July 16, 2016
Primo Levi’s appeal to all of us – as you’ll see in the poem below – could not be more timely. It is upon us to make sure that history does not to repeat itself.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/28/the-art-of-witness
The montage refers to Levi’s book The Periodic Table, photograph taken at KZ Ravensbrück. There is a new exhibit in Berlin right now about the inmates in this women’s camp who were doctors and nurses and forced to work in the infirmaries without means to treat the sick and dying. https://www.charite.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Ausstellungsflyer_Med_Vers_Rav.pdf
Shema
You who live secure
In your warm houses,
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
Primo Levi
(Translated by Ruth Feldman & Brian Swann)
Steve Tilden
I think of myself, age 14, privileged, a home, all the food I wanted, everything to keep me comfortable, and then the images. At Punahou school all were required to watch film taken in the death camps shortly after the allies over-ran them and were sorting through the horrors. Black and white, flickering footage of dead, naked, skeletal bodies rolling, sliding down the slope of a huge pit, skeletal creatures huddled, looking out from the door of their meager barracks. That was back in 1956, and these images remain. Should not all American students see this evidence of this massive crime on humanity?
And even now I reflect occasionally on my suspicions regarding Mr. Ramler; Siegfried Ramler, teaching German there in Hawaii, married to a Japanese woman. I think he was a member, and his escape was to Hawaii, where many citizens were Japanese, and it must have been easier to blend in.
Passen Sie Auf, Herr Tilden!
friderikeheuer@gmail.com
I think kids these days are taught a holocaust section in school. And the sole survivors are still coming in and reporting personally here in PDX. But I would not be surprised if your own strong interest in history got its start back then. I read a couple of years ago, when I was visiting and photographing Bergen Belsen, in the guest book the comment of a 9 the grader who had been on a school tour of the camp: “My Opa should have done this? No way on earth!” Thus the deniers are with us at an early age, in view of the incomprehensible and in loyalty to their families….