 Thinking
of Asuncion--the old Germans, and, well . . . the boa. How
if I were to have invited someone to my room--which I did--and
mentioned the boa and it's overhead alignment to my bed--which
I didn't--you have to assume the reaction would be memorable. Move
the bed. Kill the boa. Resolve
the situation some way or another. To my guest, the boa would
be considered a clear and present danger, and to remain within the
grasp of such danger was a product of either lethargy or what we
might call the ostrich syndrome--pretending the danger didn't exist.
But the Germans, who in my daily
visits to the cafe in 1976, were easily old enough to have been
instrumental in a much larger context of danger, and the pretended
absence of danger.
It is now a matter of public record,
through the Freedom of Information Act, just how many reputable
reports were arriving at FDR's desk regarding the genocide. As early
at the fall of 1939. A
phenomenon even more lucid to the German citizenry. The Aryans,
who had no issues with their Jewish neighbors and friends, and yet
because they were in the thick of it--because they were sleeping
beneath the boa, they failed to act. Or react.
But it's more. As early as January
of 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt writes to her mother-in-law regarding
a party she and Franklin were invited to. She writes: "I've got to go to the Harris party
which I'd rather be hung than seen at. Mostly Jews."
Does this help explain why the reports
flooding FDR's desk, as President, were categorically ignored? Why
he repeatedly refused to repeal the immigration laws to allow German,
Polish, Belgian, and Austrian refuge-Jews to immigrate to America? Why
a boatload of them were left stranded off the NY harbor for two months
in 1941?
There are more letters-of-record
from the pen of Churchill regarding his established anti-semitism
than seems possible from a statesmen occupying a world stage.
In October of 1941, in the thick
of it, the news from within the belly of the beast, by way of innumerable
personal letters, was as widely known and acknowledged as the starving
affects of Churchill's blockade. Walter Matner, an
SS police secretary from Vienna writes to his wife on the day following
a massacre in Mogilev. " . . . My
hand was shaking lightly, he wrote, when he shot the first truckload,
but by the tenth he was aiming more calmly. He had "
. . .'shot securely many men, women, children, and infants".
Round about 1944,
there was a mass exodus of SS officers escaping to South America. To
Paraguay. Why
Paraguay? Well,
they arrived with large, very large amounts of plundered money, at
the doorsteps of a country that had almost no awareness of the
world stage, much less the nuances of war crimes. Paraguay,
in 1944. No
TV. No internet. Very few radios, concerned mostly with
a local love for dramatic soap operas. A single newspaper,
but no network of AP or UPI links. They arrived with a veritable
fortune, sacked from millions of massacred jews, to settle into a
pleasant existence of fellow countrymen, most of them in their mid-twenties,
safe from the world tribunals that wouldn't get geared up for many
many years to come.
In 1976, just 32
years later, as men in their mid-fifties, they were enjoying a
renaissance of power, impervious to anything, unrepentant, emboldened
even. Chile, just a
few miles off, was under the hand of Pinochet. Argentina,
a few miles in the other direction, was in the thick of the 'Dirty
War'. Their tactics of mass massacres were uncomfortably
familiar. Both countries were blacked out from world news. No
news from the Northern Hemisphere reached the citizens. No
news was released to the world. The atrocities went on for
many many years, unbeknownst to a world beyond the borders of these
cultures, and yet fully known by the constituents, the citizens,
terrorized into the Ostrich Syndrome of sleeping beneath a boa. The
clear and present danger of such acquiescence.
Being in Asuncion, and Chile and
Argentina at this time, beyond the borders recommended by the American
Consul, to travel alone in a world suddenly without travelers,
was to be engaged in endless whispering conversations with local
citizens wondering when the world was coming to their rescue. Where
was America? They asked. What
was the news of their plight in America? But of course the
American populace was no more aware of their plight than they were
of the situation in Germany 1939. It would be another 8 years
before news arrived in the States. Small articles in the Times
leaking out from page six of the Times and read by me with the impact
of being slapped hard on the face.
I am not a fan of
solid privacy gates. Nor
solid privacy fences. I
have several designs for such simply because I am reacting to an
overwhelming request for such. The most popular gate among
the 98 designs offered is Gate
#29. An arched, solid privacy gate. And
how odd that the original #29 was designed for someone who herself
had escaped the atrocities of Chile under Pinochet.
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