Leon Bass’ video, The 36-Hour Day, Charlie Pierce’s Family Alzheimer’s Story.

Leon Bass speaks at an event. His wife had Alzheimer’s Disease and died earlier this decade.

Dunreith and I spoke with Dr. Leon Bass the other night.

One of my heroes, he had sent us a video that interspersed him telling his life story with images of the topics he was discussing.

Born in Depression-era Philadelphia, he served during World War II in the segregated United States Army.  During his training he had to endure numerous humiliating experiences in the segregated South.

During the war, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge and witnessed unspeakable horrors as a witness to the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Bass returned home and began a 34-year career as an educator, during which time he impacted the lives of thousands of individuals, including Community Renewal Society Executive Director and my boss Dr. Calvin Morris.

Dr. Bass participated in the March on Washington, became the first black principal at the Benjamin Franklin High School and eventually started speaking about his experiences before, during and after the war.

Shortly after returning home, Dr. Bass fell in love with, and married, his wife Mary.

A former schoolteacher, she bore, and together they raised, their son and daughter.  They traveled around the world.  They buried each other’s parents.

In short, they shared their lives during the more than half century they were married.

Unfortunately, toward the end of her life, Mary contracted Alzheimer’s disease.

Eventually, like so many others who are snared by a declining memory, she struggled to recognize her loved ones and to remember who she was.

Ultimately, Dr. Bass made the painful decision to move his wife to a facility near the community where they were living.  While there she received high-quality and compassionate care as well as daily visits from her husband.

In doing so, he heeded the advice given in Nancy Mace and Peter Rabins’ The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for Person with Alzheimer’s Disease, Related Dementing Illnesses, and Memory Loss in Later Life.

As the name suggests, one of the main points the book makes is that caring for people with dementia or other issues is a never ending task that, if not shared, can end the caregiver’s life years early than would otherwise have happened.

First published in 1981 and subsequently revised several times, this classic guide covers nearly every aspect imaginable for people dealing with loved ones who have memory issues.  Accessible and practical, the book covers everything from dealing with other family members to taking care of oneself to how to deal with issues of hygiene and how to provide environments that are not excessively disturbing for the person with memory loss.

Mrs. Bass died in the earlier part of this decade, and Dr. Bass is still soldiering on.

He’s had a knee replaced, cataracts removed from his eyes and a pacemaker implanted, but his spirits are still strong, he still sees family members regularly and travels across the country to speak to audiences about his life’s journey.

Writer Charlie Pierce tells a less happy, but at least as significant, tale in his book, Hard to Forget: A Family’s Alzheimer’s Story.

In 1985, Pierce’s father John went to place flowers on a family grave in Worcester, Massachusetts.

He was found three days later in Vermont.

This was the first undeniable sign that his father had some neurological loss-evidence that Pierce and other members of his family promptly denied.

The book tells the tale of how his family moved from denial to confronting his father’s decline, its impact on his family and the heated competition between researchers to make breakthroughs on this disease that robs its victims of their identity even as their body often remains intact.

Readers may know Pierce for his lighter fare as a regular guest on the public radio quiz show Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me, his work for Esquire magazine or his sports writing, such as his biography, Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything.

While Pierce’s writing skill is familiar, the gravity of his subject matter is not.

He skillfully moves between a searching examination and then description of the rampant nature of Alzheimer’s within his family-most, if not all of his father’s siblings have the disease-the emotional toll dealing with it takes, and the questions he asks himself at 44 years old about his own neurological future.

Pierce’s wife Margaret Doris is the book’s heroine, supporting Pierce, working to care for his parents and urging all to look squarely at what they are facing.

The number of families dealing these issues has already increased, and will only continue to grow, according to news reports.

Those who do would do well to draw on these two valuable books and to consult these resources.

James Von Brunn, Resources about Holocaust Denial and White Supremacy.

Here is a picture of alleged shooter James Von Brunn and a list of resources about the Holocaust and white supremacy.

By now, I’m sure you have heard about the shocking murder of a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, allegedly by 88-year-old white supremacist and Holocaust denier James Von Brunn.

It’s a hard time for white supremacists these days.  

Events like Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, his appointment of a diverse Cabinet, and his recent nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to be the nation’s third woman and first Latina U.S. Supreme Court justice embody all of what the haters oppose.

A sense of losing a battle often triggers desperate acts.

Von Brunn’s attack apparently was triggered by Obama’s recent visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp, which he called the “ultimate rebuke” to deniers. 

Here are some resources that can help give context to some of the issues raised by Von Brunn’s alleged shooting: 

To begin, Von Brunn was a failed artist, according to news reports.  Peter Cohen’s Architecture of Doom is an astonishing film that shows that many of the top Nazis, including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, were, too. 

I wrote last weekabout Deborah Lipstadt’s book and blog, as well as  a web site, all of which are intended to counter Holocaust denial.

The Intelligence Report, a publication of the Southern Povery Law Center and where my friend Casey Sanchez works, covers hate groups in America.  The Center more generally is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the issue.

Dear friend and full professor Stephen Kantrowitz’s Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy is a nimbly written and thoughtfully argued description of the re-emergence of white supremacy after the Civil War and into the 20th century as told through the life of South Carolina politician “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman.  

Kantrowitz and other historians who cover this ground are walking in the very wide road carved by groundbreaking historian and Arkansas native C. Vann Woodward, whose classic work The Strange Career of Jim Crow paved the way for other works like Kantrowitz’s to follow. 

For those people interested in the context that gave rise to the Holocaust Museum where the shooting occurred, I recommend Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life.  Novick argues that the events of the Holocaust have gained importance in America more because of the organization of the Jewish community than because of any change in the genocide’s tragic nature.

James Young is one of the leading authorities of Holocaust memorials; his book, At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocast in Contemporary Art and Architecture should be required reading for those intrigued by that topic.  

People seeking an overview of the Holocaust could do a lot worse than reading journalist William Shirer’s tome, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or historian Sir Martin Gilbert’s  The Holocaust:  A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War.  

Of course, Facing History and Ourselves, where Dunreith works and where I am a consultant, does terrific work around prejudice reduction with students all over the world.  While the organization has expanded from its original look at the Holocaust as its primary ‘case study,’ it still has a tremendous collection of print and video resources on the topic.  

Elements of Time, a collection of survivor testimony, is one of my favorites, while readers of Elie Wiesel’s Night should check out The Challenge of Memory, a video that accompanies the book and has complementary testimony for numerous points in the book.

Facing History’s resource book, Holocaust and Human Behavior, also has plenty of useful information, even as it’s more of a menu than a straight historical narrative.

Unfortunately, education and memory has not yet been a completely successful antidote to haters like Von Brunn and others of his ilk.  Still, actions like his only underscore the importance of continuing to inform people about past atrocities and continue to strive for a world in which events that seemingly were impossible, like the election of a black president, eventually become ordinary.

Obama’s visit to Buchenwald, Deborah Lipstadt’s exposure of Holocaust denial

 

Emory University Deborah Lipstadt after her victory over Holocaust denier David Irving in a British court. Lipstadt's book about Holocaust denial is important reading on the subject.

 

 

I carry the history of the Holocaust in my name. 

My Hebrew name is Yosef,  I am named for Joseph Lowenstein, or “Papa Joseph,” my paternal great-grandfather and the patriarch of that side of the family.

In 2004, I visited John and Maike Guntermann in the Essen-Steele area where our family had lived for generations.  

John’s father owned a print shop and had been Papa Joseph’s patient for many years.  In addition to showing me a notebook full of correspondence between our families for more than 60 years, starting with a death notice his father had created for my great-grandmother, John’s wife Maike read a letter her father-in-law had written that described Papa Joseph’s desperate efforts to leave Germany after the war had begun.

Shunned by many of the people who he had cared for for decades, Papa Joseph carried around an English dictionary as part of his efforts to learn the language to help him adjust to life in America, should he get out.

He never did.

Instead, he was deported first to Theresienstadt, and, from there, to the Auschwitz death camp. There, he and more than 1 million other people, were murdered by the Nazi regime and the workers who carried out the killing. 

President Obama’s recent visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where dear friend and personal hero Leon Bass witnessed liberation in April 1945, had personal resonance.  

In between his stops in Cairo, Egypt and Normandy, France, Obama called the camp the “ultimate rebuke” to those who would deny the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, there are many who would do so.

Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University has written a powerful book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, created a blog and been featured on a web site that seeks to expose and counter Holocaust denial.  

In the book, Lipstadt breaks down the range of tactics that deniers use.  While some are open and avowed anti-Semites, others take more sophisticated and thereby disturbing tactics.  This second group starts from the seemingly reasonable premise that war is a terrible experience for all people before starting to nibble around the edges of the numbers, the gas chambers, survivors’ memory, the role of disease, the absence of written commands from Hitler ordering the genocide, and so on.  

The cumulative effect is to say that the death of about 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews did not occur.

Venerable historian Richard Hovannisian has written about how the similar tactics employed by deniers of the Armenian genocide-an event that to this day is still denied by the Turkish government-and the Holocaust. 

In her work, Lipstadt writes about other major deniers like Ernst Zundel, Robert Faurisson, and Arthur Butz, an engineering professor at Northwestern University.

Within this part of the book, she has an interesting section about Noam Chomsky, who had a back-and-forth position about Faurisson’s right to speak at certain forums and air his views that is captured in part in the documentary film, Manufacturing Consent.   A current denier site, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, cloaks itself in the mantle of what in America is called the First Amendment.  

 She also explains the shift in tactics by the deniers, who have created “revisionist” pseudo-scholarly journals in which they peddle their hate.  

Lipstadt has always refused to appear on the same stage as Holocaust deniers because she says to do so would confer legitimacy to their lies and imply that there is an argument when, in fact, there is none.

She has paid a price for her scholarship.

In 1996, she was sued by David Irving, one of the major deniers, for libel in a British court.  Three courts found for Lipstadt, but the struggle continues, both because of the vast reservoir of information on the Internet-a Google search of her name and the book’s title instantly produced a denier’s “review” of the book that called it “vile”-and because of powerful leaders like Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who repeatedly has denied the Holocaust.  

Obama called out Ahmadinejad by name at Buchenwald, making it clear that he stands on the side of truth.  

Still, the struggle continues, especially as survivors continue to age and die, leaving us to pass on the reality about what happened to the next generation. 

1. Have you seen any denial web sites?  What tactics do they use?

2. How do you best counter a lie about history?

3. Why are so many people silent when Ahmadinejad issues these odious statements?

Social Studies Methods Class: Elie Wiesel’s Night

Madoff victim Elie Wiesel recounts his survival of the Holocaust in Night.

Disgraced and now imprisoned financier Bernard Madoff has captured plenty of headlines recently. 

The tentacles of his multi-billion dollar Ponzi Scheme have reached throughout the country and have wreaked financial havoc on thousands of families and non-profit organizations.  In many ways, the consequences of his decption have yet to be fully felt, since they came at a time when the economy was already seriously battered.

Madoff’s actions have caused particular anguish in the Jewish community. He is Jewish and used his membership in the community to exploit his religious brothers and sisters.  Some have expressed concerns that his actions will play into long-held stereotypes about Jews as financiers and lead to a rise in antisemitism, while others have struggled to understand the extent and cause of his duplicity.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel is one of Madoff’s many victims.  He has called Madoff’s crimes unforgivable. 

Themes of memory, forgiveness, belief and humanity also run throughout Night, Wiesel’s slender and classic memoir that provides an authoritative account of Holocaust survival.

Night opens in Sighet, Transylvania in 1941.  A 12-year-old  Kaballah student, Wiesel and other residents of the community are warned of their impending doom by Moshe the Beadle.  However, the townspeople find Moshe’s predictions incredible, instead concluding that he has lost his mind.

A couple of years later, his predictions turn out to be true.

Wiesel, his family and the rest of the community are forcibly removed from their homes and taken by train to the Auschwitz death camp.  His words about that first night have often been quoted, but bear repetition for their stark power:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for ever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.

The repetition and insistence of permanence and memory, the allusions to the Ten Commandments, the combination of images and their consequences all give this excerpt its considerable impact.

Night has many such moments.  He talks about how eight words uttered at the camp’s selection-men to the left, women to the right-means that he and his father are separated from his mother and sisters. 

He never sees them again. 

This is only the beginning for Wiesel and his father, though. 

Night details the appells, or hours long roll calls, which begin early in the morning, the paltry rations which slowly starve and reduce the men’s existence to animal instincts of survival, the collective punishment visited on those who try to rebel and other aspects of unspeakable cruelty they endured.

Wiesel’s father does not handle the physical strain well.  Shortly before the book ends, he dies, but not before Wiesel has come to resent and even have feelings of hatred toward him for his inability to weather the abuse.  Other sons respond similarly, with some even abandoning their fathers on the death march. 

The book ends with Wiesel’s liberation at the Buchenwald camp in 1945.  He looks in a mirror for the first time since before his ordeal and ends the book with the following:

I wanted to see myself in the mirror … I had not seen myself since the ghetto.
From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.
The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

Wiesel describes himself in both first and third person, showing again the permanent impact of his experiences, their lethal and dehumanizing consequences, and his struggle to understand his personhood and meaning in the face of the atrocity he has endured.

Night is part of a trilogy-the other two books are Dawn and Day-and is probably the most well known of Wiesel’s many books. 

Originally written in French, the work was pared down extensively from its original version of more than 800 pages.  Facing History and Ourselves has created a study guide and a video, Challenge of Memory, that has clips that accompany specific scenes in the book, which has sparked ongoing discussion about whether it is a memoir or a novel.

In addition to being a prolific writer, speaker and thinker, Wiesel also created The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.  The foundation had  $15.2 million under management by Madoff’s investment firm, and has lost nearly everything.  His life savings have also been wiped out.

And so, now 80, Wiesel faces another challenge. 

While, of course, the financial hardship and betrayal he is grappling with is in no way comparable to his survival more than 60 years ago, what is clear is that Wiesel will meet its with his customary steely resolve and frankness.  He spoken recently about the outpouring of donations from people who learned about the foundation’s plight.  

For those people looking to understand the unspeakable horror Wiesel  and many others endured during World War II, Night is a powerful choice.