Posts Tagged ‘Hedy Epstein’

Dianne and I drove Hedy Epstein to the Missouri Scholars Academy in Columbia at Mizzou on Sunday, where she spoke for the 17th straight year to 300+ gifted students from across the state.

She shared her experiences growing up in Nazi Germany, and then in Britain, where she went as a result of the Kindertransport before the beginning of World War II.

She read from her mother’s last two communications to her, a long letter, and a postcard indicating that she was “heading to the East.”  Both Hedy’s parents and several other family members died at Auschwitz.

The next day Hedy was to leave for Athens, Greece to begin the preparations for boarding the U.S. Boat to Gaza, as part of the Second International Freedom Flotilla.

During a period of silence in the car, late at night as I drove us back to St. Louis, I recalled the following journal entry from Mev shortly before the beginning of the Gulf War in January 1991.

Yesterday, I printed out Mev’s reflection, and walked it over to Hedy at her condo on Waterman.  I wrote on it, “You and Mev are two of the bravest people I’ve known.”

… and I think that our world, primarily at the instigation of “my” country, is on the brink of war – nuclear potential, no less – and I am in the process of conversion.  This is a significant moment.  The convergence of hearing daily the words, stories, laughter, challenges of people who have made an option and are paying the cost, are reaping the grace — I am called.  I am called forth to say no to injustice, war, the preparation for war.  I am called forth to yes to life, yes to diversity, yes to the stepped-on ones standing up and claiming what is theirs.

This is a turning point in my life.  I was an activist in college, engaged in various ways.  But the Middle East situation has told me that my life as usual can’t continue when such massive bloodshed is being planned, discussed, prepared for!  It makes me sick.  There is not a moral indignation, but a moral revulsion, nearly physical, that impels me to move, to do, to deepen my reflection, to put my body out there on the line. Enough.  Stop the bloodshed.

God, empower us to strive and struggle with integrity, love and humility for a better world, to strive and struggle courageously, willing to risk, willing to be inaccommodated, placing our freedom on behalf of others’ unfreedom — empower and inspire us to act creatively and justly and lovingly and disruptingly.  Life as usual cannot go on, as it grinds the poor into the dust and sand – sick, sick, sick.

God, heal this sick world and let us be your hands.  Condemning no one and afraid of no one.  Putting our bodies before the wheels of the great machine that crushes the bones of the poor, blacks, gays, PWAs, elderly, children, orphans, strangers, Jews, Palestinians, Latin Americans, Iraqis, U.S. soldiers – no more.  No more.  No more.

–last chapter, The Book of Mev

“Don’t give up, don’t give in, don’t give out.”

John Lewis, one of the 1961 Freedom Riders

My friend Hedy Epstein joined the “Move over AIPAC” protests in Washington in late May. While she was there, she paid a visit to the office of her Missouri senator, Claire McCaskill. The 86-year-old Holocaust survivor informed an aide of her upcoming participation in the second Gaza Freedom Flotilla to break through Israel’s vicious siege against the people of Gaza.

The aide to Senator McCaskill told Hedy that the Senator “wants you to be safe.” Yet, if the Senator was like her colleagues, when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke before Congress in May, she gave him 29 standing ovations.

The U.S. government proudly upholds its relationship with Israel. As the U.S. believes itself to be above the law, Israel, as a loyal U.S. ally, enjoys a comparable privilege to consider itself beyond the reach of the law, whether that of the seas or of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Netanyahu is clear about Israel’s intention to maintain the blockade on Gaza and so to keep 1.5 million human beings in desperation. He has been quite explicit that Israel is well prepared to deal with the 15 or more boats and thousand people from 40 countries soon to head toward Gaza.

The women and men who will board the U.S. Boat to Gaza object to the cruel imprisonment and impoverishment of the Palestinians in Gaza. In fact, they are willing to embody that objection and risk their well-being on this mission.

They know full well the lethal means Israel employs consistently and with utter impunity against Palestinians. They also know that global citizens concerned about human rights can be treated similarly, as evidenced by the nine people murdered last year by Israel’s commandos who took over the Turkish boat, the Mavi Marmara.

By her words, actions, and ovations, Senator McCaskill has long demonstrated on whose side she stands. Ms. Epstein is likewise forthright and clear: She is standing with a growing number of those struggling for a decent life for the Palestinians, who have been dispossessed and demonized by Israel for over sixty years.

Fifty years ago, the Freedom Riders sought to hasten the end of segregation and, by doing so, they faced harassment, beatings, bombing, and defamation. As far as the white supremacists were concerned, the Freedom Riders were subversives.

In 1961 how many American senators expressed solidarity with such “subversive” citizens?

Likewise, those who are willing to defy Israel’s brutal policies and to defend the dignity of the Palestinian people are regarded by Israel and its supporters as subversive.

In 2011 how many American senators can utter one sentence of support for the people soon to board the U.S. boat, known as the “Audacity of Hope”?

These days I am thinking of two Holocaust survivors.

I met with one today: 86 year-old Hedy Epstein and I had lunch at a local St. Louis café. The other is receiving an honorary doctorate tomorrow at Washington University: 82 year-old Elie Wiesel, who will also give the commencement address.

Mr. Wiesel and Ms. Epstein have in common the central experience of their lives: their families destroyed by the Nazi genocide. He survived the Auschwitz death camp, and she left Germany in 1939 on a Kindertransport to Great Britain.

After the war he moved to France, studied at the Sorbonne, and eventually became a journalist and novelist. After the war, she served as a research analyst for the U.S. government at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi doctors who conducted medical experiments; she then came to the United States.

In the 1990s I spent many hours reading Wiesel’s books and writing a study of his activism in light of his Holocaust experience. In the last decade I have spent many hours with Ms. Epstein: at peace vigils, meetings, demonstrations, and as part of the International Solidarity Movement in Israel’s occupied West Bank in 2003.

Wiesel is an internationally renowned icon, advisor to presidents (Carter, Reagan, and Clinton), guide to Oprah Winfrey at Auschwitz, and author of over forty books. Ms. Epstein has been known locally for decades as a speaker on the Holocaust and also as a grass-roots activist challenging U.S. militarism; more recently, she has become prominent nationally and internationally because of her work for Palestine.

Mr. Wiesel would agree with the working title of Ms. Epstein’s political memoir-in-progress, Remembering Is Not Enough. And I think that Ms. Epstein would agree with the following excerpt from his Nobel lecture in 1986: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.”

Given what Martin Luther King, Jr. once called “the fierce urgency of now,” the crucial moral task is to refuse abstraction and embody such maxims in our specific political, economic, and cultural context.

For example, in the second volume of his 1999 memoirs, Mr. Wiesel admitted, “Indeed, I can say in good faith that I have not remained indifferent to any cause involving the defense of human rights. But, you may ask, what have I done to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians? And here I must confess: I have not done enough. Is an explanation in order? In spite of considerable pressure, I have refused to take a public stand in the Israeli-Arab conflict. I have said it before: since I do not live in Israel, it would be irresponsible for me to do so. But I have never concealed how much the human dimension of the Palestinian tragedy affects me.”

The fact that he did not live in the Soviet Union, Bosnia, or Iraq did not stop him from speaking out about those urgent situations (he was a strong supporter of Bush’s invasion/aggression in Iraq in 2003). There is also the fact that, for over four decades, Mr. Wiesel has made the strongest, most ardent “public stand” of support for Israel, from the 1967 war to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to its response to the intifada in the late 1980s. He forbade himself to criticize in public the Jewish state, but he certainly sang its praises and justified its actions.

Unlike the Nobel Peace laureate, Ms. Epstein has taken a public stand to oppose, not the “plight” of the Palestinians, but their oppression by Israel, steadfastly backed by the United States.

Since 2003 she has made five trips to the West Bank to work with peace, women’s and solidarity groups opposed to the now almost 44year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. In East Jerusalem, Mash’a, Al’ara, Hebron, Qalqilya, and Bil’in, she has joined the Palestinians, along with Israeli activists and other internationals, in nonviolent resistance to Israel’s intensive effort to ghettoize the Palestinians and to expropriate more of their land for Jewish settlers.

She has bore witness to Israel’s massive wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004. She has received a very small but unforgettable taste of what the Palestinians experience every day, from being strip searched, water cannoned, tear gassed and sound bombed, as well as being declared a terrorist and security risk.

She stood face to face with the women, men and children of the West Bank and listened to their stories, memories, anguish, and hope.

In the last three years, she made four unsuccessful attempts to be one on the boats to break Israel’s sadistic siege of Gaza. She is scheduled to join scores of other U.S. citizens on the U.S. boat to Gaza in late June as part of the International Freedom Flotilla II.

By her words, but much more powerfully by her actions, Ms. Epstein is saying to us, Palestine is the center of the universe.

Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

Hedy in Cairo during the Gaza Freedom March, January 2010