Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [122]
The wreath-laying ceremony at the graves lasted an entirety of eight minutes. Before we knew it, here came the Reagans again! So, disobeying orders not to, we pulled out the bedsheet, one last chance for the president to think about what he just did. “THEY MURDERED MY FAMILY.”
With the Reagan limo speeding out of the cemetery and into the history books, the real craziness began. The locals, who had been cut out of the shortened presidential ceremony, now were allowed to march into the Bitburg cemetery and conduct their own wreath-laying action. They kicked it off with some rogue old German shouting randomly, “Jews, go home!” (He was quickly silenced as, well, there were no Jews left in Bitburg who had a home to go to.) It became obvious he was referring to Gary and me, upset at us for unfurling our banner. He had nothing to worry about. We had no interest in staying in Bitburg.
With the roadblocks now removed, a steady stream of Bitburgers were jamming the road to get into the cemetery. By the hundreds they came to make a point—by laying wreaths and flowers on the graves of the dead Nazis.
The highlight of this “People’s Wreath Laying” came when the representative of the American Veterans of Foreign Wars, Gerard Murphy, and his German counterpart from the Nazi veterans group laid a joint wreath on the SS graves and declared World War II over—again.
“We need to forget about the war and the Holocaust,” Murphy said in his speech at the cemetery. “It does no good to remember the past. The present situation demands that we join together to fight our common enemy—communism.” The crowd cheered. We left.
Heading out of town, we hitched a ride with a German woman who was headed to Hanover and in the direction we needed to go to fly home. She stopped at the Bitburg gas station to fill up before we hit the road.
“You know,” I said, “this gas station used to be the Jewish synagogue here before the War. A man in town told us it was burned on Kristallnacht (the night in 1938 when Nazis across Germany destroyed Jewish businesses, homes, and temples). Some people wanted to put a plaque on it.”
She said she knew nothing of this, and we had a quiet ride north—except for her wanting to know more about our extermination of the American Indians. Oh yeah, baby, ev’rybody got their holocaust.
As we got near Hanover, Gary suggested we stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which his parents were liberated from in 1945. The lady said she didn’t know where that was—or what it was. We thanked her and got out in town and took a taxi out to the site.
We arrived at Bergen-Belsen as the sun was setting over the many weed-covered mounds that were the mass graves. Hill after hill concealed the fifty thousand bodies that were piled underneath. No gravestones, no Stars of David, no names of anyone. Just dirt piled high and grass growing on top. No one else was there besides us.
Gary said he wanted to be alone for a while.
I went and sat on a bench and wrote this story.
A Blessing
MY PRIEST HAD A CONFESSION he wanted to make to me.
“I have serious blood on my hands, Michael,” Father Zabelka said softly. “I want you to know.”
We were sitting on the porch of my newspaper office, Father George Zabelka and I. He was the former pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Flint (the church in which I would later be married). Father Zabelka was now retired but still working, doing a whole host of projects in the Flint area, including helping out as a volunteer at the Flint Voice.
Living in downtown Flint, I had stopped going to Mass about six years prior, and so “Father George” was the closest thing I had to a priest, as I still very much believed in the central tenets of the Faith: to love one another, to love your enemy, to do unto others as you would want them to do unto you. I agreed that one had a personal responsibility