - Marc's secret ingredient.

As expected, the smoothy didn't leave me with an enjoyable buzz. On the other hand, it was really, really good. The bananas gave the drink a frosty sweetened nuance, and I was captivated. Since Marc always froze them at peak of ripeness, no matter how many were piled in his grocery cart, they never went bad - they went to the freezer. He also ate them straight up, claiming if you closed your eyes you'd swear you were eating banana ice cream. He was right about that and I went straight from intrigued to hooked. From that point on, I knew one could never have too many bananas on hand.  

Fast forward to BJs ....

She was multitasking while on the job ... and she couldn't help herself. While dutifully scanning in prices for a customer's selections, her eyes kept shifting to me as I unloaded my cart. What was so strange I thought, at BJs it shouldn't be a surprise to amass an eclectic mix in one's cart. Club members don't come to window shop, they are there to BUY! Granted we're talking mega-amounts, but I didn't consider my cart an outlier and it shouldn't have raised an eyebrow. It clearly did for my checkout lady. There were some paper napkins (OK, a ream), olive oil (a gallon), Stacey's Pita Chips (two yard waste sized bags), Windex (double pack commercial size) and bananas ...... five dozen. Nothing fazed her as she moved the items through, nothing that is until she got to the bananas. 

"Can I ask what you do with all those bananas?" she whispered so as not to attract attention. Since buying lots of bunches may be SOP (standard operating procedure) for me but not for her, I searched for a short version of the favorite fruit story you just read. Not quickly coming up with one, I offered an alternate scenario. In a hushed voice, audible only to this perplexed young woman, I said, "pet monkey".

"Oh", she replied, and with that understanding promptly concluded our transaction.  

Turns out I liked that on the fly answer and have since used it several more times. As stated before, one can never have too many bananas.

If biting into a frozen treat doesn't warm you heart, I say just try it, you may like it.

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Anticipation Angst

Foreboding

"Too political".

That was one response I received from a reader of my previous Photo-blog, Please Mister Postman, a post concerning the administration's attempt to undermine the USPS. The assault was led by recently appointed Postmaster General Lous DeJoy, a man selected not for meritoriously working his way up through the ranks but as a major donor to POTUS's election campaign.  FYI, in testimony before a congressional panel Mr. DeJoy admitted he didn't know the price of a postcard stamp!

OK, OK perhaps that blog post was a tad too political.  So I'll shift the focus of this edition to one where I bare my soul with heartfelt feelings.  They all coalesce under the heading, Anticipation Angst. As I enumerate the 'whys' of my trepidations, perhaps you will understand, and empathize.

The Mask - don't leave home without it

First, the elephant in the room precipitating my angst is anything but a lumbering pachyderm.  It's microscopic, but virulent, usually debilitating, and all too often lethal - the COVID-19 virus. 

The bug has infected life as we knew it before the first mandates for social distancing, masking, and singing Happy Birthday twice while washing and washing hands.  Fortunately the bugger has not infected the bodies of my wife and me, or any of our children and grandchildren.  For that I am most grateful.  And I also feel so fortunate to have spent the last few months in our family vacation house in New Hampshire's Upper Valley.  There, the air was fresh and clean and a vast array of New England warm weather recreational options on land and water were available. We enjoyed them all. Then as summer turned to fall we were witness to a glorious transition to October colors. As an added bonus, COVID numbers were low. It felt safe. 

That was then and this is now.

At the end of the month on October 31st, little make-believe ghosts, goblins, and fiends will invade our neighborhoods and return home loaded with the spoils of their onslaught. Then really scary demons will descend - November looms.

The angst feels like the dread a fine china shop owner must feel upon seeing a bull at the door, frothing at the mouth ready to enter and rampage.

November was already my least favorite month well before the pandemic - trees become bare, temperatures drop, rain is chillingly cold, days are short.  Outdoor activities which animated previous months gradually grind to a halt. There's no snow as yet for winter recreation - it's just gray and depressing.  There will be more time spent indoors and inherently less social distancing.  You can just sense COVID-19 working up its appetite. 

Sadly, this gray November scenario is just a warm up act to the main event, the most contentious, critical election of our times.  Despite current poll projections of the popular vote, the Electoral College numbers are far from certain.  Even if the outcome mandates passing the presidential baton, the two hundred forty-four year precedent of the peaceful, collaborative transfer of power has already been threatened, just as the legitimacy of the election results.  In short, the experiment of our American form of democracy is at stake.  Is my Anticipation Angst more understandable now?

That said, my wife and I, along with our circle of friends and family have not been sitting by idly and agonizing. Collectively we've engaged in multiple initiatives - postcards to voters, texting to get out the vote, phone banking, etc. Some, like my wife, have also taken on recruiting poll watchers and ballot curing. Our objective - maximal voter turnout and we want it to be protected.  We believe your vote is your voice!

It must be used. It must be protected. It must be counted.

If I can do it, so should you

Oops, maybe this post ended up being too political. Sorry about that ..... not really.

images © David Greenfield 

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Please Mister Postman

Feed me

Back in the day, writing longhand with a fountain pen was as commonplace as using thumbs on a smartphone today. The Sheaffer Snorkel pen I used was a top of the line instrument, kind of like today's iPhone 11Pro Max. But unlike today's smarter than ever phones which no one leaves home without, the Sheaffer is reserved exclusively for affixing my signature to official documents, and most importantly for from the heart personal missives. Those epistles employ the power of the pen to convey more feeling and warmth than that of text or email.  They also demand transmission broadband can't offer. So who does one entrust to handle such sensitive delivery? Who will trudge carrying satchels of letters through snow, sleet, rain, heat, and frigid temps to reach your door? Who? .... the uniformed men and women letter carriers of the USPS, that's who! 

Wait Mister Postman, look and see

Is there a letter in your bag, a letter for me

Why's it been a very long time, since I heard ....

There must be some word today

Please Mister Postman, look and see

Is there a letter in your bag for me?*

Announcing a very special life cycle event

 Alas, if 'Mister Postman' didn't have enough obstacles to 'deliver de letter de sooner de better', his/her job now faces a new non-weather related speed bump - the devious designs of a Not Too Dynamic Duo, POTUS 45 and recently installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

Consider - Mr. DeJoy, a major donor to POTUS's election campaign, is the first postmaster not to have risen through the ranks of the USPS. Despite not getting up to speed on operations, or the Constitutional mission of his new agency, one of his initial directives was decommissioning sorting machines and removing blue collection boxes from our streets. That was prior to appearing on Capitol Hill and admitting to a congressional panel he didn't know the price of a postcard stamp.

Here today

Gone tomorrow

For his part the 45th president continues harassing the USPS labelling it a loser 'business', rather than a former cabinet level federal agency and the public utility it truly is. POTUS remains laser focused on a mission to disparage the service and block funding. 

There's a lot for sale on this bulletin board, but not US Mail. It is priceless

And what's the objective of this campaign? - delays in service.

All this during an out of control pandemic when three quarters of US registered voters are eligible to safely vote by mail in the most critical election of our time. Why? Because POTUS fears the anticipated surge of ballots can cost him a second term. He'll employ every tool at a president's disposal to block and tarnish the service our respected mail system delivers. 

Voting is the oxygen of representative government! If these blatant interferences in 2020 voting aren't obstruction of democracy, what is?

Bottom line: Support the USPS and VOTE - apply for a vote by mail ballot if you choose not to go to your local polling place, then use your voice to express your from the heart personal missive and VOTE. 

    After the election, buy more stamps and write more letters. Those you touch this way, and you, will feel the power of the connection and feel good about it.

deliver de letter de sooner de better

Rural delivery, is it at risk?

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* lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

1961 song by The Marvelettes

 images © David Greenfield

Special thanks to my friend Rick Karash, a master of drone photography, for contributing his photo editing skills to the 'Here today, Gone tomorrow' pair of images. 

Visit my web site anytime to view other Galleries, Photo-essays, and read previous blog-posts, then kindly share on social media. Thank you.

Punch, Counterpunch

Breakthrough

Inspiration for this post is drawn primarily from Power Places, a portfolio by photographer John Phafl. His study presents the natural landscape as a theater set populated with images depicting insatiable demands for energy generated by our planet's burgeoning population. Power Places portends a collision course - stunning landscapes shrouded by the advancing cavernous maw of an energy Goliath.

During daily walks I too find examples of society's energy needs intruding into the environment, but I also discover images demonstrating nature's counterpunch to the intrusions. The existential question is whether a tipping point will be reached when intrusion and consequent abuse of the environment overwhelms what an increasingly stressed natural world can reclaim, refresh, and renew.

Punch

Hand of Man

Energy is Man's Oxygen

Concrete Crypt

Electricity

Stake in the Heart

Mechanized Brigade

Coexistence

'Natural' Gas

Walled-in

Controlling the Spigot

Plastic!

A Once Luscious Landscape

Boa Constrictor

Counterpunch

Partial Solution

Breakthrough

"I Speak for the Trees"

Creeping Back

Breakout!

Nature's Inexorable Counter Intervention

Hope

Rising Above

In Harmony?

and that remains the existential question.

 images © David Greenfield

Visit my web site anytime to view other Galleries, Photo-essays, and read previous blog-posts, then kindly share on social media. Thank you.