'My Destiny', by Holocaust survivor, Georgia Gabor

 

This is not a book review per se as nothing I can write is adequate.  Before commenting, this background information:

 

After reading (in college and later in my career republishing) The Psychology of Dictatorship by Gustav Gilbert (he was the head of my psychology department), and then as an adult reading Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance as well as the Diary of Anne Frank (and later visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam with Ann), I had, until this time, avoided Holocaust literature and films. There are other reasons as well.

 

As a child I found my father’s personal photograph collection from his days as a Signal Corps photographer during WW II. Among them were scenes from a concentration camp which led to thoughts, nightmares, which I couldn’t really discuss with my father as my access to those files in our basement was forbidden.  He also never talked about the war, something he just wanted to forget. I think those photos were from a satellite camp of Buchenwald, one not far from Cologne and the Rhine River where he was active during the closing months of the War.   They ultimately disappeared; either he or my mother disposed of them.  What remained of his war years was a detailed scrap book of primary sources which I gave to the WW II Museum in New Orleans after his death in 1984.

 

Gilbert was the prison psychologist at the Nuremberg Trial and the author of the Nuremberg Diary.  But his documentation in The Psychology of Dictatorship of how Rudolf Franz Hoess, who was the Colonel in charge of Auschwitz, described with scientific precision, and with some pride how efficiently they could “dispose of” some 10,000 people per day was unforgettable and horrifying.

 

When I read Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance I had to prop tissues under my glasses to read those sections pertaining to the Ghettos that were temporary holding pens of Jews on their way to extermination camps.  The conditions of starvation and exposure simply resulted in fewer prisoners having to be transported to the death camps.  Wouk’s fictional characters made that horrid existence personal.

 

The normalization of genocide and the indescribable cruelty made me avoid such literature and now I feel, in these times in particular, guilty, and in preparation of seeing Palm Beach Dramaworks’ The Messenger, I felt compelled to read Georgia Gabor’s memoir, My Destiny. It is the work of a brilliant and passionate survivor of the Holocaust.

 

The driving force behind commissioning the play is PBD’s Producing Artistic Director Bill Hayes.  I owe him a debt of gratitude for leading me to Gabor’s story, to allow me, after all these years, to face these ugly facts and to make me and anyone who sees the play, a “messenger.” The play was written by the recently appointed Dramaworks' Resident Playwright, Jenny Connell Davis.  Silence is complicity and it is not an option, especially now in our chaotic world where hate can be found anywhere and everywhere and where there seems to be a slow slide into the unthinkable: fascism in America.

 

During WW II most Americans hardly believed that civilized German culture could possibly engage in genocide. The United States government was more aware of the extent of it, but failed to do much.  Deep antisemitism was well entrenched here as well.   And today one only has to look at the reaction on some college campuses to Israel trying to defend itself from Hamas terrorism to see it still.

 

But I am straying from the terrifying story of Georgia Gabor, her cunning ability to survive when there seemed to be no hope (as there were none for her entire family who died in concentration camps), and to witness atrocities, be subjected to unthinkable living conditions and the constant anxiety of being on the run, escaping the Nazis twice, sometimes posing as one to get by, all before she turned 16.

 

It is a high wire story, sickening in exposing man’s inhumanity to man.

 

Then there are several moments when everything seemed to be turning in her favor, such as when she and friends rejoiced hearing the Russians were pushing the Germans out of Hungary, surely they will save the Jews who managed to survive those years in bombed out buildings in unspeakable conditions.  But the Russians raped and pillaged and Gabor was on the run again.

 

She planned to go to Palestine with a Zionist group, but it was again a dangerous attempt, the likelihood she would be shot and even if she made it, she would not be able to pursue the education she wanted, and would become a laborer or farmer for the rest of her life.  Meanwhile the thought of life under communism was unthinkable to her.

 

She lived in orphanages and befriended a woman from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration who after a labyrinth of obstacles finally was able to find a place for her in a US Congress passed bill that allowed 500 carefully selected orphan children to go to the US, becoming wards of the government until they turned 21, dispersing them in state and charitable agencies for foster care.

 

Imagine how her heart leapt at this opportunity, and when she first saw the Statue of Liberty she finally felt safe.  But that would be a nice ending for “the movie.”  Real life interceded, more terrible living conditions and finally two failed marriages to abusive men, losing custody of her two children, but finding education as her way out of a hell hole of a life (she was a brilliant mathematician) and finally resolving to be a teacher so she could gain custody of her children, find and marry the childhood friend she loved in Budapest, and secure a teaching position.

 

Again, if that was only the end of the story and indeed My Destiny, published in 1981, concludes with her happy marriage. But after that she was subjected to virulent antisemitism and harassment, and her life was again miserable because she told her story.  She was fired from her teaching job, sued the school system, and would die only two years later.  This LA Times article, ‘A Long Lesson in Hate : Holocaust Survivor Sues School District Over Harassment,’ summarizes the consequences of telling the inconvenient truth.  The world premiere of the play, which opens on Dec. 8, focuses on Gabor’s story but interacting with three different generations (1967, 1993, and 2020) all with their own reactions to her and their own stories of hate and complicity.  The audience is left to connect the dots.

 

 

“Only I can save you!”

During my publishing career I reprinted Gustav Gilbert’s Psychology of Dictatorship.  He was my professor in 1962, teaching a course of the same rubric during my brief tenure as a psychology major.  He was all business in the classroom, nary a smile, but no wonder what he witnessed.   Gilbert was the American Military Chief Psychologist at the Nuremberg trials, writing the Nuremberg Diary shortly thereafter and later his more academic Psychology of Dictatorship.

I’m reminded of this by yesterday’s bluster of our president, threatening to shut down the government to “save” us from “criminals pouring into the U.S.” and those who are not criminals, at the very least, carry “deadly diseases.”  “It’s my wall or the highway.” Scares the bejezzes out of his faithful followers. 

At Nuremberg Gilbert interviewed some of the head Nazis, including Herman Goering, who confided the following to Gilbert:  “…people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

How prophetic.

Gilbert, Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop at Nuremberg Trials

The Big Bad Wolf Comes for Little Red Riding Hood

Totalitarianism feeds on propaganda and the control of information.  My former college psychology professor, Gustave Gilbert, the author of The Nuremberg Diary said that Joseph Goebbels, who had been an unsuccessful writer, “devoted his considerable talents for propaganda to the task of winning over Berlin’s leftists to the cause of Hilterian fascism.” (The Psychology of Dictatorship, 1950).  Ultimately Goebbels served as Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.  Per Wikipedia, “Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry quickly gained and exerted controlling supervision over the news media, arts, and information in Germany. He was particularly adept at using the relatively new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes.”

Imagine if he had the Internet at his disposal.

Now we have Moscow born, former Trump special assistant, and presently Sinclair Broadcasting’s senior political analyst, Boris Epshteyn, vying for the position of the “Ministry of Truth & Public Enlightenment.”   Sinclair Broadcasting has been quietly buying up local television stations, mostly in Trump country, to spread its conservative propaganda. By now everyone knows of the coordinated “Newspeak” perpetrated by Sinclair’s stations where local “news” anchors were required to read the same statement: The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common in the media. More alarming is that national media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without checking the facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the national media are using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control 'exactly what people think'. 

Word for word, all Sinclair stations with local news broadcasters many of whom we have followed through their years, thinking of them as, well, just regular people like ourselves.  Old friends.

One such station happens to be in our viewing area, a CBS affiliate.  They too parroted this statement, as if they were speaking to us, although it was really Boris Epshteyn.  These are friendly faces we’ve seen on air before our morning commutes or once we get home. A Palm Beach Post staff writer, Frank Cerabino, wrote a funny but profound parody of what these local news anchors “really said.”

John Oliver eviscerated Sinclair’s Newspeak in his last show. 

A list of all the Sinclair stations, by State, shows the concentration in “flyover” States, with most major cities not represented.  Think of their territory as mirroring the Electoral College. 

Ironically, on the surface, the statement IS essentially true, and that is where the danger lies, voiced by an organization which indeed has “an agenda.” The unsuspecting public is but a little Red Riding Hood being toyed with by a big bad Wolf, one who knows exactly what it’s doing.  After all, this is the organization which has pushed the “deep state” conspiracy theory. 

One of the favorite techniques in propaganda is to say it over and over again.  Fox News has been doing it for years.  Now your local news broadcaster may be coming for your mind.  "Oh Granny, what big teeth you've got!"

An Even More Dangerous Turn in Political Events

In the wake of Trump’s demagogic displays, I thought it would be instructive, ironic, and as I discovered, somewhat disheartening, to read Barack Obama’s inaugural speech when he first took office.  Such idealism, only to be ambushed by a political party which, as evidenced by their new standard bearer, Donald Trump, would prefer that America be frozen in a snow globe or a Norman Rockwell painting. 

From the onset of Obama’s presidency he was challenged by the Republican base and this morphed into a stone wall of opposition, no matter what the consequences were to this nation.  It was an invitation to disrespect the mere office of the Presidency, perhaps even because it was now occupied by a man of color who said in his inaugural speech: “This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed --why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”

Is it any wonder that an ego-maniacal mass-media caricature of a presidential candidate should rise like a Phoenix from the ashes his own party created?

“Let’s make America Great Again?”  By alienating, or, worse, eliminating by deportation or excluding with walls -- physical as well as immigration blockades -- minorities he declares unsuitable?  I thought that was appalling enough until his now well-publicized comments about District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, whose parents are from Mexico, accusing the Judge of having a conflict of interest as he considers lawsuits against Trump “University.”  Instead of recognizing that this is a serious transgression of the separation of powers, and an act of racism, Trump turned the table on the press, suggesting that reporters who ask about the matter are the racists by merely asking the question – yet another attack on the fourth estate.

Trump’s world view is there are only winners (him) and losers (anyone he chooses to call as such).  He doesn’t want to appear to be weak, and therefore be “kicked off the island.”  No, to show his “strength” he even suggested that if he becomes President he’ll pursue a civil case against the judge, the argument being that his Mexican heritage is an "inherent conflict of interest." Ironic, how many presidents have been schooled in law and now we have a candidate who uses his wealth to routinely litigate or threaten to litigate to bully things his way. We all know how preposterous his litigation threat is and he may think as President he might be able to manipulate the separation of constitutional powers.  He’s already said “I consult myself on foreign policy, because I have a very good brain.”  So who needs advisers, and for that matter Congress, the Judiciary, and the Press?

It is a severely flawed personality trait, one that does not belong in the Office of the President.  It is a form of blame shifting, even paranoia.  Weakness is a trait of a “loser;” thus he must appear powerful by blaming others or circumstance. “All I’m trying to do is figure out why I’m being treated so unfairly by a judge,” he said on Fox News.  About his refusal to release his tax returns: "I have friends that are very rich….They've never been audited." He’s a victim!

This is seriously scary stuff.  During my publishing career I reprinted Gustav Gilbert’s Psychology of Dictatorship in which he said “throughout history social movements of far-reaching consequences have been decisively influenced by leaders, and that the behavior of such leaders is necessarily motivated to some extent by psychological tensions rooted in their individual character development.  We must further recognize the fact that the personalities of political leaders, like all human beings, are largely the products of their cultural mores and social tensions, and that they become leaders only if they effectively express the aspirations (or frustrations) of significant segments of their contemporary society.” Although these words apply to all kinds of societies, they were particularly aimed at those that gave rise to dictators, narcissists who tap into a discordant societal vein. 

Contrast Trump’s call for denying any Muslim immigration to what Obama said when inaugurated: “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West --know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”  Perhaps overly idealized, but some of these words could be directed to Trump himself: know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history.