Walker's Paradise

I suppose the only reason to create a list like this one is to start an argument, but on the whole, I'd say that this particular instance is actually pretty anodyne. Still, if the second best walk in San Francisco is the Financial District, we are on notice with a scandalous truth--that is: San Francisco, whatever its charms, is not that-all great a walker's city. Okay: some of the neighborhoods have their charm, but they tend to be isolated, a bit hard to access, and on the whole not as exciting or charming as you might guess for all the hype (and let's not talk about hills). Market Street is a slum, and if you must have a slum, there is a far more interesting slum on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley across the Bay (even without Cody's). Indeed, it's hard to think of any American city--okay, I will grant you Manhattan--that has the persistent seductive appeal of Rome (my #1) or Paris (#2) or Prague (#3) or Florence (#4)--at least if you find those moments when they are not inundated with others such as yourself trying to enjoy their walker-charms.

Nice to see Portland so justly well represented, although I never realized before that this is called "Hosford" (if it is). Years ago, one of my students (an ex-Reedie) pointed out that Portland was one of the best cities in America to be poor in. After the depredations of a generation of high-tech wealth, this insight surely isn't as true as it used to be. Still, I'd say Portland persists in conveying more in the way of scruffy, grass-roots elegance than any other city in America.

Great Moments in Czech Republic Gemütlichkeit

A few months back we had dinner at a lovely old-style family restaurant in Prague. The proporietress was the model of what a tourist would want to find there: earthy, good-natured and warm-hearted.

And look, folks, here is her picture in the morning paper.

Update: Damn, somebody sat on my joke. The picture used to be, you know, the other lady.

What Did We Know? The Holocaust

What did he know and when did he know it? It’s a question everybody asks about everything. Example: the Holocaust. When did “ordinary Germans” know that the Nazis were systematically exterminating millions of humans just for being what they were? When did Roosevelt know? When did “we” know?

Having been a kid during World War II and coming to maturity only thereafter, I really cannot remember exactly when I learned the truth. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have an inkling when I was a kid during the war, but I knew everything that mattered by the time I made it to college in 1953. In any event, I’ve always assumed that a lot of people knew a lot, and early.

But there’s a fascinating bit of counter-evidence from an impeccable source. Heda Margolius Kovály was a Prague Jew carted off to the camps in 1941, to stay there until she escaped near the end of the War. “In the last of the concentration camps that held me,” she recounts, she was working as slave labor at a brickyard. One day, pushed beyond endurance, she lashed she screamed at her boss. It was a piece of suicidal folly; she could only expect to be killed, or worse.

Yet against all expectations, her boss backed off. And the next day, he transferred her to “easier” duty, lugging coal. Then:

One afternoon, toward evening, the boss appeared with two Frenchmen and ordered them to help me bring in as supply of coal. He returned about an hour later, sent them out, asked me to sit down beside him on a stone ledge in the wall of the kiln and said only: Tell me.

As long as I live I shall not forget that dark cave-like place, the black walls streaked with the reflections of flames, the old man dressed in black who listened and listened and seemed to wither, to shrink before my eyes as if, with each of my sentences, part of him faded. …

I told the old man in the Russian shirt about the ghetto in Lodz where the cesspool cleaners had whistled Beethoven as they worked and where close to one hundred thousand people had been murdered or had died of starvation. I told him how the trains would arrive from Polish villages bringing men with bloody heads and women wrapped in shawls and how, once the trains were gone, the women undid their wraps and pulled out their babies, some of them dead by suffocation but a few still alive, saved from German bayonets. I told him how, a few months later, the SS would arrive and throw these same babies into trucks and cart them off to the gas chambers. …

Kovály continues in this vein for another page or so, and then concludes:

I do not remember what else I told him. I only know that he did not say a word for as long as I spoke and, when I heard the shouting of orders outside that meant we were returning to camp and got up to leave, he remained sitting, hunched into himself, his head in his palms.

The man lived in Nazi Germany and had daily contact with a concentration camp and its inmates, yet he knew nothing. I am quite sure he did not. He had simply thought we were convicts, sentenced by a regular court of law for proven crimes.

--Heda Margolius Kovály ,
Under a Cruel Star 14-15 (Holmes & Myer ed., 1996)

Kovály's life in the camps is horrific enough, but it is only the first, short part of the book. She arrives back in her beloved Prague just in time for a second nightmare: the Stalinist takeover of 1948.