My Summer Vacation: More Concentration Camps

Arbeit macht frei the ironic and terrible sign at the gate 

of Auschwitz and other Nazi Concentration Camps

Next week I am flying to Germany to join my best friend Cliff on a thousand-mile tour of Nazi Concentration Camps.  We have visited other concentration camps together in 2017, 2019 and 2020:  Buchenwald, Dachau, and the first concentration camp opened in the state of Hesse in February1933.

We also visited Nuremberg in 2020, the site of the rallies that were central to Hitler's power. 

In July we will visit Flossenburg, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Theresienstadt.   We chose these because Cliff had never been Auschwitz, I had never been to Flossenberg and neither of us have been to Theresienstadt. 

Auschwitz is the largest and worst of  the camps. A million Jews died Auschwitz, but by the time the camp was in operation, three million Jews had already been murdered. They were shot by tens of thousands of German soldiers, German police, and by police and volunteers in conquered countries.   

Flossenburg is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred by the Nazis just before the war ended. One of the worst Trump toadies wrote a biography of Bonhoeffer in 2011.  Eric Metaxas could write about a martyr and then praise Trump.  

Thereseienstadt in the Czech Republic was the "show camp" for the Nazis early in the war. It was a place they took the Red Cross to show them the camps were not as bad as the rumors. It was also the camp where Jews who were confessing Christians were sent.  Churches in Germany stood aside and let their members who had any Jewish heritage be murdered.  

Bruder Timotheus and Kanaan 

Cliff was Sergeant Cliff Almes in the1970s in Cold War Germany where we were roommates.  After leaving the U.S. military he became Bruder Timotheus at the Land of Kanaan in Darmstadt. Kanaan was founded in 1947 by two women who believed Germany must repent for the Holocaust.

Before 2017, I had never been to a Holocaust museum or memorial or a concentration camp.  But when a racist President put the head breitbart.com in the White House, I knew I had to get connected to my genetic heritage.  Steve Bannon gave white supremacists and neo-Nazis a place to promote hate on breitbart.com  

In August 2017, Nazis were "fine people" according to the President and I needed to learn more about the hateful people who are his base of support.  

Germany was a civilized, if impoverished, country in 1932. By 1945, the country was bombed, invaded and defeated. The Nazis killed millions of innocent people and left their own country a smoldering ruin.  America was the leading democracy in the world in 2016, we are now slowly sinking into tyranny while Republicans cheer. 

I am going to concentration camps to see just how bad it can get if a tyrant rips away American democracy.  

The Three Little Pigs in French--the original gruesome version

 

Last night I read the original version of "The Three Little Pigs" in French. Children's books used to be so much more gruesome.

In this version the pigs who built their houses of straw and sticks ended up in the wolf's baking dish with an apple in their mouths.

The last pig tricked the wolf three times and made him so angry he jumped down the pig's chimney into a cauldron of boiling water.

The pig had boiled wolf for dinner!

That gave me paws (a telling tail).

Since the story is in French, it sounds lovely. I read aloud to enjoy the sound. Here is the exchange when the wolf arrives at each of the houses:

--Petit cochon, petit cochon, laisse-moi entrer.

--Non, non, par la barbiche de mon petit menton.

--Alors je soufflerai, et je gronderai, et j'ecraserai ta maison.

My Daughter's First Book -- Amelia's Journey to Find Family

 

Lauren Auster-Gussman, my oldest daughter, 

with her book Amelia's Journey to Find Family

If I were asked to name one thing that defines the life of my oldest daughter, I would say, "Lauren loves dogs!"

We got our family's first dog when Lauren was eight years old. The German Shepherd named Lucky was the whole family's dog, but Lauren really loved that dog.  Except for when she lived in college dorms, Lauren has had dogs ever since.  She currently has two rescue dogs named Guinness and Watson, but she wrote her first book about a dog named Amelia.  

Amelia and her book

Lauren adopted Amelia last year and kept her alive and as healthy as possible until she passed away last month on May 20, National Rescue Dog Day at the age of approximately 12-14.  The book is a story told by Amelia about finding her last and final family.  If you would like to get the book for a child in your life (or yourself), order here.

Lauren volunteers for Lu's Labs, a Labrador Retriever Rescue organization.  Lauren fostered thirty rescued labs over the past five years before deciding to keep Amelia.  

Over the past year, Amelia posted daily on the Lu's Labs site as well as her and her brother's instagram page. These posts detailed her transition to Lauren's home, old lady ailments, the difficulties of training the humans and attempting to understand their behavior, and about finding the simple joys and things to be grateful for in each day.  These posts had hundreds of followers. 

In her passing, Amelia received over a thousand messages from people telling her how her posts inspired them, taught them about love and gratitude, helped them through difficult times in their lives, the uncertainty of COVID, and how reading her daily posts became part of their morning coffee routine or part of family dinner each night. These messages also had another common and incredible theme, so many people spoke of the incredible love they had for dog they'd never met. 

Lauren is currently posting on Facebook at Team Wag Forever.

On Instagram:  Amelia Writes Books and Guiness Watson and Friends.

Lauren shared with me many of the hundreds of comments she received.  I was really moved by the comment from her soccer coach at Juniata College, Scott McKenzie.  I only went on one college visit with Lauren and that was the college she picked. I remember little of the visit except the first moment of meeting coach McKenzie.  

Lauren and I walked into McKenzie's office. He was sitting at the desk looking at some papers, looked at Lauren then bolted straight up out of his chair, hands raised like he was in Church and said, "Praise the Lord. A five-foot ten goalkeeper wants to play for my team."  

Lauren played every season, but missed a lot of her senior season after an open fracture of her finger in a pre-season game.  

Here is Coach McKenzie's response to Amelia's passing.  Lauren's nickname on the team was "Goose."  

A good friend of mine lost one of her dogs this morning. Not just any friend and not just any dog!  Goose (my friend) competed for me while a student-athlete at Juniata College. Goose was a terrific goalkeeper for our women’s soccer team. She’s an even better human being who has dedicated her professional life to caring for others. It makes sense, then, that this tendency towards care would carry over to her personal life in the dedication she shows to her family and her pets. Goose volunteers for an organization called Lu’s Labs, which connects available dogs with their forever families. 

In Amelia’s case, the cards were stacked against this wonderful chocolate lab. Elderly dogs and dogs with compromised health are tough to place. In steps Goose (about a year ago) and becomes Amelia’s foster and then forever Mom. Goose and her husband welcomed Amelia into their family of two other labs and they became a family of five. 

Goose and Amelia wrote a children’s book together about finding a home and being loved. I can’t wait to get my “pawtographed” copy. 

Goose gave Amelia a voice and many of us have followed their wonderful journey together. 

This morning, that journey ended as Amelia earned her wings and will be waiting for her families at the Rainbow Bridge. 

Before she left, Amelia asked for a favor from all of us. She asked us to consider an elderly or ill dog if/when you adopt. She proved, over the past year, that they can give love and laughs with the time they have left. I believe this to be true. 

So, please learn more about adoption. Visit Lu’s Labs online. Consider Amelia’s book as a good read for you or a friend. 

Most importantly, open your heart to the possibility of the great amount of love that remains in our dogs, no matter what their age. 

Amelia, I never met you but my eyes were filled with tears of heartbreak when I learned of your passing. 

Good dog Amelia. Good dog. 

Goose - you’re an amazing person and I thank you for allowing many of us to join you in loving that good dog.

"He's Got No Damn Common Sense" said Sergeants of Soldiers, But It's True of All of Us

By the time Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense in 1775, 

the idea of common sense was already disappearing. 

"He's got no damn common sense," is a lament I heard all through my Cold War military career in the 1970s and 80s.  Frustrated sergeants, including me, lamented dealing with soldiers who knew nothing about wrenches or lieutenants who got lost on every field exercise.  

In Germany in 1977, I got a new replacement crewman named Brian. Every new tank crewman starts as a driver, which presumes some mechanical ability.  Brian had never owned a car and never used wrenches before joining my crew.  He became a legend (in the worst way) when I had to show him how to use an open-end wrench in a tight space.  

The head of an open-end wrench is slightly offset. You turn turn a bolt a few degrees, turn the wrench over and turn a few more.  It's slow, but you can remove or tighten a bolt in a tight or covered space by flipping the wrench.  This process mystified Brian.  He got it eventually, but his fellow crew members made merciless fun of him for not knowing how an open-end wrench worked.  

Knowing or catching on quickly to this kind of process is referred to as having common sense.  At the time, I was sure Brian lacked common sense.  

But in her most important philosophical book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt says that by the time Brian was accused of lacking common sense, the whole culture had lost what was common sense across the world.  

Arendt says that the rise of modern science, beginning with Galileo's invention of the telescope, showed we could no longer trust our senses.  

Common Sense took the experience of our five senses and gave them a unified frame of interpretation.  But Galileo showed us that what our senses can be completely wrong even when we simply look at the night sky.  In her book Being Wrong Kathryn Schulz explains how thoroughly wrong we can be when all of our senses tell us we are right. 

"Step outside...in someplace truly dark: the Himalayas, say, or Patagonia, or the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If you look up in such a place, you will observe the sky above you is vast and vaulted, its darkness pulled taut from horizon to horizon and perforated by innumerable stars.  Stand there long enough and you'll see this whole vault turning overhead, like the slowest of the tumblers in the most mysterious of locks. Stand there even longer and it will dawn on you that your own position in the spectacle is curiously central. The apex of the heavens is directly above you. And the land you are standing on--land that unlike the firmament is quite flat, and unlike the stars is quite stationary--stretches out in all directions from a midpoint that is you. 

"It is, of course, an illusion: almost everything we see and feel out there on our imaginary Patagonia porch is misleading.  The sky is neither vaulted nor revolving around us, the land is neither flat nor stationary, and, sad to say, we ourselves are not the center of the cosmos. Not only are these things wrong, they are canonically wrong. They are to the intellect what the Titanic is to the ego: a permanent puncture wound, a reminder of the sheer scope at which we can err. What is strange, and not a little disconcerting, is that we can commit such fundamental mistakes by simply stepping outside and looking up."

Arendt says that when we cannot trust the most obvious perception of our sense, we eventually lose the common sense that still is valued in its absence a half millennia later. If physics on a cosmic scale says we are wrong when we perceive the sun circling east to west every day, it's worse at the atomic level.  Who can really believe an oak table is as much empty space as the night sky.  The solid hardwood of every oak plank at the atomic level protons, neutrons and electrons and a whole bunch of nothing. And those atoms are strung together held by charge with mostly empty space in every direction.  

Poor Brian could blame every physicist from Galileo Gallilei to Albert Einstein to Richard Feynman to Roger Penrose for proving that nothing that his senses experience is as it appears. 

The Cold War sergeants' lament that "none of my soldiers has a lick of common sense" was more true than he knew.  The sad thing is, that old sergeant did not have much common sense in the traditional sense either. 

Resiliency Training Looks So Different in 2021 Compared to 2015

 

Howard Lloyd, me and Mike Pavasco

Two of the people I talked with at the welcome home for the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade were Howard Lloyd and Mike Pavasco. Lloyd was the commander of the brigade during the deployment. Mike was one of the sergeants who kept the brigade network in operation.  

Both were in the unit when I left five years ago.  Colonel Lloyd was the executive officer of the brigade.  Pavasco kept the network in operation.

In 2014 or 2015, Mike Pavasco was also in charge of resiliency training for the company we were in. He is a very upbeat guy.  He asked me to be one of the presenters for the training.  I turned him down.  I had no other choice at the time, I did not believe the training would do any good.

I left the Army the following year in 2016.  When I met up with Mike at the party, it occurred to me I could not only be one of the resiliency training sergeants now, I really have come to believe in the program.

It's almost crazy to think how far I have come in changing my view of meditation, yoga and balance in life. In 2014 I had just finished an Ironman Triathlon and was an advocate for an out-of-balance life focused on athletic goals.

While I was training for the Ironman, when I had an injury and a physical therapist said, "Listen to your body" I would think, 'My body is a whiny little bitch. I'm not listening.'

Now when a PT says "Listen to your body" I listen to her and do (or not) what my body says.

 The pandemic interrupted my yoga practice, when I returned last month I injured my knee--the one that is still me, not metal.  But I have meditated every day for more than three years--even days of injury and surgery and recovery.  

Resiliency also involves spiritual practice. The path to peace for most of us is spiritual, even for those who have no religious practice.  

Along with adding meditation and yoga to my life, I had a huge spiritual upheaval in my life that led to peace.  The winner of the 2016 Presidential election turned my spiritual world upside down.  Christians across America first supported and then worshipped a man who bragged about breaking commandments, who is the inverse of the Beatitudes.  Conservative Catholics and Evangelicals decided a vain liar was their man. They even made up stories about how he was a modern-day King Cyrus.

Every white supremacist, militia member and Nazi wannabe in America celebrated. Steve Bannon--the head of the white nationalist website Breitbart--got an office in the White House.  The following summer I visited Auschwitz and Yad Vashem and came home to Nazis marching in Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us."

I joined a synagogue a few months later.  During World War II, 400 million self-described Christians lived between the Pyrenees and Ural mountains. About one in a thousand helped Jews, 999 of a thousand looked the other way or joined in the looting, dispossession and murder of the Holocaust.  Nazis were now "fine people" in America.  

I thought things would get much worse than they have.  But whatever happens, I have peace knowing the Synagogue is the place I should be.

Resiliency training makes sense to me now.  It touches every dimension of life and can really help in a difficult world. 

Formosa Betrayed--A Chronicle of a Cold War Failure

Formosa Betrayed by George H. Kerr

 The book Formosa Betrayed, George Kerr, traces the history of the island nation that has been in dispute among nations vying for control of the South China Sea for more than a century. Taiwan came under Japanese control in 1895. At the end of World War II, Taiwan was neglected and betrayed by America and other allied governments. 

I am barely a tenth of the way through the book but already feeling the same deep sadness I felt when an utterly corrupt American President sold out the Kurds to the Turks to protect his hotel in Istanbul. Just after the betrayal, I heard an Israeli Rabbi saying, “Trump could betray us just as quickly.” 

As a Jew, I already felt connected to the struggle of Taiwan to maintain identity and independence when vastly outnumbered. In an echo of current politics, the U.S. ambassador to China near the end of World War II was forced out by an arrogant, incompetent Republican general who used his military rank and connections to circumvent the state department. 

The rogue general Patrick Hurley was eventually pushed out, but Republicans backed by Christian missionary organizations started lobbying to give power over Taiwan to General Chiang. Chiang was corrupt and a timid military leader but was favorable to the missionary groups. So, a cabal of Republicans and Christians worked against the best interests of Taiwan and its people.  Soong Mei-ling, the wife of General Chiang, spoke fluent English and was educated in Methodist schools. She used her Christian connections to hide the rampant corruption of her husband.

The ugly effects of conservative Republicans and conservative Christians working together is something that seems to crop up everywhere on the underside of American domestic and foreign policy.

I'll be writing more as I learn more.

Reunion at a Welcome Home for Task Force Anvil

Dale Shade and I at the Welcome Home for Task Force Anvil

Dale and I in 2009 with Matt (next to me) and Andy

Today I began what will be a very Army weekend by going to a Welcome Home Party for Task Force Anvil.  The unit I went to Iraq with in 2009-10 went back to the Middle East last year, returning a few weeks ago. 

Shortly after I arrived, Dale Shade said hello and asked me to have a seat with him at the bar.  He was the sergeant in charge of public affairs on the last deployment. For the last four months of the deployment, I worked in the same office as Dale and Matt.  The deployment was not going well, the staff officers in brigade headquarters were at each other's throats. Dale had to listen to complaints from frustrated officers who needed someone to blame or just to bitch at. He was the lightning rod that kept the rest of us from getting hit with the thunderbolts from the hastily built headquarters we called the plywood palace.   

I had not seen Dale since I left the Army five years ago. It was fun to catch up.  And strange to see a former sergeant with shoulder-length hair.  

The original post about the public affairs detachment in Iraq is here.