This was a post I did back in 2016 for the now defunct SlantNews. Reading George Packer’s excellent but sad piece in The Atlantic — We Are Living in a Failed State — made me think about it again. Four years later I can still feel the electricity of the crowd in the room when the Sam Goldberg video ran. Sadly, it seems like so long ago.
So here goes… From the 2016 files…
2016 — Perhaps it was all the talk of banning refugees and immigrants based on religion, but during a recent day off, I somehow got it into my head to do something that I had meant to do for years – go to the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
Amidst everything, two impressions stuck with me that offered hope for a soul starved by the cynicism of both of our political parties. It's a hope that I know may be viewed as naïve, but I don't care. Right now, I would welcome a bit of hopeful naiveté amidst all of the cynicism.
The first impression
There are so very few quiet places in the world anymore. And even fewer in a large city like Washington, D.C. And certainly even fewer in museums populated by lots and lots of tired tourists and school kids.It is reassuring to me that in an era in which we are constantly bombarded with digital stimuli, some stimuli still retain the simple power to shut everyone up. That was my overwhelming sensation at the Holocaust Museum.
Silence. Silence. Hundreds of school kids and tourists, and…silence. Apparently there are some things too horrible to ponder. Some things we cannot comprehend because of the enormity of the evil they represent. Some things that retain the power to leave one speechless. Oh, thank goodness.
The second impression
At the end of the tour, there is a set of filmed testimonials from survivors. The full script is here (and worth reading), but the moment in the film that stopped me in my tracks was this one, about a Jewish Partisan in Poland named Sam Goldberg. The full video is here.
FILM TITLES: Sam Goldberg was trapped in a box-car when the train was liberated by the American Army. The doors of the cattle car were jammed. Sam was very close to death.
SAM GOLDBERG:
Finally the door opens up. And I feel somebody is picking me up by my suit just to pull me up. Okay? Then it comes to my mind… They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me. I’m not going to let them kill me. Now, after all this time, I went through so much, they’re going to kill me now? No way! They’re not going to kill me! And I grabbed this shoe and I felt for the person who picked me up. And I hit him with this wooden shoe...
The guy started crying. And he said, “I’m not going to kill you. I’m an American. I came to liberate you.
You’re free.”
And just at that very moment, a collective double clutch, a gasp from an entire crowd as just about everyone choked up about what it could mean to be an American.
Silence and a Gasp. That’s what I want more of in America. I want more naiveté that yes, we Americans can be a force for liberation and for good in the world.
I know that Americans, like just about everyone else, have at times committed terrible crimes in the name of nationalism and are guilty about just about every other "ism" in the book.
But I retain hope in that Silence and that Gasp at the Holocaust Museum.
[Note: Four years later, I still do. But I admit it’s more difficult.]