"In fiction, the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them performs only one half of his office."
Thomas Babington Macaulay, "History," Edinburgh Review, 1828
Today, in a world in which the West knows only limited wars, and in
which many journalists and commentators lack both military experience
and historical perspective, it is common to see terms such as "war
crimes" and "atrocities" and "massacres" tossed around with abandon. It
can therefore be salutary to be reminded of what real crimes against
humanity were like: specifically, the sort that inspired the laws and
conventions so often and and casually invoked today.
One example, whose anniversary I mark every year, may suffice.
"this most savage single act of repression in the history of German occupation of continental Europe"
The most notorious reprisal occurred on the night of 9-10 June 1942, when
German forces wiped out the Czech village of Lidice, near Prague,
which, they wrongly charged, had sheltered the parachutists. Of the
503 inhabitants, 173 adult males and several women were shot, and
some 200 women were deported to concentration camps (143 survived).
A handful of the nearly 100 children were given to “Aryan” families
to be Germanized, and the rest were deported and later gassed at
Chełmno (17 adoptees could be located by 1947). The entire town was
then burned and obliterated, a process estimated to have consumed
some 20,000 man-hours of labor by 100 workers, and lasting until
July 3. (read
the rest)
The Nazis were determined to erase Lidice from memory as well as the earth, but plazas, districts, and towns around the world were renamed Lidice in order to deny Hitler that victory. Shortly after the end of the war, in June
1945, the Czechoslovak government decided to rebuild
the village. The cornerstone was laid in 1947.
Among the things that were so striking about
Lidice was not just the brutality, but the fact that the Nazis openly
proclaimed their actions (in contrast, for example, to the murder of the
Jews, which was to be kept secret). The news was therefore almost
instantly public knowledge.
Here, for example, is how the Washington Post
covered the story only a day after the assault. Note that it received
prominent billing second only to emerging reports of the epochal Battle
of Midway:
Czech Town of 1200 Wiped Out to Avenge Death of Heydrich
Community Razed, Men Slaughtered
Women and Children Sent to Other Areas; Population Accused of Harboring Killers
By the Associated Press
London.
June 10.--German vengeance squads utterly wiped out Lidice, a Czech
village of 1200 persons today, killing all the men and deporting the
women and children on the ground that the population harbored the two
assassins of Reinhard Heydrich, the late German ruler of
Bohemia-Moravia.
Completing this most savage single
act of repression in the history of the German occupation of continental
Europe, Gestapo and German soldiery razed the village, leaving nothing
but rubble: the German-controlled radio announced from Prague. Then the Nazis removed the name of the village from their records.
Lidice is--or was--a village of coal miners and woodworkers a few miles
west of the Czech capital and not far from where Heydrich "the hangman"
was fatally wounded by two patriots while driving along a winding road
two weeks ago. Assassins Still at Large
The assassins, who leaped upon Heydrich's car with automatic pistol and bomb, have not been caught.
Shortly after Prague and Berlin radios had announced the fate of Lidice
"as the hiding place of the Heydrich murderers," German authorities in
Prague disclosed that 25 more Czechs had been executed today in the
capital and 6 in Brunn for a total of 306--exclusive of the Lidice
dead--to be slain since the attack on Heydrich.
In London,
authorities of the Allied and exiled governments estimated that nearly
300,000 persons had been shot or hanged in all Europe since the
beginning of the German conquest.
Only yesterday, during
Heydrich's elaborate funeral rites in Berlin, Gestapo Chief Heinrich
Himmler vowed complete revenge on his killers. The slaughter of Lidice
was his macabre sequel.
The Prague broadcasts did not give the
number of men of the village who were shot. It said the women had been
sent to a concentration camp and the children to "educational centers." "Other Hostile Acts" Charged
Besides being accused of hiding Heydrich's slayers, the population of
the village was accused in the broadcast of having "committed other
hostile acts, such as keeping an illegal dump of ammunition and arms and
maintaining an illegal transmitter."
Meanwhile, it was apparent from German advices received today in Switzerland that a new wave of
[p. 2]
punitive measures was on the way, not only in Czecho-Slovakia but in other occupied countries.
Prague, Paris, Amsterdam, all Poland and Yugoslavia probably will be
the first to feel the chill of this new terror campaign, it was
indicated.
Of the approximately half-million Europeans already
believed dead by the hand of the Nazi executioner, approximately 5 per
cent were wiped out in mass "reprisal" killings of hostages. The
remainder, including many women, were executed on various charges, such
as sabotage, plotting, and aiding the enemy.
Increased Resistance Seen
The Norwegian, Belgian and Netherlands governments and the Free French
Committee here said the increased tempo of executions in the last few
weeks indicated resistance to the Germans was increasing in direct ratio
to the shootings.
The governments, in estimating the number
killed, did not consider "the countless thousands who have died in
concentration camps or from ill treatment and hunger as a result of the
'New Order.'"
The Yugoslav government estimated 350,000 killed
in Yugoslavia, alone, and the Polish government said 90,000 Poles had
been executed. They attributed the stupendous totals to German massacres
of "entire villages in their attempts to wipe out guerilla [sic]
activity."
Incomplete totals picked up from German
broadcasts tell a grim story of their own, with the best compilations
showing nearly 7000 shootings and hangings reported by the Germans
themselves.
A majority of the executions were never broadcast.
Some were published in local papers which never reached London. One
Czecho-Slovak official said:
Germans Don't Tell All
"A vast number of those killed was never made public at all, but we
hear of them eventually via underground routes. For example, last
November the Germans said nine students were executed as a result of
riots in Prague, but we know of 120 who were killed."
In Norway,
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Czecho-Slovakia, and lately in France,
the list of those shot reveals the Gestapo is following a definite
pattern of wiping out "intellectual" leaders. Teachers are frequent
victims in Norway, while professors, students and "liberal" officials
have fallen in other countries.
[There follows a brief tabulation of executions announced by the Germans vs. estimated real figures established by the Allies.]
As I mentioned in the previous post, I thought I would resurrect a few older pieces in order to provide some perspective on the new debate that seems to be shaping up around the issue of Town Meeting and Amherst's form of government.
This
first piece, from four years ago, notes the popular frustrations with Town
Meeting but strikes an overall optimistic stance. Some of the details
were intended as historical background. The rest have now become such.
Readers can decide for themselves to what extent any of this is still of
interest or use.
Laughing to Keep From Crying
But there is also some humor, and
that, at least, is enduring. One factor that can make politics so
needlessly unpleasant is people who take themselves and the game too
seriously.
Two lighter pieces on the foibles of traditional New England government in our small towns included in that old post:
1) "I Hate Town Meeting" from New Hampshire Magazine.
2)
A segment from "All Hail the Councilman," an episode from the "Newhart"
show (which some of you may remember--or have discovered through new
media outlets), in which Bob Newhart plays the owner of a Vermont
country inn.
Neither one represents our system of
government--but I'd wager that Amherst residents could nonetheless spot
some resemblances. See whether you can see yourself (or all of us)
there.
As I recently noted, the low turnout in Tuesday's local election gives one pause for thought. At a moment when protests against dictatorship and for participatory government (whatever the complexities of the specific political constellations and possible outcomes) are rocking the Middle East in a spectacle captivating the attention of the world, the vast majority of us here in the safety of Amherst did not bother to vote (a mere 8.47%). Aside from the fact that there were few contested races or hot issues, it is of course more generally true that voter turnout tends to be lower in societies with long-established traditions of democracy and elections.
Still, one wonders about the lack of candidates as much as turnout. It could well be that what Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe said of that office and contest applies here too: "the lack of challengers either indicates" that the incumbents "are doing a good job or no one else wants to do the job." And yet, it seems more problematic when applied to a 240-person Town Meeting than a 5-person Select Board.
We Amherst residents have something of a love-hate relationship with Town Meeting and our larger political culture (which, if you study Amherst history, seems to have its own tradition [1, 2] ). Twice in recent years (the first time in 2003), voters attempted to scrap our current charter, with its system of Town Meeting and Select Board, in favor of one based on a mayor and council (that's the difference between a "town" and a "city" in Massachusetts law). The second time, in 2005 (1, 2), it was only narrowly defeated in an election that brought out 35.2 percent of the electorate. The so-called Charter Reform attempts arose because of a frustration with Town Meeting: its tone, its slow pace, and its outcomes (or lack thereof).
And yet the issue was complicated. I always recall what one ardent Town Meeting supporter, a refugee from Nazi Germany, told me. He compared the lack of civic spirit and willingness to stand up for justice and democracy (what Germans call Zivilcourage) in his native Germany with his adopted New England's tradition of active participation and debate. He had no illusions about the flaws of Town Meeting but cautioned against abandoning it as earlier generations had overthrown "messy" democracy in the name of fascist "efficiency." Each step away from broad-based democracy, he warned, reduced the opportunities for public participation in government, and in the process, not just citizen involvement but also citizen interest in public affairs. We had already gone from an open town meeting—in principle embracing every adult resident—to an elected town meeting, restricted to 240 members (24 from each of ten precincts), plus the dozen-odd officials. Now to reduce the number of citizens making decisions about the fate of the town by some 96%, to a nine-member council and mayor (with veto power) seemed to him a regression that could not be justified. It was a powerful argument.
I have to say that I think the last Charter referendum squeaker turned out to have a salutary effect all-around. It made clear to Town Meeting diehards just how deep the popular dissatisfaction and even anger ran. It made clear to Town Meeting opponents that, despite considerable popular sympathy for their complaints about the political culture, residents were not prepared to abolish this venerable political institution. And it thus conveyed the message to all: we have to live together, so we'd better get our act together.
On balance, I'd say, we have learned that lesson well: Town Meeting has become more efficient. It manages to get its business done while occupying fewer days on the calendar, thus reducing the demand on members' time (an oft-cited obstacle to greater participation, especially for families with young children). The tone is generally civil, the debate more focused and productive. There has of late been at least hypothetical talk of reducing the size of town meeting, so as to increase competitiveness and thus the actual representativeness of the representatives (empty seats and unopposed candidacies were among the issues that motivated Charter reform supporters), but for the time being that remains just talk. For now, we work with what we have.
This is not to say that Town Meeting form of government (any more than Congress) cannot still be the source of silliness and frustration. The piece from New Hampshire Magazine that I recently cited on the history of the hog reeve happened to be entitled, "I Hate Town Meeting":
I hate town meeting.
Town meeting is a laboratory sink for psychologists.
Every dreadful facet of human nature reveals itself at these gatherings. One must have the emotions of a sociopath to escape town meeting with one's soul intact.
I remember a town meeting in Temple years ago where the Police Chief, Russ Tyler, was attacked for using his cruiser too much. Poor Chief Tyler used his own car as the cruiser. He saved the town a lot of money using his own car.
But the mob at the meeting was sure he was getting away with something.
I remember thinking, "You people are crazy to be yelling at the Chief like this. He has a gun."
But Chief Tyler also had great heart. He was a straight shooter and a nice guy (although he did look like that sheriff in the old TV ad who says, "Boy, you're in a heap of trouble.")
In the end, the meeting vented itself and the Chief got his budget. But what heroic self-restraint that man showed.
Towns are made up of people who do not trust one another. It is and has always been "us and them."
The "new" people settle here with an idyllic view of living in a small town. They come from places where no one knows each other. Here they expected to find love.
What they find, of course, is resentment. The old Yankees don't trust the newcomers. Usually the newcomers are Democrats.
Some newcomer always stands up at the meeting and says something like, "My name is Ralph Lumpman and Loraine and I moved up here last fall from Darien. We bought the old Cosgrove place on Swamp Road. And I'd like to say that our moderator tonight is doing a bang-up job and I think we should give him a round of applause."
Then all the people, who recently moved to town, clap.
And there is always someone who informs the moderator that the flag is on the wrong side of the stage.
Town meeting gives people license. No one is expected to practice restraint.
Everyone is there to tell it like it is.
For 24 years of my life I was a small-town newspaper reporter and did news on the radio station in Peterborough.
I have attended over three hundred town meetings.
In my 50-plus years of going to town meetings I've seen a lot of changes. Years ago most towns were controlled by the families who owned the mills. In Milford it was Charlie Emerson; in Jaffrey it was D.D. Bean; in Wilton it was the Abbots; in Dublin, Robb Sagendorph.
If you didn't work for these men, someone in your family did. I used to watch D. D. Bean sit in the front of the hall at the Jaffrey Town Meeting.
Mr. Bean owned the match factory, in Jaffrey. When an article important to him came up he would turn and look back over his seat and note who voted "for" and who voted "against" the article.
Robb Sagendorph was the publisher of Yankee magazine and the Old Farmer's Almanac up in Dublin and he had double clout. Robb Sagendorph was also the moderator. If he didn't like an article he would close down discussion.
"We have had enough jawing about this matter," he'd say. "It's time to vote."
Of course, the system of mayor and town council is hardly perfect, either. The following episode of the old "Newhart" show seems somewhat confused in that it speaks in places of both "town council" and town meeting, but seems to depict the workings of the latter (perhaps the author was not familiar with the intricacies of New England government). In any case, no matter: the dilemmas and foibles can be universally appreciated. In episode 3 (full video here)
newly arrived innkeeper Dick Loudon (Bob Newhart) complains about a
dangerous intersection in front of his establishment and wants the town
to install a stop sign. Local political honchos persuade Dick that, as
a man of civic spirit who does not only complain but also proposes
solutions, he should run for Town Council. In the clip below, he attends the first meeting:
It's nice to be reminded that things could always be worse.
the light at the end of the tunnel--or just someone's headlights?
Yes, we made it again, as the sign at the High Horse brewery congratulated us Town Meeting diehards. Or did we?
That is, we got through another annual Town Meeting, and it didn't go on for an inordinate amount of time: 22.5 hours vs. 27 last spring, so I am told (though by most reckoning, it could have been at least a day shorter). Admittedly, we were not dealing with multiple complex pieces of zoning legislation, as in some past years, so the increase in "efficiency" might in part just reflect the fact that our tasks were more modest.
But one has to wonder about the fate of the institution. As Amherst residents know, complaints about Town Meeting arise as regularly as the spring flowers and then fade with the same regularity--and yet this year somehow feels different.
One item at last night's Select Board agenda was the annual Town Meeting debriefing: a chance to reflect on our performance and the overall tenor and success of the endeavor.
Our main concerns--above all, wasted time and "incivility"--were not new, but they seemed to acquire new urgency. The coming adoption of an electronic voting system might do a good deal to alleviate the former. The cure for the latter is less obvious. We expressed our regret that, both in formal remarks on warrant articles and in audible background chatter, Town Meeting members repeatedly, and often without reprimand from the Moderator, violated the rules of the body (Section V D, pp. 17-18 [33-34]) by imputing motives to individuals and in particular impugning Town staff, elected officials, and members of citizen boards. At Town Meeting, we heard the repeated insinuation that Town boards and staff were somehow colluding with developers at the expense of the common weal. Only slightly more subtle was the implication that those "at the front tables" (i.e. Select Board, Finance Committee, Planning Board) were somehow the adversaries of Town Meeting rather than partners in a system.
Town Meeting: attendance and attention uneven
It is a shame. A mere four years ago (see the next post), I thought the various factions, having survived a contentious "charter" referendum that sought to eliminate Town Meeting, had accommodated themselves to political coexistence. I am no longer so sure. The discontent expressed by some members as well as citizens at large is the highest that I can recall since that last Charter vote in 2005. Again, it may dissipate, but it is a worrisome sign.
The division of opinion over the merits of Town Meeting was amply expressed in two recent editorials. I won't try to analyze the arguments here and will instead
just offer excerpts with links to the full pieces. Read and judge for
yourselves.
In the first, longtime Town Meeting member Jim Oldham defended the institution against the charge of inefficiency and obstructionism: The wisdom of democracy borne out at Amherst’s Annual Town Meeting
excerpt:
This year’s Annual Town Meeting is a great example of effective democratic government. . . . While many individual members have maintained either pro- or anti-Town Hall positions, the body as a whole produced more complex outcomes, neither acquiescing to, nor rejecting out of hand, all proposals placed before it. . . .
Motions to end debate rarely contribute to better decisions . . .
Worst are suggestions, such as heard early on from a member of the Finance Committee (an appointed body intended to serve Town Meeting), that members shouldn’t second-guess the work of staff and committees. That actually is exactly the job Town Meeting is charged to do. Fortunately the majority of members continue to embrace that responsibility, as recent sessions demonstrate.
In response, Professor Ray La Raja and graduate student Wouter Van Erve of the UMass Political Science Department urge residents,
Don’t romanticize Town Meeting democracy in Amherst
excerpt:
Thin deliberative democracy. Oldham argues that Town Meetings should have lengthy debate. He argues further that it is the job of members to “second guess” the work of policy committees. Both these views are contradicted by what research says about effective representational bodies. The most deliberative American legislatures are highly “institutionalized.” That is to say, when dealing with complex issues — especially those that divide a community — legislative bodies tend to divide the labor and defer to the expertise of policy committees. It is here where dialogue and compromise take place before a bill is sent for a full vote. Most of the time, the “debates” that ensue before a full legislative vote are purely symbolic because a winning coalition has taken shape beforehand.
Debates in Town Meeting appear largely symbolic rather than deliberative. Persuasion and compromise need to come earlier in the process. Otherwise, Town Meeting is simply a forum to affirm individual preferences and make sure allies outnumber the other side.
Funny thing is: these pieces were in many ways a reprise of a similar exchange a year ago:
Ray La Raja and Wouter Van Erve:
How representative, really, is Amherst Town Meeting?
excerpt:
Our data suggests that Town Meeting in Amherst is fairly unrepresentative both descriptively and substantively.
This would be less disconcerting if we had confidence that residents could effectively hold their Town Meeting members accountable. . . .
. . .Town Meeting elections lack even the most basic information that would help voters hold members accountable. Most residents don’t know who is running, what they stand for, or how they voted in previous sessions. So how does the voter make a decision? . . . .
In Amherst, those who vote tend to know those who are running for office. Our analysis shows, not surprisingly, that these voters share the same demographic and preference profile of Town Meeting members. In other words, the voters and members run in the same social circles, while non-voters do not.
Amherst Town Meeting is independent, not unrepresentative
excerpt:
The Around Town column in the June 13 Bulletin reported on the Select Board discussion of concerns about the length of time Town Meeting took this year and the supposed “level of incivility.” They seem to have overlooked that they themselves instigated the most inefficient use of time and the most uncivil behavior at Town Meeting this spring.
Faced with two citizen zoning petitions that could not be acted on for technical legal reasons, and which Town Meeting would have voted to refer to the Planning Board with little discussion, the Select Board chose instead to advocate for dismissal, an action with no practical benefit but more pejorative to the petitioners, thereby triggering close to an hour of unnecessary debate and several counted votes.
But rather then review the wisdom of that choice, they focus instead on raising general concerns about Town Meeting.
Meanwhile, University of Massachusetts professor Ray La Raja and grad student Wouter Van Erve assert that Town Meeting is unrepresentative (see essay, Page A5), based largely on the claim that Town Meeting members do not reflect the population at large.
The commemoration of the centennial of the Armenian Genocide on the Town Common last week was an even greater success than we could have hoped for: circa 50-60 people were present, which is an unusually large number for any such ceremonial event, even compared with our well-attended Black History Month gathering in February.
(Amherst Media recorded the proceedings, which should be posted soon.)
It was a moving event.
Town Meeting and League of Women Voters member Adrienne Megerdichian Terrizzi opened the ceremony with music and an explanation of Armenian history and the nature and lasting trauma of the genocide.
Amherst Select Board Chair Alisa Brewer welcomed guests on behalf of the Town, emphasizing the need for remembering and learning from history.
Our Massachusetts State Representative Ellen Story spoke of the struggles that she had experienced in the course of attempting to get the legislature to recognize this crime and make it part of our educational curriculum.
Whereas, from 1915 to 1923, the government of the Ottoman Empire systematically planned and carried out the murders of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians living in Asia Minor and historic West Armenia, and
Whereas, by 1923, this mass extermination and the accompanying atrocities had resulted in the virtual elimination of the Armenian population and culture in historic Asia Minor and West Armenia, which has become known as the Armenian Genocide, and
Whereas, the first mass murders began on the night of April 24, 1915, when the Turkish government arrested more than 250 Armenian community leaders in Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire’s capital city, and
Whereas, most of the prominent educators, clergy, writers, lawyers, intellectuals, and other public figures of the Armenian community were summarily executed, and
Whereas, most of the adult males were either conscripted into the Turkish army to fight on the side of the country that was killing their people or were murdered on the spot, and
Whereas, large numbers of Armenian old men, women, and children, including babies in arms were either killed or forcibly deported to the Syrian desert, during which deportation many died either en route, at the hands of government-aligned gangs, or from dehydration and starvation in the desert, and
Whereas, in May 1915, the Allied Powers of France, Great Britain, and Russia issued a joint statement charging the government in Constantinople with committing crimes ‘‘against humanity and civilization,” and
Whereas, Raphael Lemkin, the initial drafter of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the originator of the term “genocide,” recognized the Armenian Genocide as the type of crime the United Nations should prevent through the establishment of international standards, and
Whereas, historians cite the Armenian Genocide as a forerunner of later genocidal massacres, including the Holocaust, the Cambodian Killing Fields, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur, now therefore be it
Resolved: we, the Select Board of the Town of Amherst do hereby urge all residents to mark this occasion and to participate fittingly in its observance by honoring the memories of the victims and the courage and resilience of the survivors,
Beginning with a ceremony to be held in front of Town Hall on April 30, 2015
And further, by taking to heart the lessons of this tragedy as we commit ourselves to upholding the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, throughout this centennial year and beyond.
Finally, be it resolved that the Town of Amherst be directed to send a copy of this resolution to Governor Charlie Baker, State Senators Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren. U.S. Representative James McGovern, President Barack Obama, the Armenian National Committee of America and the Armenian Assembly of America.
My Hampshire College colleague Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy then read a poem by a murdered Armenian poet.
This work combines narrative, memoir, and primary sources to tell the story of a group of Armenian men who undertook a covert operation created to assassinate the Turkish architects of the genocide.
In one of the fascinating coincidences of history, a Polish Jewish anarchist, Sholem Schwarzbard, stood trial for assassinating the Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura--accused of allowing pogroms in the chaos of the Revolution following World War I--at the same time as the Armenian Soghomon Tehlirian stood trial for assassinating the architect of the Armenian Genocide, Talaat Pasha. Both were acquitted. (After Word War II, Jewish "avengers" carried out operations similar to those of the Armenian "Nemesis.")
My Hampshire College colleague Aaron Berman introduced the event by explaining the historical background of the Armenian Genocide in the context of Ottoman history.
Adrienne Megerdichian Terrizi introduced Marian, who then read from the work and answered questions.
One of the most intriguing aspects of Marian's book is that she did not discover her grandfather's role in the revenge operation until after his death when she came across a cache of papers presenting a very different portrait of the mild-mannered patriarch that she had known. The book is thus a story of detective work and personal exploration as well as historical analysis. Any one of those traits would make a compelling case for placing it on anyone's "to be read next" list.
Here, to whet your appetite, is an excerpt (via Armenian Weekly):
For the first six years of my life, my parents, brother and I lived in my maternal grandparents’ house in Syracuse, N.Y. The six of us were crammed into a small early 20th-century frame house, with a front porch and tiny back study that served as my bedroom; an enticingly flat roof outside its window overlooked our grape arbor, fruit trees, and strawberry patch where my grandmother caught the thieving bunny she spanked and sent on its way. Our home welcomed many a visiting dignitary. As a small child I sat on the lap of family friend, Hamo Paraghamian, a huge man with a heart to match. My small hands carried a bowl of yogurt and garlic for General Dro sitting in the blue chair in the corner of our living room, who thanked me by intoning in his gruff voice, “This is food for the gods.”
Aaron Sachaklian (in Armenian, Aharon), my grandfather, spent most of his days in the red leather chair near the wooden radio he listened to every day, silently smoking his Camels with shaking fingers, perhaps from undiagnosed Parkinson’s that would, years later, steal my mother’s smile and cause her shuffling gait. But when I was three, four, five, this quiet man who wore a three-piece suit nearly every day of his life, who had private sessions with visiting community leaders and battle heroes, bounced me on his foreleg, carried me through the doorways on his shoulders like a queen, and took me outside at dusk to survey the peach, pear, and apple trees beyond our back door. When my grandmother Eliza and I made our weekly trip to Abajian Cleaners three blocks down on South Avenue, I was the one to carry his wool coat, hugging it to my chest, saying, “I love my medz-hairig [grandfather]. I wish he would live forever.”
My grandfather lived to 84, the last few years in mental and visual darkness, his eyesight failing, his prodigious brain’s neurons deadened from a series of strokes. Thinking me his wife as a young woman, he called me Eliza, took my hand in his, stroked it, and held it to his cheek. No one in our family knew until close to 25 years after his death that my grandfather was the bursar and logistical leader of the covert operation—known as “Operation Nemesis”—to assassinate the Ottoman-Turkish architects of the Armenian Genocide.
Resources:
a recent post serves as a backgrounder on the genocide, its commemoration in Massachusetts, and some controversies over definitions and political implications
I'm willing to bet that few of my readers are aware of the presence of a plaque in the Massachusetts State House honoring our Armenian community. (It dates from the Bicentennial year of 1976).
But most--especially this year--are probably aware of one of the historical situations described on it:
who reached these shores, having escaped from the tyrannical rulers of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. For centuries, the Armenians were subjected to political, social, and religious abuses, and the most degrading indignities of man's inhumanity to man, including mass genocide.
By tradition, the Turkish arrests of Armenian leaders in Constantinople on the night of April 24, 1915 have been taken to mark the beginning of a series of persecutions, atrocities, and massacres that have collectively become known as the Armenian Genocide: which, through the deaths of perhaps 1.5 million civilians, and the persecution and driving out of hundreds of thousands of others, eliminated the physical and cultural presence of this people in its historical homelands of Armenia and western Asia Minor.
The acknowledgement of this crime, which, committed in the context of an unprecedented murderous war, set the tone for further mass murders and ethnic cleansing in the subsequent hundred years of European history, has long been controversial in Turkey. The government of the modern state has not only rejected the terminology of genocide, but also claimed that whatever losses occurred were the result of either the general hardships of war or an open conflict between peoples for which the Armenians themselves bear some blame. (In one case, Turkey even pressured a Canadian local school board to drop the subject from the curriculum.) The current Islamist regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has been particularly vehement in its responses as the centennial loomed--witness the lengthy press release on "The Armenian Allegation of Genocide: The issue and the facts" (the title is revealing) from the Foreign Ministry.
It came as an increasing number of states and public figures not only marked the anniversary, but also made a point of speaking explicitly of genocide. The first to gain widespread attention for this step was Pope Francis, who called the atrocities "the first genocide of the twentieth century." Turkey called the statement "far from historic and legal truths" and "unacceptable." Denouncing the "unfounded claims," it recalled its ambassador. Davutoğlu accused the Vatican of “joining the conspiracy” of an “evil front.”
When the European Union spoke out on the genocide, Turkey called the resolution a "preposterous" repetition of "the anti-Turkish clichés of the Armenian propaganda" "mutilating history and law," and ascribed characterization of the events as genocide to "religious & cultural fanaticism." Other states have this spring earned similar rebukes and diplomatic retaliations.
Some nations, groups, and leaders were more circumspect.
A Genocide By Any Other Name?
Admittedly, defining genocide on the level of history and international law can be more complex than it seems at first sight to the layperson. The Süddeutsche Zeitung (in my opinion, still the best German newspaper, despite certain marked flaws and idiosyncrasies when it comes to foreign affairs) correctly points out that, legally, this was a matter of intentions and other factors beyond mere numbers (or else Chairman Mao, whose policies killed millions, would appear in the list). The resultant infographic may appear confusing.
The reprehensible but isolated murders of some 762 to 3500 Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla carried out by Lebanese militias in the context of a civil war during the Israeli invasion in 1981 appear as a "genocide" because some UN body asserted they were such, and yet this puts them on a par with the systematic murder of 1.5 million Armenians and ethnic cleansing of this population from its ancestral lands simply because both have thus (in some sense) been declared to be genocides while neither has been the subject of a formal trial. Meanwhile, the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims has not been officially declared a genocide or prosecuted; thus only the massacre at Srebrenica is listed. The Khmer Rouge butchery in Cambodia is likewise not classified as a genocide, though it has been prosecuted.
The Süddeutsche further argues that the intention of the killers is difficult to determine in the case of Armenia. Some scholars share this view, not necessarily denying the extent of losses, but arguing that the overall picture is too complex to justify the designation. Others see a growing consensus that the crimes were indeed part of a deliberate and systematic policy and thus did constitute a genocide: a recent review of three new books in The Financial Times is a case in point. Middle East Forum has just published a very useful backgrounder, providing an overview of the issue and links to articles representing the full range of viewpoints.
The Economist, in a piece similar to that in the Süddeutsche, observes:
The
“g-word” has considerable power. If mass slaughter is recognised as
genocide when it is happening, it is harder for outside forces to sit
idly by. When it is over, official recognition that it was genocide can
give the survivors some grim satisfaction. But when that recognition is
withheld, whether because of a technicality or political expediency, it
can feel like the final insult. And some human-rights activists and
legal scholars feel that genocide’s status as the “crime of crimes”
sometimes overshadows the horror of other crimes against humanity.
Part of the problem, then, is that the subject involves legal, historical, moral, and emotional issues at once.
A case in point has been Israel's reluctance to use the "g-word." It is ironic in some ways. Jews were among the first to call attention to and commemorate the slaughter. It was the US Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, Sr. who reported on the massacres and confronted the Turkish government. Franz Werfel produced the first great literary representation of the suffering of the Armenians in his novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933; English, 1934; a reference to an Armenian stronghold in 1915). And it was Polish Holocaust refugee Raphael Lemkin who coined the term "genocide" and explicitly cited the Armenian example.
This is sometimes said to derive from the concern that doing so might dilute the significance of the Holocaust, but it is not the real reason and is in any case a groundless fear. Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust remembrance authority, refers to the Armenian genocide in honoring Armenian Holocaust rescuers and likewise speaks of genocides in Rwanda and Darfur and includes survivors of those murders in its educational programs. The real issue has been geopolitics, pure and simple: specifically, a reluctance to harm relations with Israel's erstwhile regional ally Turkey, and now, new regional ally Azerbaijan. (Raphael Ahren provides perhaps the best and most nuanced overview.) The centennial has sparked a welcome new debate, with echoes in the worldwide Jewish community. (1, 2, 3).
The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations was even more equivocal. "[C]oncerned about alienating a key ally, Turkey, through one-sided declarations," it noted:
we share the pain suffered by Armenians during this period. We also believe that any acknowledgment by religious or political leaders of the tragedy that befell Armenians should be balanced, constructive and must also recognize Turkish and Muslim suffering.
In this respect, characterizing the events of 1915 as genocide without proper investigation of these events by independent historians will not only jeopardize the establishment of a just memory pertaining to these events, but will also damage the efforts aimed at achieving reconciliation between Turks and Armenians.
Calling for further investigation by historians has, of course, always been the preferred delaying tactic and escape strategy for those unwilling to call the killings a genocide. (Rule of thumb: outsiders defer to historians only when there is an ulterior motive; we don't get much respect otherwise.)
Those Who Have Power Yet Do Not Speak Truth
Although the stance of the Israeli government strikes many as problematic or even morally indefensible, it is at the least understandable in the world of Realpolitik and the struggle for survival. One struggles in vain to find an explanation for the behavior of those who are more powerful and can act with impunity.
the secretary-general firmly believes that the commemoration and continuing cooperation between Armenians and Turks “with a view to establishing the facts about what happened should strengthen our collective determination to prevent similar atrocity crimes from ever happening in the future."
The United Nations, founded in the wake of the worst genocide in history, unanimously approved the Genocide Convention in 1948, and is supposed to be the leader in moral issues, not a splitter and trimmer.
Two years ago, I criticized the Secretary of State for the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, after he properly used the term 'genocide' to describe Turkey's slaughter of thousands of Armenians starting in 1915. … as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.
Now no one who has reached the age of reason should be surprised that candidates make promises that they cannot (or perhaps do not even intend to) fulfill. But this was a candidate who made a point of promising something different: hope and change and an end to partisanship and politics as usual. The bigger the failed promise, the greater the disappointment. According to CNN, a presidential spokesperson addressed the issue in the clinical language of bureaucracy and diplomacy:
"We know and respect that there are some who are hoping to hear different language this year," the official said. "We understand their perspective, even as we believe that the approach we have taken in previous years remains the right one -- both for acknowledging the past, and for our ability to work with regional partners to save lives in the present."
Representative Adam Schiff (D-California) said:
"How long must the victims and their families wait before our nation has the courage to confront Turkey with the truth about the murderous past of the Ottoman Empire?" "If not this President, who spoke so eloquently and passionately about recognition in the past, whom? If not after one hundred years, when?"
Unfortunately, it is part of a consistent pattern on the part of a president whose foreign policy has been an almost complete disaster (1, 2). (full disclosure: I voted for him twice, eyes wide open). In a region in chaos, he declined to support the Iranian "green revolution" or the real democrats of the "Arab Spring" and instead perversely chose to throw in his lot with the anti-democratic, obscurantist Islamists: Morsi in Egypt and the Erdoğan-Davutoğlu regime in Turkey. The former is out of power, but the President naively and vainly seeks to curry favor with the latter, in defiance of both historical truth and basic political judgment. The Armenians, among others, are paying the price.
Meanwhile, by contrast, quietly and outside the corridors of power, some Turks joined Armenians in marking the centenary in Turkey, and that is ultimately far more important than the words of an American president: dialogue and reconciliation on the ground, among the peoples concerned.
Today we have a chance to reaffirm our record on the Armenian genocide as Massachusetts and 42 other states have already done. I’m proud that our state continues to stand firm on this issue and educates our students about the history of the Armenian genocide in public schools through the Facing History program.
I am pleased and proud that the Town of Amherst will acknowledge this crime against humanity on the occasion of its centennial, calling upon residents to honor the dead and the survivors and to draw the appropriate lessons in the continuing struggle for human rights in our own world.
On April 30, at 5:00 p.m. in front of Town Hall, Town officials will read the proclamation, and along with other residents, speak to the historical and enduring significance of this issue. (Town Meeting and League of Women Voters member Adrienne Megerdichian Terrizzi has generously taken the lead in organizing the event.)
At 7:00 p.m. at Amherst Books, my Hampshire College colleague, Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, will read from her provocative new book: Sacred Justice: The Voices & Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis. This work combines narrative, memoir, and primary sources to tell the story of a group of Armenian men
who undertook a covert operation created to
assassinate the Turkish architects of the Genocide.
Two examples of the markers used to designate graves of Revolutionary War soldiers in Amherst. (Walking through the cemetery today, I noted at least one mistake: a case in which, judging from the age on the tombstone, the person buried there cannot have served in the Revolution.)
I assume it is one of the replacements put up after a shameful series of thefts, in which artless criminals stole the markers and sold them as antiques or for scrap metal.
It is a truism--and a typical piece of philistine thinking--to say that it is "impossible" for words, or art, to capture the reality of the Holocaust. On some level, words and art--the only tools at our disposal--are "incapable" of capturing many realities and experiences, and yet we use them to try to approximate that goal. Still, most of us would nonetheless agree that addressing the Holocaust through the arts does pose steep challenges. Just avoiding the maudlin, the hackneyed, and the banal is challenge enough--never mind actually capturing the essence of the tragedy or making an original aesthetic statement.
And what of music commemorating the Holocaust?
At first, it seems hard even to think of pieces that might serve such a debate. Commemoration and depiction have been much more the domain of literature. Still, there are examples.
When I was a kid, I was present in New York at the world premiere of Darius Milhaud's cantata, "Ani M'amin" ("I Believe") to text by Elie Wiesel. In the words of a recent review: "a meditation on the possibility of faith in the presence of unbridled and seemingly unpunished evil." In all honesty, mostly what sticks in my mind is one rather cynical adult saying he had enjoyed the Holocaust more. He was, I suspect, no fan of modern and contemporary music. I am. Still . . .
I hadn't listened to the piece in years. I enjoy much of Milhaud's music, but somehow, this one, and this particular style of choral singing never did much for me. In any case, you can judge for yourself from this excerpt.
Here, for what it's worth, are some of the compositions that I find most accomplished or most regularly play:
Lukas Foss, Elegy for Anne Frank
I've always been partial to the music of Lukas Foss, the German-born American composer who succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as professor of music at UCLA.
His "Elegy for Anne Frank" is a modest but moving piece. The elegiacal mood, crudely interrupted by variations on the Nazi hymn, the "Horst Wessel Song" (not as the Milken Archive describes it: the "German national anthem"), before returning to the original register, somehow captures both the innocence of the insightful girl and the anxiety of life in the Secret Annex. (It exists in two versions, one with spoken text, and one without, critics generally preferring the latter.)
Speaking of Schoenberg, this treatment of the Holocaust stands out by virtue of its relatively early date (1947) and its power. Although Schoenberg had converted to Catholicism, the rise of Nazism prompted him to return to Judaism. The text is Schoenberg's own, based on the account of a survivor of the Ghetto Uprising and liquidation. In the liner notes, fellow composer Nancy Van de Vate, noting that "many" regard the composition as "Schoenberg's most dramatic and moving work," describes it as follows:
The narration is in Sprechstimme, a kind of speech-singing which Schoenberg developed, precisely notated for rhythms, more approximately for pitches, Olbrychski's moving narration is uniquely authentic, yet faithful to Schoenberg's notation. The cantata builds to a powerful, dramatic climax when, at "the grandiose moment," the male chorus begins spontaneously to sing the Shema Yisroel ("Hear, O Israel") in Hebrew, the third language of Schoenberg's life. It is "the old prayer" central to Judaism, that its martyrs have sung throughout history in defiance and resignation in their hour of death. It is the dramatic climax of the piece, for which Schoenberg has skillfully prepared the listener from the narrator's first lines when a French horn softly played the opening of the Shema Yisroel melody.
The music vividly accentuates textual details throughout. A trumpet fanfare first awakens the Jews for transport to death camps. There are suggestions of military drum, unusual string effects from taps or scratches of string with bow sticks, high woodwind trills, muted brass fluttertonguing, snarls of muted horns and trumpets. The music builds to the terrifying counting off, louder and faster to prepare for the choral entry. "They began again, first slowly: One two, three, four, became faster and faster, so fast that it sounded like a stampede of wild horses, and all of a sudden, in the middle of it, they began to sing the Shema Yisroel." The sung Hebrew dramatically contrasts with the spoken English and brutal Nazi commands, and gives the work a powerful, moving climax in its only extended melody.
Here is a version narrated by the great Maximilian Schell:
I have a couple of recordings of this piece, but the following version, by Polish performers, conveniently combines it with other works commemorating the atrocities of the Second World War.
No list of Holocaust music would be complete without
Krzysztof Penderecki's "Dies Irae," or Auschwitz Oratorio.
Back in the day when I was a high school student, first learning properly about classical music, this piece was issued on a vinyl LP with a bleak black-and-white image of a crematorium chimney. Popular, too, was his "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima," and these became obligatory items on the record shelves of all right-thinking progressives who prattled on about "man's inhumanity to man" even if they didn't really know any history and could not fully appreciate the jarring, and indeed, terrifying music. They may have bought it, but I really doubt they often listened to it.
Penderecki's piece, composed for the dedication of the international memorial at the Birkenau (Auschwitz II) death camp in 1967, differs from the others here in that it does not focus on the Jewish victims. Although Jews made up the largest number of victims at Auschwitz, the camp served first for the internment of Polish political prisoners, and subversives and resisters from many countries. It is also a site of specifically Polish national mourning. Penderecki is also Catholic (literally and figuratively) in his textual choices. Although he does not use the text of the requiem mass, he draws upon the Psalms, Apocalypse, Revelation, and Corinthians, as well as Greek tragedy and modern poetry.
The piece also reminds us of a very exciting time in the history of avant-garde music and other arts, not least, when artistic experimentation flourished in the countries of the East Bloc between the tyranny of Stalinism and the prosaic repression and philistinism of the post-1967 "normalization" and the following "era of stagnation."
As Nancy Van de Vate says in her liner notes,
Dies Irae
is an atonal, extremely dissonant work employing precise notated
pitches, quater-tones, and sounds of indeterminate pitch. As in other
works from the composer's early period . . . combinations of many
unusual timbres, used both simultaneously and in succession, create
unusual textures, neither homophonic nor conventionally polyphonic.
Extreme dynamic contrast, from the softest to the loudest imaginable
musical sounds, adds further to the music's drama and intensity. The
sound of an air raid siren at the end of the second movement intensifies
a section of the music which depicts beasts and men being burned alive.
The rattling of a chain and shaking of a thunder-sheet (lastra) further
evoke feelings of fear and horror appropriate to the subject.
The chorus
sing, speak and chant with an unusual variety of vocal sounds. The
imagery of their text is dramatic and terrible, ranging from references
to the shorn hair of a little girl's pigtail once tugged by cheeky boys
at school to the triumphant "Death is swallowed up by victory" (Absorpta est mors in victoria) of the final movement. Yet the work closes tragically with the phrase Corpora parvulorum (Bodies of the little ones) which has been heard many times earlier.
Part I:
I am a great fan of mid-century modernism in all fields, from architecture to avant-garde music, but more recently, the minimalists have made their contribution, too.
Among more contemporary compositions, one that I find the most compelling is
Steve Reich, Different Trains
Trains, along with chimneys and barbed wire, are among the most common and evocative images of the Holocaust as the epitome of modern industrialized death. (Not coincidentally, a train also figures on the cover art of the final CD that I will mention.)
Using the symbol of the train, Reich's piece offers a brilliant and troubling mediation on the vagaries of chance:
The concept for the piece comes from my childhood. When I was one year old, my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since the arranged divided custody, I traveled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942 accompanied by my governess. While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.
He says that the work, commissioned for the Kronos Quartet, "begins a new
way of composing," "the basic idea" being "that speech recordings
generate the musical material for musical instruments." It features recordings of his governess, an African-American Pullman porter, three Holocaust survivors, and historical train sounds from the era of his childhood journeys. It is divided into three parts:
America--Before the war
Europe--During the war
After the war
Popular music has not often ventured into the territory of the Holocaust, and that's probably a good thing. Still, there are notable exceptions. One of the truly great albums is Yehuda Poliker, Efer ve Avak (Ash[es] and Dust)
Poliker is one of the most multi-talented and influential Israeli musicians, a compelling vocalist and a stunning soloist on a wide range of intstruments. His parents were Greek Holocaust survivors, deported from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz, and at the same time as Reich was writing "Different Trains," Poliker teamed up with son of Polish Auschwitz survivors Yaacov Gilad, who wrote most of the lyrics for "Ashes and Dust." Eight of the twelve songs deal with the Holocaust, and the album became not only a bestseller and reflection of Israeli Holocaust culture, but also a shaper of it: specifically, in the shift from collective to individual commemoration, and in its emphases on the new role of children of survivors in shaping the reception of the events as the focus moved from history to memory.
Like much of the best Holocaust literature (I always think of the works of Aharon Appelfeld), this music succeeds because it is subtle and often indirect, moving around the margins of the topic, confronting it by implication rather than declaration. The result is an overwhelming mood, a persistent sense of loss.
The title song:
When You Grow Up (a subtle meditation on the children of survivors)
Haaretz today ran an article, "A dozen reasons why Israel should do away with Holocaust Remembrance Day." It was no doubt supposed to be provocative, but even if some of the individual points were valid or worth discussing, the whole was less than the sum of its parts. Above all, in condemning the holiday "because it has become a tool in the hands of ultranationalist ideologues," the piece simply substitutes one political agenda for another. It's one of those ideas that, as the saying goes (not in fact Orwell's, but close to his thinking) is so absurd that only an intellectual could believe it.
One might as well say that we should end Fourth of July celebrations because American patriotism sometimes degenerates into triumphalist jingoism. The solution is not to do away with the holiday, and rather, to infuse it with new and deeper meaning. The founding of a revolutionary democracy or the commission of genocide are worth commemorating, and far too important to discard on the whims of a self-important op-ed writer.
At the very least, the simple and non-political rituals of commemoration should seem unobjectionable. The traditional ritual of mourning on the anniversary of death involves lighting a candle that burns for a full day.
I have taken to placing mine on top of this immense old candlestick, of hammered iron in the Arts & Crafts or Werkbund style, circa the beginning of the twentieth century.
The dealer I bought it from acquired it from a scrap metal dealer in Dortmund, so it's precise origin is unknown, Clearly, though, given its striking size (77 cm. tall, or just over 30 inches), it came from institutional setting rather than a private home. In fact, it is identical in appearance to a brass one sold at auction over a decade ago. That one came from the destroyed Leipzig synagogue in the Gottschedstraße, destroyed in Kristallnacht. It seems more than likely, then, that what I have here is another relic from the pogrom that began the Holocaust, and as such it seems especially fitting to call it into service for this use.
Many have remarked on the challenge of representing the genocide through conventional monuments. Some do, however, succeed in being both original and powerful.
Still, to me, the most powerful "monument" is actually a ritual used in Israel: On the morning of Holocaust Memorial day, an air raid siren sounds, and the entire country literally comes to a halt for two minutes. People stop where they stand on the sidewalk, cars and buses pull over to the side of the road, and drivers and passengers get out and stand respectfully in silence. Then life resumes. It is the most eerie and moving ritual I have ever seen.
It is evanescent, yet eternal: lasting only two minutes yet repeated every year. It is a monument in time, of time. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. . . . Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time.”
And because this ritual so abruptly interrupts daily time itself, it conveys almost better than anything the tear in the fabric of the world and civilization that the Holocaust represented.
Footnote:
I have often thought that the United States should adopt something similar for Memorial Day. I still recall how, as children, we stood and observed a moment of silence at 11:11 a.m. on November 11, in tribute to Veterans' Day's origins as Armistice Day. We have lost that sense of an entire nation united in mourning the tragic costs of war.
In April-May 1940, the security services of Stalin’s Soviet Union, which had concluded a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in August 1939 and then occupied the eastern part of Poland after the Germans invaded from the west in September, murdered some 22,000 Poles--soldiers, intelligentsia, and other suspect classes--at Katyń forest near Smolensk and other locations.
On April 13, 1943, the Nazis, acting on rumors from locals, announced the discovery of one mass grave at Katyń forest near Smolensk. The Soviets emphatically denied the charges. The incident led to a break in relations between the London Polish Government-in-Exile and the Soviet regime.
The incident long remained controversial, as the Soviets insisted that these were the victims of German occupiers. In fact, I recall my father saying that, while he was serving with the US occupation forces in Germany (OMGUS), he found Germans testifying to "terrible crimes" they had committed in that area, which no one was willing to address.
This illustrated magazine, produced by the Nazi regime, conveyed the news to the occupied Polish population in May, 1943. The cover is a harmless depiction of the lobster harvest in Martinique (which was then under the control of the Vichy French regime).
Without warning, the next page reveals the horror of the Katyń massacre--conveyed through a Nazi propaganda lens.
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