Documents

The Forward, SEPTEMBER 28, 2001

Ashes Adrift in a Gentle Wind

By MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT

Thousands of men and women slaughtered, many of them incinerated, their bodies never to be found. Ashes, the remains of loved ones, friends and neighbors, drifting in a gentle wind for miles. Auschwitz, 1944, or New York City, September 2001? The stench of death making it impossible for anyone in the vicinity ever to claim that he or she was unaware of the carnage. Bergen-Belsen, 1945, or New York City, September 2001? No, there is no comparison. But there are echoes.

On August 4, 1943, on arrival at Auschwitz, my mother was separated from her parents, husband and five-and-a-half year old son. My brother’s last words to her were, “Mommy, are we going to live or die?” My mother had no answer. She was haunted by this memory until her own death four years ago. Like millions of others gassed and burned in the death camps, my grandparents and my brother have no graves. My mother must have wondered, as she walked through the camp, whether the air she was forced to breathe contained her parents’, her child’s or her husband’s ashes.

Zachary Stern, a student at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, told his father that he felt that the silver dust gleaming in the sunlight as he and his school mates were being evacuated on September 11 was made up of thousands of souls. In the tons of rubble, ashes and debris that rescue workers have had to walk through for the past two weeks are the remains of victims whose bodies will never be recovered. All New Yorkers have been physically enveloped by the dead and death.

It is only natural to ask how God could have allowed this newest cataclysm to happen. The simple answer is that, like the Holocaust, it was perpetrated by human beings, not by God. Nonetheless, I believe God was at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, just as God was present at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. But God was not in the killers.

God was within every Jewish parent who comforted a child on the way to the gas chambers. God’s spirit was within my mother as she kept 149 Jewish children alive in Bergen-Belsen throughout the winter and early spring of 1945. The divine spark that characterizes true religious faith was within every Jew who helped a fellow inmate in the death camps, just as it was within every non-Jew who defied the Germans by risking death to save a Jew.

Similarly, God was in all the New York City firefighters, police officers and rescue workers who risked or gave their own lives to save others. God was in the heroic passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who overpowered the terrorists and sacrificed themselves rather than allow the hijackers to reach their target. God was in the man who remained in the World Trade Center with a friend confined to a wheelchair. God was in every victim who made one last telephone call to say, “I love you,” or whose final thoughts were of a husband, a wife, children, a parent or a friend.

On September 11, we witnessed both absolute evil and absolute good. As a nation, we must now make a choice: We can become obsessed with revenge, allowing a justified hatred of the terrorists to poison our own souls, or we can try to reshape the world according to the ideals that the murderers sought to destroy. After the Holocaust, its survivors, while never ceasing to remember and mourn, rebuilt their lives and created new families in a collective act of defiance. During the difficult days and weeks ahead, their example and their ability to overcome the most extreme suffering of all times can serve as a lantern for New Yorkers and all Americans.

Mr. Rosensaft, a partner at the law firm of Ross & Hardies in New York, is the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.]]

www.forward.com/issues/2001/01.09.28/oped1.html

By Rachel Zoll, AP Religion Writer

4 Tishri 5762 17:35 Friday September 21, 2001

The effort to identify the thousands of people buried under the rubble of the World Trade Center has raised difficult questions for the guardians of ancient Jewish traditions.

Rescuers fear many bodies will not be found or identified at all, potentially leaving strictly observant Jews without the direct evidence religious law requires to confirm the death of a relative.

The identification is critical for families to complete the mourning process, already disrupted since they can’t meet the requirement to bury their dead within 24 hours.

Proof is also needed to invalidate a Jewish marriage so the surviving spouse can find another husband or wife.

Even in cases where DNA identification can be made, problems remain — some rabbis question the tests’ accuracy and do not accept the results alone as evidence of death.

“The number of individuals who are going to have to be identified by means other than direct identification — that’s unprecedented,” said Rabbi Moshe Krupka of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.

An Israeli police forensics expert has come to New York at the request of Jewish leaders to help oversee the process, Krupka said.

Rabbi Gedaliah Schwartz, chief of the Rabbinical Council of America, will be among those providing guidance on religious law, said his spokesman, Rabbi Joseph Ozarowski.

Schwartz served as an adviser in the recovery effort for SwissAir Flight 111 in 1998 and for other tragedies.

There will be as many opinions as there are rabbis, scholars say.

“We don’t have popes. Any man who is schooled in the law has the chance to look with a different viewpoint,” said Rabbi Saul Aranov of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada, where the SwissAir flight crashed.

More than 6,000 people have been reported missing and are feared dead beneath the crumbled Trade Center.

Most Jews will begin the mourning period once New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani begins calling the salvage effort a recovery instead of a rescue mission, indicating all hope is lost.

But that will not solve the need for evidence of death.

Giuliani has acknowledged that the 2,000-degree Fahrenheit (1,100-degree Celsius) fire caused by the explosions of the two planes and the implosion of the 110-story twin towers make it likely some victims will never be recovered.

“In this case, we don’t know what exists under that rubble,” Krupka said. “We don’t know what has been buried, what has been crushed, what has been incinerated.”

Identification is simpler for Roman Catholics, Protestants and Muslims, who generally accept whatever method the medical examiner deems appropriate. More liberal Jews will also accept the government’s ruling.

Orthodox Jews, however, will look to the Talmud. This collection of religious and civil law requires more than one piece of evidence to identify a person who has been disfigured in death, said Rabbi Moshe Tendler, professor of Jewish medical ethics at Yeshiva University.

Rabbis accept dental records and fingerprinting, and many accept DNA testing, but some require other proof as well.

In the SwissAir crash, where minute bits of the bodies of the 229 victims were recovered, some rabbis approved the passenger list as evidence of death, if airline officials marked that the victim had boarded the plane, said Aranov, who helped oversee the process.

Others accepted a personal object, such as a ring or watch, along with the DNA tests, he said.

It is not known how many Jews were killed in the suicide strikes at the Trade Center.

More questions will likely be raised later about what to do with body parts that cannot be identified, since each faith tradition has different rules about burying or cremating human remains.

“We are undertaking the largest effort outside of a war zone for identifying the remains of people through technology and science,” Krupka said. “It’s a terrible time.”

JPost Radio: How do we begin to mourn in the face of a pillar of fire and a cloud of smoke rising heavenward?

Rabbi Daniel Landes, director of the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, spoke with JPost Radio’s Dave Bender about the Halachic implications of the grisly task.

By DICK FOSTER

Scripps Howard News Service

August 22, 2001

— Joe Mauk wears the green beret of the Army’s elite Special Forces and a uniform bedecked with ribbons and medals for bravery. He talks about his time in Vietnam, his 11 purple hearts for wounds, his Silver and Bronze stars for valor, and his captivity as a prisoner of war for nearly 2 1/2 years.

His stories have brought tears to the eyes of adults at his many speaking engagements. And when the Vietnam Memorial “Traveling Wall” came to the Denver area July 13-15, “Master Sgt.” Mauk was invited as the keynote speaker.

There’s only one problem.

According to Army records, Mauk was never a prisoner of war, never in Vietnam, never a member of the Special Forces, never wounded in battle, and never a master sergeant.

Mauk’s soldier persona began to unravel July 16, after the Rocky Mountain News published a photo and article on his appearance at the Traveling Wall.

Outraged Vietnam veterans and ex-prisoners of war erupted with e-mails and phone calls saying that Mauk is not what he claimed to be. They said impostors dishonor the 58,226 who died in Vietnam, the 153,363 who were wounded, and the 661 real military prisoners of war.

Mauk was confronted Monday with Army and Defense Department records in a meeting with the News and retired Navy Capt. Mike McGrath, an ex-captive who heads the national Vietnam prisoner-of-war organization NAM-POWS.

Mauk staunchly maintained that he served in Special Forces, was injured 11 times and was a prisoner of war for two years, four months and nine days, but could provide no records to confirm any of his claims.

“I’m in the process of getting documentation sent to me at the present time, from a colonel with (military) intelligence,” Mauk said.

Mauk’s stance brought an angry rebuke from McGrath, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and Navy fighter pilot who spent five years and eight months in a North Vietnamese POW camp.

“Mr. Mauk, I’d like to say one word. You’re not worthy of laying flowers on the graves of my roommates and my squadron mates and the people who died beside me in Hanoi,” McGrath said. “You’re not worthy of even talking to one of those graves.”

McGrath had known of Mauk long before their meeting Monday.

“He’s just a fraud,” McGrath said. “He’s been listed as a fraud for five or six years. I carry 668 of these frauds on our list now. What they think is that 28 years has gone by and people won’t know the difference, so they can just do anything they want.”

(Contact Dick Foster of the Rocky Mountain News.)

By LOU MARANO

Thursday, 5 July 2001 18:05 (ET)

WASHINGTON, July 5 (UPI) — Defense attorneys have long known that eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable in criminal proceedings. A new study sheds light on why.

In recent years, advances in DNA testing have exonerated many convicted “felons.” Disproportionately, these have been men sentenced to long prison terms after having been positively identified by rape victims.

In the Jan. 8 issue of the New Yorker magazine, Atul Gawande cited a study of 63 DNA exonerations of wrongfully convicted people. Of these, 53 involved witnesses who had made a mistaken identification. Almost invariably, those witnesses had viewed a lineup in which the actual perpetrator was not present.

In the July issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology, professors Sharon L. Hannigan, of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and Mark Tippens Reinitz, of the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., have published a study indicating that illusions in memory might result from the basic human need to make sense out of events.

Through a series of experiments, they found that when people see an effect without seeing its cause, they automatically “fill in the blank” with a probable cause.

In everyday life, Hannigan and Reinitz wrote, these inferences are generally useful, adaptive — and correct. Even so, they are based on false recollection. And in criminal cases, the costs of false recollection are high.

Hannigan and Reinitz showed subjects a slide of an effect, such as oranges scattered on a supermarket floor. Then the investigators showed subjects pictures of the most probable cause of that effect, such as someone reaching for an orange from the bottom of a stack, and asked whether they had seen that picture before. A statistically significant number said they did.

The errors increased with the passage of time.

Hannigan and Reinitz found that these causal-inference errors were common in retrospect but not in looking to the future. In other words, exposure to the “effect” slides caused illusory memories of having seen “cause” slides but not the reverse.

In fast-paced and emotionally charged scenes, eyewitness identification errors are common even in the absence of inferential mistakes.

Gawande began his New Yorker article by recounting a staged altercation in a law school class at the University of Berlin in 1901. The professor asked students, as eyewitness, to describe exactly what they had seen. The most accurate witness got 26 percent of the significant details wrong. Some students present got up to 80 percent wrong.

“Words were put in people’s mouths,” Gawande wrote. “Actions were described that had never taken place. Events that had taken place disappeared from memory.”

Since 1901, the experiment has been replicated “thousands of times” with similar results.

This is important, Gawande wrote, because more than 75,000 people become criminal suspects on the basis of eyewitness identification in the United States alone, and the DNA exonerations show that the most common cause of false accusation is eyewitness error.

Gawande, a surgeon, wrote that in medicine this kind of systematic misdiagnosis would get intense scientific scrutiny. The law, however, “has balked at submitting its methods to scientific inquiry.” Ohio State University psychologist Gary Wells has tried to come up with practical solutions.

As reported by Gawande, Wells’ research shows that witnesses who picked the wrong person out of a police lineup were just as confident about their choices as those who identified the right person. Further, volunteer jurors believed inaccurate witnesses just as often as they did accurate ones.

Wells found that having multiple witnesses didn’t solve the problem. A crime might be witnessed by dozens of people, yet they would often finger the same wrong suspect.

In a “crime” staged to give 100 witnesses several good looks at a “thief,” 54 picked the perpetrator correctly, 21 said they did not think his picture was among the six they were shown, and the others spread their selection among the five others in the lineup.

A second group was given the same pictures minus the perpetrator. This time 32 people picked no one, but most of the rest chose the same wrong person.

Gawande wrote that researchers at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh discovered that witnesses who are not explicitly warned that a lineup may not include the perpetrator are substantially more likely to make a false identification under the misapprehension that they’ve got to pick someone.

But Wells and Rod Lindsay of Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, found that if witnesses were shown only one person at a time and made to decide whether he was the culprit or not before moving on, this reduced false identification by more than 50 percent without sacrificing correct identifications.

Of course, one would expect prosecutors and police departments to rush to adopt this method. One would be wrong.

In the 15 years since Wells and Lindsay published their findings, only a “scattered handful” of police departments, mainly in Canada, have implemented the reform. And prosecutors have been far more resistant than police.

Gawande quotes Wells as saying that people in the criminal justice system only want to know whose side you’re on — the prosecutor’s or the defendant’s. For them, science is just another form of spin.

Ideas

By ALEXANDER STILLE

The New York Times

March 10, 2001

ROME — When Alessandro Portelli was doing an oral history of a small working-class Italian city in the 1970s, he became puzzled when his subjects repeatedly made factual errors or even related events that had never happened. For instance, when talking about the death of a worker named Luigi Trastulli, who had been killed in a clash with the police in 1949, the people Mr. Portelli interviewed all insisted that the event had occurred during demonstrations in 1953.

At first it seemed like the kind of mistake that aging memories are prone to and the reason that many historians are wary of oral history. But Mr. Portelli, perhaps because of his background teaching American literature at the University of Rome, began to see the errors of oral histories, like Freudian slips, as a central part of their meaning and their narrative strategy.

Trastulli died during a demonstration over Italy’s decision to join NATO … a controversy that had lost much of its meaning by the time Mr. Portelli did his interviews … and the 1953 demonstrations were prompted by mass firings from local factories, which had permanently changed life in the area.

“I realized that memory was itself an event on which we needed to reflect,” he said in a recent interview at the University of Rome. “Memory is not just a mirror of what has happened, it is one of the things that happens, which merits study.”

[…]

The field began to take off during the 1960s and early 70s with the emergence of the civil rights and feminist movements and the proliferation of inexpensive tape recorders. Scholars hailed oral history as a means of documenting and giving voice to blacks, women, Native Americans, immigrants and other groups that had often been pushed to the margins of society. Oral history reached mass audiences with groundbreaking books like “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” “Roots” by Alex Haley and “Hard Times” “Working” by Studs Terkel and “La Vida’ and “Children of Sanchez” by Oscar Lewis, which were all based on interviews.

At the same time many academic historians viewed the field with suspicion, insisting that written documents were the gold standard of historical truth. Oral sources, they said, have selective memories, get facts wrong, conflate events and slant their accounts of the past to fit the needs of the present or of the researcher. Oral historians responded to that criticism by trying to make their work meet the same standards as documentary history.

[…]

“People there [in the Soviet Union] tended to rely on rumor, so the reliability of their stories is not as interesting as their meaning,” he [Indiana University’s Russian and East European Institute advisor Hiroaki Kuromiya] said. “These oral sources may not tell you much about what Stalin was doing, but they are terribly useful in telling you about people’s minds.”

By LAURIE ASSEO, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — People who disagree with political orthodoxy should not “censor ourselves” or yield to criticism, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday.

“By yielding to a false form of civility, we sometimes allow our critics to intimidate us,” the justice said at the annual dinner of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

“Active citizens are often subjected to truly vile attacks; they are branded as mean-spirited, racist, Uncle Tom, homophobic, sexist, etc.,” Thomas said. As a result, he added, sometimes “we censor ourselves. This is not civility, it is cowardice, a well-intentioned self-deception at best.”

Thomas, who joined the court in 1991 after a bruising confirmation battle, told of getting a strong negative reaction in 1980 when as a government official he was quoted as questioning the “sacred policies” of affirmative action, welfare and school busing.

“Debate was not permitted. Orthodoxy was enforced,” Thomas said. “When whites questioned the conventional wisdom on these issues it was considered bad form. When blacks did so, it was treason.”

“These rules of orthodoxy still apply,” the justice said. “You had better not engage in serious debate or discussion unless you are willing to endure attacks that range from mere hostile bluster to libel.”

However, he added, “one should not be cowed by criticism.”

Thomas said that after he dissented from a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that let inmates sue prison guards for using excessive force even if no serious injuries are inflicted, “I was widely denounced for advocating the beating of prisoners, which is ridiculous.”

People who say children should be raised in two-parent families “are often accused of trying to impose their values on others,” Thomas said. He called such criticism “purely and simply an in-your-face response. It is, in short, intimidation.”

But he said people should not shy away from stating their views.

“We are required to wade into those things that matter to our country and our culture, no matter what the disincentives are or the personal cost,” Thomas said.

To: The MEDIA

Re: CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVORS

Dear Sir / Madam,

My name is Alexander McClelland I am an Australian veteran of WWII, a TPI (Totally and Permanently Incapacitated) and a survivor of a Concentration Camp.

Aged 19 I volunteered for the AIF and fought as a Bren Gunner in 2/1 Infantery Btn in North Africa, Greece and Crete where I was wounded and captured by German forces. I spent the rest of the war as a POW but due to my many escape attempts I was finally put into the TEREZIN Concentration Camp close to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia.

I have recorded my experiences in an autobiographical book entitled : ‘The Answer — Justice’. In 1965 I was featured in an award winning but historically inaccurate Australian television documentary on Theresienstadt called ‘Where Death wears a smile’

I don’t receive my TPI Pension because of the heavy wounds I received in the battle action on Crete. I get my TPI Pension because of the inhumane treatment I received in the Concentration Camp. It is a mistake to believe that the Germans had enough spare manpower to staff and run the concentration camps. The Germans only ever guarded the outer perimeter of the camps, we Prisoners hardly saw German soldiers, so it was not the SS or German guards that beat me up daily.

No, the daily beatings that left me totally incapacitated, came from two fellow Prisoners called KAPOS.

Kapos (or Camp Police) had extra priviliges, such as their own room and they also had power, For example the Power to say who got to visit the Camp Sick Bay or the Camp Brothel, and because of the absence of the very disciplined Germans, these Kapos even had the Power over Life & Death.

The two Kapos that beat me daily, using a heavy wooden baton they called ‘Herr Doktor’ (The Doctor) were both fellow Prisoners, both were Jewish, one from Hungary and the other was, I believe, a Ukrainian. I was often witness when they dragged other hapless prisoners from their cells onto the ‘Appelplatz’ and beat them to death with ‘The Doctor’.

So whenever I meet a ‘ Camp survivor’ now, I look him deeply in the eyes to see what sort of a ‘survivor’ they are … whether they were really a Prisoner just like me, or whether they were one of the many ‘Privileged’ ones who survived the war being more inhumane to other Prisoners than the Germans ever were.

As a matter of fact, it was a German SS Soldier who saved my life after the Kapos, who after beating me sent me outside the camp on a work detail, with a dangerously poisoned leg. The SS Soldier walking by, saw my mates helping me, came over and then gave me his medical kit.

I now look deeply into the eyes of the ‘survivors’, because I know that not all Concentration Camp survivors were innocent victims. I know that a lot of the Prisoners were brutal and inhumane criminals. The world has never been told the whole truth about what life in the Camps was like. All we ever hear or read in the media is , how bad the German guards were and how badly they treated their Prisoners. I was in more than 8 POW Camps and a Concentration Camp, so who would know the truth? Me or the Media!

sincerely

Alexander McClelland

PO Box 887

Toronto NSW 2283

Too bad India doesn’t have the secret Nazi technology that, according to anti-revisionists, allowed them to cremate Jewish bodies in a few minutes using a couple pounds of coal! Funny, how no one today has been able to equal that Nazi technology. A skeptic might wonder if the stories of Nazi crematory efficiency aren’t gross exaggerations.

Cremations nonstop in quake’s wake

• DISASTER: The number of dead creates an overwhelming need.

January 31, 2001

By NIRMALA GEORGE

The Associated Press

AHMEDABAD, India — An electric crematorium in this city was so overloaded that the hinges of the furnace door melted. Outside, wood-fired funeral pyres burned around the clock, overwhelming mourners with foul-smelling smoke.

“The bodies just keep coming in. Sometimes entire families, other times three or four members of a family,” said Syed Zain, the operator of the electric furnace at the Ellis Bridge Crematorium in central Ahmedabad.

The awesome human toll extracted by Friday’s earthquake in western India becomes obvious at Ahmedabad’s 11 crematoriums, which have been overwhelmed by the unending stream of bodies.

Hindus, the majority in India, believe that not cremating a body will leave the person’s soul in limbo — a fate worse than hell.

Zain said he has lost count of the number of bodies he has cremated. Besides those who died in Ahmedabad, people have brought corpses from nearby towns.

At the Ellis Bridge Crematorium, the registry clerk said that from an average of three to six cremations a day, the numbers had risen to about 50 a day.

“I have never seen anything like this in 22 years that I have worked in this crematorium. The number have mounted with each passing day,” said Zain, his eyes red with fatigue and fumes from the nearby wood-burning funeral pyres.

The proximity of the Ellis Bridge Crematorium to the V.S. Hospital, one of the city’s biggest, has meant that people who died of injuries have received the last rites here.

The electric furnace has been operating around the clock, Zain said. In the compound of the crematorium, 10 to 12 traditional funeral pyres of wooden logs burned continuously. At any given time, at least 10 or 12 bodies were being consigned to flames.

At the Saptarishi cremation ground, mourners lit incense sticks and threw sandalwood, sesame seeds and clarified butter into the flames in accordance with Hindu rituals. But the sweet combination could not hide the sulfurous, noxious smell of burning flesh.

The long wait and queues at the crematoriums have forced families to burn two or three bodies together.

Aslam Mansoori, the operator of the electric furnace at the Saptarishi crematorium, said it was so overworked after the earthquake that the hinges of its doors melted. The furnace had to be cooled down and the hinges replaced.

The electric furnace is maintained at more than 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, but the temperature in its inner chamber goes up when corpses are burned.

In Bhuj, the town closest to the epicenter of the earthquake, workers used wood pulled from fallen houses to light funeral pyres.

The late-night hours are the most hectic, said A. B. Mehta, manager at the Dudheshwar Cremation Home, the city’s oldest facility. At night, bodies lying unclaimed in the hospital or found on the streets are brought to be burned.