Monday, April 16, 2007

Made in Germany - Reflections on Yom Ha-Shoah




Well, it seems Kohelet was right. There's nothing new under the sun. German racism did not begin or end with Hitler. Just in time for Yom Ha-Shoah, it came to light that a German officer was training recruits by telling them to imagine themselves in the Bronx, where three African-Americans jump out of a van yelling insults about the recruit's mother. The recruit is instructed to fire his machine gun while yelling an expletive in English. Watch the video; although it is in German the flavor (stink?) should come through:










For the record, I was post-docing in the Bronx at the height of the crack epidemic in the late 1980s, and I would run through the South Bronx almost every afternoon. Nobody touched a hair of my head.

Running magazines I read constantly run articles about motivation and how to sustain it. My motivation could have a stamp on it: Made in Germany. Like most things made in Germany, it is strong and enduring. Whenever the yetzer hara whispers "Quit," all I have to do is conjure up this image from Bergen-Belsen to remind myself what the results of weakness can be:






Q: Shall these bones live?

A:






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4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Maybe when you ran through the streets of the South Bronx in the 1980's you appeared so crazy that even the drug dealers were afraid of you. The rest of us, with some sanity, stayed far away from neighborhoods like that.

Fri Apr 25, 04:34:00 PM EDT  
Anonymous Neandershort said...

Either crazy, or willing to fight, or both. And you, with some effeminacy, won't put your name on what you write. Or maybe I just have an attenuated fear of death, not wishing to live in a world where men don't have manly courage.

Fri Apr 25, 04:47:00 PM EDT  
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