Remembering The Millions, The Thousands, & The One

So already, I'm sure it's because I'm Jewish. But whenever I hear or see the number 6,000,000, I think dead Jews.

Immediately, my mind leaps across the Atlantic Ocean and imagines places like Germany's Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau concentration camps and Soviet Ukraine's Babyn Yar ravine.* 

 

The convenient thing about killing people at the edge of a ravine is that their bullet-ridden bodies either slip into the ravine--or can be easily pushed into it.

So this past week, when The Boston Globe reported that the number of people worldwide who'd died of COVID-19 had reached 6,000,000, my first thoughts were of the Holocaust. In truth, though, I'd already been thinking about it because of another article I'd read a couple of days earlier. "Putin’s attack on memory at Babyn Yar"** explores the Russian habit of eradicating, or at least trying to eradicate, inconvenient truths from the official historical record. 

 

In that article, Jeremy Eichlen explains that Russian officials had first tried to erase Babyn Yar's murderous history by erasing--literally filling in--the ravine itself. Later, in an attempt to conceal their complicity in the murder of 33,000 Jews, they'd installed a marker that provided no information about what groups had been killed at the site. Not that Jews hadn't been killed in Russia before. 

 

But people frequently don't cooperate with government efforts to alter history; often, they refuse, publicly or privately, to forget what they know. For that reason, since then, multiple memorials, some designated for specific groups murdered at the site, have been erected at Babyn Yahr. In times of peace, people visit them and remember events past.

But as you well know, these are not peaceful times, and Russian attempts to prevent memory seem to be persisting, according to Eichlen. Russian attacks in recent days in the Babyn Yar area have significantly damaged a building that had been designated to become a Holocaust museum.

Eichlen then goes on to say that peacetime and wartime efforts to rewrite history have a formidable opponent: art, which often not only preserves and draws attention to history, but conveys its human toll and significance . He speaks in particular of how Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem "Babi Yar" permanently engraved on the collective human memory the facts and legacy of the mass murder of so many Jews at Babyn Yar. "The story of Babyn Yar," Eichlen asserts, "also reminds us of why art can be such a threat to totalitarian regimes: It remembers."**

 

I agree: art does remember, and other important collective and individual human needs depend on remembering. I think about Suzanne Brennan's "In America: Remember," an installation on the National Mall consisting initially of 600,000 flags for the Americans who had succumbed to COVID-19 by the autumn of 2021.*** One of those flags was for my father. 

 

Such works of art create the physical and temporal space in which we can remember, can ruminate on the present moment, can feel, can speak to ourselves, can speak to the dead if we want to, can think about mortality and meaning, can seek healing and hope. I believe that even just knowing that these works exist can create important psycho-spiritual space for those of us who can't visit them.

 

I write these words thinking about a book on my shelf that I've yet to read. I bought The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World because, like its author, I'd heard the news story about a phone booth in a man's garden on Japan's northeast coast that was attracting visitors. They wanted to use its disconnected phone to speak to loved ones they'd lost in the post-earthquake tsunami of 2011. I have to imagine that making the pilgrimage to this spot so close to where their loved ones had perished must have been as important as speaking to them on that disconnected phone.

I'm thinking a lot about the stories that we must remember to tell and hear as my choral group prepares--again--to sing Craig Hella Johnson's passion oratorio, Considering Matthew Shepard, on April 9 and 10.**** It tells the story of the gay college student who was brutally murdered in Wyoming in 1998.

It's not that Matthew Shepard, the "ordinary boy" who became known around the world, is in danger of being forgotten--his name, and by extension his story, are forever enshrined in the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act***** and on a commemorative plaque in the National Cathedral. It's that hate crimes like the one that killed him continue to be committed and have in fact increased in number in the past decade.****** That tragic and disturbing fact brings to mind the lines from "Where Have All the Flowers Gone": "when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn."

Yes, we need to be better and do better. But there's another important reason for telling these stories, specifically in art, music, and poetry. "We tell each other stories so that we will remember/ Try to find the meaning in the living of our days," explains the final of the three pieces in the oratorio's Prologue section. We have to find ways to mourn and to cope, and then to move forward with hope and active purpose. For Jewish people, this is about tikkun olam, or repairing the world.*******

One of the prominent voices in the musical story of Matthew Shepard belongs to the fence on which Matthew Shepard was hung and left to die by his murderers. Its monologues come from Lesléa Newman's poem cycle October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard.********

 

The fence is a destination site for the bereft in the weeks and months after Matthew's death. In "The Fence (one week later),"it opines that "being a shrine/ is better than being/ the scene of a crime"(45). But eventually the fence is taken down, perhaps because of people's conflicting feelings about it. "The Fence (after)," in which the fence is spoken about, captures these tensions in its internally contradictory couplets:

 

prayed upon

frowned upon

adored 

abhorred

despised

idolized . . .

gone

but not forgotten (82)

When the new owner of the land on which the original fence had stood erected a new fence, people began coming again "to pay their respects," according to a friend of Matthew Shepard's (Newman, 85). As chronicled in"Pilgrimage," in the Epilogue section of the oratorio, people "walk to the fence" and eventually "leave the fence surrounded by beauty" (Newman, 85).

But as much as the fence matters and helps many needing to come to terms with the events it symbolizes, it's really only a tool, or a way station on the human journey. In the next section of the piece--the section that makes me cry every time--the speaker and the music reach out to us to help us move beyond the fence, toward healing and wholeness:

 

Meet me here,

Won't you meet me here

Where the old fence ends and the horizon begins

There's a balm in the silence

Like an understanding air

Where the old fence ends and the horizon begins.

 

If you're able to come to one of our concerts or otherwise to hear the complete Considering Matthew Shepard,  I hope you'll experience it as something that delivers "All of Us" from the despair that it both recognizes and understands, and then propels us forward and upward toward a new and better day. That's why I ended a talk I gave about this piece couple of years ago by showing the adjacent slide. 

Eichlen is right: Art remembers--and does so much more. That's one of the things we'll be talking about when I moderate a Zoom conversation with Craig Hella Johnson, Michael Dennis Browne, and Lesléa Newman on April 6. 

 

It's not that art completely transforms tragic, senseless death-- be it of the millions, the thousands, or the one--into something meaningful and positive. But it does make it less in vain--because it either captures and gives form to what should not be forgotten; raises consciousness and begins a change process, as in the cases of George Floyd and Matthew Shepard; or offers hope and peace to those sadly lacking it. Whatever art does, we should never cease to remember.

*Ukraine marks Babi Yar massacre’s 75th anniversary. (2016, September 29). AP. Retrieved March 10, 2022. from https://apnews.com/article/6114f23279e84691808739c35706f2b7 [Note: the phot was accompanied by this information: "FILE - This is a 1942 file photo of a photo found on the body of the Nazi officer killed in Russia, shows a Nazi firing squad shooting Soviet civilians in the back as they sit beside their own mass grave, in Babi Yar, Kiev. Kiev prepares to mark the 75th anniversary of the Nazi massacre of Jews at the Babi Yar ravine, where at least 33,000 Jews were killed over a 48-hour period on Sept. 29, 1941.(AP Photo, file)"] 

** Eichler, J. (2022, March 5). Putin’s attack on memory at Babyn Yar. Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/03/05/world/putins-attack-memory-babyn-yar/ 

*** Franklin, J.  (2021, September 21). More than 600,000 thousand white flags on the National Mall honor lives lost to COVID. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/17/1037011493/covid-national-mall-white-flags-art-exhibit-memorial-pandemic-dead

**** Two years ago, the mid-March lock-down precipitated by the terrifying advent of the pandemic upended our plans to perform the piece in late March. At the time, we hoped we were postponing rather than cancelling altogether those performances rather than cancelling them altogether; two years later, we can report we merely postponed these performances. 

***** signed into law by President Obama signed into law in 2009

*(6) So report the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups that track hate crime.

*(7) Don't think that Jews all agree on what it means to do this.

*(8) Newman, L. (2012). October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard.  Candlewick Press.