Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? Page #10

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in a neighborhood

that was largely Irish

and German Catholic...

this is in the '30s...

and very anti-Semitic

and pretty pro-Nazi, in fact...

the Irish

'cause they hated the British

and the Germans

'cause they were Germans.

It's not like today;

a boy in the streets wasn't

going to get shot, you know.

But it was unpleasant.

You know, there was a lot

of anti-Semitism in the streets.

There were streets

I couldn't walk through

because the Irish kids lived there.

I'd go somewhere else, you know.

But I never talked to my parents

about it.

I don't think they knew

until their deaths.

You know, by the time

the Second World War came,

everything changed, superficially.

So in December 7, 1941,

the people who had been

still having beer parties

at the fall of Paris,

which I remember,

were walking around with tin hats,

telling everyone

to pull down their shades

because the Luftwaffe was going

to bomb the city and so on,

a very striking transition,

which taught me something.

But then during the war,

for reasons I don't understand,

there were race riots

all over the place.

In fact, there was

a teenage curfew,

for a couple of years, at 7:00.

In Philadelphia?

Yeah, if we wanted to go out

after 7:
00,

we had to have parental permission.

And I went to a Hebrew school,

and, actually, we had

police protection

from the subway stop

to the school and back.

And once we were on the subway,

you were kind of on

your own, but...

I don't know why, but there was

some kind of phenomenon

that took place during the war.

And when did you hear about

the camps for the first time?

Well, rumors were

coming through by '42, '43,

yet nobody really knew the scale,

and it was downplayed,

strikingly downplayed.

The most dramatic...

Actually, as I'm sure you know,

there were international

conferences

to try to do something

about the people

who wanted to flee the continent,

but nobody was willing

to do anything.

Roosevelt, in fact, turned back

a ship, the St. Louis,

which came with, I think,

1,000 refugees from Europe,

and they went to Cuba, sort of

wandered around the region,

but the US. just turned it back.

They were sent back to Europe.

Most of them ended up in,

you know, gas chambers.

The most striking thing was,

after the war,

in 1945, there was...

By then, everybody knew.

There was no longer any pretext

for not saving the survivors,

and there were a fair number

of survivors,

and they were living

in concentration camps.

The camps were not very different

from the Nazi camps

except that, you know,

the gas chambers weren't...

no extermination

but living

under horrible conditions.

And they came back

with a very grim picture

of what life was like in the camps.

You mean the same camp in Poland?

Same camps.

You know, maybe another

detention camp,

but the circumstances

were not very different.

They were, like, not in detention.

They were...

Well, you know, they weren't

extermination camps,

no gas chambers, you know,

no killing, no slave labor,

but the conditions were horrible.

You should read

the Harrison commission,

Truman's commission.

How do you call that? Harrison?

Harrison, H-A-R-R-I-S-O-N.

I suppose it's obtainable.

It's a pretty grim picture

of life in the camps.

"Generally speaking,

"three months after victory

in Europe

"and even longer

after the liberation

"of individual groups,

many Jewish displaced persons

"and other possibly

non-repatriables

"are living under guard

behind barbed-wire fences,

"in camps of several descriptions

"built by the Germans

for slave-laborers and Jews,

"including some of

the most notorious

"of the concentration camps,

"amidst crowded,

frequently unsanitary,

"and generally grim conditions,

in complete idleness,

"with no opportunity,

except surreptitiously...

"In spite of

the many obvious difficulties,

"to find clothing

of one kind or another

"for their charges,

"many of the Jewish

displaced persons,

"late in July, had no clothing

"other than

their concentration camp garb,

"a rather hideous

striped pajama effect,

"while others, to their chagrin,

"were obliged to wear

German SS uniforms.

It is questionable which

clothing they hate the more."

Actually, you know,

this is pretty normal.

I mean, treatment of

Holocaust victims is grotesque.

Right now, take France.

The Roma were...

You know, they were treated

pretty much like the Jews.

France is expelling them

to miserable poverty.

They're expelling, basically,

Holocaust survivors

and their descendants.

And it's particularly dramatic

in France,

because there's so much

posturing there

about Holocaust denial.

I mean, you can't have

a more extreme case

of Holocaust denial

than taking survivors

and punishing them.

And as far as I can see, in France,

there's almost no discussion

of this.

In fact, when the European Union

protested,

Sarkozy condemned them, you know,

for their anti-French extremism

and so on.

I mean, you know, the

cynicism about all of this

is pretty remarkable.

Can I come back to maybe

more happy matters?

Pick at random in the world,

it won't be very happy.

I know, but we're

going to co me back,

go more inside your memories and...

Okay.

I wanted to know

if the education you gave

to your children

was influenced by what you believe

in language acquisition

or what's going on with the brain.

Well, I mean,

the education at home, yes.

So, you know, we read to the kids

and encouraged the kids to read

and encouraged them to follow

their own interests.

The three kids

were quite different.

My son, from a very early age,

was mostly interested

in science and mathematics,

so, you know, by the time

he was ten years old,

we were reading together

popular books

on relativity theory

and things like that.

But we just let the kids go where they

wanted and encouraged them, you know.

They went in different directions.

It was fine with us, and, you know,

tried to just encouraged them

to do what they wanted.

School was conventional.

We wanted them to go

to the public schools,

and it worked reasonably well.

And if one child was not

making out in public school,

we moved her to a Quaker school,

which was better.

They essentially picked

their own paths.

As soon as they left home,

they went off to become

political activists.

One... my older daughter spent

a couple of months at college,

couldn't stand it,

went off and joined

the United Farm Workers,

and ever since then

has been very involved

in political activity.

And her younger sister

went to Nicaragua in the 1980s

and stayed.

And my son went off

in a different direction.

But my children grew up in an atmosphere

of extreme political tension.

I don't know how much they felt.

For example, I was in and out of jail,

and I was facing a long jail sentence,

enough so that my wife went

back to college after 17 years

to try to get... to get a

degree, an advanced degree,

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