Luck and maybe something buried led doctor through Buchenwald

The Bramsons, my grandfather's family, killed in Poland.

     Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.*  Usually I'd let that grim holiday go unremarked upon—the Holocaust gets plenty of attention without me piling on—but the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald last week made me think of this article.
    Since it touches upon the idea of luck, I should mention the sheer coincidence that brought it about.  In 1978, the fall of my freshman year at Northwestern, I took Introduction to European Fiction with Erich Heller, perhaps the preeminent scholar of German literature in the United States. Students knew that Heller's brother Paul had been Edward R. Murrow's guide for his famous broadcast when Buchenwald was liberated. That's how Prof. Heller found out his brother had survived the war. He never spoke of these things, of course. But we all somehow knew.

     Cut to 1995. I'm at UIC Hospital, as a reporter, covering a press conference about a breakthrough in treating sickle cell anemia. The doctors are introduced, and one of them is named Paul Heller. I remember thinking that "Paul Heller" might be a common European name, like "Bill Smith" here. It might not be THAT Paul Heller. But he said a few words, in a heavy Czech accent. I went up afterward and surprised him by saying, "You're Erich Heller's brother, aren't you? You were in Buchenwald. You spoke with Edward R. Murrow." That meeting led to this story, which was frustrating in a way. Sitting in his living room, I kept trying to get at how a man survives six years in a concentration camp. He kept saying, "I was lucky." I finally realized that, whatever the full truth is, he wasn't going to tell me. So I went with lucky.

     Dr. Paul Heller is a lucky man. Sitting in the living room of his pleasant Evanston home, he recognizes that only good fortune could have gotten him through nearly six years in Nazi concentration camps, placing him—sick but alive—in Buchenwald the day it was liberated 50 years ago, on April 11, 1945.
     "Of course, I am lucky," says Heller, 80. "I was very lucky. Each day could have ended differently than it did."
     Not all the luck was good. Heller was a young doctor in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia — he received his degree just before the Germans closed down the school — with an exit visa from the Gestapo and a plane reservation to London when the Germans invaded Poland and World War II began on Sept. 1, 1939.
     He was arrested the same day, he believes, because of a political group he belonged to as a student.
     "I wasn't arrested as a Jew," he recalls. "I was arrested as an anti-Nazi."
     He was taken to Buchenwald, where he spent the next four years working in a quarry, carrying large stones in work that "seemed without purpose except to torture us."
     Again, fate came to Heller's aid.
     "I tolerated all this torturous life because I was young and relatively strong," Heller writes in an account of his life he prepared for his grandchildren.
     "But I also was lucky that I had some help. I became a friend of a German political prisoner, Max Girnd . . . he supplied me with half a loaf of bread almost every week."
     In the spring of 1943, he was transferred to the death camp at Auschwitz. Again, fate intervened.
     "I was transferred to Auschwitz to be executed and they made me a doctor," says Heller, who was put to work as a physician at the mining camp at Jaworzno.
     His written account of life in a concentration camp has a measured, almost sedate tone to it. A bout of torture becomes a "cruel interlude." A group of dying prisoners are "the most horrible sight." He retains that calm view — there is no anger or bitterness in him — which he feels was a defense mechanism.
     "This was a way of survival," he says. "I didn't look at it as a reality. There was something terribly unreal about the whole thing. I would come home from working in the stone quarry and think, `It really isn't true, what I went through today.' "
     As the war neared its end, the Germans, desperate to cover their crimes, kept trying to transfer prisoners away from the advancing enemy. Heller survived a murderous forced march from Auschwitz to another camp, Gross-Rosen. Then, severely ill from the march, Heller had the ironic good fortune to find himself shipped back to Buchenwald again.
     "I was saved in the camp hospital because I knew the people there," he says.
     Heller was still in the hospital on April 11, 1945, when Gen. George Patton's 3rd Army liberated the camp. One more stroke of luck was about to help reunite him with his surviving brother and, eventually, bring him to the United States. A day or two after liberation, the former inmates had taken over the S.S. Hospital. Heller was using its fluoroscope to screen for tuberculosis when a tall, handsome man in an American uniform — whom Heller assumed was some sort of official — stopped in and asked to be shown around Buchenwald.
     "It was a sheer accident," Heller remembers. "He was approaching the camp and stopped at the first big building."
     Heller showed the man — who turned out to be broadcaster Edward R. Murrow — around the camp, to the crematorium, the piles of shoes, of glasses, the mounds of human hair. Murrow, dazed, tried to count the bodies, "stacked up like cordwood," but gave up.
     Murrow was not only struck by the scenes of horror, but by the former station of the emaciated men who came up to greet him. He used their names — Peter Zenkl, the former mayor of Prague, Professor Charles Richet of the Sorbonne, even a man from Joliet, Walter Roeder — in his famous broadcast of April 15, one of the first reports to bring the true nightmare of the concentration camps home to a wide audience.
     "I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words," Murrow said, toward the end of the broadcast. "If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald — I'm not in the least sorry."
     Murrow also mentioned the name of his guide, Dr. Paul Heller. The broadcast was heard by Heller's brother, Erich, the noted literary scholar, and a reunion was arranged through CBS. Heller spent a year in London, then with Murrow's help, came to the United States. The two remained in contact through the years, until Murrow's death.
     Heller went on to a distinguished career in medicine. He still teaches and does research at the University of Illinois-Chicago Hospital. Now remarried after his first wife passed away, he has two grown children and three grandchildren. He declined the chance to go back to Buchenwald. "I've seen it enough," he says.
     Heller says his ordeal in Buchenwald changed him as a person and colored the rest of his life.
     "This experience was so strong it overshadowed everything," he says. "Continuous and always. Even now, 50 years after liberation, it is still there and every day I remember."
     --Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 10, 1995

* I was referring to Yom HaShoah, the Day of Remembrance in Israel, which occurs on the 27th of the Hebrew month of Nisan, falling in mid-April. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is Jan. 27.

Happy Tax Day. Or not.

     Wednesday is Tax Day, the dread April 15, when income taxes are due to the United States government, at least for now. American colonists cried "No taxation without representation," which, as befits the streamlining of modern life, has become simply "No taxation.'
     Twenty years ago, the idea that American citizens should not pay taxes was limited to the lunatic fringe, who would pick over the Revenue Act of 1913 and write elaborate, self published manifestos explaining why federal income taxes were a Wilsonian conspiracy against the Constitution and natural law. Now mainstream Republican candidates chant it as a mantra.
     Look at the first three Republicans to charge out of the gate in the 2016 presidential race.
     "We need to abolish the IRS" Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told a conservative conference last month—though not, to my surprise, because taxes won't be collected, but rather because a flat rate will be charged so taxpayers will merely write their salary on a postcard, multiply it by a universal figure and be done.
     Internal Revenue Service commissioner John Koskinen, living in the reality-based world, immediately pointed out that even if Americans had a flat tax, and filed their returns on  Ted Cruz's postcard, there would still need to be an IRS collecting the money and confirming the cards.
     "Someone has to follow through on all of that," said the killjoy.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul also talks wistfully about eliminating the IRS, and has a number for his flat tax—17 percent—which, like all flat tax plans, is a half-clever way of saying, "Tax breaks for everybody!" (If the figure sounds familiar, Steve Forbes ran on a 17 percent flat tax in 2o00. Historical note: he lost).
     Marco Rubio doesn't want to cut taxes for everyone, just the middle class and the rich, which is code for everyone since poor people don't pay much income tax.
     The Tax Policy Center estimates Rubio's plan would cost the government $2.4 trillion over 10 years.
     Which is the entire point. The bedrock of the Republican party is the notion that government is bad, by definition. Since cutting specific functions—health care for vets, say, or milk for poor children—draws howls of protest and can raise a tingle even in anthracite Republican hearts, the focus is shifted to impersonal dollars.  Cut taxes, ignore what those taxes go to. Starve the body and the head dies.
    If you try to get at why government is bad, they'll say it's corrupt, or incompetent, or domineering, or illegal, or all four. My theory is that they despise the people government serves most—especially the poor, minorities—and since publicly despising them has gone out of fashion, they attack the government as a surrogate. I can't prove this, but then they can't prove that trickle down economics works, and that never stops them form insisting that giving money to the rich somehow profits the poor.
     Speaking of facts-- for those eccentrics who, like me, still find facts meaningful -- is that our taxes are low however you compare them.They're low internationally: our federal taxes top out at 39 percent. In Great Britain it's 45 percent, in Australia, 50 percent. (Comparisons are difficult, with each country having a complicated web and local and national taxes, but that suggests issues are nuanced and complex, and why should I be the only one pushing that crazy idea).
     U.S. taxes are also low historically—our top federal income tax rate is 39 percent. In the 1950s, was a jaw-dropping 91 percent. Rich folk still worked (nobody actually paid that much—again with the nuance— with deductions, the top effective tax rate was 70 percent. The economy boomed).
     Taxation is one of the most common features of human organization, along with baking bread. And there is astounding consistency. Today the top 10 percent of U.S. wage earners pay an average of 19.2 percent in federal taxes. That's almost exactly the rate paid in ancient Egypt. "Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt unto this day that Pharaoh should have the fifth part" it says in Genesis.
     To be fair, I should mention the tax position of Democratic president candidate Hillary Clinton, who entered the race earlier this week. She feels the wealthy aren't taxed enough, aren't paying their fair share in society. Talk about crazy...

"Goddam Abe Lincoln ... goddam you"

     Abraham Lincoln went from a log cabin to the White House, he freed the slaves and won the Civil War, while writing the most stirring sentences ever spoken by an American politician.
    But if Lincoln is even more than that, our greatest president, who comes as near to an American saint as anyone in our history, then the moment of his beatification came 150 years ago this evening, April 14, 1865, when a fanatical Southern sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth, outraged at the thought that blacks would become American citizens,  snuck up behind Lincoln in his unguarded box at Ford's Theater and put a bullet behind his ear.
     The tragedy was amplified by occurring precisely at the moment of national joy, at least in the North, as the Civil war had ended a scant week before. 
     Lincoln's death left the nation awash in grief, which has a tendency to skew our perceptions of history. Eyes filled with tears no longer see clearly. The love and respect lavished on Lincoln after his assassination had the tendency to portray him as a serious saint—I've already written about how that fallacy is embraced by right wing talk show hosts. It also leaves the impression that he was always revered, and that too is a fantasy, and a harmful one.  
     There are thousands of books about Lincoln, exploring every aspect of his life. One of my favorites is  Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President edited by Harold Holzer (Addison-Wesley Publishing: 1993). These letters and notes, some of them very brief, bring Lincoln's era alive, in all its crazed passion. Like online comments today, they are a quick, sobering glance under the rock of American life.
    "Equal rights & Justice to all white men in the United States forever," urges John McMahon of Hambrook, Penn. on Aug. 5, 1864. "White men is in class number one & black men in class number two & must be governed by white men forever."
     Lincoln's correspondents complain about politics, try to wheedle job appointments, gush with praise when successful, spew bitterly when not. 
     "My Dear Sir," writes Jesse. K. Dubois, "I am sorely disappointed in all my expectations from Washington. I made only two or three requests of you. One for the Northern Superintendancy of Indian Affairs for my friend J.P. Luce. My heart was set on this application for him..."
     Nothing is more contemporary than scorn, and Americans lined up to denounce Lincoln ("You are destroying the country") and the men he surrounded himself with.  
    "For God's sake let a plain man say a few plan words to you," begins John P. Cranford, a New Yorker. "It is commonly reported and believed that Mr. Seward is drunk daily; and it is universally believed that [Secretary of War Simon] Cameron is a thief —All men believe you, upright—but know you lack experience and fear you lack nerve."
     Well, maybe not "all men." 
     "Sir Mr Abe Lincoln if you don't Resign we are going to put a spider in your dumpling and play the Devil with you," writes one A.G. Frick in February, 1861, in a letter discovered in the Chicago Historical Society files, "you god or mighty god dam sundide of a bith go to hell and buss my Ass suck my prick and call my Bolics your uncle Dick god dam a fool and goddam Abe Linoln who would like you goddam you excuse me for using such hard words with you but you need it for you are nothing but a goddam Black nigger."
     It seems the wildest anachronism that someone wrote to Abraham Lincoln and told him to suck his dick—yet why do I feel that type of person isn't safely consigned to history? Lincoln's spirit might be gone, wiped from the body politic, impossible. But his enemies remain, strong and vocal and all too common. Malice like that never dies. 
     That said, let's not give them the final word. 
     Some of the letters are positive, such as Edward Everett's graceful note penned the day after they share a podium dedicating the Union cemetery on the Gettsyburg battlefield. 
    "Permit me also to express my great admiration of the thoughts offered by you, with such eloquent simplicity & appropriateness, at the consecration of the cemetery," the former governor of Massachusetts writes. "I should be glad, if I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."
     Lincoln replies with delightful tact: "You could not have been excused to make a short address, nor I a long one."
     He was thinking of the public when he wrote that. Perhaps that is the most amazing thing about Lincoln. Facing what he did, a nation divided, at war, vicious enemies, within and without, one of whom would kill him, 150 years ago today, that he managed to remain the man he was. Another reason to revere him. 

Maybe Spike Lee should call his new movie "Eden"

     Sigh.
     The Chicago City Council. The aldermen in it. Where do these jokers come from?
     Ald. Anthony Beale (9th) specifically. Ever heard of him? Me neither. But there he was, in the Sun-Times on Saturday, demanding that Spike Lee call his new movie something other than "Chiraq."
     "It's very offensive and, hopefully, he rethinks his position," Beale told our Fran Spielman. "He definitely needs to change the name."
     He does? Definitely? Or what?
     Maybe Beale will lead a squad of alderman to arrest the movie, the way Ald. Dorothy Tillman and a couple colleagues, backed by the cops, raided the School of the Art Institute to seize a painting.
     Not that we have to go back to 1988 to find Chicago officialdom acting as ham-handed censors. It's a Chicago tradition. Remember Persepolis? The acclaimed graphic novel that two years ago Barbara Byrd-Bennett yanked out of the public schools after one complaint. Or Bob Fioretti quashing a hot dog stand, "Felony Franks?"
     Doesn't Beale realize that sting of embarrassment over art quickly passes, but the stain of censorship never fades? He belongs to the same legislative body which, in 1965, voted its "unqualified condemnation" of Wright Junior College, for having James Baldwin's novel Another Country on a reading list?
     And why? Let's read from the City Council resolution. The book "extensively dwells upon homosexuality as though it had redeeming social value."
     Ouch.
     It isn't always the City Council trying to toss a blanket over what they don't like. That's a game anyone can play. In 1958 the Archdiocese of Chicago banned the Everly Brothers' song "Wake Up Little Susie." Polish groups pushed the mayor to remove Nelson Algren's 1942 novel, Never Come Morning from library shelves. More on that later.
     No matter how far you go, you have bluenose Chicagoans jamming their sausage-fingers in the arts.
      In 1907, the Chicago Tribune thundered against nickelodeons for exerting "an influence that is wholly vicious." That was the same year Chicago instituted its movie censorship board, one of the first cities to do so. Chicago is a place that censored silent movies. Then gangster movies. Then Richard J. Daley was so insecure about the city's film image that he shut down production here altogether. His son had the head of the school board investigate students who acted in "Hardball" because kids in it swore a lot.
     The city's silent movie censorship backfired. The pink permits it issued to show movies had adult content became prized advertising tools.
     Censorship always backfires, bringing publicity to what these lunkheads are trying to squelch. News of Spike Lee's movie being shot here was in the gossip pages before, speculating on which stars would appear. Now it's news.
     Titles change. Lee might call it "Chiraq." Or he could change the title to "Eden," sarcastically, and include a scene where a dunce alderman pops his mouth off, making empty demands, as if Chicago's violence problem will be solved if nobody knows about it.
     Artists don't forget, and revenge is a dish best served cold. Mayor Kelly pulled Algren's book. But he had other books.
     In Chicago: City on the Make, Algren decries, "the medieval nonentities of City Hall who have gotten the work of Rossellini, Sartre and Denis Mitchell outlawed here don't care for the local talent either ... The Dziennik Chicagoski will get you if you don't watch out. The Polish Roman Catholic Union, having recently purchased Milwaukee Avenue, wants its property boosted, not described."
     That's it. In a nutshell. Beale wants the city "boosted, not described." Spike Lee hasn't shot a foot of film, and already he's flushing out the fools in Chicago, prompting them to leap up and wave, identifying themselves. Just imagine what the film itself will do.
      "Freedom of expression still doesn't mean you can insult the people of this city," Beale said of a movie that hasn't even been made yet.
     Actually, freedom of expression means exactly that. The embarrassment is that Beale doesn't seem aware of the fact.
     Yet.

Kermit wasn't a real frog

     An alderman spoke out against the tentative title of Spike Lee's yet-to-be-filmed movie, "Chiraq," because it implies there is violence in Chicago. While I was whittling the splintery stick I plan to shove up his ass on Monday, I came across this column from 15 years ago, giving Mayor Daley his due for jamming his nose into the movie business. A shame he didn't take my advice in the last paragraph, and give Chicago's actual problems—like the tottering pension system—more of his scarce mental energies. 

     Everybody in the Paramount movie "Hardball" swears. A lot. The boozy baseball coach swears. The inner-city kids on his team swear. Even the saintly, near-nun love interest swears.
     Heck (now, I'm doing it!) there's even profanity in the stage directions, which is really out of the ordinary.
     I just read the script. This being a family newspaper, I can't tell you what they're saying. In 120 pages, I counted at least 50 "f-words," in various colorful, polysyllabic configurations, as well as 45 "s-words" and maybe another 50 lesser obscenities.
     But I may have missed a few.
     These words have gotten Mayor Daley so agitated that he lashed out at the movie, currently in production, and wants to somehow deny filmmakers use of the word "Chicago."
     "If they want to portray it someplace else, fine, make it someplace else," the mayor said.
     This lovely bit of mayoral lunacy falls into a fine Chicago tradition of measuring any creative venture against the rough yardstick of morality. It lands somewhere between the City Council once condemning Wright Junior College for putting James Baldwin on a required reading list and the two weeks it took our local censorship board to deliberate before allowing "The Man With the Golden Arm" to appear on Chicago screens.
     It portrayed, after all, heroin addiction.
     Seeing the city government in such a lather -- Daley pulled schools CEO Paul Vallas' chain, and now Vallas is snooping around, busting kids who played hooky to act in the film -- itself sends a bad impression. It suggests that, rather than being the "world-class city" we aspire to, we're still the brackish backwater that Nelson Algren so ably mocked.
     You can bet that New Jersey isn't trying to quash "The Sopranos."
     Yes, the youths portrayed in "Hardball" are crude caricatures of the complex individuals introduced in Dan Coyle's best-selling book. Yes, the umpires and league officials are not portrayed as the kind, decent human beings that I'm sure they really are.
     And the kids swear a lot.
     But you know what? It's a movie. Movies generally aren't accurate reflections of life. Kermit wasn't a real frog. The Emerald City wasn't a real place. Bruce Willis would have died a dozen times had those "Die Hard" movies taken place outside movieland. I hope I'm not breaking this news to you.
     The characters indeed play to our rough, mistaken notions of what inner-city kids are like. A better film would have portrayed them more realistically.
     But it's a movie. Most movies do not reflect reality. Streetwalkers do not look like Julia Roberts, nor do they end up with billionaires who look like Richard Gere. In reality, they are hardened harridans from hell who end up beaten to death by drunken sailors. That's reality.
     Movies are fantasy. That's why we pay $8 to see them. Nobody wants to sit for 100 minutes and watch Richard Daley's dreamquest of a perfect city. The swearing in "Hardball" is no more a violation of reality than the scene where the female love interest strides into a bar and orders whiskey, neat, or Frank Thomas strolls over to a bunch of kids calling his name and begins happily high-fiving them. But having Thomas send a note to a cute girl in the front row wouldn't quite move the movie along.
     What's most important about the script is that you care about the kids. I had tears in my eyes at the end -- cheaply extracted Hollywood tears, true, but tears nevertheless. I cared for the little buggers, and who is to say that part of my concern wasn't because of the constant stream of profanity pouring out of their mouths. (They have to, remember, keep up with the coach).     
     Mayor Daley should limit his concern for the reputation of Chicago as reflected in the real-life city, which last time I checked still had a number of actual problems to crack. He is not responsible for fantasy depictions of the city or the people in it, and therefore should not waste his precious mental reserves worrying about how many dirty words are uttered by fictional characters located in chimeratic Hollywood Chicagos.
                          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 1, 2000

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Last week's contest was very satisfying, because the winner was really, really glad to win—a longtime reader who was into the spirit of the thing.
     But this week's is going to be even more satisfying, because I'm finally going to stump you. I can just feel it. Because this place is so off the beaten track, yet so grand. I used to think I was the only person who knew about it. 
      Which is where I'll stop. No more hints. As much as I like getting rid of my limited edition, hand-set blog posters, so I don't feel quite so stupid for printing them up in the first place, I am going to savor stumping the Hive with this carved cockatiel and bear. The place looks huge, and is. But where is it? Post your guesses below, for all the good it'll do. I've got you now!

Postscript: I didn't. The location was identified, in the comments below. Maybe next week. 

Bitter Ironies of American History, Vo. 1

     "What have you done?" God asks Cain, after he slays Abel. "The blood of your brother cries out to me from the ground."
     I don't quote the Bible much. But sometimes there isn't much else to say. You have to watch that video of a South Carolina police officer, Michael Slager, gunning down a fleeing black man, Walter Scott. You may have already seen it. Once is plenty. But if you haven't, go online, endure it, not out of prurient interest, but as a kind of civic duty, because it starkly reveals the hinge that has been swinging America back and forth like a shutter in a storm since the moment the nation was created.
     Do I exaggerate? When the United States Constitution was ratified in 1787, there it is, Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3:

     Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

     The famous "three-fifths" compromise counted each black slave — not that our founders sullied our national charter by using a vile word like "slave" in the Constitution, as if that helped — as 3/5 of a person. The compromise was made because Southerners didn't want to join a union that might ban slavery, or tax their agricultural exports. Southern states were dubious about what this new House of Representatives might do, and wanted to wield the whip hand, of course. So no banning the import of slaves until 1808 — kick the issue down the road — and blacks, who didn't count as human beings on a practical level in Southern life anyway, and hardly counted in the North, suddenly acquired a 60 percent personhood for the purpose of giving white Southerners more power in Congress.
     This compromise allowed the nation to be born, but it led directly to the Civil War, 78 years later, a reminder that glossing over problems only tends to make them worse, a hard truth that applies to more than pension reform.
     What have we done? That Thursday was the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War is just one of those coincidences — you might consider them God's little jokes — reminding us that the problem we faced in 1787 and 1865 is still right here. Let's call it the "3/5 Problem."
     I went outside and stood by the river at the appointed time Thursday, hoping to hear the bells that were supposedly rung citywide to celebrate the anniversary of the Civil War's end, but heard nothing, which seemed apt. Celebration is premature, with the casualties still piling up.
     How can you shoot a man running away from you?
     I'll be generous and list three factors. First, there was apparently a brief chase of some sort, not on the video, so the officer was no doubt worked up — let's hope so, because the only thing worse than firing eight bullets at a fleeing man in anger is doing so coolly.
     Second, the cop had a gun on his hip, and we all know how helpful guns are when it comes to making a bad situation worse.
     And third, that old Three-Fifths Compromise in action. Maybe the cop would have shot a 50-year-old white guy just the same. Maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he would never have even stopped a white man driving a Mercedes with a broken taillight last Saturday. Who can say?
     It's hard to view everyone you encounter as as a full person. It must be, because so many have such trouble doing it, from Cain on down to Michael Slager, the North Charleston cop. Minorities are seen as fractional people, as are women, gays, and on and on. Full personhood is granted so easily to ourselves and people like ourselves. But until we nudge the needle up to 1.0, full, 100 percent, for every single person, black or white, gay or straight, we're never going to escape this stuff. Never.