Chilean Chronicles, Part 94: Hernan's Gutierrez's Memory and Imagination

Imagine that you’re in Santiago, Chile in 1973.

Imagine that you’re 13 years old and walking to school with your father.

Imagine that there’s been a coup in your country that deposed the president and left him dead.

Imagine that your school was closed for about a week. When you returned, many, if not most, of the teachers you worked with and learned from and loved are gone.

This included Julia Del Rosario Retamales Sepulveda.

A 55-year-old Communist, she was for you the sweetest, kindest, most nurturing teacher there was.

Imagine that you learn later that she was detained at Villa Grimaldi, the largest and most notorious detention center in the network of such facilities established by the DINA, Pinochet’s secret police.

You never saw her again.

Imagine that you’re walking along the Rio Mapocho with your father on the way to school.

You see something floating downstream.

You realize that what you are seeing are dead bodies.

Your father tries to protect you and stops you from moving closer.

You can’t see everything, you see enough to realize that some of the bodies have been shot.

Others have no heads.

Imagine that you walk along the river the next day.

You see more bodies.

The day after that.

Even more.

Hernan Gutierrez does not have to imagine.

Because this happened to him in the fall of 1973.

“It was horrible,” he said, shuddering as he described the terror inflicted on the people during the Pinochet dictatorship.

Forty years later, the memories are still with him.

The trauma of what he saw has not stopped Gutierrez from marrying and raising a family or from moving forward with business endeavors.

His wife had a similar experience after the coup, so they each understand what the other experienced.

In the early 80s, the couple moved to Germany for eight years because they did not want to raise their two boys in a society that instilled such fear in its citizens.

They returned in the early 1990s, moving from Santiago’s bustle to the quiet seaside town Algarrobo, where they’ve set up a life together.

They own a chocolate shop on the main street of Carlo Alessandri.

Two doors down, she runs a clothing store.

Their sons have grown and become men. One is an artist whose work adorns the wall of the clothing store. A daughter-in-law works in the chocolate store.

Life is quiet and peaceful.

But the memories still sit uneasily beneath the surface.

When he thinks about them, they remind Hernan not only of that darker, earlier time.

They make him question those who were older and say they did not know.

If I could know this at 13, he asked, how could they not know what was happening?

After we visited Hernan, we drove to Villa Grimaldi, the former restaurant that became a detention center during the Pinochet era, a place of unspeakable evil where people were tortured and the torturers’ children played in a nearby pool.

We walked to the part of the park that honors women who were detained and disappeared there.

Each woman has a plaque that looks like a multi-colored tile lollipop planted in the ground near a rose.

The flowers are arranged in a series of circles.

In one of the circles, there is a tile and flower for Julia Del Rosario Retamales Sepulveda.

Just as Hernan remembered.

He does not have to imagine.

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting supported this story.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 93: On Albie Sachs and Giving Thanks

I’ve learned a lot from Albie Sachs over the years.

The South African freedom fighter and classical music lover whose taking the other as a Supreme Court Justice elicited a tear from then-President Nelson Mandela endured solitary confinement and a car bomb in Mozambique that cost him much of his right arm and part of his vision.

I first saw him at a conference in New Haven, Connecticut that Marc Skvirsky and I attended with Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. Among many important things he said that day was that although Mandela had near-perfect pitch with the people he led, one should not mistake the leader for the source of the victory he and so many others had dedicated their lives to winning.

Speaking in his mellifluous baritone voice, his left arm moving animatedly, Sachs also cautioned against moral relativism.

Apartheid was evil, he said. We were better. And we won.

A few years later, he spoke at a community event for Facing History and Ourselves around his book, The Free Diary of Albie Sachs, a work that chronicled his six-week journey with then-partner, now wife, Vanessa September, to London and other European capitals.

In his opening comments Sachs talked about the dreams that he had had as a younger man of living as a free man in a country that was being transformed from a site of intense evil to a thoroughgoing democracy with many official languages, one of the world’s most far-reaching and inclusive constitutions and open debate of the questions of the day.

He also talked about living with a woman with whom he wanted to spend his life.

These dreams, he explained, had all come true.

Although I understood the meaning of Sachs’ words, I didn’t feel them the way he seemed to.

Now, I do.

There are moments, and I’ve been blessed to have a number of them recently, where I literally cannot believe the abundance of gifts and love I’m privileged to experience.

Where I wake up wondering not so much what I’m going to do, but which delicious set of options we’re going to explore together.

The past few weeks, which have seen Jon come here for a couple of weeks so that we can work on a project about Chile’s past, present and future.

A week later, Dad and Lee, whom we had seen in Argentina and Uruguay, were in for a week after their glorious two weeks plus tour that took through Argentina and down to the southernmost part of the continent before heading to the spectacular views of Torres del Paine, up into Chiloe and meeting us again in Santiago.

There are the gains that the students in my Data Journalism class have made, the pair of conversations in the next couple of weeks sponsored by the Fulbright Commission in which I’ll share preliminary results about my research into the nation’s 2009 Transparency Law, the news we’ve heard about the memorial event in Essen led by the indefatigable Gabriele Thimm that she told us was the best ever and the plans we’re formulating to advance the project, the events that we are planning in Wellesley and Cambridge and Arica or Punta Arenas.

All that is beautiful, and one of the most meaningful parts for me and for us is that Aidan got here on Sunday for what will be a month together in Santiago, in Northern and Southern Chile and in Peru’s fabled Incan ruins of Machu Picchu.

He’s just returned from a semester in which he traveled to New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia and the United States before he set foot here. It’s a treat to spend any time with him, let alone such a concentrated dose, and, in parts at least, Internet-free zone.

Underneath all of these experiences is a sense of possibility and flow, of the great fortune of being in a space it feels deeply possible to successfully integrate family and friends and language and investigation and teaching and writing and networking and traveling and food and drink and discussion and applying for new opportunities and converting those that arise and working more and more to do what we all need to do in life, which is to steer the ship of our lives.

This is not to say that we live in a perfect world.

Far from it.

Indeed, some initial discussions with Aidan have only reminded us how deeply flawed the world is that we will leave to his generation.

Nor is it to say that I’ve always felt this way.

That, too, has not been the case.

Indeed, my appreciation of this moment is deepened not only because I am more aware than before of life’s finitude, but because this more profound sense of possibility and authority comes after years of having a different gut-level conviction.

So, as Hannukah begins, after we’ve had one Thanksgiving meal and before we’ve had another, with a series of Chilean adventures behind us and more ahead, with family having departed and our son here, the sun shining in a cloudless sky, the breeze rustling the curtains of the room where Dunreith and I are next to each other, I am immensely grateful for my life’s abundant gifts.

I imagine that wherever he is, Albie Sachs is giving thanks, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 92: Pure Joy as Jon Arrives and Family Time Begins

There's nothing else like it.

The feeling you get around those who knew you when, the people with whom you shared the most formative, embarrassing, meaningful and ordinary moments of your lives.

Those with whom you grow up and whose progression through the life cycle helps you mark your own life journey.

Your family.

Our time here in Chile has been an extraordinary one for many reasons.

One of the most important of these is that Dunreith and I are sharing this adventure.

That we sold our house the day before we left only heightens our sense of carving this chapter together.

Late last month we had the pleasure of spending five glorious days with Dad and his partner Lee in Argentina and Uruguay.

They'll be coming here next Thursday after a 17-day tour that has them heading down to the continent's southernmost point before making their way up Chile to Santiago.

They'll also be here with my brother Jon, who arrived in Santiago this morning for a two-week stint during which we'll do a journalistic project.

It promises to be a period of intense activity. I've been exerting a lot of energy calling and emailing to make sure we take full advantage of the opportunity.

I'm optimistic that we'll do just that with a hard push.

And, mostly, I feel tremendously fortunate not only that we have this time together, but that we're able to collaborate on work that we love.

Jon's arrival marks the beginning of our final seven weeks here in Chile.

Dad and Lee will stay until November 21.

Aidan, who set off for Bali today after finishing his expansive semester in New Zealand, lands a few days later.

He'll be here for a month.

During that time we'll travel to northern Chile to see the desert and to the south to spend time in Chiloe and Patagonia, a place Dunreith first wanted to visit in 1977 after reading Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia.

We'll also spend close to a week in Peru, including several days in legendary Incan site Machu Picchu.

Time with any family member is something to be treasured, particularly since we no longer live near each other.

Having that time with Aidan, especially in places where none of us will have access to the Internet, feels even more so.

Dunreith, Jon and I met at our place after I had finished with teaching and meeting and interviewing and planning.

We all walked to our favorite Peruvian restaurant, where Jon had his first dinner on Chilean soil as well as his Peruvian pisco sour. We made plans for what we'll do tomorrow and the weekend and as much of the next week as we've got lined up at this point.

We savored the three types of ceviches, feasted on the classic Peruvian dish of aji de gallina and devoured the crepe-covered ice cream and the tres leches cake.

After dinner we took the Metro down to La Moneda, the presidential palace that was bombed on Sept. 11, 1973, the day on which Salvador Allende delivered his famous final speech to the Chilean people.

The massive Chilean flag that is so often unfurled and waving in the wind during the day was still.

The palace was surrounded by a wall marking it off as a construction site.

Dogs lay on the sidewalk, looking, and perhaps even being, dead.

O'Higgins Street bustled with activity.

The three of us walked to the site to get a better look at the front of the palace.

A statue of Diego Portales, one of the nation's most critical political figures, loomed in the distance.

We strolled past the parking garage and into the cultural center and saw a large, open space where workers were packing up chairs and speakers from a performance.

We went out the back and saw a statue of Allende standing above words from his final speech, "Tengo fe en Chile y su destino."

I have faith in Chile and his destiny.

We headed back to the Metro.

Jon stopped every few steps to take pictures of the dogs, of the political posters, of the artwork in the station of Chilean geography, and, after we got off at the Pedro de Valdivia stop, of a yellow public service announcement telling people to register their guns.

On one level, Jon's setting foot in Chile bring just a tiny hint of sadness because it means that the finish line to a remarkable time in our lives is visible, if only faintly.

But that wasn't what I felt tonight.

It was pure joy.

A Special Kristallnacht Anniversary

This year marks 75 years since the pogrom later known as Kristallancht, or “Night of the Broken Glass.”

The two-day rampage saw homes, businesses and synagogues ransacked in communities throughout Hitler’s Germany. After taking the pulse of world opinion, the Nazi government fined the Jewish community for the damage it had suffered.

It also led to the death of close to 100 Jews and many more being injured.

One was in our family.

One of the few childhood memories that my father retained from his years in his homeland was of the Gestapo coming for his father Max, a World War I veteran and the descendant of a family that had lived in the area for close to 150 years.

He returned weeks later, bruised and badly beaten. My father often wondered if the physical abuse contributed to his father’s later deafness.

Grandpa Max’s incarceration and public abuse convinced my grandfather that the country he had served was no longer his.

It also allowed him to listen to his wife and to take the seemingly impossible step of sending his children away to save them.

In the wake of the devastation, the British government established the Kindertransport program that allowed about 10,000 Jewish children ages 4 to 17 from Germany, Austria, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia to find refuge in England.

Dad and his older brother Ralph were two of them.

Dad boarded a train in the spring of 1939, shortly before he turned 5 years and just weeks after he had had his appendix removed.

His father, a World War I veteran who lost the unfettered use of his right arm and much of his hearing in the trenches, took his ailing son from doctor to doctor throughout the town.

None would operate on a Jewish child.

Eventually, my great-grandfather Joseph, the patriarch and the man for whom I am named, found a non-Jewish colleague to perform the surgery on his kitchen table.

Dad and Uncle Ralph lived under the watchful care of Ruth Stern, a Cambridge-educated headmistress, for close to a year and a half. In late 1940, they were reunited in the United Steas with my grandparents, who had managed to escape through Genoa, Italy after the war began.

As a result of the British government’s generosity and my grandparents’ courage, Dad and Uncle Ralph’s survival has always been linked to the memory of the Kristallnacht atrocities.

This year, the connection is a special one.

That’s because of the relationship we’ve developed in the past couple of years with Gabriele Thimm, a remarkable educator in Dad’s hometown who is fiercely committed to her students’ learning the truth about their nation’s genocidal history.

In the fall of 2011, Gabriele contacted me after reading an article I had written in 2004 about searching for our family’s roots. She said that she was organizing a memorial ceremony for the Jewish community of Essen, and that one of the stops would be at my great-grandfather’s house.

She invited us to attend.

We could not make the event, but we sent pictures and a statement in which we expressed our gratitude for what they were doing and our hope that we would meet them in person soon.

Six months later, we did just that.

Along with Dunreith, Aidan, my brother Jon and Dad’s partner Lee, Dad set foot in his hometown for the first time in 73 years.

Gabriele organized a series of events throughout the time we were in Germany.

We visited Dad’s former apartments.

We met a non-Jewish family whose parents had held our family bible for years during the Holocaust.

We visited the old Jewish cemetery and a farm house our ancestors had owned.

We held a surprise 78th birthday party for Dad.

We also attended a pair of Cermonies of Life that Gabriele had organized with her students.

The first was held at the Great Synagogue that was destroyed in Kristallnacht and has since been reopened as a cultural center.

The second took place at the school where Gabriele teaches.

The students read, sang and showed documents that told the story of the Jewish people, the Jewish community in Essen, our family’s history and the devastating impact of the Nazi regime.

At the school ceremony, students came forward and pinned the names of individual Lowenstein family members in the shapes of leaves on a green paper tree, eventually building a seven-generation family tree.

At the end, Dad rose and spoke.

He answered students’ questions, but before he did that, he announced that we were creating an award in our family’s name to honor young people who acted for Tolerance and Justice. (Part of the funds for the award came from an honorarium that the town had offered Dad.)

This year, Dad, Lee and I returned to Essen, where he presented the awards to the winners who had been selected from a panel of three people that Gabriele had spearheaded.

A class of art students had built a bright, multi-colored mural with the words “Tolerance and Justice” made out of puzzle pieces.

A group of students performed a rap they had written about the family.

A video that other students had made showed black and white images of forlorn children on the Kindertransport, numbers around their necks as they prepared to depart from their parents.

The video explained that Dad and Uncle Ralph were on the program.

Language that said Dad had returned to the community after many years scrolled across the screen, followed by a color picture of Dad speaking to the community at the Great Synagogue the previous year.

Dad gave the awards to the winners after reading in a statement he had written that told the young people they represented the future.

Months after the ceremony Gabriele told me that the leader of the cultural center had asked her to speak about our project at this year’s Kristallnacht commemoration.

She accepted.

A couple of days Gabriel wrote us that a television was recording a segment about our family.

Her students who had made the rap were going to answer questions and show photographer, the mural paint and the plaque that bears the award winners’ name.

The crew also wanted to see the family tree and Papa Joseph’s house.

The next day the students were going to record the rap on a CD.

And we’re talking about how to expand the project to other schools.

It is important not to overstate the extent and impact of what has happened, to use Gabriele’s extraordinary commitment and energy to put an excessively happy ending to a story of death and destruction or to look away from the intolerance that still exist in the community.

But it’s also important to know that stories of repair matter a lot.

Examples that permit young people to move forward knowing about what has come before and also carrying with them the belief that they can act in a different way can make a difference.

This Saturday and Sunday I’ll be thinking of Kristallnacht’s destruction

But I’ll also be thinking of Gabriele’s courage, of Dad’s character, and of my great fortune to be a part of this journey that has already brought tremendous meaning and joy and is not over yet.

That’s worth remembering, too.

RIP, Dick Yoder, or On Parents' Passing.

This morning I got an email from Mom telling me that Chris Yoder’s father Dick had died on Saturday. This was the second death of a friend’s parent within the past week or so.

Last week I learned through Facebook that the mother of Sinan Akdag, a high school friend and soccer teammate, had passed.

Even though I learned the news virtually, the impact was visceral both times.

I knew and cared about the Turkish mother and American father in different ways, and they both mattered to me.

Sonny´s mother was a dark haired, self-respecting and fierce woman who didn´t hesítate to speak her mind when she thought her son or his guests, on occasion me, were in the wrong.

Mr. Yoder-I always called him that, even though he had earned his PhD. In Literature at the University of Pennsylvania-was an early example of a house husband.

He worked at a number of universities before his time there ended.

And, in the years that we were growing up, he spent a lot of time serving on Brookline’s School Committee, blowing on the french horn with any number of his classical music groups and playing soccer with us at the Northeastern University Astroturf that lay across the street from their home on Harrison Street.

Mr. Yoder was right there with the rest of us, hair flying as he headed the ball that occasionally hit his round glasses, more than making up for in doggedness and determination what he lacked in dribbling skill.

It was unusual for me to meet a father who was so comfortable with his own unconventional career path and his wife being such an accomplished woman. (I called her “Mrs. Yoder,” even though she was a decorated radiologist.)

They both were extraordinary parents to their three sons, Chris, Lu and Nick.

One of the greatest gifts you can give a child as a paernt is the encouragement to be who they truly are and the example through their own lives of how to do that

Mr. Yoder and Mrs. Yoder gave that to their boys.

From jumping BMX bikes over close ot a dozen fellow elementary school students to riding a tandem bike cross-country to playing soccer every morning from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. to majoring in physics and philosophy to welding to running an organic cooperative in Dover to earning a Chemistry PhD.s to inventing a bike-powered carrot washer, the Yoder boys have always chosen from passion and values, rather than for money.

Chris has worked as an organic farmer for close to a quarter century, toiling the land both out of a love for the land and as a profound expression of his political beliefs.

One time I called for Chris in Brookline.

Mr. Yoder answered the phone, sighed at my request, and then said, “Jeff, Chris is trying to lead us back to the seventeenth century.” before assuring me that he would convey my message to Chris.

It was a vintage comment: laced with caring and wit, containing both the hope that his boys would see things his way and, ultimately, satisfaction that they had come to their own conclusion and direction.

Mr. Yoder always conveyed a gentle sense of acceptance and inquiry that encouraged vigorous and thoughtful discussion. (I have a vivid memory of Mr. Yoder starting to talk about the grammar in a piece a number of family members had read when Lu started barking, “The argument! The argument!” in an eventually successful effort to change the discussion’s focus.)

The power of his formidable intellect had waned for more than a decade as Alzheimer’s took its inexorable ruinous toll. He hadn’t lived at home for a number of years.

I´ve not yet spoken to, or communicate with the guys or Mrs. Yoder, and I imagine that, as with my father-in-law Marty, there was an element of mercy and relief for him as well as for them.

But there is also, at least for me, the recognition that life´s inevitable end, which came for our grandparents before us, is now happening more and more often to our parents.

One will day will come for us, too.

As these moments occur, I’m struck more and more by the importance of details.

As more time is behind me, what came before matters more than it did before, even as the present seems more precious, too.

Beyond the reminder of being in touch with gratitude that Mom and Dad are both around and healthy and joyful in their own ways, I find that parents’ death spark within me a desire to savor the memories I shared with Mr. Yoder, to miss the man, and to learn from his example.

I´m not about to pick up the French horn andy time soon, but I will strive apply the lessons Mr. Yoder taught in my own way.

I think he would have liked that.