I've been spending time with Luna Kaufman, Holocaust survivor and new author.
Her book Luna's Life just won Independent Publisher's Living Now award, and for good reason. It's a raw, moving story of a woman who spent her teenage years as a prisoner in Auschwitz. But she came out and changed the world.
Well, it's a little more complicated than that. Luna's story is one of a gentle soul bringing order and goodness to a life that drags her backward through fascism, communism, and other forms of insanity. A native of Krakow, Poland, she lost her father and sister to the camps. Upon release, she first went to Israel before joining her husband in New York City.
At 82, Luna today remains active in the Sister Rose Thering Endowment, which promotes interfaith understanding. In fact, its namesake, Sister Rose, was influential in the Vatican's 1965 policy paper "In Our Time" which reversed millennia of Christians holding the Jews responsible for the execution of Christ.
Luna recently invited me up to her atelier in Trump Plaza, overlooking Central Park and the East Side. A woman who has been through hell now has a place that seems close to heaven, complete with a white piano. She ordered us a pizza, which we shared.
"Could the Holocaust happen again?" I asked.
"Very easily," she said. "We have to learn how to deal with people. There's too much scapegoating."
"What did you think of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ?" I asked.
"It has everything in it but the car chase," she replied. "Sister Rose was very upset about it. He's putting the 'fault of the Jews' back onto the Jewish community."
Around her neck, Luna wears a replica of Sister Rose's old pendant: a cross and a Star of David woven together, in silvery metal.
"We have to get to know each other," she said. "Instead we sit in judgment. There is such a multitude of religions in this country. We are all people working toward a common goal."
Luna told a story about the kind of thing she does. New Jersey made a statewide commitment to "holocaust education" thanks to legislation passed by Luna's friend, then-governor Thomas Kean, with whom she once traveled back to Auschwitz. One time, she spoke in Chatham, New Jersey, a place she described with a smile as "very white, no Jews." The students received her so warmly that they decided to invite a group of senior Holocaust survivors to their high school prom. They did a series of video interviews with them, preserved in a time capsule to be unearthed in 2030.
"The majority of survivors are living in isolation," explained Luna. Most never had anything like a prom, and the experience in Chatham gave the students and survivors a chance to break out of racial and class restrictions. They forged a lasting emotional connection. A young female friend from Chatham accompanied Luna on several subsequent speaking engagements.
At the risk of saying the wrong thing, I asked Luna what she thought about Jesus.
"He was one of the most brilliant men, one of the most righteous," she said.
"If Jesus were alive today?" I asked.
"He would be a political leader," she replied.
Let me read you a bit of Luna's book. In this chapter, perhaps the most poignant in the book, the war is over and and the camps have been liberated. Nevertheless, Luna still had to deal with a long struggle to get out of communist Poland. At one point she accompanies an American journalist back into Auschwitz:
Here I faced the reality.
In one area was a showcase of objects that had been made by prisoners. Among the collection of drawings was a watercolor that made a lasting impression on me, because it symbolized my own feelings during the years of incarceration. The painting depicted a silhouette of a prisoner bent over a spade in front of barbed wire, looking longingly to the other side of the fence where a singing bird sat on a tree, the sun of a new day rising over the landscape. This artist had captured the longing for freedom that all of us inmates had experienced in the camps. It immediately brought to mind the morning in Plaszow when Commandant Ghett had entered the barracks, requiring me to report to him the number of inmates present. It had been a spring day, and I had been conscious of the outdoor sound of a bird freely chirping its song, oblivious to the human slavery endured nearby.
Later, Luna called me to recant certain harmless remarks that, out of respect for her wishes, I have not reproduced here. Her reasoning? "A revolution might happen."
Well, maybe we need a revolution. If the Luna Revolution is more understanding, more openness to the religions of the world, finding what they have in common, then that's a revolution I can sign on to.
Follow Sander Hicks on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SanderHicks
But you are looking for someone to say that the slaughter of non-violent activists in Gaza, on the flotilla, or anywhere, is wrong, I am willing to take that stand with you.
Justice for Palestine!
Palestine will be Israel and Palestinians will be extinct as a population, as culture.
When I compare the attitudes of Nazism and Zionism before the Holocaust I see no difference. They call the exclusivity and superiority of one people or nation over another.
To simply put it, I disagree with the notion that the Jewish religion conveys a title of property.
The land is Palestinian. Period.
We also have to learn to deal with religion and the role it played (or not) in the great massacre of a third of the Jewish people on Christian lands - more than the population of Israel today.
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MY BLASPHEMOUS BLOGS
Holocaust Haggadah - שו××”
Delusion dealers blame the victims.
Rabbi Irwin Kula: "Your Holocaust Haggadah is amazing."
http://holocausthagaddah.blogspot.com/
Bible Belts
http://biblebelts.blogspot.com/
Bewildering Bible Legends
Dr. Harold Holmyard Th.D, Dallas Theological Seminary:
"I admire your computer skills and all the work you have done on this blog".
http://bewilderingbiblelegends.blogspot.com/
In the East God Won - The high cost of organized ignorance.
Michael Pieracci, Ph.D., Religion Instructor: “Holy heretic’s insight is indeed profound.â€
http://whengodwins.blogspot.com/
Holy Cows and Calves - Sacred superstitions, aka religions.
http://holycowsandcalves.blogspot.com/
× ×™×¤×•×¥ ××œ×™×œ×™× - ביעור הבערות
Holy Heretics - Jesus, Maimonides, Spinoza, the Founding Fathers, Herzl, Einstein.
http://holyheretics.com/
Thanks for commenting. Fanned!
BTW, always good to see you in print, Sander!
" "Could the Holocaust happen again?" I asked.
"Very easily," she said."
So I answered, it already is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They call it the second Congo war, but in reality it is the continuation of the Rwandan Genocide. 5.4 million people already die.d there (not counting the 1+ million that died between 1994-98).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War
Apparently HuffPost won't let me show that there is something that rivals ha'shoah in brutality and the number of dea.ths
I never did understand all the Jew hating. Jesus was a Jew.
so for the last 20 centuries, people have tried to blame the Jews. However, my Gr Grandma told me that Because the Jews were God's people, He closed their minds so they would not believe Jesus was the son of God. So it was all part of the big confusion. You can't blame someone who cannot know.
Who cannot know? The Jews for having their minds closed? (Never heard THAT one before) The people who hate Jews? People who believe the Jews killed Jesus and not that the orders came from Rome? People who believe any of this stuff?
The Jews think they killed Jesus, they BOASTED about it....I guess one day we'll figure out who is the "chosen" people.
And good chance this post won't see the light of a monitor screen.
My “Post-Judeo-Christian seriesâ€
Jefferson, Darwin, Freud and Einstein passionately agreed: to be infected with sacred superstitions stinks.
I HAVE RECENTLY BEEN EXAMINING ALL THE KNOWN SUPERSTITIONS OF THE WORLD, AND I DO NOT FIND IN OUR PARTICULAR SUPERSTITION, CHRISTIANITY, ONE REDEEMING FEATURE. THEY ARE ALL ALIKE FOUNDED UPON FABLES AND MYTHOLOGIES.
Thomas Jefferson
http://books.google.com/books?id=2nhEj3oak4QC&pg=PA203&dq=
Darwin too was against the inculcation of sacred superstitions.
"NOR MUST WE OVERLOOK THE PROBABILITY OF THE CONSTANT INCULCATION IN A BELIEF IN GOD ON THE MINDS OF CHILDREN PRODUCING SO STRONG AND PERHAPS AS INHERITED EFFECT ON THEIR BRAINS NOT YET FULLY DEVELOPED, THAT IT WOULD BE AS DIFFICULT FOR THEM TO THROW OFF THEIR BELIEF IN GOD, AS FOR A MONKEY TO THROW OFF ITS INSTINCTIVE FEAR AND HATRED OF A SNAKE."
Charles Darwin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin's_views_on_religionâ€
"THE WHOLE THING IS SO PATENTLY INFANTILE, SO FOREIGN TO REALITY, THAT TO ANYONE WITH A FRIENDLY ATTITUDE TO HUMANITY IT IS PAINFUL TO THINK THAT THE MAJORITY OF MORTALS WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO RISE ABOVE THIS VIEW OF LIFE"
Sigmund Freud
http://www.freud.org.uk/education/topic/10573/freud-and-religion/
"FOR ME THE JEWISH RELIGION, LIKE ALL OTHERS,
IS AN INCARNATION OF THE MOST CHILDISH SUPERSTITIONS"
Albert Einstein
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g6vLZj4hBdG1G_1NBqX6s8DMbCIg
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/34220
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1951333/Einstein-thought-religions-were-childish.html
We are obviously at a time when history is repeating all the ancient religious and ethnic hatreds. Fingers are being pointed in all directions to assign blame for the current economic calamity.
As long as there are those like Luna and Wiesel who will tell their stories, those who deny the holocaust will never be listened to by decent, rational people.