Terra Cotta Warriors

We took an overnight train: Selia, Olivia and me and I was so excited. Olivia had to sleep in a section with a family. Selia and I shared our sleeper car with three other people.  A man and woman slept on the top bunk and an old woman slept on the bottom bunk.  We had the other side. Space was tight but it didn't matter to me.  I was, at last, going to see the Terra Cotta Warriors.


We arrived early in the morning and get a friend of Selia's.  He showed us where to get something to eat and then he took us to the site. It is an enclosed dome, much larger than a football field.

When we walked in, I stopped in my tracks as I couldn't believe the size of this massive gravesite.  I had seen photos of this image but until it hit me in the face, I couldn't get a real sense of its true size. Mostly people walked around in silence because we were all concentrating on the details of each and every soldier.


Selia wandered around and spoke English to anyone who would speak to her.  She came looking for me to tell me, "I met a man who says he is from Poland.  Do you know Poland.? Have you ever been there? Where is it?"


Olivia followed me around and blurted out, "This is amazing. I am so lucky to be here." And that is exactly how I felt as well.

The volume of soldiers is overwhelming



No matter where I looked, I saw something different, something caught my eye.


Every soldier is unique and filled with exquisite detail. 

Dachau Concentration Camp- 2012

Dachau Concentration Camp
Dachau, Germany
January 2012

I am in Germany, visiting friends with my 20 year old nephew.  William wants to go to Dachau but he is afraid this interest in this bleak moment of history for Germany will offend my friends.  I assure him that they view this time as a very sad moment as well and they won’t be offended.  So we go off on a cold, wet, windy, snowy day.

William tells me we can wait for another day, for better weather.

“No, let’s go today and get the full effect. Let’s try to imagine how awful this place was for them on a cold, snowy day.”

We got to the gate and I told William to take the time he needs.  

“When should we meet?” he asks.  

“When you have had enough,” I tell him. We part company at the entrance and I don’t see him until the end of the day, when the museum is closing. 

Since my visit, almost 25 years ago, so much more documentation has been added, so I stayed inside the museum and read every letter, every directive, every memo, every newspaper article displayed.  And after all of that, I still can’t get an inkling of understanding as to how one man could have convinced so many people to prey on the spirit and souls of so many innocent people.  

I am numb by the time I run into William.  He is wet and cold and dumfounded by the day’s experience as well. On the train ride home, I ask him what he thought of the gas chambers.

“What, I didn’t see them.  Where were they?  Damn, I didn’t see them.”

Later in the evening, we mention the chambers again and again, he laments that he missed them.  It’s as if this journey is now incomplete in his mind.  There are unanswered questions.

“Then let’s go back tomorrow to see them.” I offer.

“No, that’s ok.  We don’t need to do that.”

But I can tell this oversight is bothering him.  So I convince him that we should go back so he can see what he needs to see.  “Take the time you need to soak in this horrible moment.”

I go with him to the chambers.  It’s a big cement room with shower faucets up too high on the wall.  There are several entrances and both of us don’t dare to actually step inside the chambers.  It’s too ugly, too scary, too sad.  We stand in silence for some time and then he says, “Ok, I’m finished.” And we leave.

Auschwitz Concentration Camp- Poland- 2007

Auschwitz Concentration Camp 
Auschwitz, Poland
2007

Jim and I are on a train, making our way to Auschwitz.  “I wonder if this is the actual route they took”, he comments ever so somberly.  “I wonder how much they knew what going in to here. What were they thinking when they pulled up here?” His tone is unusually pensive.

The setting is just as horrible as the concentration camp in Dachau. So the harse reality doesn’t slap me in the face the way it did for Jim. But the exhibit of the solders’ socks made with the hair of the prisoners seems particularly cruel to me.

Jim is very quiet as we all are. We walk around in silence and try to figure out how to even respond to all of this ugliness.  Just then, our silence is broken.   An older couple approaches us.  We are standing by the execution wall where the prisoners had to stand and be shot or watch others as they are executed.  The wall has an ugly history, one of murder, shame and grief.

“Excuse me, would you be so kind?  Would you take a photo of my wife and I in front of the wall?” he asked ever so cheerfully, oblivious to the thoughtlessness of his request.

The thought of cheerfully posing in front of this horrific wall offends me as it does Jim.  He looks at me and I look back at him in disbelief of this disrespectful gesture.  

“No”,  Jim answers, “No, we won’t” and we walk away.

Dachau Concentration Camp- 1978

1978- Dachau, Germany

I am 23 and traveling through Europe with a friend.  We are in Amsterdam, leaving Anne Franks’ house and I am moved to tears with the injustice of the world and the courage of one young girl.  

“What should we do tomorrow”, my friend asks?

She wants to go to Switzerland to see the beautiful Alps. But now I want to go to Munich to Dachau, the concentration camp.  That is more than my friend can bear so we part company and catch up to each other in a few days.

I board a midnight train and make my way to Munich.  I spend the night reading Anne Franks diaries. By the time I arrive in Munich, I am exhausted and sadden.  My eyes burns and now I am sorry I have wandered off on my own to search out such misery.

I make my way to this beautiful town of Dachau and find a pastry shop.  In conversation with one of the locals, a pleasant woman, about 60 years old, she offers tourist sight for me to see.  “And I hope you haven’t come to see that dreadful camp.  There are so much more beautiful things to see in my country than that.”  I don’t respond because it is just easier for both of us.  But I wonder if she lived here during that time and did she know what was going on?

I find the camp and spend the day in bewilderment. The inhumanity is beyond comprehension.  I cant take it all in.  Nothing makes sense to me and I want to forget this place.  Just then I hear a man call to his wife, “over here, love, come take my photo by the oven.”  He stands perched against one of the crematory ovens, smiling as if this photo just might be his Christmas card photo.  I want to forget this place and he wants to make it a photo opportunity. I leave, angry with him.

Taking the Taxi in Kenya

Taking The Taxi

Mombasa, Kenya

Spring, 1994

It was a hot Sunday day in Kenya. Mid-morning, the temperature was soaring to the high 90F. So an invitation to spend the afternoon at a plush resort with a pool and bar service was welcomed.  My friends had booked a room here for a few days and suggested I join them.  So I hopped a taxi and looked forward to a doing pretty much nothing for the rest of the day. My taxi driver was a young woman who proudly told me she had just graduated for college.

“What did you study”? I asked her.

“Languages.  I learned languages. I can speak English, French and Spanish”, she proudly told me.

I felt ashamed of myself as I can barely speak English. And here, this woman, in this very poor country,  spoke four languages and a few dialects of her native language.

“What do you hope to do now that you have your degree”?

“What do you mean”?  It was clear that she did not understand the jest of my question.

“What type of job do you hope to get where you can use all of these languages?”

“I’m doing it.  I am a taxi driver.  This is my own car. This is my business.”

“You went to college to learn all of these languages so you could be a taxi driver?” I couldn’t believe what she was telling me.

“Yes, yes.  Now, I can take the tourists because I can talk to them.  I will make more money if I can take the tourists.  If I cannot speak to them, I cannot drive them to their destination”.

I was flabbergasted.  But I could not continue our conversation because a police officer flagged her  to pulled over.  She got out of the car and had a long conversation with him. When she returned, I asked why had she been pulled over.

“I do not have a permit on my car for this area.  He said I have to have a special permit to drive on this street. So he wanted to give me a fine”.

“How much is the permit?”

“It is not much, about 2 dollars.

“Why don’t you just get the permit”?

“Because it does not matter.  If I had the permit, he would find another reason to pull me over.  Maybe my headlight is not on or I drive too fast or whatever, he would just pull me over, that’s all.

“Really, why do you think that?  Isn’t that illegal”, I asked naively.

“He pulled me over because you saw you.  When the police see us with the white people, we just get pulled over.  They think I will make a lot of money because I have a white person in my car.  So it does not matter if I have the permit or not.  He just wants to make money off of me, that’s all.  They all do it”. She spoke without judgment.

“Did you pay him”, I want to know. I found myself to be irritated by this injustice.

“No, I told him you did not pay me yet.  So he said I had to pay him when I return.  He said he would look for me.  But maybe he won’t be there when I return so that would be good”.

“Is that how it always it?”  My self-righteousness began to rear its ugly head.  I had an urge to fight back somehow.

“Yes, the police always try to make money off of the people.  They are very corrupt. You have to pay them or you get arrested.”  She spoke with a resignation to this sad state of affairs.

As she spoke to me, I sunk down in the back seat so that I was no longer visible to anyone on the street. The driver noticed my horizontal descent and laughed, “Thank you.  Yes, that is a good plan. That is a good idea.”

Self Sufficient

Self Sufficient

She stands by the soda fountain machine.  Her cart is full of groceries. She holds on to her two-year-old son, sitting impatiently in the front seat on the food cart.  Her four year old break away from her grip.

“Go ahead. You go ahead of us" , she tells me, resigned to a battle with her daughter.

“No,” I tell her, “you go ahead and let me know how I can help you.  Can I get a drink for your daughter?”

“No, Caroline is quiet self-sufficient and she doesn’t like help”, she responds with a tone of exhaustion.

.

“Well, self sufficiency is a great quality to have”, I tell her, hoping to offer my support to both of them.

“Yes it is, and I am sure that some day in the future I will appreciate this self sufficiency of hers” she says as Caroline charges up to the fountain and over-pours a beverage which spills on her dress and the floor.  I quickly get out of the way.

Mr. Nelson

Mr. Nelson
Philadelphia, PA
1966

His store was across the street from our elementary school. At the end of the day, the nuns yelled out every line of dismissal: Alleyway, Firehouse, Church Street, 59^th street, Nelson’s.  We ran to our respective lines and charged home.  Most of us joined the Nelson’s line and ran to his store, the local 5 & dime store.  We pooled our pennies and bought a bag of penny candies:  Mary Janes, Cinnamon dots, licorice strings, etc.

Mr. Nelson was Jewish in this very Catholic neighborhood. So there was some slight hostility all around.  The nuns sometimes referred to him as “that cheap Jew” when a student had been sent to his store in the middle of the morning, on an errand for the nuns, and came back to report that he paid full price, no discount for the nuns as was the custom of the other store owners in the neighborhood.  The nuns got every thing for free from the other merchants. But not from “that cheap Jew” some of the nuns would mutter under their breath, without shame, without care for who could hear them, without thought that we would interpret this action as license to make similar remarks to him and others who differed ever so slightly.

But anyway, every afternoon at 3:10PM, a mob of us would charge in and yell to get his attention, “Hey Mr. Nelson” in tones similar to Denise the Menace.

This infuriated him, “My name isn’t Nelson. It’s Carabell.  That was my father-in-law’s name,” he told us each and every time one of us called him Mr. Nelson.  But this one simple request of respect didn’t register with any of us.  For years, we only addressed him as Mr. Nelson.

Some kids were banished from the store for life for the crime of stealing.  So they did everything in their power to upset this mandate.  Some of us had to serve as decoys while the bad boys snuck in.  We had to call to Mr. Nelson and occupy his time with his usual lecture while the McCoys or the McCains or the McLaughlins snuck in, grabbed a few things and took off.  He usually caught a glimpse of them just a moment too late and then looked back on the decoy to determine if this was a sting or not.  He was helpless in seeking the nuns’ intervention on this matter which could have ended it right there.  They would have gone right to the boys’ home and taken care of business. But Mr. Nelson didn’t have enough sense to give the nuns free merchandise like everyone else so “that cheap Jew” was on his own to handle the deluge of annoying, loud students who flooded his store and tried his patience every single school day for 42 years.

Our Lady of Lourdes Elementary School

Philadelphia, PA

1960s

Break Ups

Break Ups

Philadelphia, PA

1984

My parents had six kids in seven years and then eleven years later, they hatched another kid, Brian, the family prince. By the time Brian was 14, we were all out of the house. Several of us were already married, with kids and a mortgage and all the other joys and burdens of adulthood.

At one family gathering, Brian was really down.  He was so sad.  His girlfriend, his first girlfriend, had dumped him for his best friend. Brian was devastated and we all wanted to beat up the girlfriend and his friend. But we didn’t and we tried to offer words to console him, just something to lift his spirits and let him know that life will go on.  But no words helped this broken 14 year old heart. So we stopped trying.

But one brother-in-law thought he would give it one last try. He patted Brian on the back and told him, “The first one is the hardest and then the rest of the breakups, you get used to them. They don’t hurt as much.  Girls just break up with you.  You just have to be used to it. You’ll be alright.”

Bill’s comment resonated with the rest of us.  And while these words may not have been helpful to Brian on this day, future break-ups did not seem to be as devastating.