Every Day, All Day Humiliation at Auschwitz

 

Auschwitz-Birkenau latrine

On my return visit Auschwitz in July of this year, I saw things I missed or forgot I saw on my first visit in 2017.  

In 2017 I was overwhelmed by the scale of the camp--so many people murdered, so many German soldiers and civilians running the camp.  

One of the horrible sights was the latrine in a barracks at Birkenau.  The guards herded the inmates to the latrine. They used the latrine together, dozens at a time. The guards used a stopwatch.  When time was up, the inmate had to get up or be beaten.  

When I try to imagine how horrible life truly was I think of times when I lived and worked in close quarters large groups of men--the Army and Teamsters loading docks.  One lament common to both places was, "Can't I take a shit in peace?"  

No one wants to be rushed in a latrine.  

And even men I have known who care little for privacy would occasionally want "to shit in a latrine with a door."

When I was on German gunnery ranges in the 1970s, some of the ranges had a place we called a "Make A Buddy" Shitter.  It was an outhouse with two boards with three holes connected by a narrow floor space.  When it was full, three men sat on each side facing each other with interlaced knees.  The inside guys had to wait until the outside guys were done to get out.  Sometimes men would wear their gas masks to use that latrine.  

And yet, these laments of dock workers and soldiers hardly touch the deep humiliation of prisoners in Auschwitz and other concentration camps forced to use latrines on a stop watch.  

The Nazis who marched in Charlottesville represent the very same things as the guards at Auschwitz. They see me and everyone who is not in their tribe as less than human. Nazis are never "fine people." We can never have peace with a government that tolerates Nazis. We are fortunate to be delivered from a government that numbers all American Nazis among its voters.

Nazi and rebel flags together at Charlottesville, 

both flags represent the losers in racist wars.

 

Seven Years Ago Today: Ironman Finish Six Minutes Before Midnight

 

My wife and I crossed the start line at 7:20 a.m. I crossed the finish line at 11:54 p.m. after 16 hours and 34 minutes of swimming, riding and running a total of 140.6 miles. My wife finished an hour before me.

Seven years ago today, I did my first, last and only triathlon. It was the Louisville, Kentucky, event.  That day, like today in Pennsylvania, the temperature was in the mid-90s with 90% humidity.  

Since that very long day, I had a knee replaced, lost partial use of my left arm.  I will never do another Ironman, but I am very glad I did the one I finished seven years ago today.

I have written several blog posts about the Ironman. They are here.

Vital and Urgent Priorities in America's Place in the World

 

At the center of the book "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" the author says we must learn to separate the Vital from the Urgent and live our lives taking proper care of both. The reason we can't is the tyranny of the urgent. 

When there is a fire on the stove we have to put it out before we can think about remodeling the kitchen to be more efficient. Social media makes the urgent loom much larger than Stephen Covey could have imagined when he wrote his book. I can see and sympathize with the urgent plight of the people of Afghanistan. 

But America also needs to keep its commitments to other allied nations, and I would add to fix prior betrayals. What America has done to the Kurds in the last three decades needs to be fixed. It does not have the videos of the current crisis, but we left the Kurds in Iraq to be gassed and slaughtered by Saddam Hussein in 1991. Our failed "nation building" strategy left the Kurds isolated in 2003 and after. Then the last President betrayed the Kurds in Syria after one phone call with Erdogan. Unlike the current President, he was not surprised by events, he did not give a fuck about the Kurds or any commitment we made to them. 

And while we focus on Afghanistan while showing the world we are incompetent, what happens to Taiwan? Does China think we would come to Taiwan's aid? And Ukraine? What would stop Putin from moving into Ukraine in force? The Baltic states have authoritarian Belarus and Russia as neighbors to the east and increasingly authoritarian Poland to the south and west.

Bungee Cord Repair Lasts 2,400 Miles

2021 Nissan Altima plus six bungee cords

Last Friday my son Nigel and I left Lancaster at 8:30 p.m. to drive to Minneapolis, Minnesota. He will be staying with his sister Lisa for a couple of months.  

The plan was to drive to somewhere around Cleveland, drive as far as I could Saturday and arrive by Sunday late morning.  As it turned out, I drove straight through. We arrived Saturday at 1 p.m.  More on that later.  

Nigel and Lisa at Caribou Coffee in Minneapolis

About 100 miles from Lancaster on US 322 West, I ran over what I think was a chunk of truck tire.  There was a horrible scraping noise.  We pulled over and found the bumper and pieces of the underbody dragging on the ground.  We tried to pound it into place, but it fell apart as soon as we moved.  

Then I remembered I had a bungee cord in my back pack.  And at the second place we stopped there was a bungee cord lying in the breakdown lane.  With two bungee cords, we could drive slowly to a Rutter's Store four miles away.  There I bought a half dozen more bungee cords.  I threaded them through the damaged pieces under the body, pulled bumper into place and kept driving. 

The Nissan Altima before we left. 

Nigel asked if the cords would hold until Minneapolis.  I reminded him that NASCAR repairs partially wrecked cars in the pits with Duct Tape and Bungee Cords and they hold at 200+ mph.  I could tell him the bungee cords would hold till I got home.  They did.  

When I returned the car after the 2,500-mile trip, I pulled off the bungee cords. The bumper and underbody parts stayed in place.  They will fall apart if the car is driven over a bump, but the tension of the bungee cords had stuck the damaged parts together.  

And why did I drive straight through?  When we got near the Ohio state line, I looked on my hotel app and saw very few vacancies anywhere near Cleveland. A Holiday Inn near Toledo had one room for $368!!!  I decided to keep driving.  When the sun came up we were approaching Chicago.  We at pancakes in Wisconsin and got to Minneapolis in the early afternoon.  I slept for four hours, got up for dinner, then slept nine more hours.  Late the next morning I started back.  This time I stopped half way.  

Modern cars are so reliable, it was fun to show Nigel I could put a broken car back together on the side of the road in the dark with green, yellow and black bungee cords.

"Le Grand Remplacement"--Great Replacement Theory Began in France and Became the Trump Call to Arms

Le Grand Remplacement came to America as "Great Replacement Theory," the belief that Jews are 

replacing white people with brown people as a strategy for world domination

 

On my last day in Paris in July 2021, I stopped by La Nouvelle Librairie on Rue de Medicis across the street from Luxembourg Gardens. It is the fascist bookstore of Paris, on a shaded street with a half dozen bookstores and several cafes. 

In front of La Nouvelle Librairie was a book table with a dozen copies of Le Grand Remplacement by novelist, gay rights activist and fascist Renaud Camus.  The subtile "Introduction to Global Replacement" (Introduction au replacisme global) made me smile. A French intellectual could describe a 500-plus-page book as an introduction. An American publisher would insist on something less than a third that length.

The fascist bookstore and The Red Wheelbarrow English-language bookstore are next door neighbors. Not happily.  The Red Wheelbarrow always has anti-fascist books in the window display.

Penelope Fletcher, owner of The Red Wheelbarrow, the English-language bookstore next to the fascist bookstore, assured me in 2019 that the French fascists have nothing good to say about President Trump or American fascists.  "They see themselves as intellectuals," she said of the fascists next door. "They don't like to be associated with Trump and American fascists."

But American white supremacists, Nazis and others racists have made Great Replacement Theory their own, even if they don't know its French roots. When the Charlottesville Nazis chanted "Jews will not replace us" they were echoing the theory that Jews are moving brown people into white nations as part of a global takeover.  (I can't help wondering what Charlottesville racists would have thought if they knew they were quoting a gay activist French intellectual.)

The man who murdered Jews in Pittsburgh in 2018 was motivated by Great Replacement Theory.  When Trump said caravans were invading America he was echoing Great Replacement Theory back to his racist ChristianNationalist voters.  

The ADL (Anti Defamtion League) has an excellent summary of Great Replacement Theory.   I have some highlights below: 

• “The Great Replacement” theory has its roots in early 20th century French nationalism and books by French nationalist and author Maurice Barres. However, it was French writer and critic Renaud Camus who popularized the phrase for today’s audiences when he published an essay titled "Le Grand Remplacement," or "the great replacement," in 2011. Camus himself alluded to the “great replacement theory” in his earlier works and was apparently influenced by Jean Raspail’s racist novel, The Camp of the Saints.
• Camus believes that native white Europeans are being replaced in their countries by non-white immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, and the end result will be the extinction of the white race.
• Camus focused on Muslim immigration to Europe and the theory that Muslims and other non-white populations had a much higher birth rate than whites. His initial concept did not focus on Jews and was not antisemitic.
• The “great replacement” philosophy was quickly adopted and promoted by the white supremacist movement, as it fit into their conspiracy theory about the impending destruction of the white race, also know as “white genocide.” It is also a strong echo of the white supremacist rallying cry, “the 14 words:” “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
• Since many white supremacists, particularly those in the United States, blame Jews for non-white immigration to the U.S. the replacement theory is now associated with antisemitism.
• The night before the August 2017 the Unite the Right rally, white supremacists, marching across the University of Virginia campus, shouted, “Jews will not replace us,” and “You will not replace us,” clear references to Camus’ theory.

Use By Individual Extremists

• In October 2018, white supremacist Robert Bowers killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, after writing a Gab post blaming Jews for bringing non-white immigrants and refugees to the U.S.
• In March 2019, white supremacist Brenton Tarrant livestreamed himself killing 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand. Tarrant also released a manifesto online called “The Great Replacement,” an homage to Camus’ work.
• In April 2019, white supremacist John Earnest killed one and injured three at a synagogue in Poway, CA. In a letter he released online, Earnest claimed that Jews were responsible for the genocide of “white Europeans,” and cited the influence of Bowers and Tarrant.
• In August 2019, white supremacist Patrick Crusius opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, TX, killing 23 people and wounding almost two dozen. In a manifesto, Crusius talked about a “Hispanic invasion” and made reference to the great replacement.

Use by Media/Tech Personalities

• In July 2017, Lauren Southern, a Canadian far-right activist, released a video titled, “The Great Replacement,” promoting Camus’ themes. That summer, Southern was involved in “Defend Europe,” a project lead by European white nationalists to block the arrival of boats carrying African immigrants. Southern’s video further popularized Camus’ theory.
• In October 2018, on Fox News' The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham said, "your views on immigration will have zero impact and zero influence on a House dominated by Democrats who want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants."
• In October 2019, Jeanine Pirro was discussing Democrats' hatred of Trump on Fox Nation's The Todd Starnes Show. She declared, "Think about it. It is a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals that will vote for the Democrats."
• On April 8, 2021, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host explicitly promoted the ‘great replacement” theory. Carlson discussed “Third World” immigrants coming to the US who affiliate with the Democratic Party. He asserted, “I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term 'replacement,' if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate — the voters now casting ballots — with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World, but they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it. That's true."
• On April 11, 2021, Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, posted on his own platform: “Now today the ADL is trying to cancel Tucker Carlson for daring to speak the truth about the reality of demographic replacement that is absolutely and unequivocally going on in The West. These are not ‘hateful’ statements, they objective facts that can no longer be ignored.”

August 11, 2017, When Nazis Marched in America

 

Nazi flags and Rebel flags together in a racist medley at Charlottesville

Four years ago today Nazis with Tiki torches marched across the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.  The chanted "Blood and Soil" and "Jews will not replace us."  I was riveted to TV coverage of the march and worried about my daughter who lived 60 miles away in Richmond.  Hundreds of armed racists were in Charlottesville for a "Unite the Right" Rally.  Would the rally spill over into other parts of Virginia? I didn't know.  

The next day one avowed Nazi would murder Heather Heyer and maim several more people.  The coward-bully President we had at the time would waffle for days applauding then reluctantly condemning his fervent supporters waving Nazi and Rebel flags.  He finally said there were "good people on both sides."  

For more than fifteen years, my family and I had been members of Presbyterian Church that was part of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) denomination.  It was the conservative side of the denominational split in the 1970s.  

In the wake of Charlottesville, the liberal side of the split, the Presbyterian Church USA condemned the violence and the President for not speaking forcefully against Nazis.  The PCA did nothing. I already was bewildered by people at the Church who  supported Trump, some fervently.  I left the Church.  

By the end of the year I was attending a local synagogue.  I had learned a lot about the Holocaust since Trump won the election. Two months before Charlottesville, I visited Auschwitz and Yad Vashem.  At both places I learned about decorated Jewish veterans of World War I who were murdered in the Holocaust. I knew that my service to America means nothing to Nazis, or to the fascists who flocked to Trump. 

I also read about German Jews who became Christians, sometimes going back three generations.  In 1935, Jewish converts were expelled from all Churches in Nazi Germany.  By the end of the war, nearly all were murdered.  The Churches who expelled their ethnically Jewish members still called themselves Churches, but they were dead. Their god was Hitler.  

The Churches that openly worship Trump now and call him God's Chosen or a modern-day King Cyrus are no better.  There is not a word of the Sermon on the Mount that Trump has not spit on by his actions and life. So much of conservative America has shown itself to be shallow and shameless in following Trump.  The Churches that worship him, or simply allow worship of him, are as spiritually broken as Nazi Churches.  

Another Alphabet Makes Five: Arabic

 

Alif, Baa, Ta, Tha...the beginning of the Arabic Alphabet

Growing up I was mono-lingual. I still am mono-lingual if fluency is the measure language.  My father spoke Yiddish, but had no interest in teaching me the language of his home.  Except for a crash course in Hebrew six months before my Bar Mitzvah, I had no language training growing up. 

During my second enlistment, I lived in West Germany for three years, from 1976-79.  During that time I tried to learn German, but never got very far.  I also began to learn Ancient Greek, a language I studied on and off right up to the present moment. In the past two decades I have take six semesters of Ancient Greek.  

The Alpha to Omega of Ancient Greek

Somewhere in the nineties, I started to learn French.  It became very useful when I got a job with the American branch of a French chemical company.  I made a dozen trips to France and could carry on a simple conversation and read some documents.  

Although our ability to learn language is greatest when we are very young, my interest in language got deeper in the past decade.  I had always loved Russian literature since my first Russian lit. class in college.  Around 2013 I decided I wanted to go to Russia, riding south to north from Odessa to Finland.  The trip never happened, but I took three semesters of Russian and practice what I know several times each week.  Now I had three alphabets floating in my head.  

The Russian alphabet has 33 characters

In 2017, Nazis marched in America chanting "Jews will not replace us."  I joined a synagogue.  It had been fifty years since I had read or said any Hebrew, but I started to learn.  Now I have four alphabets.  My best friend Cliff also decided to learn Hebrew so we commiserate  about the difficulties of learning language at our advanced ages.  

Hebrew reads right to left and has script characters

that are really different from block characters. 

And now Arabic.  I probably should have tried to learn Arabic when I deployed to Iraq in 2009.  But I have been to Israel three times since 2017 and hope to return sometime in the next couple of years.  I saw a lot of Arabic and decided I should at least be able to read the signs.  

My language practice app is Duolingo.  They just added an alphabet feature for alphabets other than the one for western  languages.  So I decided I could start from nothing and see if I could get to some basic phrases with just Duolingo and some writing.   

Last month when I was in Germany for two weeks, I could order food in a restaurant in German. Language rests in strange places in my head.  

So I will keep struggling with five alphabets and six languages (there is always more to learn in English) and possibly read Arabic signs on my next trip to Israel.

Terezin: "Model" Concentration Camp and Death Camp for "Mosaic" Christians

The ironic lie at the gate of many concentration camps, including Terezin

Two weeks ago I visited the Terezin concentration camp west of Prague in the Czech Republic. Terezin is variously classed as a ghetto or a concentration camp.  Tens of thousands died in the camp both from execution and disease, but it was not an extermination camp with gas chambers.  

Dozens of people slept in these bunks

Terezin was used a "model" camp. It was the camp the Red Cross was allowed to visit in February 1944 to show that the camps were not as bad as the reports coming out as the Nazi Army retreated.  The Nazis gave the Jews in the camp some autonomy. Many Jewish children were sent to Terezin and not made into slave laborers or murdered, at least for a while.  

A memorial to Jews tortured and murdered in the small fortress at Terezin

Another group sent to Terzin was professing German Christians who had even one Jewish great-grandparent.  Christians with Jewish backgrounds were removed from Church leadership in 1933. All Jewish or "Mosaic" Christians were expelled from Churches in 1935. Many were sent there to be enslaved and eventually murdered at Terezin or sent to Auschwitz to be enslaved or murdered.

A memorial near the fortress wall that served as an execution site

After my first visit to Auschwitz in 2017, I began to see the area controlled by the Nazis, between the Pyrenees and the Ural mountains, as a place where 400 million people with a Christian identity lived and possibly one in a thousand acted like Jesus. All those Christians were living normal lives until the Nazis took over, then the trial came and 999 of 1,000 murdered and dispossessed their Jewish neighbors or averted their eyes.

The history of Terezin and the attempt to make it a "model" camp makes clear that even the worst of the Nazis knew that their actions were evil. 

Walking My Bike in a Grocery Store

 

Bike path??

Yesterday I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from the afternoon ride. I was on my racing bike so I did not have a lock and was not going to leave a bike with $2,000 wheels outside a store, so I walked my bike through the store.

As I walked to the back, a woman said, "I've never seen that before."

I remembered I needed coffee cream so I walked over to the dairy section. After I picked up the carton, a man in his mid-40s looking at the milk display said, "You look like someone who stayed trim later in.....as you got older. What kind of milk do you drink? I could slim down some. Do you drink almond milk?"

When he took a breath I said, "I drink Lactaid. I tried almond milk. I don't like it. But you could try it."

He thanked me and said he should exercise more. I waved and clicked away (bike cleats) toward the cash register.

Only once did I have someone tell me I could not walk my bike in a grocery store. I pointed out that my bike took up less space than a shopping cart.

Have you ever walked a bike through a store?

Last Day of the Trip was a Beautiful Day in Paris

Jardin Luxembourg, the garden ringed by statues of every queen of France 

After two weeks of traveling across central Europe visiting four concentration camps, I arranged my trip so I would spend the last day in Paris. The day turned out even better than I could have hoped. 

First, I woke for breakfast at 9am then afterward went back to bed. I finally got up at noon and on the train to the area of Saint Michel, Luxembourg and the Pantheon. All my clothes, which isn’t much, were dirty, so I walked form the Seine in brilliant sun up the hill toward the Pantheon. I stopped on the way to eat Sushi then walked over to Boulevard Saint Michel. 

When I arrived in Paris two weeks earlier the five-floor bookstore Gibert was closed—I thought forever. 

Gibert librairie

But the doors were open and I went inside, to every floor. 

I bought a little book of Greek grammar and Leonard Cohen’s “Book of Mercy.”

I walked further up the hill and started washing my clothes. I went back to the laundromat where I met an Australian couple who were in France for the 24 Hours of Lemans. But this time I met no one. Only one other machine had clothes in it while I was there. With the clothes washing I walked further up the hill and had cappuccino at Columbus Café, opposite Jardin Luxembourg. 

Next I walked around the corner to Red Wheelbarrow bookstore and visited there. After folding my clothes, I walked around Luxembourg for an hour. 

Then I had an early dinner at Au Pere Louis, one of my favorite restaurants in Paris. I walked more and finally went back to the hotel. Following two weeks of shared seeing the worst of humanity, it was good to spend the last day in civilization at its best.

Visiting Auschwitz Again It Is Even More Horrible

 

Auschwitz I

The second death camp I visited on this trip was the Auschwitz concentration camp. I was here in 2017. It was the first death camp I had ever visited. In fact, before that Auschwitz visit, I had never been to a Holocaust museum. 

The Nazi lie at the gate of every death camp

On this second visit I was more aware of the terrible scale of the slaughter and of the
camp itself. Auschwitz began as a Polish army camp taken over by the Nazis shortly after their victory in 1939. The camp is on the edge of the small city of Oswiecim. 

The little Polish town of Oswiecim became the center of death as Auschwitz-Birkenau

To Nazis expanded the camp by using slave labor to add second stories to existing barracks and added other buildings. The brick construction in Auschwitz is still solid today, unlike in many camps where wooden and hastily built brick buildings have long since fallen or crumbled. As Auschwitz became the center of Nazi genocide, the huge Birkenau camp was built two kilometers away. Acres of barracks and workshops cover a large field just outside the town of Oswiecim. 

The vast facility at Birkenau was where most Jews were murdered

In between acres of barracks is the rail siding where Jews were unloaded from box cars and separated to either work as slaves or be immediately killed by gas. Cliff and I walked for hours between and in the two camps trying to take in the full scale of place where more than million Jews were murdered.

Life or immediate death at the whim of a malignant Nazi

Entrepreneurs of Violence: Money and Hate Drove SS Innovations in Horror

 

Jewish slave labor in the Flossenburg quarry

The Flossenburg concentration camp was a working quarry site before it became a death camp. When the SS took over operations in the late 1930s prisoners became free slave labor to deliver quarry stones to the Nazi war effort. Later in the war, when there was little demand for stone and much need for Messerschmidt fighter planes, the underground halls in rural Bavaria became manufacturing sites for airplane parts. Innovations by the SS and Gestapo made the horrors of the Holocaust far worse than they might have been. 

In the mid 1930s, Hitler had vague plans to send Jews to Siberia once he conquered Russia or to Madagascar. The possibility of killing all the Jews in Nazi-controlled territories became possible as the SS developed more efficient methods of mass murder. At the beginning of the war Jews were killed primarily by shooting. Tens of thousands of German police and soldiers murdered Jews across Eastern Europe by shooting them over slaughter pits such as those in Kiev and Lviv in what is now Ukraine. 

Camps such as Auschwtiz and Treblinka began mass murder by gas only in the 1940s. Then rather than millions of individual murders, Jews were killed by the thousands and cremated. The death camps led to the particular horror created by Adolph Eichmann—putting three million Jews in rail cars and shipping them to their death, primarily in Poland. 

Less than a year before the war ended, hundreds of thousands of Jews were stuffed in rail cars and murdered on arrival or after being used as slave labor. As the war neared its end, slave labor lost its value and death became the sole business of the camps. The final spasms of slaughter were the worst of all. 

The crematorium at Flossenburg

At Flossenburg and Auschwitz, those who survived slave labor were marched west ahead of the Soviet Army. Tens of thousands of prisoners starved and froze to death and were buried along the roads during the cruel winter of 1945.

A diorama made by a camp survivor