Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [117]
The ceremony would take place in the small town of Bitburg near the Luxembourg border. And Gary wanted to go to Bitburg.
Gary was not a political activist. He was not prone to act on impulse. He was the kind of guy whose pattern of daily activities—eating, exercising, sleeping—is the kind you can set your watch to. So the anger in his voice and his eagerness to act politically—and publicly—was a pleasant jolt to my afternoon.
Gary was unique in another respect. His father and his mother were survivors of both the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Over one million died in Auschwitz, and 50,000 in Bergen-Belsen. His parents survived both. They were from a small city in Poland called Kielce. In 1940, Kielce had a population of 200,000, with about 20,000 Jewish citizens. The Germans and the Poles established the Jewish ghetto in 1941, but by August 1942 the ghetto was liquidated and most of its inhabitants were sent to the Treblinka concentration camp. Only a couple thousand was kept behind to work as forced laborers (i.e., slaves). Gary’s parents, Bella and Benny, were among the slaves. Each of them was married to their respective spouses, but neither of those spouses survived the war.
In 1944, they were sent to Auschwitz where they survived the “selection” process (they were deemed fit enough to do the slave labor). In 1945, when the Russians were days away from Auschwitz, the Germans took those they still needed for the slave work and marched them in the dead of winter to a rail station in Gliwice, Poland, a twenty-mile distance. Many died. Those who lived, including Gary’s parents, were loaded into cattle cars to Bergen-Belsen, where the British liberated them on April 15, 1945.
While in a refugee camp in Munich the following year they met and got married. One of them had an uncle who had emigrated to Flint, Michigan, twenty years earlier to work in the General Motors factories. Because of that connection they were able to come to the United States and to Flint, where they were welcomed and where they thrived.
The ordeal of Bella and Benny Boren took a toll not just on them, but, in years to come, also on their children, Gary and his three brothers. Nearly everyone else in his family in Europe—grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—were killed in the Holocaust.
The trip to Bitburg, he told me, would be his personal statement against those who did this to his parents—and perhaps, more important, his one-man act of defiance against his own president who was either insensitive or stupid or cruel. Each was inexcusable.
And what exactly was my purpose in going?
“You’ll know how to sneak us in to the cemetery,” Gary said matter-of-factly. Gary then ticked off my résumé of major break-ins: getting on the floor of the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco with no press credentials; traveling through Nicaragua to the Honduran border without proper papers or visas; sneaking backstage past security at concerts to meet Joan Baez or Pete Seeger.
“When’s Reagan going there?” I asked.
“This Sunday.”
“This Sunday?”
“Yes. C’mon. I’ll take care of the plane tickets.”
I didn’t need any convincing. I was up for the adventure and I was up for anything that would stick it to the Gipper. If Bonzo was going to Bitburg, so was I.
Forty-eight hours later, we were on a plane from Detroit to Hamburg, West Germany. We arrived in Bonn, the West German capital, late Friday afternoon.
Our first step upon deplaning was to go and convince the German authorities to give us the necessary press credentials we would need to follow Reagan into Bitburg. This was not going to be easy, considering the cutoff date to apply for said credentials was a month ago, and the Bonn Economic Summit was already half over.