Turn Every Page: why we need to remember
Remembering the dignity and gift of each person
At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, you end the self-guided tour in a room that contains a bank of theater-style seats and a screen that plays a loop of videos of Holocaust survivors giving their testimony. One survivor told her story and spoke of being in a concentration camp on the day it was liberated by U.S. forces. Gerda Weissmann was the first person to make contact with the soldiers, and spoke to one man in particular when he approached. He introduced himself as Kurt and asked her name. She quickly found that they were connected. She explained, “We are Jewish, you know.” His response was, “So am I.”
Kurt asked her to lead him to “the other ladies,” which, she said, was a title she had not been called in a long time. As they walked to the room, he held the door for her. That simple act, in her words, was enough to restore her dignity as a person. The humiliations and sufferings of her time in the camp had, momentarily, been washed away by a gentleman holding the door for her. She called it “the moment of restoration of humanity, humaneness, dignity, and freedom.”
Go to 31:23 in the video for the relevant section:
It’s remarkable that a small gesture—a gesture that some people now reject as perpetuating negative views about assumed gender roles—had so much meaning for Gerda Weissmann. And, *spoiler alert*, Kurt later became her husband.
It is important to remember what has happened in the past. That is true not only so that we do not make the same mistakes as those who have gone before us, but so that we keep alive the history that has shaped us individually and collectively. There is something true about the quote attributed to Mark Twain that “history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” History will not look exactly the same, but certain similarities arise in different scenarios. Human nature is the through line that runs down the ages. And historical events often look similar because, despite our technological advances and modern “enlightenment,” human nature has not changed much since the ancients. That is why Aristotle is relevant today. It’s why Stoicism is making a comeback. And it is why history—truly remembering the past—still matters.
We do not always have a clear memory of what has happened in the past, so it can be difficult to construct things. A year before he gave the commencement speech at my grad school graduation, Brian Williams, the former host of the NBC Evening News, was reporting from Iraq. The group of helicopters he was embedded with were fired upon, but not Williams’ helicopter. His was a “follow” aircraft that was about an hour behind the helicopter that was hit. But as he told the story about that day, starting in 2003, his recollection became more and more skewed to the point that, by 2007 or 2008, he claimed that his own helicopter was targeted by enemy fire. In 2013, Williams appeared on the Letterman show and his story was firmly that his own helicopter was hit by an RPG.
Lots of people pilloried Williams for his statements. Many people called him a liar. But some asked whether it could have just been a faulty recollection of events. Malcolm Gladwell, in his podcast, Revisionist History, argues that misremembering something does not make someone a liar, and it should not be reflective of someone’s character, using Williams as an example.
Gladwell concludes by suggesting that Williams was not lying when he told the story about Iraq, but just misremembering, and that he should not be faulted for a bad memory.
There is science that backs up Gladwell’s conclusion. Two years ago, I sat at a dinner in Park City, Utah having a fascinating discussion with lawyers and neuroscientists about this very thing. We talked, in part, about a paper discussing the inherent unreliability of witness memory. Witnesses will give the most accurate responses initially soon after the event they witness. But, witnesses will often come to a response that they rate as even more confident later in the process, even if the later response contradicts the first one. In other words, some studies have shown that an eyewitness to the burglary of a house across the street may say initially that the burglar was a white male with long hair. Then, at the time of trial—after the “contamination” of deposition questions, reviewing evidence, etc.—the witness may testify with equal (or more) confidence that the burglar was a black man with short hair.
On a broad scale, this is why it is important for society to remember. We have heard in recent months a lot of criticism about Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” But for those of us old enough to remember (correctly), Bill Clinton used that exact phrase when he was campaigning for president, as did Ronald Reagan before him.
The interesting thing is that Clinton—during Trump’s 2016 run for the White House—criticized Trump for saying he wanted to make America great again. For Clinton during Clinton’s campaign, it was a call to enliven Americans to build the country into something stronger. For Clinton in 2016, the slogan was a rallying cry for those who wanted to go back to some kind of idealized America.
But I never heard anyone criticize Clinton for this, and I’m not saying we should. Perhaps he just misremembered that he used the same phrase in his own campaign.
Memory is hard. We don’t need to chastise people for misremembering things. That is just human nature and one of our many faults. But it’s not a surprise. We are fallen creatures. As one author put it—“if you have never picked up a fly rod before, you will soon find it factually and theologically true that man by nature is a damn mess.” (Maclean, A River Runs Through It, 5) There are lots of things that are wrong with us, and memory is just one of them.
But I still think it’s important to do what we can to keep memories alive. The library at my undergraduate alma mater is named the “John K. Mullen of Denver Memorial Library.” Yet in my years of attending there, I never stopped to learn who he was. Here is a guy who obviously donated a large sum of money to get his name on a building—and made sure that no one mistook him for a “John K. Mullen” outside of the Denver area—and yet I did not take the time to learn about him. Before we started our professional careers, a friend of mine said that he wanted to make enough money to “put [his] name on a building.” Turns out that even that does not guarantee that you will be remembered.
Projects like those at the Holocaust Museum recognize that each person’s individual story is worthy of telling and remembering, not just large donors. Each person, each unrepeatable and unique human being, is worth being remembered. We all have stories to tell.
Ray Bradbury puts this well in a discussion with the protagonist in Fahrenheit 451. There, Montag’s interlocutor, Granger, encourages Montag to recognize the impact a single life has on the world:
When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.
(149) (emphasis added). He continued:
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
(149-150)
Let’s make our goal to be there for a lifetime—to remember those who have gone before us, and to do it as accurately as possible. But let’s decide to make an impact on the world and leave our imprint on our family, friends, and community.
Remember to turn every page. Enjoy your weekend. Please let me know whether you need anything.
Best, Aaron