“They tried to eradicate us”
When I asked a young man guiding Rebecca and me through America’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice what should we read, he mentioned two book titles after a glance at his phone. And then he looked at us and said through his COVID mask:
They tried to eradicate us.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice memorial was the last stop on an eight day trip visiting civil rights museums and memorials in Memphis, Jackson, Selma and Montgomery. It honors the 5000 known and the many unknown African-Americans lynched in the United States of America.
Two weeks returned and our guide’s words triggered thoughts of another place I had been that helped me understand the power of hatred. The animating idea of the National Memorial to Peace and Justice and Auschwitz-Birkenau is what human beings fueled by hatred do to their victims.
To be hated
What does it mean to be hated? To be despised because of my religion or ethnic identity or race, with no recognition of either the content of my character or my shared humanity. My stomach tightens in anxiety when I am disliked or ignored or misunderstood. But to be hated, that’s beyond my experience. What must it be like to be our National Memorial guide who could reasonably say “they tried to eradicate us?” To know what it means to be hated, I needed to listen to the stories of the victims of hate.
And if the eyes of those men had had the power to pulverize that car, it would have been done, exactly as, in the Bible, the wicked city is leveled–I had never in all my life seen such a concentrated, malevolent poverty of spirit.
James Baldwin, No Name in the Street, p. 78
This was James Baldwin’s description about how he felt on a visit to Alabama in the 1960s as three white men in the Montgomery, Alabama airport followed his movement through the terminal to a waiting car. Later, Baldwin mistakenly walked into a “whites only” restaurant.
Every white face turned to stone: the arrival of the messenger of death could not have had a more devastating effect than the appearance in the restaurant doorway of a small, unarmed, utterly astounded black man.
p. 71
Baldwin once said: “What is most terrible is that American white men are not prepared to believe my version of the story.” The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Auschwitz-Birkenau tell versions of stories all of us need to hear if we are, in the words of our Montgomery guide
To face our past to move forward from our shared pain.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
“They are all honored here.” This is what our young guide said when I asked him why he worked at this place. The memorial includes 800 steel monuments representing the 800 counties in America where 5000 African-Americans were lynched. We descended as we walked through the memorial and finished with the monuments over our head, the height of a hanging body.
John Hartfield was one of those honored. He was lynched for having a white girlfriend in Mississippi in 1919, the year my mother was born. A blink of an eye ago and 54 years after America’s civil war ended. Michael Donald was the last American lynched, in Mobile, Alabama, on March 21, 1981. My son would be born at the end of the last decade of lynching in America. Grandmother and grandson, two generations, and hundreds of lynchings apart.
This paragraph, from Wikipedia, is instructive. “Hartfield was hung in a tall sweet gum tree, then his body was riddled with bullets, then brought to the ground where men cut up the corpse for souvenirs, finally burning what remained. Afterward, commemorative postcards of the lynching were created and sent out.[5]A story circulated among whites that Hartfield had been hanged from the very same tree where the confederates had hanged three insurgents in the civil war.[1] Governor Bilbo declared “This is a white man’s country, with a white man’s civilization and any dream on the part of the Negro race to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end”.[6]
Auschwitz-Birkenau
In the fall of 2004 I twice toured Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Memorial and Museum. Two impressions from those visits linger: the massive pile of victims’ shoes behind a glass window and the silence. No one among the 30 people in either tour group said a word.
A friend and one of Rebecca’s son-in-laws, Aviv Hod, listed below in a Facebook post the members of his family killed in a German concentration camp.
These are my family members that were cruelly rounded up and killed. Family members that the survivors like my grandmother mourned all her life.
Avraham Tratsch- maternal great grandfather, Sarah Tratsch- Mother of my mother’s grandmother, Yodel Tratsch- brother of mother’s grandmother, Peeyga Tratsch- sister, Hanyiah Tratsch-sister, Michayel Tratsch-sister, Chaiya Tratsch -sister, Bracha Tratsch- Grandma from mother’s side aunt, Yankele Tratsch- Grandma from mother’s side uncle.
From my maternal grandfather’s side:
Alec Pakentregar, Leizer Pakentregar, Avraham Pakentregar, Rosa Pakentregar, Sheyna Pakentregar, Motka Menachem Pakentregar, Phela Pakentregar, Sruleek Pakentregar.
Extended family from paternal grandparents:
Moshe Fox, Itzik Heller
Aviv’s grandmother, Hanah Porat, and her sister, Aliza Hamer, were the only members of Aviv’s family to survive the holocaust. In Aviv’s words:
They were forced to march from their home in Moldova to the Chelmo concentration camp in Poland. Many died along the way from starvation, exposure, and disease. They were 12 and 13.
Sacred Places
“This memorial is a sacred place.” So read a sign at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I felt a sacredness at Auschwitz as well. In the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, we stood on the ground where slave auctions took place. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, a crematoria sat in rubble unchanged from Allied bombing.
10,000 people watched John Hartfield die, not 3,000 predicted in the New Orleans States newspaper. Google ‘crowds at lynchings’ and look at the image-link and then at the faces of those present at the lynchings. Isabel Wilkerson in Caste describes these horrors as “part carnival.” After observing Adolph Eichmann on trial in Israel for war crimes, Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil. And just before he died in 2006 Alabama sheriff Roy Clark said he “would do it all over again.”
Buddhists tell us evil comes from ignorance. In these memorials, we pause in silence and stillness to open ourselves to what happens when we hate.
What hate takes away
In one of those still-moments, I imagined a John Hartfield who was not lynched. He has lived a long life and is holding a grandchild.
Like Aviv’s grandmother and great aunt.
