Salvaged Pages

#note.//
I got a chance to visit the Museum of Tolerance with Pete and Lil (2017). I listened to one survivor tell her story-- so much shouting and yelling and barking dogs; infants thrown out the second floor to a waiting dump truck; surviving, meeting her husband, moving to Minnesota-- moving to Los Angeles.

Every week she goes to the museum and repeats her story, and it is still emotionally exhausting, but she goes so we won't forget.

I stood in a simulated gas chamber and watched videos of how our Community kills itself.

When I returned to Boston, I got a chance to see in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, “Memory Unearthed”. I saw rare photos of life inside the Lodz Ghetto during its existence from 1940 to 1944. The photographs had been taken by Polish Jewish photojournalist Henryk Ross (1910–1991).

Juxtaposed next door were other pieces that show across time and culture, how we've always pitted us vs them, you vs. me. Self vs non-self. I saw a ancient Chinese vase painted over with a New Order Red inscription.

After the exhibit, I bought Salvaged Pages

linked.data.essay.//<create> JB3.you and me, us vs. them

#author.//Young writer's late 1930s to early 1940s

#editor.collector.//Alexandra Zapruder

#note.//
Each chapter has an introductions to each person's diary entries

Klaus/Jacob's entries:
born.19240412.linked.data.//the 12th.my number also. He changed his name upon arrival in Palestine.

father:Erich
mother:Rose
grandmother:Mina

place:Wiesbaden.linked.data.//They moved here when he was three. I've been to Wiesbaden. It's next to Mainz, where Becky did her postdoc.

start:193703.//Klaus starts his diary in German shortly after his bar mitzvah.

start:201705.//I start reading parts of his entries 80 years later.

The included entries start in April 1938, around when he turned 14. I'm a man in my later forties.2017 reflecting on a boy.me before the violence.trauma.chaos.killing happens. I feel alternatively like both Hanna and Michael in Der Vorleser.

introduction:
They were an assimilated family. We know what's going to come and can't help shouting at them to MOVE! Yet, they are like us, rooted. It's so difficult to become refugees, and most countries didn't want to take any Jew refugees, even the USA. I can only sympathize with my parents, uncles, aunts, and all their extended network of family and friends who moved. The fear was.is real.

In the Hour of Chaos, the future is full of fear.