How Can This Be?

     I remember sitting in my grandparents' sunroom. Papa would sit on his blue recliner and Nana on the grey one.  I'd sit on the floor in-between them, able to see them both and pet their dog at the same time.  We would talk about almost anything:  books, concerts, gardens.   I always liked when Papa would call me a "sponge" and then I would make him feel smart by having him explain the rules of baseball to me.  It was fun to hear Nana talk about her grown-up piano students.  But sometimes, I would push conversation too far.

     "What did you know about the Holocaust when you were growing up?"  They would never respond.  "I mean, you were about 18 when Hitler came to power.  My age.  What did you know?"
Silence.  "Come on, you had to know something..."   Nana finally admitted that she knew he was a bad, bad man.

    I, unfortunately, was past the point of life when I could make simple answers.  Good and Bad. Right and Wrong.  Life is so much more complex.    "If you knew he was a bad, bad man,  what did you know that he did that was bad?  Did you know about the concentration camps?"  The most I ever got out of them was "Not until after the war, Emily."

    I found this hard to believe.  Confession: I was at a rough point in my relationship with my grandmother back then.  I tended to disbelieve her.  She is the person I have to thank for piano and languages; in essence, it is thanks to her that I am who I am.  But at that point in my life, I was seeing her weaknesses and how she hid her hurt in compliments of "Wonderful! Marvelous! Gorgeous!"  and I just didn't know what to believe.

   Recently, though, I came upon a disturbing documentary film that was spotlighted at the Tribeca Film Festival two years ago.  "Reporting on the Times" is a scathing commentary on the New York Times and its underreporting of the Holocaust.   If the NY Times were my grandmother's main source of news,  there would have only been 26 front-page articles on the Holocaust during the years of the war.  That's about one one-thousandth of the front page stories during that time frame.  Not good, really not good.

   My friend Arnie Gottlieb, on the other hand, was speaking with me at Passover this year.  He told me about how his family knew about the troubles in Europe and did everything they could to forage for money to bring their family members over.  Once the first group made it to the United States, he heard firsthand about the brutal conditions abroad.    Once you hear these things, I assure you, you can't unhear them.

   So, maybe my grandparents were mostly in touch with their relatives in the US, and mostly got their information from media sources that only told part of the story.  Or maybe the truth was too much for them to handle, too much to process.  Whatever the case may be, it must have been a rude awakening after the war.  I can't even imagine!

    Now I am following the race riots throughout the United States.  I am mindful of the media coverage and always questioning where the truth lies. What is the real story? What is the full story?  Intellectually, I can process these questions.  But emotionally, I feel empathic pangs for the families of the fighters, fighters who believe they need to fight, fighters who don't have the other resources to freedom that might allow for non-violent action.   I feel for the victims of Rough Rides-- and am surprised that neither I nor my extremely literate mother had heard about them until now.  I think about subway rides when I've needed to hold onto the handlebars to stay vertical; what if my hands were cuffed?  No wonder there are injuries in some of these police rides!

    I'm not talking about whether this is a common practice, or whether this is a race issue.  I'm talking about this being something which is in the news and pertinent now, and has been in the news for some time, and which I am first reading about now.

 

Courtesy of the NY Times...ironically :)

    My point?  Keep yourself informed.  Don't rely on one sort of media.  How can this be?

   This can be because, in part, we are not all informed.  Stay informed.  Be part of today's society.

Keep your eyes open.