Note: This story was sent to me by my Sea Ranch and email buddy of long standing, Toni Louise Mayer. I agree with her: the good guys deserve their day in the sun and our thanks, however belated. No episode in our national history so shames us as much as our tepid, prejudiced response to the plight of European Jews in the 1930's and during the war. Thanks, Toni. BGJ
The Leica is the pioneer 35mm camera. It is a German product - precise, minimalist, and utterly efficient.
Behind its worldwide acceptance as a creative tool was a family- owned, socially oriented firm that, during the Nazi era, acted with uncommon grace, generosity and modesty. E. Leitz Inc., designer and manufacturer of Germany's most famous photographic product, saved its Jews.
And Ernst Leitz II, the steely-eyed Protestant patriarch who headed the closely held firm as the Holocaust loomed across Europe, acted in such a way as to earn the title, "the photography industry's Schindler."
As soon as Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ernst Leitz II began receiving frantic calls from Jewish associates, asking for his help in getting them and their families out of the country. As Christians, Leitz and his family were immune to Nazi Germany's Nuremberg laws, which restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities.
To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz quietly established what has become known among historians of the Holocaust as "the Leica Freedom Train," a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being assigned overseas.
Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were "assigned" to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain , Hong Kong and the United States.
Leitz's activities intensified after the Kristallnacht of November 1938, during which synagogues and Jewish shops were burned across Germany.
Before long, German "employees" were disembarking from the ocean liner Bremen at a New York pier and making their way to the Manhattan office of Leitz Inc., where executives quickly found them jobs in the photographic industry.
Each new arrival had around his or her neck the symbol of freedom -- a new Leica. The refugees were paid a stipend until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers and writers for the photographic press.
The "Leica Freedom Train" was at its height in 1938 and early 1939, delivering groups of refugees to New York every few weeks. Then, with the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany closed its borders.
By that time, hundreds of endangered Jews had escaped to America, thanks to the Leitzes' efforts. How did Ernst Leitz II and his staff get away with it?
Leitz, Inc. was an internationally recognized brand that reflected credit on the newly resurgent Reich. The company produced range-finders and other optical systems for the German military. Also, the Nazi government desperately needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz's single biggest market for optical goods was the United States.
Even so, members of the Leitz family and firm suffered for their good works.
A top executive, Alfred Turk, was jailed for working to help Jews and freed only after the payment of a large bribe.
Leitz's daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, was imprisoned by the Gestapo after she was caught at the border, helping Jewish women cross into Switzerland. She eventually was freed but endured rough treatment in the course of questioning. She also fell under suspicion when she attempted to improve the living conditions of 700 to 800 Ukrainian slave laborers, all of them women, who had been assigned to work in the plant during the 1940s.
(After the war, Kuhn-Leitz received numerous honors for her humanitarian efforts, among them the Officier d'honneur des Palms Academic from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the European Academy in the 1970s.)
Why has no one told this story until now? According to the late Norman Lipton, a freelance writer and editor, the Leitz family wanted no publicity for its heroic efforts. Only after the last member of the Leitz family was dead did the "Leica Freedom Train" finally come to light.
It is now the subject of a book, "The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train," by Frank Dabba Smith, a California-born Rabbi currently living in England .
Thank you for reading the above, and if you feel inclined, please pass this along to others. Memories of the righteous should live on.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
Something New Under The Florida Sun
The other day a tiny ray of sunshine came in the mail from Florida Power and Light. It was an invitation to “Join [FPL’s] brightest Customers!” For only $9.75 more a month our lights, appliances – even the TV – can hum with “Sunshine Energy.”
“For each month that you participate in the program, FPL ensures that 1,000 kwh of cleaner electricity from sources like wind, bioenergy and solar is . . . delivered to power systems serving Florida and other states nationwide.”
Nor would we be alone. It seems that “. . .37,000 enlightened FPL customers” have already signed up." Hmmm. One moment while we do the math: 37,000 x 9.75 x 12 equals $4,329,000 a year that "enlightened" Floridians already pony up on top of their regular bills.
What do they get for their money beyond vague assurances that somebody somewhere is pumping somewhat cleaner electricity into the nation’s power grids? How, specifically, is FPL investing that windfall?
In their communique FPL happily told us. Near Sarasota a 250 kilowatt Solar Array is up and humming and will “ . . . prevent approximately 327 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.” That same other day the local daily paper confirmed the news, sort of. Wrote AP reporter Zack Anderson: “[A]n array of 1,200 panels . . . [was] supplying electricity to about 20 nearby homes” on a recent morning.
Well, it’s a start. Zack also reported that Florida Govermor Charlie Crist wants to triple state grants to homes and businesses for rooftop solar panels as part of a more comprehensive energy program. We’ve had one of those rooftops for 16 years now and like it fine even without a subsidy -- although the pool could be warmer in February, Governor.
Actually, it is good that Gov. Crist is attempting to herd all those Tallahassee cats in the right direction. “The Sunshine State” ought to quickly become a global leader in the deployment of solar energy or, in all honesty, adopt a more modest motto. Why? Because global warming is real, and for Floridians it is more real than for others. We live on flat terrain not much further above sea level than the Dutch.
The cause of global warming is equally real. The greenhouse gases that trap the sun’s heat pour from our smokestacks and tail pipes. The greatest warming is happening at the poles. The evidence is in and only the rare diehard ostrich is left to hide his head and scoff. And our best efforts may not be enough.
We may have to watch helplessly as the Greenland and Antarctica ice caps warm to the tipping point and slide – perhaps abruptly – into the global sea, which will rise and cover much of Florida, sparing neither churches nor shopping malls, flooding schools, roads and homes. Florida: "The Sunshine Sea."
Then, again, maybe nothing much will happen for a long time, a century even. Time enough, let’s hope, for FPL to sweet talk us all out of an extra $9.75 a month, and supply solar electricity for a lot more than 20 homes and for their electric cars to boot. Time enough, perhaps, for Gov. Crist to bell the cats and do something besides “research the issues” before he runs for vice-President.
“Be one of our ‘brightest’ customers today!” David Bates, FPL’s Sunshine Energy Program Manager urged at the close of his letter. Don’t know, Dave. We could give that money to the Sierra Club, get a tax deduction and enjoy watching the environmentalists harass you into doing something anyhow.
But we both know where the money for doing that “something” would come from, don’t we? It’s pay you now or pay you later. So count us in. We’ll be your 37,000 and first suck – er, partner. Could we be the 21st home? We're already budgeting for a plug-in Prius.
UPDATE: Gov. Crist ran for Senator and lost out to Marco Rubio, having been passed over for Sara Palin, who turned out not to be an inspired choice for the Republicans. FPL has discontinued its Sunshine Energy program and no longer bills us an extra ten spot, less two bits, a month. Our Volvo wagon is still with us, pending Toyota's roll out of that plug in Real Soon Now. Scientists now report that the polar ice is melting quite a bit faster than previously thought. They have reported this before and may do so again. It is not clear anybody is listening.
.
“For each month that you participate in the program, FPL ensures that 1,000 kwh of cleaner electricity from sources like wind, bioenergy and solar is . . . delivered to power systems serving Florida and other states nationwide.”
Nor would we be alone. It seems that “. . .37,000 enlightened FPL customers” have already signed up." Hmmm. One moment while we do the math: 37,000 x 9.75 x 12 equals $4,329,000 a year that "enlightened" Floridians already pony up on top of their regular bills.
What do they get for their money beyond vague assurances that somebody somewhere is pumping somewhat cleaner electricity into the nation’s power grids? How, specifically, is FPL investing that windfall?
In their communique FPL happily told us. Near Sarasota a 250 kilowatt Solar Array is up and humming and will “ . . . prevent approximately 327 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.” That same other day the local daily paper confirmed the news, sort of. Wrote AP reporter Zack Anderson: “[A]n array of 1,200 panels . . . [was] supplying electricity to about 20 nearby homes” on a recent morning.
Well, it’s a start. Zack also reported that Florida Govermor Charlie Crist wants to triple state grants to homes and businesses for rooftop solar panels as part of a more comprehensive energy program. We’ve had one of those rooftops for 16 years now and like it fine even without a subsidy -- although the pool could be warmer in February, Governor.
Actually, it is good that Gov. Crist is attempting to herd all those Tallahassee cats in the right direction. “The Sunshine State” ought to quickly become a global leader in the deployment of solar energy or, in all honesty, adopt a more modest motto. Why? Because global warming is real, and for Floridians it is more real than for others. We live on flat terrain not much further above sea level than the Dutch.
The cause of global warming is equally real. The greenhouse gases that trap the sun’s heat pour from our smokestacks and tail pipes. The greatest warming is happening at the poles. The evidence is in and only the rare diehard ostrich is left to hide his head and scoff. And our best efforts may not be enough.
We may have to watch helplessly as the Greenland and Antarctica ice caps warm to the tipping point and slide – perhaps abruptly – into the global sea, which will rise and cover much of Florida, sparing neither churches nor shopping malls, flooding schools, roads and homes. Florida: "The Sunshine Sea."
Then, again, maybe nothing much will happen for a long time, a century even. Time enough, let’s hope, for FPL to sweet talk us all out of an extra $9.75 a month, and supply solar electricity for a lot more than 20 homes and for their electric cars to boot. Time enough, perhaps, for Gov. Crist to bell the cats and do something besides “research the issues” before he runs for vice-President.
“Be one of our ‘brightest’ customers today!” David Bates, FPL’s Sunshine Energy Program Manager urged at the close of his letter. Don’t know, Dave. We could give that money to the Sierra Club, get a tax deduction and enjoy watching the environmentalists harass you into doing something anyhow.
But we both know where the money for doing that “something” would come from, don’t we? It’s pay you now or pay you later. So count us in. We’ll be your 37,000 and first suck – er, partner. Could we be the 21st home? We're already budgeting for a plug-in Prius.
UPDATE: Gov. Crist ran for Senator and lost out to Marco Rubio, having been passed over for Sara Palin, who turned out not to be an inspired choice for the Republicans. FPL has discontinued its Sunshine Energy program and no longer bills us an extra ten spot, less two bits, a month. Our Volvo wagon is still with us, pending Toyota's roll out of that plug in Real Soon Now. Scientists now report that the polar ice is melting quite a bit faster than previously thought. They have reported this before and may do so again. It is not clear anybody is listening.
.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Ayn Rand is Not the Answer
George Will once wrote a sophomoric paean to novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand and her windy polemic, “Atlas Shrugged.” It should not go unanswered.
Will did get one thing right: Rand’s writings are an established rite of passage for legions of the educated young. This former undergraduate made the journey well before “Atlas” was published, and the steady sales of her works a half-century later show that the phenomenon continues.
But eventually we are supposed to put away childish things, and Will’s 2010 endorsement of a Wisconsin senatorial candidate who has yet to do so (he calls Rand’s 1,100 page fictional opus his “foundational” book), demonstrates that at least two nominal adults have not. Count Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Board chair for four Presidents and noted Rand acolyte, as a third.
Who is Ayn Rand, and why does she so captivate many of our kids and not a few influential grown-ups? Born Alicia Rosenbaum in Tsarist Russia’s ebbing days, she fled the horrors of Marxist collectivism when still an adolescent and fashioned a new life, name and philosophy in America exactly the opposite of what she had abandoned.. There is nothing to criticise about that; all praise, in fact.
From her earliest writings Rand championed an absolute individualism and the heroic in man. Her first, still successful novel, “The Fountainhead,” celebrated fidelity to artistic integrity and thrilled this writer to the marrow of his freshman bones. In a tempered way it still does. We should honor the creative among us -- artist, inventor, scientific genius -- and cut them a little slack when they single mindedly follow their muse to the exclusion of life's normal responsibilities shouldered by more ordinary folks.
That 1943 work is still Ayn Rand’s best; its well developed characters and plot stand in stark contrast to the stick figures that populate the didactic and gimmicky “Atlas.” Through one of her Fountainhead protagonists she demonstrates the corrosive effect of power on those who seek self worth through its exercise. Through another she illuminates the folly of living for the approval of others. Through her heroine she paints the futility of dispair over a world that places no value on personal integrity. Through her hero, an architect, she showed what a driven genius with no need or desire to serve anyone could create for us all -- and why he need not care that what he does is valued by others.
Where, then, did Rand get it wrong? When she moved from demonstrating that the artist must be his own man to do his best work to attempting to dress economic and political actors in the same philosophical garb. When, in other words, she expanded the theory of the transcendent individual applied to the special and appropriate case of creative expression, to encompass the life of the whole of society.
It is natural and necessary for the adolescent to strive to be an independent person. Society functions best when it is well stocked with mature individuals of integrity. But the basic unit of humankind is the family. Our children learn how to leave the nest in order to build another. (As another philisopher said, " No man is an island.")
In “Atlas Shrugged” there is exactly one reference to raising children, and that an obvious after thought. Nor are there any old folks in need of care. All the heroes are tall and striking with minds to match. The cripple and the deviant need not apply. Exit, for example, Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing.
All of us, without exception, have only to live long enough to be dependent on others at least twice in our lives. This is a bedrock fact overlooked by followers of the Randian creed. Nor is there room in their philosophy for organized help for innocent victims of hurricanes, oil spills, economic booms and busts, technological change, wars, accidents and disease. Altruism is their favorite four letter word. Because they do not care to live for and through others, they would eschew all empathy as empty sentiment, all calls for social justice as special pleading for the undeserving, all collaboration as theft from the creative.
There is valid tension between the individual and society, between man and state, and – fatefully – between humankind and nature. Resolution of these opposites will be forever a work in progress, within our breasts and our many tribes, and the continuing responsibility of those we send to places like Washington, DC.
They will need to take more than one book with them, and an open mind wouldn’t hurt.. Rapturous Randian followers might profit from reading “The Passion of Ayn Rand,” a compassionate biography by Barbara Branden (Doubleday, 1986) available new and used via http://www.bookfind.com/. Another, more recent and dispasionate account of Ayn Rand's life and philosophy is the recent "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right" (Oxford University Press, 2009) by Jennifer Burns.
They will learn, to their surprise, that their exalted hero is all too human, though just as fascinating and smart as they thought she was. One example of her occasioal lapse into human failing: she refused to countenance probability theory -- the basis of mundane statistical inference and and more esoteric quantum physics -- as a sufficiently rigorous method of logical reasoning until the day she was informed that, after a lifetime of constant smoking, she had not beaten the odds.
She crushed the fire from her cigarette and never lit another, though in the end, pneumonia and the absence of an excised lung, is what killed her. Obviously any man with the surname, Will, has to go for that.
Will did get one thing right: Rand’s writings are an established rite of passage for legions of the educated young. This former undergraduate made the journey well before “Atlas” was published, and the steady sales of her works a half-century later show that the phenomenon continues.
But eventually we are supposed to put away childish things, and Will’s 2010 endorsement of a Wisconsin senatorial candidate who has yet to do so (he calls Rand’s 1,100 page fictional opus his “foundational” book), demonstrates that at least two nominal adults have not. Count Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Board chair for four Presidents and noted Rand acolyte, as a third.
Who is Ayn Rand, and why does she so captivate many of our kids and not a few influential grown-ups? Born Alicia Rosenbaum in Tsarist Russia’s ebbing days, she fled the horrors of Marxist collectivism when still an adolescent and fashioned a new life, name and philosophy in America exactly the opposite of what she had abandoned.. There is nothing to criticise about that; all praise, in fact.
From her earliest writings Rand championed an absolute individualism and the heroic in man. Her first, still successful novel, “The Fountainhead,” celebrated fidelity to artistic integrity and thrilled this writer to the marrow of his freshman bones. In a tempered way it still does. We should honor the creative among us -- artist, inventor, scientific genius -- and cut them a little slack when they single mindedly follow their muse to the exclusion of life's normal responsibilities shouldered by more ordinary folks.
That 1943 work is still Ayn Rand’s best; its well developed characters and plot stand in stark contrast to the stick figures that populate the didactic and gimmicky “Atlas.” Through one of her Fountainhead protagonists she demonstrates the corrosive effect of power on those who seek self worth through its exercise. Through another she illuminates the folly of living for the approval of others. Through her heroine she paints the futility of dispair over a world that places no value on personal integrity. Through her hero, an architect, she showed what a driven genius with no need or desire to serve anyone could create for us all -- and why he need not care that what he does is valued by others.
Where, then, did Rand get it wrong? When she moved from demonstrating that the artist must be his own man to do his best work to attempting to dress economic and political actors in the same philosophical garb. When, in other words, she expanded the theory of the transcendent individual applied to the special and appropriate case of creative expression, to encompass the life of the whole of society.
It is natural and necessary for the adolescent to strive to be an independent person. Society functions best when it is well stocked with mature individuals of integrity. But the basic unit of humankind is the family. Our children learn how to leave the nest in order to build another. (As another philisopher said, " No man is an island.")
In “Atlas Shrugged” there is exactly one reference to raising children, and that an obvious after thought. Nor are there any old folks in need of care. All the heroes are tall and striking with minds to match. The cripple and the deviant need not apply. Exit, for example, Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing.
All of us, without exception, have only to live long enough to be dependent on others at least twice in our lives. This is a bedrock fact overlooked by followers of the Randian creed. Nor is there room in their philosophy for organized help for innocent victims of hurricanes, oil spills, economic booms and busts, technological change, wars, accidents and disease. Altruism is their favorite four letter word. Because they do not care to live for and through others, they would eschew all empathy as empty sentiment, all calls for social justice as special pleading for the undeserving, all collaboration as theft from the creative.
There is valid tension between the individual and society, between man and state, and – fatefully – between humankind and nature. Resolution of these opposites will be forever a work in progress, within our breasts and our many tribes, and the continuing responsibility of those we send to places like Washington, DC.
They will need to take more than one book with them, and an open mind wouldn’t hurt.. Rapturous Randian followers might profit from reading “The Passion of Ayn Rand,” a compassionate biography by Barbara Branden (Doubleday, 1986) available new and used via http://www.bookfind.com/. Another, more recent and dispasionate account of Ayn Rand's life and philosophy is the recent "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right" (Oxford University Press, 2009) by Jennifer Burns.
They will learn, to their surprise, that their exalted hero is all too human, though just as fascinating and smart as they thought she was. One example of her occasioal lapse into human failing: she refused to countenance probability theory -- the basis of mundane statistical inference and and more esoteric quantum physics -- as a sufficiently rigorous method of logical reasoning until the day she was informed that, after a lifetime of constant smoking, she had not beaten the odds.
She crushed the fire from her cigarette and never lit another, though in the end, pneumonia and the absence of an excised lung, is what killed her. Obviously any man with the surname, Will, has to go for that.
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