-Caveat Lector-
On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I pass you this
poem and ask you to pass it on, praying for the many
Holocausts which continue on our scarred planet.
May all beings be FREE from suffering!
Aloha from Sovereign Hawai'i ::: BZ
############################################
The End and the Beginning
***********************
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
Again we'll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.
>From behind a bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass which has overgrown
cause and effects,
someone must be stretched out,
blade of grass in his mouth,
gazing at the clouds.
Wislawa Szymborska
1996 Nobel Laureate
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak
************************************************************
Not a death camp, but 'evil enough'
By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff, 04/13/99
RAZDA, Macedonia - The mists of history descend like fog over the refugee
camp here.
Images of the Kosovo refugees seem, at first, like grainy black-and-white
newsreels of World War II horrors, transformed into Technicolor misery and
beamed to the world by satellite.
There are boxcars packed with refugees from Kosovo, stripped of everything
they own. There are children's faces frozen in fear, as soldiers with black
boots and rifles bark orders. There are hands stamped with identification
numbers, as passports and papers are collected at the gate.
The scenes make for casual comparisons between the Serbs' ''ethnic
cleansing'' and the Holocaust. But the expulsion of a half-million ethnic
Albanians from Kosovo, as horrifying as it is, is not the Holocaust.
Although a group of men at the barbed-wire edge of the Stenkovic refugee
camp chanted ''Auschwitz, Auschwitz'' in recent days, to compare this to a
death camp would be to pervert history.
The stories of three refugees cut through that fog of history here
yesterday, vivid portraits of three people who had to run for their lives.
They are different tales that stretch over a half-century, but they
intersected yesterday in the muddy rows of canvas tents and bread lines in
Brazda's refugee camp.
In a hospital cot in the Israeli Defense Forces medical corps tent lay a
young woman who had been ordered out of her Kosovo home last week at
gunpoint, and who then was shot by Serb paramilitaries as she fled down a
mountain road. As an Israeli Army doctor operated on her leg to remove a
bullet fragment, he reflected on his own family's harrowing escape from the
Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1940. In the next tent worked his new
friend, a surgeon with the German Red Cross, who remembered when he, as the
8-year-old son of a German naval officer, also ran for his life with his
family as US planes bombed their home in Berlin and the Allies closed in on
victory.
''There are mental pictures in this place that bring back memories to all
of
us. I think everyone feels it,'' said Dr. Jacob Adler, 68, wearing Israeli
Army fatigues and a surgeon's scrub suit, and thinking of the people in
other camps more than 50 years ago. ''Of course, there is no real
comparison. This is not a death camp.
''But that's history, and this is now. And this is a disaster, and what has
happened to these people is quite evil enough,'' Adler said as he
delicately
worked long-handled tweezers to remove a bullet fragment lodged in the back
of the young woman's leg.
Snapping off his surgical gloves and moving over to study one more time the
X-ray showing where the fragment was, he said, ''The point is to focus on
the present and on helping people.''
''We ran for our lives''
That is exactly what he was doing in the Israeli medical corps tent, where
a
dozen surgeons and 75 medical support staff set up a makeshift hospital.
The woman, Ibandete Dormishi, 21, covered her face in pain as he worked on
her leg. Later, her story unfolded through the aid workers who helped her
as
she recovered.
''We ran for our lives,'' she said, still wincing in pain.
She and her husband were ordered at gunpoint to leave their home in the
village of Mazgit near Pristina on April 3. They were speeding toward the
border when Serbian paramilitaries opened fire, and both were wounded by
what they believe were fragments from ricocheting bullets.
Bleeding, but not critically wounded, they made it to the border in their
bullet-pocked car. There, they were herded onto a train and into the
squalor
of the refugees' encampment in the ''no man's land'' near the
Yugoslav-Macedonian border. Eventually, her husband, who had a deeper
wound,
was lifted over the crowd pressing to get out of the camp and taken to a
hospital.
D octor and patient
She was left behind in the camp. But the pain in her leg grew worse, and on
Saturday she was brought into the Israeli medical corps unit. The wound had
become infected, the piece of shrapnel so deeply lodged that in the end the
surgeon was unable to remove it.
After he prescribed pain killers and antibiotics, she was asked if she
realized that her doctor had also fled for his life as a refugee more than
a
half-century ago.
''I didn't know he had been through so much,'' she said, smiling politely
through pain as she was loaded into an ambulance to be transported back to
her tent in the camp. ''I'm just glad he was here.''
Yesterday, after she came by for a follow-up visit and for more
antibiotics,
Adler, the Jewish doctor, said he and the Albanian woman had shared a warm
moment, a sense that both had survived evil that targeted them simply
because of their ethnicity and their faith. But Adler said he was
uncomfortable talking about it directly and preferred just to focus on
making sure she was cared for. He insisted that a nurse double-check that
the lab was doing a culture from the wound so he could be sure it was not
still infected.
F our years in hiding
In a rare moment of calm afterward, Adler warmed his hands on a cup of
coffee and told his own story. It was 1940 in his native Czechoslovakia. He
was 11 years old when his father, Hugo, also a physician, led the family to
safety in the face of the imminent Nazi invasion. They made it to Norway,
but the Nazis invaded there as well, and they lived in hiding for four
years.
He remembered the night when he, his sister Hannah, and his parents huddled
in the back of a horse-drawn sled as it was driven over snow-covered roads
lined with Nazi troops. They made it to Sweden through the resistance
underground. They lived in Stockholm until 1949, when they arrived by boat
in the newly founded state of Israel, where he has lived and has raised a
family in Jerusalem.
After years in the Israeli Army's medical corps, Adler has seen war and its
effects. He has traveled on humanitarian missions to Rwanda and Cambodia,
where massacres have unfolded.
Doctors become firefighters in history's worst conflagrations, and they
develop a kinship. On this assignment, Adler has developed one with Dr.
Dieter Jacobi, who set up the German Red Cross tent next door to the
Israelis. Adler was there yesterday, helping Jacobi with the details and
offering assistance.
Jacobi, 61, has penetrating blue eyes and blond hair peppered with gray. He
was a young boy in Nazi Germany, and his images of World War II are vivid.
``No comparison''
He was 8 years old when the news came that his father had been taken
prisoner of war from a German navy ship. His father's navy duties were
largely administrative, he said, and he was not a member of the Nazi party.
When American planes bombed Berlin in the final stages of the war, the
family's home was destroyed. His mother, his four siblings, and he were
left
homeless and fled to the countryside. For years, he said, they slept where
they could with relatives and friends.
''There were so many refugees on the street, and not much sympathy. I
remember begging for food on the street,'' he said amid rows of cots in the
surgical tent.
For him, a German, the refugee camp also evoked powerful reminders of his
country's haunting past.
''It's always in your mind, and here it is more than ever. You have to live
with your history and the history of your father,'' he said.
Asked if the mounting of evidence of atrocities committed by Christian
Serbs
on Muslim Albanian Kosovars could be compared to the Nazi persecution of
Jews, he hesitated. Then he answered.
''No,'' he said, exhaling on a Marlboro. ''No, there is no comparison.
''The Nazis were systematically eliminating a race. The Serbs have been
systematic as well, but in expelling the people. What has happened to the
Albanians is horrific, but from what we hear from the people coming in, the
killing has been sporadic,'' he said.
''The point is anyone who has become a refugee knows the experience,'' he
said, ''and knows what it does to you.''
H olocaust Memorial Day
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, and a young press officer for
the
Israeli medical corps posted news of a ceremony and a press conference to
be
held in the muddy center of the field hospital here. That infuriated Adler,
the Israeli surgeon.
''I am offended by it, honestly,'' said the corps' only doctor old enough
to
have fled the Holocaust. ''It has nothing to do with why we are here. It
only distracts from the focus of what we should be doing. I am afraid it
can
end up alienating our colleagues with whom we have worked very closely,
namely the Germans. It is just not a dignified occasion, which it should
be.''
An elderly ethnic Albanian refugee limped into the tent in the drizzle of
the late afternoon. Adler rose to his feet and went to work treating him.
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 04/13/99.
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FOLLOW THE GLEAM
Not of the sunlight,
Not of the moonlight,
Not of the starlight!
O young Mariner,
Down to the haven,
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel,
And crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the Gleam.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
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"The media's the most powerful entity on earth.
They have the power to make the innocent guilty
and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power.
Because they control the minds of the masses."
Malcolm X (1925-1965)
"The question is not whether we will be extremists, but
what kind of extremists we will be...The nation and the
world are in dire need of creative extremists."
.:*~*:* Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. *:*~*:.
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Dare to FREE Sacred EARTH Cultures!!!
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