On Cameras and Crematoria

The evolution of the camera, in short: cameras went from the cumbersome big, boxy, bellowy things that had to be supported on tripods and allowed long periods of exposure; to increasingly smaller and faster devices that could be hung around one's neck and adjusted on the fly with two hands; to computerized, palm-sized wafers that can be cupped small and light as a sparrow, operable with only two fingers.

As the camera changed, so too did photography and the photograph. In the early days of large format cameras, taking a photograph (well) required knowledge of both light and lens, and patience adjusting for each. Photographers (good ones) treated each exposure meticulously, striving for excellence in image and economy of materials. Time spent preparing the photograph was time saved in the darkroom.

As cameras moved from tripod to hands, some of the photographer's manual considerations -- such as balancing the appropriate aperture and shutter speed to the amount of available light reflecting off the subject -- were automated by innovations like the built in light-meter and push-button zoom. As the technology advanced, picture-takers, needing to know less about the physics of photography, were liberated to point-and-shoot. 


But even though the camera liberated the photographer it didn't liberate the photograph; film still had to be purchased and photos had to be processed, generally at some expense. Unless one one had the luxury of wastefulness, photographers weighed the value of each exposure. If you were going to spend $10, $15, $20 developing a role of film into prints, you were going to exercise some level of judgment and selectivity about what you shot and why.

When the digital camera liberated both photographer and photograph; when everything apart from choosing the subject became the province and provenance of the camera's brain; and when photographs, rendered in pixels, ceased to exist as anything that had a materials/cost limitation, people were then totally free to shoot what they wanted, when they wanted, as often as they wanted. 

And so today, with the advent of the inexpensive digital camera, we have people taking pictures almost indiscriminately, even on the slightest hunch that there might be something worthwhile in them upon further review. The strategy seems to be; shoot first, determine value later.

As this mindset has taken increasing hold over the camera-bearer, there has been a parallel distancing between being-in-the-moment, and mining-the-moment-for-some-future-being, as though the photos destined for viewing later on will be of more value than the actual standing before or inside the very thing the camera has digitized.

Hence, I report back from Auschwitz with disappointment -- if it isn't sinful for me to say that I am disappointed in a museum predicated on exposing the horrors of the holocaust. I was disappointed both with what I saw happening outside me (some of which I participated in myself) as well as for what I didn't see happening inside me, and perhaps others. I anticipated a powerful experience; in truth, the place had some power, but far less than I had expected it would.

In fairness, my response to Auschwitz was undermined by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, which I had visited several years ago. There, in DC, I saw some of the same ghastly "artifacts" -- mountains of eyeglasses, suitcases, human hair, and shoes -- as were exhibited behind glass in Auschwitz. When I first laid eyes upon those artifacts in DC, particularly the shoes, I was greatly upset: nothing symbolized the end of the line so definitively as the forfeiture of shoes. Perversely, perhaps, I would have been happy to have been greatly upset seeing those shoes in Auschwitz, as well. But I wasn't, and that frightens me a little. Nor was I much moved by many of the other exhibits and remains.

My lack of emotional response was not wholly owing to a callous heart. Auschwitz, as a high volume museum resists emotion, in part because it strives toward exhumation and memorialization, and in part because the hordes of people who attend each day become human wedges between the museum and any hope of intimacy. Over a million people a year travel to the little Polish town of Oświęcim to visit Auschwitz, and they, too, come with expectations. The want to learn; they want to see; and, they want to be jarred, horrified. 


However, jostled is not jarred, and because of the daily influx of visitors Auschwitz is crowded, teeming, and in order to see the exhibits one must often gently elbow their way up front, then to be gently nudged from behind. There is a constant slow churning at each exhibit, and it is only twenty or thirty seconds looking at the mound of shoes taken from infants and toddlers, or the mountain of pots and pans, before the intakers begin to feel the breath of others. To remain is to overstay, is to take more than you are entitled to. 


So visitors become part of a single lava flow from one exhibit to the next, from one building to the next, moving in a steady, orderly, forward progress. Regrettably, along the way there is no defined space or time for reflection. Yes, it's possible that some reflection occurs in the in-between of exhibits, but it's equally likely that one concentrates more on the shuffling of the crowd and care taken toward neither stepping on nor having stepped on feet than on the resonances of the fading exhibit.

The crowds, then, made it very hard for me to connect. I was one among the cattle. But it wasn't just the numbers that put layers between me and an emotional connection. Too, it was the ubiquitous and unrelenting presence of the digital camera and its ubiquitous and unrelenting pops of light. 


I don't mean to suggest that people shouldn't take pictures of the exhibits -- I took a few. Especially given that no one really had the luxury of lingering, it's easy to see how someone would want to take a photo, perhaps to later recapture a sense of what they first saw when they first saw it. 


But there were some who took pictures of everything, not reflectively but reflexively, as though going to a museum, any museum, even Auschwitz, was to go on a photographic safari to bag and tag images whose value will be assessed back at the computer. On these safaris everything has potential meaning, not necessarily because the photographer "sees" something, but rather because the camera can capture it at no cost or sacrifice. Perhaps if their digital cameras didn't come with memory cards capable of storing hundreds of thousands of images those people would be a little less trigger happy. Maybe I should have been able to block them out, but I didn't. Instead, I got pissed.

There was another strange camera occurrence: people taking pictures of others posing in front of an instrument or remnant of barbarism. A posing woman, leaning against a cement pillar of a barbed wire fence, lifting a heel against is as if standing coyly under a street lamp; or a guy having his picture taken in front of one of the ovens, and then taking the same picture of his friend who'd taken it of him -- this inside an actual gas chamber. Maybe it is their way of bearing witness; and maybe it is not. All I know is that I found it impossible to feel a sense of holiness at Auschwitz, in Auschwitz. There was neither time nor space nor demeanor.

But Auschwitz is only the first of the death camps in Oświęcim. Birkenau (Auschwitz II), the much bigger camp, designed for death after Auschwitz had only been improvised for it ("Auschwitz," or Auschwitz I proper, was Polish military barracks commandeered by the Nazis and retrofitted for torture, diabolical medical experiments, death), is situated 3km away, and one must take a shuttle bus to it from Auschwitz. Though Birkenau is where most of the exterminations took place, Auschwitz is where the museum is located. And where Auschwitz stands virtually intact (or has been restored to appear so), Birkenau is in ruins. A wasteland

Very few of the people who toured Auschwitz as part of my group followed on to Birkenau. It had been raining off and on all day. Never heavy, but sometimes steady. Umbrellas opened and closed, opened and closed. It might have been the weather that held visitors back at Auschwitz. But is also might have been that Birkenau doesn't offer much explicit history: Auschwitz busily documents the enormity of Nazi crimes; Birkenau quietly documents the immensity of those crimes. 


Getting off the bus, standing outside the barbed wire fence, able to peer out to the camp's extremities owing to the destruction of most barracks, I was struck by the camp's vastness, its reach. Within its barbed wire perimeter, Birkenau goes on and on. Prior to my visit I had seen Birkenau in pictures and film; standing there outside it, taking in its full panorama, dwarfed all previous notions of it.  


There was little to photograph, and much to photograph. The watchtower, Birkenau's imposing maw, remains. So too do the tracks on which daily transport trains, fifty boxcars long, slowed, squealed, stopped. And the 1500 foot long path on which the overwhelming majority disembarking those trains walked their final breathing minutes en route to the gas chambers/crematoria awaiting them at the end of those 1500 feet. I took that walk. I was eerily aware of each footfall. 


At path's end, I walked up to the subterranean gas chambers, where Zyklon B snuffed the lives, wholesale. Now existing only as gaping holes in the ground, little by little the earth is reclaiming them. 


The adjacent crematoria, however, the buildings which housed the ovens which burnt the evidence of mass murder, they remain, though in piles of brick rubble and twisted metal tendons. The Nazi's, fearful of these smoking guns, destroyed the four crematoria before fleeing the advancing Russian army. 


Nearby stand a handful of barracks -- barren of life and light -- the not-so-long-ago way-stations of those who, no longer able to hang on, slipped from from useful to flammable. Structures beyond the comprehension of the young, barrack walls bear the etches and gouges of hormonal youth.


As I think back upon the two camps, Birkenau offered less to know, but more to imagine. To imagine the human density of those cattle cars which pulled in daily, and then, to imagine how swiftly thereafter their human cattle had been sorted, gassed, incinerated, and turned into ash.


And to imagine their walk, the walk that the too old, and too young, and too maternal, and too crippled took along those rails which lead to the then still standing brick buildings with their imposing though seemingly benign smoke stacks, and to imagine what might have been going through their minds with each hurried, Nazi-prodded closing step. Why have we been separated? Why are we going in this direction, when others are not? Why is that soldier standing there smiling as he blows cigarette smoke skyward? 


At their peaks the crematoria were capable of combusting 9000 bodies a day. The gas chambers were apparently capable of more. As the trains eventually disgorged victims in excess of what the ovens could cinder, overflow corpses were hauled from the gas chambers, tossed in a ditch, and burned en masse in the open air.  


The mass murder was cut short at three years. By the time the Russians liberated Birkenau, over a million people, 960,000 of whom were Jews, had been turned into ash.


I took pictures of their cemetery.

Passover

I am now in Poland on a train headed for Auschwitz. Not directly, but eventually.

That's a strange thing for me to write. I was tattooed by Auschwitz at ten or eleven in the early '60s when my synagogue showed us the documentary Let My People Go, and I lost my innocence. As I got older, I learned just how crucial the railroads were to feeding the furnaces at Auschwitz. And now I ride these rails; am I hearing the same clack-clack... clack-clack ... clack-clack Jews heard then?

Since landing in Hungary I've read some accounts of the war and Auschwitz by notable Hungarian writers who survived it. Their accounts bring to light not simply the death of those camps, but the living in them; how people survived, and under what terms and conditions. I've also read reviews of those works that elaborate even further on the complexity of the social and economic machinations of the concentration camp.

What emerges from these writers is a picture much less black and white then I remember seeing in Let My People Go. In that film people, Jews, were either dead or rescued at the 59th minute of the 11th hour. They were either rotting, muscleless, rubbery corpses laying in tossed heaps, or as shrink-wrapped skeletons peering out hopefully and hopelessly from behind barbed wire.
The presence of absolute victim, the presence-by-absence of absolute evil.   

But the picture that emerges for me now some forty years later from Imre Kertész, György Konrád, István Deák, is not less representative of victim and victimizer but more nuanced about who was what, and why. Maybe even to what degree.

When I went to Berlin a few weeks ago I traveled in ignorance, conflating all Germany with Hitler's Final Solution. As a rational human being, I knew that such over-generalizations are indefensible, but as an equally irrational being I never bothered to learn otherwise: all Germany was evil. Period. 

Once in Berlin, though, and owing to a highly informed non-Jewish German Judeacist, Irene, I discovered that at least from the German side of things, such an over-generalization is in itself a form of heaping, an indiscriminate ditching of everyone German. 

Irene has used the term "little Schindler" to tell of the Germans -- how many I don't know, though to my mind a number is irrelevant -- who at great risk to themselves thwarted Hitler and his Final Solution in whatever ways, large or small, they could. Irene said that someone figured it took the coordination of twelve Germans to rescue one Jew. That's a complicated chain with many breakable links. 

And yet these little Schindlers succeeded. They may not have risen to the level and legend of of their namesake, Oscar Schindler, made known to the world by Stephen Spielberg in Schindler's List, but even so, their efforts saved a handful of Jews here, and a handful of Jews there, fully knowing that to have been found out would have meant prison or death. And acknowledgment of the little Schindlers does not account for those individuals who may have hidden a neighbor, a friend, perhaps even a total stranger. Like the little Schindlers, they, too, were "part" of Hitler's Germany. 

The question why some Germans went the way of Schindler while others didn't can't be answered here. All I can say is that some did, and because some did, a blanket condemnation of Germans is insupportable. Anyone seeking the truth must accept it in total.

It would be nice to be able to stop there, on a redemptive note, but the stories surviving the camps as revealed in the above-mentioned writers, and others, tell of uncomfortable incidences of Jewish-Jewish exploitation and oppression, sometimes in the service of Nazi-Jewish extermination. Apart from the simple yin-yang, German-Jewish portrait of camp life most people hew to -- or at least I did -- , inmate populations were oftentimes highly hierarchical, both politically and economically. Imre Kertész tells in his memoir Fateless that as a boy alone in Auschwitz he was completely shunned by other inmates and left to his own peril because he was a Hungarian Jew and not a Polish Jew. István Deák, in a review of Kertész and others in The New York Review of Books, cites that the Jews who stripped camp arrivals of their possessions often acquired a considerable booty from the process, happy booty at that. These Jews awaited the trains eagerly. So, Jews turned on and in their own. 

More unsettling still: as children only consumed food and produced nothing, they were of absolutely no use to the Nazis and -- once the killing machine reached its peak efficiency -- children would step off or be lifted down from the freight cars and get marched directly to the gas chambers. Mothers holding their young child's hand would be sent to the chambers along with them. And so there were reports of mothers abandoning their children, walking away to secure their own lives while relenting to the inescapable fate of their children. But there are also stories of older women, knowing what awaited a mother, furtively snatching the hand of a child away from its mother and going to the gas chamber as that child's "mother" instead, so sparing the younger woman certain death. 

How do we account for all this, all this capitulation to evil and all this refusal to capitulate? We know what happens in the moment: a decision is made, an act committed, a past sealed. Whatever chapter it may comprise, it becomes an entry to the official biography of one's life. But what leads up to that decision? What in our lives sends some of us one way, and others of us the other way? What, or who, has prepared us for that moment of crisis? 

***

I am on a train to Auschwitz and it will be Passover when I arrive. For those who don't know, Passover is the Jewish holiday that commemorates the story from the book of Exodus when the Egyptian Pharoah, having not succumbed to the first of God's nine plagues, is about to suffer the tenth: the slaying of all the non-Jewish first born (males). To protect Jews from God's wrath against the Pharoah, the Israelites are instructed to slather lamb's blood on their doorposts so that the Angel of Death, spotting the blood, will not descend but pass over that house and on to homes not so marked. The Jews did this and were spared; the Egyptians were not; and the Israelites were set free.

As I walk through Auschwitz, I will be thinking about death and its agents. The unfathomable number of lives ended there, and the unfathomable number of lives whose coordinated efforts put them there or resisted, and sometimes succeeded, in putting them there. Auschwitz is but the last stop; the rail lines to it begin many miles away, from many different directions, laid by many hands.

Was it the same Angel of Death that flew over Europe as flew over Egypt? For whatever inscrutable reason, did he this time seek out the lambs blood not to spare, but to sentence? How much more complete would his work have been were there not those with no lambs blood on their doors hiding Jews inside, shielding them from his mission?

As I walk within the death camps, I will be conscious of the irony of visiting Auschwitz on Passover.

Tall Tales From My REMoir

Memoir is in trouble again. After having been humiliated a few years ago by Opra's couch-mate and Book Club coronate, James Frey -- the Self Embossed Bad Boy of A Million Little Pieces --, the genre has apparently been depantsed again by a 60 Minutes report on another bestselling memoirist, Greg Mortenson, questioning the quacks of his facts in Three Cups of Tea. 


In unfairness to Mr. Mortenson, CBS, and The New York Times, I did not see the TV report and only scanned the newspaper article, but from that I've gleaned the controversy has to do with K2, the mountain. Not that Mortenson's bumper sticker should read This car climbed K2! and not I Climbed K2!, but the issue is whether, as he claims in the book, that on his descent he recovered from the grueling climb while being cared for in the village Korphe, Pakistan, the village which inspired him to raise money and build schools throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan (apparently, some of these schools are in question, too, but that allegation is outside the context of the book) or whether he actually visited Korphe a year later. Given that the guy appears to do quite a bit of good in the world, and his book has inspired many others to do good in the world, the "controversy" over when he went to Korphe seems to me a trifle. 


But readers feel betrayed, ripped off. Which raises the question of what readers are really after in memoirs, especially when they are memoirs of hardship: "You mean you weren't sexually abused as a child? How dare you! I paid for sexual abuse. I want my money back!" "What?! You weren't beaten within an inch of your life by that street gang but only roughed up some? Damn you, I paid for extreme violence and near death! Gimme back my money!"


In any event, incidents such as Mortenson's or Frey's or any number of other defrocked memoirists always initiates a new round of hand-wringing and soul-searching among writers (and publishers): where, in memoir, does the writer draw the line between fact and fiction?


I actually solved that dilemma several years ago when I conceived and coined a new genre, REMoir, pronounced the same as memoir but with an r instead of an m. It seemed to me then that memoir kept getting called to the carpet because the assumed unwritten subtitle for every memoir is, "It's All True."


REMoir makes no such claim. Instead, REMoir's subtitle would be something like, "It's All Truish."  


Truish?: what does that mean? I don't know; I'm still working on it. But so far, what I know is that REMoir is bound by these rules: 

• that it contains elements and episodes that are true; 

• that it may contain elements or episodes that might have become true, if things had worked out differently, as long as the reader is properly cued; 

• that it may contain things wholly untrue, so long as there is no possibility that a reader could construe them as true

So, real lives are REMoir's anchors, but once so anchored, the REMoirist can set his or her tiller and drift toward truishness, wherever it may take them. In other words, whereas in memoir imagination is verboten, imagination is the very stuff of REMoir, as long as both reader and writer are on board that REMoir, unlike memoir, makes no claims about digitizing reality (or capital T Truth). This opens up great writing possibilities for people like me, whose real or capital T Truth lives aren't really all that interesting. If Mortenson or Frey had written REMoirs instead of memoirs, no one would have raised an eyebrow or pointed a finger. Readers would have assumed creative embellishments as characteristic of the genre.

Why REMoir? Because REMoir combines the unconstrained imagination of sleep's REM cycle, the dream cycle, with the constraints of an actually lived life. As long as I stay anchored to my life, I can sail away on dreams as far as my imagination can carry me. 

For example, in my unpublished and untitled REMoir completed a year ago (I like to refer to it as Volume I), I recount this episode: 


 
When I was eleven or so it was decided that I would get braces for my teeth. My teeth were fine, and didn't need braces, but like all kids from middle-class, Long Island Jewish families of the late '50s/early '60s, you got braces not because you needed them but rather so that others should know you could afford them. Braces were like Jewish bling. It would be a shanda if parents didn't put their kids in braces: God forbid, everyone would think you were from poverty.


So, when I was eleven or so my mother schlepped me off to Dr. Mittleman, the family orthodontist, for a consultation. As both my older sisters had braces by Dr. Mittlemen, my mother should have been quite pleased that our family had contributed so generously to Dr. Middlemen's sparkling waiting room and state of the art equipment. He did well by us. And he was about to do weller.


A nurse walked me into his office and laid me back in the plush dental chair. She told me that he was going to take some pictures, some x-rays, so that the doctor could get a better look at the work not needing to be done.


She wore white but had blood on her hands as proceeded to stick a series of sharp-edged, painful x-ray films in my mouth and zap me. Then she went off to develop the field of play.

Now, at eleven or twelve or whatever age I was, I was still growing. I don't know if I had yet surpassed my mother's 5'2", but I am certain that I was no where near my father's 6'2".


So when Dr. Mittlemen, white smock fluttering behind him,  came in beaming with x-rays in hand, and said to me, "You know, these x-rays show me that you have a large head, and I am guessing from the size of it that you are going to grow to be very tall, six-two, six-three," me and my perfect teeth and big head beamed along with him.


Six-two or six-three! I'll be able to play pro-football, just like my idol, Dick Butkus! It was the happiest day of my young life.

But Mittlemen lied. Or was a quack. Or maybe that was his schtick for building rapport with a kid whose mouth he'd be spending much of the next couple of years torturing. When my much awaited growing spurt failed to materialize, I ended up splitting the difference between my parents and stalling at 5'8". That's the reality of it.


As the story continues in my REMoir, however, Mittlemen is right! I do grow to be 6'3", and quickly, so that by the time I get into junior high school I am fully grown. And not only that, I am so gifted as an athlete that I am sent straight to the varsity football team, where, as middle-linebacker, I am truly outstanding and become recognized throughout the state and across the country. Though I still have years of high school ahead of me, college recruiters from the biggest named universities flock to me and court me left and right, offering me all kinds of scholarship goodies -- and even a guarantee to waive that pesky requirement, the high school diploma!


Of course, I am flattered, and though bewildered by the blitz of attention I'm receiving my parents are very proud. When it seems as though the recruiters are about to overrun our lives, my father finally takes control and announces to them, all of them (they've been camped out on our front lawn for weeks, each hoping to be picked by me) that we need time to think, that they should go back to their respective schools, and that we'll be in touch. There is a collective hang-dog groan as the recruiters pack up and shuffle off to their cars, and, even though I am a monster, physically (you wouldn't recognize me), I am glad to have had my daddy shield me. Yes, we are all feeling pretty good at dinner that night, except for my sisters who are jealous.


The next morning during breakfast there is a knock at the door. "Not them again!" my mother says as she heads toward the door ready to pounce. My father has already left for work.

From the kitchen table I hear her open the door and start in: "Can't you recruiters leave us alone? My husband told you that we need time to think, and twenty-four hours is not time."

"Ma'am, I'm not a recruiter," the man says apologetically. "But I would like to see your son."


"He's having breakfast, and then he has to go off to school. I'm sorry."


The door creaks as she started to close it. 


"But wait!" the man says desperately,"If you'll only tell your son that I'm here, and then let him decide!"


I get up from the kitchen table, curious. But I can't see through my mom.


"Who should I say is calling?" my mother asks.


"Dick Butkus, ma'am."


Dick Butkus! I run to the front door nearly knocking my mother over once I get there.


"It is you! And you're in his uniform!"


"Hi, Jerry."


Dick Butkus! The greatest linebacker, ever, just said "Hi, Jerry"!


"Mom, this is Dick Butkus!"


"I heard," she says. "So; who is Dick Bupkus?" 


"Only the greatest linebacker ever! We have to let him in. He's Dick Butkus, mom!"
 
"Okay, okay. Come in Mr. Bupkus, before my son has a heart attack."


She leads him in with a sweep. Out of respect to her, he doffs his helmet before entering and says, "Thank you, ma'am." 


What with his shoulder pads and all, he barely fits through the doorway. And yet, when he does, strangely, he and I are eye to eye. We shake hands. Two strong hands. I can't believe it: he seems to be no taller than I am. In fact, I get the sense that of the two of us, I may be the taller. Taller than Dick Butkus!

 ***

Well, I hope you get that gives you an idea of how REMoir can work. Just so you know, Butkus is there to ask me -- beg me -- to come to Chicago and not only play for his Chicago Bears, but replace him at middle-linebacker for the Bears -- actually assume his number 51. He tells me he has suffered a knee-injury which has greatly hampered his game, and he believes I am the only one in the country who could fill the position he will soon have to vacate. As a teaser, he hands me his helmet and tells me to try it on. Fits perfectly. 


I discuss it all with my parents, who agree, and, at 17, I begin a professional football career with the Chicago Bears, a career that sees me voted to the Pro-Bowl every year, that sees me break every defensive record known to the NFL, that sees me retire after 20 years as the most feared and revered linebacker ever to have put on the pads -- more feared and revered than even Butkus himself. What a life. And I owe it all to Dr. Mittleman.

So, you see, REMoir is much better than memoir. In memoir, the horizon is determined by how close to the truish edge you dare go; in REMoir, the horizon is determined by how far beyond the truish edge you want to go.


You should give it a try.

Tikkun Olam

I am heading back to Eger on the 9:59 a.m. train from Veszprem. On either side the land is flat and fertile; vast seas of good farmland, greening as they should in April.


I have been in Veszprem the past two days participating in something called "America Week," a joint effort sponsored by the University of Pannonia and the Veszprem American Corner (which is to say, the U.S. State Department). 


The idea of America Week is to bring together speakers across a range of American interests and issues. Some spoke of music and of the arts; some spoke of history, and of philosophy. 


I presented on The Moving Wall, the half-scale replica of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial located on The Mall in Washington, DC. (If you would like to read more about The Moving Wall, please visit my blog Rolling With The Moving Wall).
 
My America Week audience was a mix of faculty, students, and local citizens simply interested in things American. My host and session organizer, Ildy, informed me and my two co-panelists that, as we had a two hour slot to fill, we could each speak for 30 minutes, as opposed to the 20 minutes originally allotted. I was grateful, but in the end I still had to rush to finish.
 
Because my audience was largely young, and almost exclusively Hungarian, I wasn't sure how much they would know about the Vietnam War and the need for a memorial commemorating not only the sacrifice of those who lost lives or loved ones fighting in it, but also the sacrifice of those who served and lived through it. 


And so I told them of the war's having been made visible through advances in journalism, and how, with those advances, the war was also made unpopular. I showed them iconic images of the war's barbarism, gasped at in the front-page photos of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Vietcong fighter Nguyen Van Lem,

of civilians gunned down by Charley Company at My Lai

of children fleeing a napalm bombing.

For many Americans such images came to represent what the war was about. For some Americans, such images came to represent what American warriors were about.
 
And so I told my audience that when soldiers returned home from Vietnam they were not assured of receiving a hero's welcome. Sometimes they were greeted with bile and spit. 


Unsure of their civilian status as Vietnam vets, many who returned home laid low and kept quiet about their tours of duty, hid who they were, went underground. I told my audience what John Devitt, Vietnam vet and creator of The Moving Wall, once told me: that if you were applying for a job, you kept your service record off of your resume; you didn't bring it up in an interview. 


I told my audience of Jan Scruggs, also a Vietnam vet, and how, after watching the film The Deer Hunter he felt compelled to do something to reclaim the veterans' collective psyche by creating a memorial to them, and how after some bitter wrangling (with others than Scruggs) Maya Lin's black chevron -- The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, aka, The Wall -- was finally dedicated on November 13, 1982.

I told my audience how John Devitt, who had scrounged money to make the cross-country trip from San Jose, California so that he could be present at the dedication, was so moved by what he saw there that he felt he had to do something, too. Because, I told them, transporting as The Wall was for those vets and their families who visited it, John knew that confronted with financial, physical, or psychological obstacles, many of those most needing to see The Wall never would. Devitt knew that there were broken lives all across America for whom Washington's salvation or emancipation would remain out of reach.
 
And so finally I told them about The Moving Wall, 

and how Devitt conceived and created this line-by-line, name-by-name replica of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial 27 years ago, and how he has been trucking it around the country ever since; how he has delivered it to over 1100 cities and towns where it has been visited by millions; how it has galvanized communities in remembrance, reverence and gratitude. Most important, though, and closest to Devitt's heart -- the thing that most motivates him to do what he does -- is this: many of the lives The Moving Wall has met along the way have been lives broken by Vietnam. For more than anyone, The Moving Wall is for the broken.
 
And Devitt has come to know a lot of them; perhaps has even become known to them. Without seeking to be, he is sought. One March night, late, while I was visiting him in White Pine, MI, winter home to The Moving Wall, John and I were elbows on the bar at the Konteka Inn, and in the corner sat a shadowy soul. A fellow vet. After a while he slid over a bar stool or two and began speaking with John about veteran's benefits, and the trouble he was having getting his. John gave him some advice, and the man slid back to his shadows. I asked John about post-traumatic stress disorder, something of a new term coined since the Vietnam War to account for some of the psychological troubles Vietnam vets were experiencing, the kind of troubles made cinematic in The Deer Hunter. John told me that every war has produced PTSD, though under different names. Others have said so as well.
 
Still, Vietnam vets seem to struggle differently than vets of other wars. Perhaps they're just more open about it. Or perhaps their war was categorically different than other wars. Maybe the war in Vietnam lowered the threshold for what it means to be human and to act human. This much is clear: the mind of the American vet in many instances was ill-equipped to process that war. I am thankful that my mind never had to. 


I write this because here, in Central Europe, where Jewish survival was solely a matter of luck, where being in the right place at the right time as opposed to the wrong place at the wrong time determined one's lifeline, and where the literature of Hungarian Jews, and no doubt Jews of Poland, Germany, France, and on, and on, can find no reason why some lived and others died, why I lived and you did not, I suspect that those who visit The Moving Wall, and John Devitt himself, wrestle with similar questions. 


From the Holocaust, from Vietnam, some have survived, but have never lived beyond their survival; they are flesh hung on bones; spirit, the light, sputters. But some, somehow, have gone beyond surviving, have found a jet within themselves to feed the light, a light that burns not just for themselves, but for others. 


John Devitt fought in the Vietnam War. The same war as those whose names appear on The Moving Wall; he returned from the same war as those vets who come searching among the names. But Devitt has managed to survive it in a way that many of his comrades haven't. That night in the Konteka Inn, when I was asking him about PTSD, he finally mused: "Hell: I'm the poster-child for PTSD. My whole life is that war. I've never moved beyond it." 


Perhaps. Though it would be hard to imagine that Devitt could have done anything more noble with his life than to have shepherded The Moving Wall for the past quarter century. Consider the alternative: no Moving Wall. What a huge tear that would have left unstitched. 


There is a Hebrew phrase, tikkun olam, which means "repairing the world." We are all called to it, to repair the world, but few of us actually do. While he may not realize it, John Devitt has been practicing tikkun olam, has been repairing the world -- year by year, town by town. 

The Rise and Ultimate Dictatorship of the Colatariat

"To capitalism!": Karl Marx.

One account of the history of Hungary since 1989 can be summed up thus: Kremlin moves out; Coca Cola moves in. Not that Coke wasn't here before the fall of the Soviet Union, but until then Pepsi was the cock of the cola walk. Coke played third fiddle to its arch-competitor and the communist ideology. When Sovietism was sent packing, Coke-is-it-ism stepped up and overthrew Pepsi. In a commercial purge Stalin would have admired, Coke succeeded in wiping out Pepsi and any other serious threat to its fizzy rule over Hungary. Today, it thoroughly dominates the soft drink market. Pepsi, 7-Up, or any other contra-Cokes are nowhere to be seen, except in rare incidences of token dissent from the party colatariat. As for now, rebel opposition to The Cola is anemic, scattered, and demoralized. Hence, it can be tolerated. Such tolerance serves to demonstrate, by juxtaposition, Coke's colossal strength in the world of soda.

How did Coke rise to such prominence in Hungary? I don't know, though I have made some observations. 

In the United States, where advertising saturation has numbed American society, Hungary stands in stark contrast by its lack of advertising. Which is not to say advertising doesn't exist, but rather, that because the landscape is so uncluttered, the little advertising one encounters here -- on buses, billboards, etc. -- really goes a long way; and, from an American perspective, how much, how vastly much remains to be plowed. Why it remains unplowed is anyone's guess. Perhaps it's because Hungary wants to restrict the intrusion of private commerce into public consciousness; or perhaps it's because Hungarians by and large don't have a lot of disposable income, so why bother.

Coke chose a different path. Rather than refrain from or go timidly into the then virgin market of a free, democratic, and capitalistically coquettish Hungary, Coke went on an all out blitz to make sure that its red logo replaced the red star as the dominant symbol Hungarian culture. Since I arrived in January, I have been amazed at how prevalent Coca Cola is, and I don't just mean the soda; I mean the sign, the symbol, the trademark signature. It! is everywhere.

Case in point: In my little town of Eger, where I am now conducting research seated at an outdoor wine cafe, within my view are five restaurants, all with outdoor seating, and all with identically beiged awnings bearing the individual restaurant's name, and the Coca Cola logo.

Though my father owned a beer and soda store, I never drink soda (can't say the same for beer), and so I don't know if Coke is a good product. What I do know is that no matter how good Coke may be, no establishment is going to advertise the product without getting something in return, a bit of Coke-pro-quo. In other words, all these restaurants bearing Coke tattoos struck a deal:

Coke: We'll help offset some or all of the cost of your awning.

Restaurant: What's the catch?

Coke: Two things: our name goes on it, and you sell nothing but Coke products.

Restaurant: Deal.

So, not only is Coca Cola reiterated ad nauseum everywhere you turn, by virtue of its Coke-pro-quos, it is Coke (or Coke products The Coca Cola "Portfolio") or nothing.


And the limits of Coke-pro-quos seem to have no end. Here is some Coke furniture:

Table top

Accompanying Chairs

Here is some Coke artwork:

And restaurant equipment:

What about those who want to drink something a bit stronger?

Well, there is certainly the traditional alcohol+Coke product, such as the old war horses, rum and Coke and Jack and Coke. But those are drinks for old-timers and dive bars. Today's drinkers of tomorrow need new, hip drinks to call their own, and Coke has obliged, at least here in Hungary, by concocting a bunch of new drink recipes -- all of which call for a product from the Coke portfolio -- and by promoting them, gratis, in slick Coke printed and logoed drink menus found throughout the country.

You've got to hand it to Coke. They think of everything, and then provide it.


But, what if you don't like to drink your drink with Coke portfoliates? Say you like your whiskey straight, or simply prefer wine or beer? In that case, hasn't Coke perhaps wasted this promotional outpouring? Maybe, but maybe not. So, two scenarios:

Scenario 1: Four college kids go out on a night of drinking. All four drink beer, because, a), that's what college kids drink, and b) it's cheaper than mixed drinks (hence, a).

Scenario 2: Same four kids go out on a night of drinking, except Hungary has a zero-tolerance law when it comes to drinking and driving. Meaning, even a spec of alcohol in your bloodstream lands you in hot water. So, in Scenario 2, of the four drinkers, only three are drinking beer. The poor guy who is the designated driver has to abstain 100% from alcohol. What then is the designated driver's choice should he or she not want to simply sit with hands folded, to openly reveal to the world that I am the loser of the drawn straws? Why, a soft drink of some kind! With the proper get up, a soft drink even looks like a drink drink. So, have a soft drink!
 
In Scenario 2, all is not lost for Coke. Yeah, Coke did lose three of the four to beer, but Coke never had them in the first place. Coke did, however, put itself in position with the designated driver.

Now, let's connect the dots. 


Dot 1: Coke has completely colonized Hungary. In 99% of Hungary's restaurants and drinking holes you will find Coke products and only Coke products. All the Coke-pro-quos guarantee that.  


Dot 2: Coke or Coca-Cola is emblazoned everywhere -- inside, outside, on the way into the mall:

Dot 3: Hungary's zero-tolerance law ensures that at least one person of a group will drink something other than alcoholic beverages. 


Ergo, Dot 4: at least one person in the group will drink some Coke product.  


Seems to me that the zero-tolerance law likely produced quite a windfall for Coke. Just look at the litter of designated drivers sired by the law.


Hence, in my tendency to see much of the world in terms of conspiracies, I can imagine a script wherein Coke, calculating the benefits to be reaped from a zero-tolerance law in a country where such a law would lasso buyers for their products, might actually have wrangled some politician or politicians to propose the law, and then help to insure its passing. I've heard of (and imagined) more cockamamie ideas in my life. 


Whatever. Bottom line: In Hungary, more than it!, Coke is it.

A Tale of Two Utcas (Ootsawsh): Part 2

Váci utca, 47b

 Note: This is part two of a two part series. See prior post for part one.

To continue. The hotel where I was staying on Dózsa György u. sat diagonally across from Heroes Square, just to the west of the northern end of Andrássy u. According to both Google Maps and my hotel gratis map, getting to Vácsi u, 47b was as simple as stepping out of the hotel's entrance and banging a left. Within a half mile or so I'd run right into Vácsi u. Absolutely. 


Google's directions from my hotel pinpointed 47b to the north of Dózsa György, and so, following the directions' blue line, with a left on Dózsa György and a right on Vácsi u. I would be there in no time. This night, there would be no possibility of going left when I should have gone right; both maps clearly agreed, and confirmed each other, and me. And, as insurance, they showed that to reach Vácsi u., I needed to cross some railroad tracks, railroad tracks that were only to the Vácsi u side of the hotel, the same railroad tracks whose trestle I could clearly see standing outside my hotel. In other words, my directions were Jerry-proof.

European hotels, at least those I book, don't furnish room clocks, and so I opened my clamshell Westclox clock upon checking into the room, forgetting that in addition to setting it forward an hour the night before adjusting for European summer time, I had not corrected for the roughly ten minutes fast time which didn't fool me at home in Eger but which did fool me there in Budapest. And so, unaware, when I set out at 5:00 to meet Nora, it was actually 4:50.

As I approached Vácsi u. and looked up to a huge church clock straight ahead which showed not 5:20 as I had assumed, but 5:10, I thought, "Well, so I have to wait a few minutes for Nora. Big deal. She waited plenty for me."

I turned right on Vácsi u. and began counting up. I think I began somewhere in the teens, maybe twenties, meaning, 47b could not be so far away. 


Addresses can be a little non-intuitive in Hungary, though, as the b in 47b suggests. You can have a single block that runs from, say, addresses 20 to 25, or a single block that runs from 20a to 20g. The numbers don't synch with the distance traveled; progress does not move at a metered pace. And as I realized this passing long blocks which were stuck on a single number, I wondered just how far ahead 47b could be. Blocks? Miles? Regardless, I concluded, walking up from 20 in search of 47, wherever its b may be, you've got your nose to the wind. As long as the numbers continued upward,  meeting Nora was inevitable.

Frankly, the further I walked, the less appealing was the neighborhood. Granted, it was Sunday, so with shops closed the sidewalks were going to be empty. But contrary to the lower parts of Vácsi u, near Dózsa György, where there was a hotel, and a gleaming mall, and some kind of modern business park, the higher numbered addresses of Vácsi u were occupied by tiny crumbling stores selling lottery tickets, cigarettes, and cans of beer, or sneakers, or fake nails. The avenue on both sides struck me as dry and dusty. I surmised that I was simply passing through some kind of urban desert, after which would come an oasis and St. Michael's Church.


As I approached number 40 not much had improved. There was an auto parts store, and wedged between two spaces dark and vacant, a narrow camera shop was locked behind a sliding metal gate.


Several blocks further, at 45, signs of a retail pulse became even fainter. The 45 block was a mix of vacancies, a shoe repair, a key maker, a card shop with yellowed cards on display. 


Still, regardless of what I would have expected the surrounding neighborhood for a church and classical music venue to be, I was making progress. The numbers proved it. And even though I couldn't yet see the church -- no doubt because it was set back from the road a bit -- I was confident that soon I would. And there Nora would spot me from a distance, and sigh with relief.


Initially, I was more confused than alarmed when at last I came upon Vácsi u, 47b. What kind of church is this? 

Váci utca, 47b

The address was right, but the building was wrong. Maybe it's on the far side of this building, behind it, I thought, so I turned the corner and walked down the side street and turned again to find the church there, but it wasn't. 


I began getting a bad feeling.


Heading back up the side street I spotted a couple who had just parked their small truck and were about to unload some used furniture. I approached the woman and asked if she spoke English. "Kicsit," she said, so I showed her the concert ticket with "Szent Mihály Templom" and the address on it and asked her where the church was. 


She studied the ticket for a few seconds. 


"You must go to Metro, három vonat,"

"Three train,"


"Yes, yes. Three train. To Deák Tér." She poked the ticket with her finger. "Deák Tér. Metro." She handed me the ticket and pointed back in the direction I had just walked, back toward Dózsa György.


Remember from Part 1 of this story the image of Dustin Hoffman sprinting in The Graduate? Hit "replay."

By the time I got to the Metro stop at the junction of Vácsi and Dózsa György the church clock which once showed me to be early now showed me to be approaching late. And again -- because what could possibly go wrong? -- I hadn't brought Nora's number with me.


Panicked as I was, I knew I couldn't panic entirely. I couldn't just jump on the train to Deák Tér without some corroboration. So, though instinct wanted to fly down the tunnel to the Metro reason stood me before the reception desk of the hotel at the corner and calmly asked where the hell the church was.

The receptionist was very nice, though a bit stumped by my question, but she then pieced it all together and opened up one of the hotel gratis maps, searched for St. Michael's, circled it, and then showed me that I had to get on the train and take it to Ferenciek tere, one stop beyond Deák Tér. Reason was feeling rather proud of itself. The rest of me was feeling like an idiot.
When I emerged from the subway at Ferenciek there was no big yellow arrow hanging from a cloud pointing me toward St. Michael's so I asked the first person I could find, a guy standing at the top step of the metro entrance. 

When I asked if he spoke English he said, "Kicsit," and so I asked him where St. Michael's was, but he mumbled something. So I showed him the ticket with the address, and after mulling it over for a minute -- which seemed more like an hour to me -- he started giving me directions to Váci utca which would have landed me back with the couple unloading furniture.


Out of nowhere a rather distinguished elderly man in tie, overcoat, and fedora approached and asked in sweet, blessed, near perfect English if he could be of assistance. I asked him where St. Michael's was, and he pointed me two streets down on the left, on Váci utca. Just take a left on Váci utca, he said, and the church will be on the right after a block or two.
I thanked him and turned Ben again.


Sure enough, there it was. Váci utca, 47b. The other Váci utca, 47b. Or, perhaps there were more. Perhaps there was a chain of Váci utca, 47bs.


The church clock tower read 5:45, and though I looked inside the sanctuary to see if perhaps Nora was waiting there, I didn't really expect that she would be. And she wasn't. 

Maybe she went to the Central Cafe to wait for me there, I thought, brightening some, because, after all, that was our plan anyway, to eat there before the concert. So I hurried to the Central Cafe but Nora was not among its many smiling and relaxed diners. 


Had I the luxury of time I would have lingered at the Central Cafe, stewing and berating myself, etc., but I decided that before I could indulge myself I had to swing by the church once more, just in case.


And there, sure enough, was Nora. She wasn't happy. She didn't exactly light up at seeing me.


I tried to explain but my self-defense was so mangled that it didn't even make sense to me. She changed the subject and said that she was very sorry, that she couldn't attend the concert because she had to photograph a friend's dance recital instead. It is entirely possible that those plans were rather freshly minted, say sometime after 5:30, though there was no way I was now going to probe that possibility standing behind a giant 8-ball. 


In any event, Nora would not be joining me for the concert, and that was that. We did agree to have something to eat at the Central Cafe, though she said he had to clear out by 7:30. At not yet 6:00, we still had an hour and a half to kill before we had to go our separate ways.


The meal began rather awkwardly, what with the fact that I had twice blown a rendezvous with her as the table's imposing centerpiece. After a while, though, the adrenalin which had so seized her shoulders earlier began to drain, and, though she may disagree, by meal's end I thought we had turned things around pretty well. We laughed some, giggled some, and drank wine some. In sum, then, despite the harried start, we concluded by having a pretty nice time together.


Of course, not so nice that I will ever hear from her again or get a response to an email I might send. Not that nice a time. But nice, given the circumstances. 


There is an adage that goes, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." It doesn't go as high as thrice, and neither would Nora. And who could blame her?


I did go to the concert at Váci utca, 47b, and it was good. Although, between pieces and movements a large white neon PUTZ kept flashing inside my head that I couldn't shut off.


In case you are wondering, I made no mistake, misread no map or address. In Budapest, there really are two Váci utca, 47bs. The right one, and the wrong one.