but there wasnt one , at least not one with reguard to what happened 67 years ago , im sadened to think we as americans can cast off the relavant past with so much ease , but then , the generation that lived it - died in it and remembered itvividly is dieing or sinking into dimentia ,
i spent an interesting weekend with my mother , i alternated between being the son she was thankfull came to visit and the young man she grew up with and married , living a full and fruitfull life with , she gets confused at times ..................
having said that i think its abominable that we the offspring , who grew up with them , living thru the undiagnosed post stress and ongoing silence they often imposed upon themselves to spare their familys the mental anguish they experienced , allow such event to go unrecognised - not for the actions of our enemies , but for those that died , those that lived , and all of those that served as a result of that action ,
this is the redeaming story our paper chose to publis instead - equally deserving of the publication , but perhaps on a more appropriate occasion , and yet i feel this just as deeply so ill share it with you ..............................................................
Historic project, concert transforms area musicians' perspectives on life, humanity
By David Unze,
dunze@stcloudtimes.com • December 7, 2008
It wasn't tanks, concentration camps and crematorium that launched the Holocaust. Long before the Nazis swept Jews and others they deemed undesirable from the streets of Germany and exterminated millions with a precision efficiency, there were words.
Words, indifference to their meaning and failure to act against their message allowed horrific acts that are replicated today in places like Darfur and Rwanda.
There was a human being who methodically opened tin cans containing Zyklon-B gas pellets that filled the killing chambers at Birkenau. It was a human who screwed in the railroad ties that built the boxcar lines running between there and Auschwitz. And neighbors of the mountaintop Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp had to have known, must have at least wondered, what was causing the smoke and peculiar odor in the skies above their valley hamlets.
"The real evil lies in the silence," said St. Cloud State student Anna Rooney. "If we're going to be silent about how we feel about Darfur or how our homosexual friends are being treated, we are just as much promoting the evil as the people who are actually instigating it."
Rooney saw firsthand what silence can foster. More than 200 St. Cloud-area students were there with her this spring, and all are changed.
Those students, from three St. Cloud-area colleges and universities, paid their own way to take a Holocaust oratorio to Europe in May and June. The centerpiece of the trip was the performance of "To Be Certain of the Dawn," a musical gift of healing, at the site of the former Natzweiler concentration camp in eastern France.
The after-effects of the historic, two-week tour to Germany, France and Switzerland are just beginning to unfold for the college students, children and others who went on the tour. Many struggled in the days and weeks after the trip to put into words its impact. Some still do.
Nearly all speak about the impact of singing healing words to the souls of the Natzweiler dead at the site where the atrocities occurred. Art was the transcendent, in a place where evil reigned among the surrounding, stunning landscapes. The musicians who saw and sang were transformed. And they brought their new perspectives home.
"I cannot be silent, about anything, especially when it comes to persecution and people being put-down because of their race or their religion or their lifestyle," said Heather Wetzler, a choir member from St. Cloud State. "We say that it will never happen again, we've improved, we're in a better world. And that's not true. We still have just as much evil. It happened back then, it can happen again."
Bringing more than 200 students back to the St. Cloud area to spread their newfound knowledge builds on the educational opportunities, and how far they spread the message and change their communities will help measure its success.
"What it shows," said St. Cloud State University President Earl H. Potter III, "is that this university and the larger community has the capacity to touch people's understanding and their hearts together and change the way they approach the world. And that's a university at its best."
Ihringen, Germany
The mayor of this tiny town tucked into the fertile, terraced hills of wine country is an outsider among some of his own people.
Seventy years after Nazis removed all the Jews from Ihringen, it remains Judenrein, a German word meaning "Jew free." It's a word with no literal English counterpart.
Mayor Martin Obert could easily ignore the Jewish cemetery nestled on the edge of town. The one in nearby Breisach rests unattended, weeds masking the aging and abused tombstones. The foundation of a nearby synagogue is all that's left after Kristallnacht.
But Obert tends to the Ihringen cemetery, trimming the weeds, mowing the grass, cleaning the graffiti and righting the tipped tombstones targeted by local neo-Nazis.
His silent acts of denunciation are not unlike the trip itself for the college students and young women of the Cantabile Girls Choir. Those students rode a mobile classroom that was regimented with cultural exchange, musical performance and historical perspective.
"When I was over there, I thought a lot about what I take for granted and what would happen if it were all gone," said Rael Parks, a 15-year-old member of the choir. "It really made me think how lucky I am to have friends who actually care about me and would miss me if I were one of the people who disappeared during the Holocaust and would speak for me if I was gone."
The students came from communities that struggle with racism overt and subtle. Musicians from St. Cloud State, St. John's University and College of St. Benedict rehearsed and performed the oratorio in St. Cloud campus buildings just yards from where swastika graffiti was found.
And while swastikas undoubtedly can be, and have been, found in other schools and public buildings, they have a complicated and nuanced meaning when word gets out that they are so brazenly displayed at St. Cloud State.
The discovery of the swastikas in November 2007 was 10 years removed from similar incidents in which an African-American student had "KKK" and a swastika written on a message board in her campus dorm with an arrow pointing to her name. Around that time a university professor had swastikas cut into her vehicle on separate occasions in separate parking lots.
There were lawsuits in the late 1990s alleging anti-Semitism, and in late 2007 a student of color reported that two men used a Nazi salute toward her and spit in her direction on campus. Numerous swastikas were found across campus, although few rose to the level of a crime.
Obert cleaned up the graffiti in the Ihringen cemetery, pieced together the splintered headstones and opened its arched gates to the St. Cloud delegation. He retreated from the attention and watched quietly as Rabbi Joseph Edelheit said "Kaddish," the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead.
It was the first time a rabbi had said Kaddish in Ihringen's Jewish cemetery since the Jews had been forced from town.
"Let's face it, there's racism everywhere, there's hate everywhere, there's xenophobia everywhere," said Bernard Reuter, former director of St. Cloud's State Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education and organizer of the trip. "But when you actually bring people together and confront them with how far racism can go, that's a very strong incentive to try to work to make things better in the present."
The music and message at the center of the trip, the oratorio "To Be Certain of the Dawn," was commissioned by the Rev. Michael O'Connell, composed by Stephen Paulus and written by librettist Michael Dennis Browne, all Minnesotans.
Those three recognized the need to educate younger generations about the Holocaust, to keep the story from dying as the survivors pass.
"My generation will see the last Holocaust survivor die," said girls choir member Anni Johnson, 16. "And I think it will be much harder to keep their stories alive when they're gone."
And while the Holocaust was ever-present on the trip, the message became universal. Jews made up about 13 percent of the prisoners at the Natzweiler camp. The rest were gypsies, homosexuals, resistance fighters and anyone the Nazis deemed undesirable.
"I think we walked away thinking people just don't care about other people's cultures and it's not tolerable," said St. John's University student Eric Loehr. "We're living in an age where all these cultures are together, whether it's the Somali people living here in St. Cloud or whether it's us going into Iraq. It's an issue of people realizing that comfortable isn't always the best thing."
"I've been trying to treat people with more respect than before I visited the concentration camp," said Ch'aska Quillo, 14, of the girls choir. "Because now I'm more fully aware that everyone is a human being and has feelings and should be treated accordingly."
"It makes your little everyday things that people get so worked up about just so insignificant," said girls choir member Zoey Steidl, 13. "It just makes you feel small."
Those young voices, making profound statements about their world and their future, need to translate into positive change throughout their communities, Potter said. The trip and learning experience has thrown a stone into the pond, he said, and there are a lot of circles going out.
How those people influence others will determine the impact of the message they learned.
"The learning and significance unfolds as changed people encounter their communities," Potter said.
And for those who discount the message as insignificant or unworthy of attention?
"I can't help but tell the person on the outside to wake up to that, to wake up to the world changing into this diverse place and having a more global view, a more international view," Loehr said. "Things in Darfur are still happening. Why does it take a documentary to come out and show us, in order for us to care?"
The experience made Vanlice Washington realize he had to leave St. Cloud. It's not because he doesn't love the area, he said. As an African-American from Liberia, he was angered by the symbols found last year on campus. The St. Cloud area isn't racist, he insists, and he hasn't endured the overt racism others have reported.
But the trip made him realize that he has to live every day as if it's his last. He moved to Florida to pursue a career in music entertainment production. It's a field not offered in St. Cloud, he said.
"I'm not going to sit and waste my life," he said, "because it can end at any moment."
Potter and others at St. Cloud State are hoping to harness the energy and momentum of the trip as an opportunity for ongoing dialogue and education. The former director of the university's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education marveled at the way young Americans' actions and emotions provided impetus for Europeans to talk about things on which they had long remained silent or indifferent.
"This was unique, and I think it shows that there is a very special dynamic or energy point at this place," Reuter said about St. Cloud State. "That, while there may be some things to deal with, to address in public discussion, there is an overwhelming effort, an overwhelming sense that things can be dealt with. And that message comes across to the outside."
For the Rev. O'Connell, a performance of a work he commissioned as a gift of healing from Christians to Jews at the site of such atrocities was more than he could have imagined. He watched with his good friend and partner in promoting interfaith dialogue, Rabbi Joseph Edelheit.
"We challenged the children, especially the Christian children of the third Christian millenium, that they can do it differently," O'Connell said moments after the historic concert at Natzweiler. "And I think tonight we saw a bunch of young people that are going to do it differently. This is transformative for them and for us."
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