Yesterday I had a visit from a French journalist and a historian who set up a camera in my house and interviewed me for hours about my life in activism from the mid 1960s until now. This has happened a few times in the last few years. Mainly since I started talking about one period during my later days in the Black Panther Party when I was “detained” in an Israeli prison. But these folks dug deep. We began with my living in a housing project as a child in Atlanta Georgia and having Nazi “death camp” survivors for neighbors. You see, this camp was in Poland …called “Treblinka” I got to hear many stories of life and death in that place as a youngster. But most memorable for me was the stories of two revolts…One was in Warsaw …in a place historians simply refer to as the “Warsaw Ghetto”…..a huge “open air prison”…. 19 April – 16 May 1943 saw the largest resistance to Nazi Germany by a Jewish insurgency during WW II..”13,000 Jews were killed in the ghetto during the uprising (some 6,000 among them were burnt alive or died from smoke inhalation). Of the remaining 50,000 residents, almost all were captured and shipped to the death camps of Majdanek and Treblinka.” I never met anyone who survived “Majdanek” but I knew several people while I was a child who survived both the Warsaw rebellion and “Treblinka”….You see Treblinka is remembered as the most “efficient” of the death camps. Why was this so important to my story? Well the first time I learned about an actual “movement” to end “Jim Crow” as a youngster was when I saw my Jewish friend Jacob’s mother crying about the murder of Emmet Till. I was very young and my friend Jacob…who went to Treblinka as a teenager ..only reconnected with what was left of his family when they all ended up in NYC in 1950. Jacob’s father in 1961 ran a little store and gave me 25 cents everyday to sweep the store and empty the trash. he told me to come look at a news broadcast on the TV in the rear of the store…I saw film of a burning bus…It was the “Freedom Riders”….more on this later but it’s worth it to note that what I remember most about Jacob’s dad ….whose name I can’t seemed to recall. was that one day years later when I was deep in the movement and went to his wife’s funeral in 1966. He told me about a forgotten event in history…There was actually a real rebellion among the Jews in death camp Treblinka in August of 1943 or 44 I can’t remember..but I’m sure you can look it up. Officially only 67 people survived that rebellion….I think there were more….or at least people who claimed to be…It’s estimated that just over one million “Roma” and Jewish people were exterminated at Treblinka…Why Do I talk about this as a part of “my” story ?. Well it’s because Jacob …who died in Warm Springs Georgia just a few years ago and his parents were always making comparisons to my life under Jim Crow and what happened to them in the years leading up to the “final solution”….and more “uncanny” Jacob in his later years began along with other death camp survivors to see that what happened to them and what relatives told them was happening to Palestinians….just as they had seen in “Jim Crow” and South African Apartheid were close to the same thing, de-humanizing …devaluing people ….I don’t think I would be the person I am and have been in the civil rights movement or the Black Panther Party …or what happened to me in Africa and the Middle East. If I had not had “historical guides” like the people I knew who had survived great evil…..and lived to tell the tale to a little Black kid in a housing project in the 1950s…May is Jewish American Heritage Month…..Just my little two cents.
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