Acts of courage: Miep Gies
In 1942, as the Nazis began to deport Dutch Jews to concentration camps, an executive at a spice company who had already moved his wife and two daughters from Germany to the Netherlands realized there would be no second chance to run. The family went into hiding instead, living in a suite of rooms concealed on the upper stories of the company’s warehouse at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, helped by a handful of employees who smuggled them everything from newspapers to potatoes. They hoped to hold out that way until Germany was defeated and the war over.
You know how this story ends, of course. Someone still unknown betrayed the family to the Gestapo, and they all died but the man: Otto Frank. His younger daughter’s diary also survived, and when he finally returned to Amsterdam in 1947, he had it published, giving the world the best-known document of the Holocaust. But we wouldn’t have the Diary of Anne Frank without Otto Frank’s secretary, Miep Gies.
Gies was nearly arrested herself on suspicion of helping the fugitives. She risked her safety again by trying to bribe the Gestapo to let the family go. When that failed, she went back to the Franks’ ransacked hiding place to retrieve their belongings and save them against the day they might, however improbably, return. It was Gies who found Anne’s papers scattered across the floor, gathered them into a suitcase, and kept them — unread! — until she could give them to Otto Frank.
After the war, Gies and her husband, who had also hidden someone in their own home, settled into obscure domesticity for more than 40 years. In 1987, though, an American writer persuaded her to write a memoir, and she became — in her 80s! — a much in-demand speaker for Anne’s diary and against Holocaust denial. Still, as recently as her birthday last winter, Miep Gies modestly maintained that many others had done far more to fight the Nazis than she.
Miep Gies died today, just a few weeks shy of 101, having insisted until the end that she was no hero. With all due respect, I disagree.
Obituary in the New York Times
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (2)Tut, two
I’m not sure what it says about me that in an exhibit full of extraordinary and beautiful objects, some of them almost 3,500 years old, what I found most emotionally compelling was a small oval piece of ivory, no larger than the palm of my hand, carved to resemble a duck with its head curved gracefully to its side. It was a box, about an inch deep, with a top that swiveled out to reveal a gentle hollow. According to the label, it was probably used to hold some kind of cosmetic or perfumed salve.
The translucent greenish-yellow scarab at the center of an elegant pectoral was more mysterious. Scientists only recently discovered the scarab was carved not from semi-precious stone, but from glass — and not manmade glass, either, but glass found only in the dunes of a small corner of the Sahara, created by something that melted the sand there at a temperature higher than that of lava. Maybe it was a meteorite even more ancient than the pyramids, but there’s no sign of an impact crater anywhere near. No one really knows.
The stone bust of Nefertiti was more inspiring. Her serene gaze and full lips reminded me that she was considered the most beautiful woman of antiquity. She was also Tut’s stepmother (his mother was one of his father’s secondary wives) and his mother-in-law (because he married her daughter, his own half-sister). And before her husband’s death and Tut’s succession to the throne, Nefertiti may also have been the powerful co-ruler of Egypt in her own right. Not a woman to be trifled with, to be sure.
The many golden, bejeweled artifacts were certainly more shiny. I’m a magpie; I love jewelry, and I certainly ogled a few things and imagined how they might look on me.
But that little duck-shaped ivory box was — I’m grasping for the right word — lively. Playful and utilitarian at the same time, something I could imagine on the dressing table of a boy king. Even though was tucked into a box and buried with him, not to be seen again for more than 3,000 years, it wanted to be held and used. I just stood there for a good five minutes smiling at it, delighted.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Tut, Tut, Tut
File this under “Department of Excessive Fondness for Antiquities” —
San Francisco’s De Young Museum is one of just a handful of places in the US to host the return of King Tutankhamun, or some of his stuff, anyway. The last time Tut’s treasures came through this country, I was too far away from any museums that displayed them, and too young to appreciate them properly.
Now? I have a ticket to a special event tonight for museum members, “Tut at Twilight,” which takes place after regular museum hours. It’s not a huge Egyptian-themed party, but it does include a free audio tour and special snacks in the museum cafe. And at the very least, I’ll be surrounded by other people who like antiquities, enjoy museum membership, and want to spend their Wednesday evening hanging out with shiny objects that belonged to a boy king 3,000 years ago. If that doesn’t provide plenty of conversation-starters, I don’t know what would.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Spiritual autobiography, part 3
As I’ve noted in the past, I was raised Jewish — though a contradictory flavor of it, to be sure. We kept kosher at home, but not in restaurants. We went to temple on the High Holy Days, but not on weekends. It was made clear to me that I was going to have a Bat Mitzvah whether I wanted one or not; I didn’t, and had to be bribed with an electric typewriter.
(Yes, I sold my soul for a Smith-Corona — though I suspect this says less about the ethical flexibility of a preteen than the undeniable truth that I was doomed to writerdom from an early age.)
I was well into adulthood before I stopped feeling like I had to defend my decision to say Goodbye To All That. I once even got into a screaming fight with a dear friend who, out of heartfelt fondness for a very liberal version of Judaism, told me I had no right to forsake the faith of my forebears until I had sampled every current variety of it and judged them all a bad fit for me. To be fair, we’d been drinking, and each of us said things we regretted. Nonetheless, it ended up being a productive argument for me, because it clarified my realization that I had drifted away from even a mushy nondenominational religiosity into hardcore agnosticism.
Today I finally managed to articulate the reason — well, one reason; there are several — why my ancestral faith never felt like a good fit. Ironically, I found it in an article in a Jewish publication. (Full disclosure: the spouse of someone I know is quoted in this article, and a friend is actually a columnist for the publication, although neither of these facts is terribly relevant.)
In a nutshell, the article explores the discomfort the Modern Orthodox writer feels at going to yoga class, because despite her enjoyment of the exercise, she feels the chanting and bowing make yoga a religion, and she believes that even if it isn’t, it looks like one. And the tenets of Judaism as she observes them require her to avoid not just committing a sin, but avoiding even the appearance of committing a sin.
In other words, even if you have no ill intent, it’s not just what you do — it’s what other people think about what you do. One must be beyond reproach. At all times.
Granted, a more liberal rabbi says later in the article that what matters is intent. But it nailed the pointed problem of my youth: I was taught, in no uncertain terms, that if someone else thinks you’re misbehaving, you are misbehaving, or might as well be — and that the appearance was every bit as important, and maybe more so, than the substance. And that, of course, can be perverted in a multitude of ways.
In an ideal world, being concerned about the judgment of others makes you live a good, ethical life, which is then reflected in your actions. But toss in a dash of narcissism or some other common craziness, and you end up with a thought process that goes something like this: “We can do whatever we want, as long as the actions that are visible to other people make us appear to be good and ethical. In fact, if enough other people perceive us to be good and ethical, we’ll believe it of ourselves, even if our actions behind closed doors are anything but — because if enough other people see and say it, it must be true. And therefore what we’re doing out of the public eye is by definition acceptable, because how could people who are so widely acclaimed as good and ethical do wrong?”
Or, more succinctly, “If we look good, we are good.”
In the end, scary as it is to discuss, I’ve chosen a path that involves living in congruence with what I feel is right, regardless of what other people think. Call it moral relativism, but I continue to believe that spending my time worrying about how I appear to other people is not righteousness, but a fast track to anxiety, neurotic perfectionism, and the sense that every bar I hurdle only leads to a higher bar in an unending quest for unachievable flawlessness.
It may not look good. But it’s good for me.
Filed under fears, progress | Comments (6)Bumping up the resolution(s)
Every year around this time, someone asks me about my New Year’s resolutions. Every year I reply that I don’t make them. It’s not that I’m opposed to the idea; it’s just that if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, January is peak season for the supernatural Department of Public Works. I know darn well that most people who buy a gym membership this week will let it lapse by the time spring is in the air. Besides, January 1 is an entirely arbitrary date on which to start a project. Why not my birthday, or the summer solstice, or some random day in March?
In any case, I have a marked propensity for beating myself up whenever I don’t achieve a goal, and giving up that bad habit is in itself something I aspire to. So rather than setting myself a bunch of benchmarks I feel guiltily compelled to try to meet, I’m taking a more gentle approach. I’m trying some new things, seeing what I think of them, and giving myself permission to let them drop if they don’t work for me. For someone more hard-charging, that might seem like a dilettante’s approach, an undisciplined dabbling that can’t be expected to yield results. For me, though, it’s a comforting reassurance that I don’t have to be perfect at everything I try or stick with something I don’t enjoy.
I’ve started to make a list of the things I want to try this year. It keeps shifting and getting longer, but here are a handful of highlights:
- take voice lessons
- visit Yosemite, with camera
- learn to play the drums
- get back to the UK
- be able to do a real pushup
- learn to ride a motorcycle
All of these are entirely reasonable, time and budget permitting. Now let’s see how I can make time and budget permit.
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