Unitarian Society of New Haven
Jim Peters
May 27, 2018 USNH Sermon:
Never Forget: Re-Membering on Memorial Day Weekend
Reading:
An excerpt from “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Mitch Albom (©️1997, Doubleday)
I look back sometimes at the person I was before I rediscovered my old professor. I want to talk to that person. I want to tell him what to look out for, what mistakes to avoid. I want to tell him to be more open, to ignore the lure of advertised values, to pay attention to what your loved ones are speaking as it if were the last time you might hear them.
Mostly I want to tell that person to get on an airplane and visit a gentle old man in West Newton, Massachusetts, sooner rather than later, before that old man gets sick and loses his ability to dance.
I know I cannot do this. None of us can undo what we’ve done, or relive a life already recorded. But if Professor Morris Schwartz taught me anything at all, it was this: there is no such thing as “too late” in life. He was changing until the day he said good-bye.
Sermon:
Mitch Albom was best known for his sports journalism when, in 1997, he authored “Tuesdays with Morrie,” a book which recounted fourteen visits with Morrie Schwartz, his college sociology professor. When the visits began, Morrie was in the later stages of ALS, also known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” ALS, which is at least for now, invariably fatal, attacks the neurons controlling voluntary muscles, but has no effect on the mind. Morrie knew he had only a short period of life left, and through those hours together student and teacher had a chance to exchange a meaningful, thoughtful, deeply-felt goodbye.
The “Tuesdays with Morrie” narrative speaks to me, because I have been living a version of it for the last several years. Today, I would like to tell you the story of my “Thursdays with Aunt Renate,” and how those hours together have changed my life.
I want to say at the outset that in order to preserve her privacy, Renate, who raised me, is not her real name. But all of the other facts are as true and complete as I have been able to divine.
Renate, who was born in 1930, was an extraordinary student. She had a habit of finishing at the top of her class — whether it was at Hunter High School in New York City, or Swarthmore College, or Yale Law School. When she graduated from Law School in 1954, however, the world of corporate law to which she aspired was not yet ready for female associates, so one interview after another ended in rejection. As a result, she returned to academia, where she taught law for 22 years before being appointed a state judge. Her career in the judiciary lasted another 34 years until her retirement in 2014. This is a volume of her opinions while on the bench. But it’s not the whole set. There are 11 more just this size.
Like Morrie Schwartz, my Aunt Renate has a condition that eventually will claim her life. But Renate does not suffer from ALS. Instead, her illness has gradually but now almost completely robbed her of the ability to create and retain short-term memories.
What she experiences isn’t the kind of forgetfulness that I suspect you and I worry about all the time — when we can’t find our keys, or when we walk into a room and then forget what we were meant to do there, or when we see a face and can’t place the name. For Renate, “now” is experienced really wholly differently than you and I. We will be having a conversation, often about my children — and when we are doing so, she’ll have insightful comments to make about my 20-something daughter and son. But, invariably, invariably, after some time chatting, something will happen — the phone will ring, or her aide will refill her coffee cup — it could be any distraction — and the scene we had just played together, is erased from her experience. There is a look in her eyes as the scene resets, and often, she will pose the very same question that began our conversation a few minutes ago: “So, tell me about the kids.”
Renate’s condition makes it difficult for her to leave her apartment, where fortunately she has the resources for 24-hour care. For when she leaves, she quickly forgets why she has, and she experiences most spaces other than her home as unfamiliar and potentially confusing. Fortunately her daily aide and her have a strong relationship of trust, and that gets Renate through the inevitable trips to the doctor as well as time outside when the weather permits.
I tell you all this, because I want you to understand the context of my Thursdays with Renate. While what I have shared with you might seem grim, in truth it isn’t really at all.
I want to share with you something I never would have believed had I not lived it myself these last years.
ALL IS NOT LOST.
ALL IS NOT LOST.
Because the “now” is so ephemeral for Renate, a long time ago I discovered that the most meaningful place to be with her during my visits is in her past. The mind is an amazing, enigmatic organ whose processes we are only beginning to understand. Renate, who can no longer store and recall the present, can still access with amazing clarity details from her distant past. And it is there over the last few years that I have travelled and learned with Renate, and in the process discovered parts of my own story I would never otherwise have known.
My Thursdays with Renate have taught me how our shared memories connect us, sustain us, complete us. To justify this assertion, If you’ll indulge me, let’s go back in time, to the beginning of Renate’s story.
I mentioned that she was born in 1930. Renate Asch was born in March of that year in Berlin, Germany, younger sister to my mother Ellen, and my Grandparents Ernst and Hilde. Ernst was a successful 40-year old attorney who had emigrated from Poznan, Poland to establish his career. He was ambitious, hardworking, by all accounts highly competent. And he was Jewish. Ernst was not a practicing Jew — he hadn’t attended synagogue since his youth — but he was Jewish nonetheless.
Renate recalls her early childhood as a happy one — filled with music — Hilde was an accomplished violinist — and lots of extended family around all the time. Hilde and Ernst traveled frequently across Europe, and the girls stayed home with a nanny.
But all was, of course, not well in Germany at that time. During the 1930’s my grandfather, whenever possible, arranged payment for his legal services in any currency other than Reichsmarks — often agreeing to painfully disadvantageous exchange rates — in order to build up reserves of foreign currency. One of his clients was the artist Marc Chagall — and from him he was compensated not in cash but in one of his paintings — which, incredibly, is still in Renate’s possession.
Renate doesn’t know how Ernst saw the writing on the wall and gathered these cash reserves — held in small accounts in cities across Europe. But those funds would prove crucial to their survival. For in the fall of 1938, after the Munich Agreement codifying the Nazi annexation of the Sudentenland, and before Kristallnacht on the 9th of November, my grandparents were arrested and held overnight by local police. Friends of my grandfather secured their release, but told him they couldn’t be counted on to do it again.
The family had been hoping to emigrate to the United States, under the German quota, and had been partially successful in navigating the process with American officials in Berlin. But my grandfather was always the sticking point. For the Polish city Poznan had been the German city Pozen before the Treaty of Versailles redrew the European borders in the aftermath of World War I. So should Ernst be considered for entry to the United States on the Polish quota or the German? No one could give a definitive answer.
With their status was still unresolved, the Asch family fled Germany two days after the arrest, bound for Amsterdam. Renate remembers vividly the scene at Berlin’s Templehof Airport. The Immigration officer, one at a time, confiscated their German identity documents, saying in turn to each of them, “Du bist jetzt staatenlos” — “You are now stateless.” Hilde’s mother accompanied them to the airport, but refused to leave. It the last time Renate ever saw her grandmother.
The family lived in Amsterdam for 14 months. Renate and Ellen learned Dutch and went to school. Ernst worked his contacts and tried to get the family visas to enter America. They succeeded for all but him. Finally, Ernst insisted that the rest of the family leave Europe, as the skies were growing darker by the day. So in December, 1939 my grandmother, aunt and mother boarded the SS Volendam, bound for New York City.
Ernst remained in Amsterdam as long as he could, and almost too late. In the dawn hours of May 10, 1940, the day Winston Churchill took over as Prime Minister from Neville Chamberlain, as the German army was overrunning the Dutch defenses, Ernst bribed himself onto a plane carrying mail headed for Portugal. He remembers seeing Wehrmacht vehicles approaching the airport perimeter as the plane, possibly the last departure before the occupation, lifted off.
My grandfather’s undocumented odyssey took him from Portugal to Spain, Venezuela, and then ultimately to Mexico City, where he somehow obtained permission to remain temporarily. From Mid-May through July of 1940 Hilde and Ernst wrote each other almost daily as they had been out of steady communication for the weeks since Ernst’s escape from Holland.
Ernst was safe in Mexico, but lonely, and frequently ill from the unfamiliar climate and food. He was worried about the prospects of employment in America even if he could obtain a visa, and he reasoned that their savings would last a lot longer in Mexico, where the cost of living was much less than in New York. He pleaded with Hilde to consider relocating with the girls to Mexico.
According to a letter dated June 12, 1940, Hilde was unmoved. She wrote of Mexico, “I believe of course that you could earn money there, but I fear the unrest. I was just today reading an article about Mexico in Life magazine that reports it is always the same there, a revolutionary undertone for the country and its people.”
This decision could have gone either way. I marvel at the fortitude of my grandmother, who prevailed in her decision not to move the family yet again.
Here is a copy of the magazine I believe Hilde referenced in her letter. It’s the June 10 edition. There is indeed a short article about possible Nazi infiltration into Mexican politics: “A Nazi Fifth Column and Communist Allies are Active in Mexico.”
Let me add that it’s succeeded by the next article which touts the wonder of “NYLON! Women hope new yarn will halve their stocking bill without loss of Glamour.” Life goes on, even under the shadow of war.
It’s ironic to me that it’s LIFE magazine, because of course it changed the course of my life, or more accurately the existence of my life. Had Hilde emigrated to Mexico in the spring of 1940, Renate would not have had her life in America. Neither would my mother have met my father in an American college. It’s sort of a miracle that I’m here at all.
What prompted Ernst to sense the impending danger, and to take concrete steps years in advance? How did they know that the Netherlands was no safer than Germany? Why did Hilde decide not to accede to Ernst’s wishes and move to Mexico? The succession of circumstances that collaborated to ensure their survival, and hence that of the succeeding generations, seem so unlikely in retrospect. It’s the same, I suspect, for each of us gathered in this room here today, though the specifics are different. We are the product of so many decisions, so many actions, utterly beyond our control but which literally are the difference between our being and our not being.
It’s a miracle any of us are here at all.
In any event, on July 18, 1940, a telegram arrived for at 362 Riverside Drive, Apartment 3-A, addressed to Hildegard Asch:
“Quota Number Arrived. Medically examined. Visa Monday/Tuesday. Plane or Boat. Telegraphic decision travel plan. Overjoyed. Ernst.
My grandmother Hilde passed away before I was born, but Ernst, who became a successful investment advisor in Manhattan, and who worked throughout the war to secure the freedom of relatives and friends still under Nazi control, died of natural causes at the age of 90. After his death the family discovered that he had saved the family correspondence from those fateful months in 1940. Renate translated the letters and bound them for the family.
I knew only the shadows of our family story before my Thursdays with Renate. Growing up, the trials of the war were not subjects of routine conversation, or really any conversation. I knew nothing of the specifics of the journey, the details. I knew there was a song, so to speak, but I never heard the melody. But Renate can still remember the names of classmates from her third grade year in Holland. She remembers learning to bowl in the basement of Riverside Church, and the quizzical expression of the woman who enrolled her in a children’s program there. “You come from an interesting family,” she told Renate, who remembers it as if it happened yesterday. And so the music finally is being shared.
So my friends, all is not lost. I have learned more about my extended family, and about where I come from, then I ever would have. What’s more, these memories are the places where Renate comes alive. The clarity will not last forever, but while the light is still shining I have learned so much from what it has illuminated.
And that is how it is with memory. It feels so personal, so individual, the stories that run through our minds, and we get frustrated, or frightened, when we lose the thread or feel disconnected or forgetful.
But memories are never only individual.
We carry our stories together, we pass them down, as Renate is passing hers down to me. Someday, the processes that are taking her memory will lead to a moment when she won’t have a name for me. But I will have a name for her, and I will carry her story forward.
We are more than the sum of our parts, aren’t we?
Because this month’s theme is “Creativity” I wanted to find an artistic connection to my reflection this morning — I found it in “Coco,” the 2017 film from the Pixar Animated studios.
In the story, the main character Miguel learns that on the Mexican holiday “Day of the Dead,” family members who have passed away are actually able to travel to the land of the living — provided that their living family members have memorialized them on altars, ofrendas, in their homes. That’s the one-day ticket back. It’s the remembering that allows the journey. Back in the land of the dead, people remain for the rest of the year, in a parallel life, year after year, until the last living person has forgotten them. At that instant, they disappear entirely and finally.
I think there is great wisdom in that story.
We re-member ourselves, we make ourselves fully embodied when we hold to our identities and our stories. We are more than the sum of our individual memories — we are bound, we are strengthened, we are animated by our shared stories. Re-membering is, in this sense, the opposite of dis-membering. Re-membering holds us together, integrates us, makes us whole.
Our memories connect us to ourselves, and to each other. Renate cannot make new memories, but she yet has stories to tell, and in that telling she and I remain deeply, powerfully connected.
My connection with Renate, and the family’s flight from Europe was in the front of my mind when last November my wife Jean and I visited northern France, the site of the Allied invasion on June 6, 1944.
The Normandy American Cemetery’s 172 acres are the final resting place for over 9,000 soldiers, most of whom perished on or shortly after D-Day. The average age of the soldiers buried in Normandy is 24 years. That’s the average. Many were were far younger.
I want to say a bit about how these soldiers are remembered — in particular the fallen who are as yet unidentified. The military is in a continual process of identifying remains — with each breakthrough in genetic testing more soldiers can be positively identified. At the Normandy Cemetery, there is a “Wall of the Missing” — with the names of those who have died but whose bodies are not yet identified. There are over 1,500 such names at Normandy. Each time a positive identification is made, a rosette is placed next to the name in the wall. This work continues across the globe, from Pearl Harbor to Korea to the South Pacific to Europe. The remembering never stops.
We were at the Cemetery with a group of about 175 Americans, mostly our age or older than my wife and myself. We participated in a simple ceremony I’ll never forget. Our tour leader, Lionel, a 60-year-old Frenchman, told us that he had grown up in le Havre, about 50 miles to the east. “I swam in free waters every day growing up. And it was all because of what happened here that I had that freedom.” He then asked the retired servicemen and women in our group to stand under the American flagpole and we faced them and sang the National Anthem to each other. They cried looking at us. We cried looking at them, and at the flag, and at the thousands of white marble headstones laid out in perfect rows before us. We each then were given a rose to lay wherever the spirit led us.
A few hours later, a warmish, sunny late November afternoon, Omaha Beach itself was deeply peaceful. Out near the horizon there are still remnants of the “mulberries,” pieces of the concrete artificial harbor that were towed over only hours after the initial invasion. And there is a beautiful sculpted stainless steel monument — — both reminders of the fact that this is no ordinary beach. But what stood out was the length of the exposed sand — extending about 300 yards from the low hills behind us. For we had arrived at low tide. There’s a picture of us inside the order of service.
When planning the invasion, the navy argued for the initial landings to be low tide, so that the troop carrier operators could see the obstacles that were blocking the beaches and which were most exposed at low tide. The army wanted to go at high tide, to limit the distance the soldiers would have to travel under fire. They compromised, and scheduled the invasion to begin about three hours after low tide.
Looking out at the literally hundreds of yards of sand stretching out into the English Channel, the depth of the courage it must have taken those tens of thousands to engage the battle took my breath away. It still does.
Much has been written describing what the Allied forces and, especially the Americans on Omaha beach, had to endure before finally securing the beachhead and beginning the allied ground invasion of Europe.
It is important to remember this: the outcome, at the time, was anything but certain. General Eisenhower in fact himself carried in his pocket for weeks afterward words he had written and intended to deliver had the invasion failed. It was only a few lines long:
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
Imagine for a moment had Eisenhower been required to make such a speech. How many more months, or years, would the Holocaust have continued? How far West would the Iron Curtain have descended if the only major allied army left to fight in Europe had been under Stalin’s control?
The stories of each of us, and of all of us, are surely different than what they would have been had the Allied invasion not succeeded. Who can say exactly how the differences would look today? I do believe that the Nazi nightmare, which due to my grandparents’ uncanny prescience and instinct for survival, spared my immediate family, was an evil that could only have been confronted and defeated with massive force. I have only gratitude for those who offered themselves to that effort.
And so we re-member, sharing our stories and strengthening our connections. We remember for those who have passed across the divide.
I re-member, with and for Renate.
Together, we are more than the sum of our parts, for all is not lost.
So friends, on this Memorial Day weekend, let us re-member ourselves. Let us be connected to our past, to our foreparents, as we continue our storytelling in our time. Let us seek out the Morries, the Renates in our lives.
Hear the stories.
Tell the stories.
Remember the stories.
And let us this day and every day be grateful for the sacrifices that preceded, and protected, and permitted our lives, as we re-dedicate ourselves to a birth of liberty, with justice for all.
May it be so.
Blessed be.