Holocaust Remembrance Day

Wisteria weeping on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I learned this when I turned the radio to WRTI, the classical station by day, jazz by nite. From their website:

WRTI will honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.....with special programming throughout the day.

Listen in the 2 pm hour for I Never Saw Another Butterfly by Philadelphia composer Charles Davidson. This, his best-known work, is a setting of poems by children imprisoned in Theresienstadt; only 100 of the 15,000 children there survived.

I Never Saw Another Butterfly has received more than 4,000 performances throughout the world....Charles Davidson is the cantor emeritus of Congregation Adath Jeshurun in Elkins Park.

You'll also hear works by composers that the Nazis considered "dangerous" to the Reich; music labeled "Entartete" or "degenerate" was banned, and many of the composers of those works were imprisoned and killed.

The music of those long dead, such as Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler, didn't escape the ban. Paul Hindemith and other non-Jewish composers had to flee the country when they disobeyed government orders to fire Jewish colleagues.

Painted my totem pole PVC pipe while listening to Charles Davidson's exquisitely moving music w/children's chorale. Interesting to learn he was cantor on Synagogue Row in nearby Elkins Park.

I worked w/latex paint which is extremely gummy. I wore my blue rubber gloves which picked up paint easily. This was the messiest job I've ever worked on.

Scott suggested I keep the pipe in his garbage can, which was a perfect holder. Plastic tarp protected nearly everything but my shoes (I was wearing 'painting clothes').

With the thick glossy red paint I also touched up my side door. What a lovely feeling it is stroking on the paint.

One of the excellent doc's that's on PBS about the Holocaust is "Escape from Auschwitz," first aired in 2008. You can watch it here.

Rudolf Vrba, b. Walter Rosenberg (1924-2006) was 17 when he arrived at Auschwitz, the largest of Hitler's killing factories. He was determined to escape so he could tell the world about it.

He and fellow inmate Alfred Wetzler made their daring escape in April 1944, then traveled on foot thru forests and towns to Slovakia to warn The Jewish Council of the methodical perfectly executed plans of extermination.

At first, no one believed them. Then they were put to a test. Vrba had memorized the numbers of people on each boxcar, as well as names of people put to death. He told the astonished council that most of their friends and family members would never return.

In addition, he described the gas chambers, the ovens to incinerate the bodies, and the mass graves. Council members were nauseated.

Their info was dictated to the Council and transformed into a 32-page report that was sent to the Pope, to Britain and to America.

Vrbo, who later became a prof of pharmacology at University of British Columbia. He married his childhood sweetheart from Slovakia who he met after escaping Auschwitz. She's still alive today.

Britain was the first to acknowledge its veracity, breaking the Germans' lies and deceptions that told the world the Jews and others were simply being used as labor forces.

Meantime, the Germans invaded Hungary. Like other Jews, the Hungarians (my people) packed their bags w/valuables and boarded the crowded cattle cars w/no food or drink. Many never came out alive, which was just as well, for they faced the gas chambers.

You view the ruse of being given bars of soap and a towel as men, women and children enter the gas chamber.

Vrba and Wetzler described the sweet smell of the zylon gas and the bodies burning, the smoke pouring through the chimneys and the countryside.

When I interviewed psychiatrist Laszlo Gyulai for a Compass interview, he told me his parents and I think grandmother were in the camps but survived.