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8/14
1998
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girls left for Jordan, we remember.
There is no propaganda in these sto-
ries. Only truth. And from this
truth, I hoped, compassion.
The following week, Gail and I
told Ron that we thought the rev-
erend had crossed a line. We won-
dered if a man who would call the
Holocaust "propaganda" should serve
on a committee charged with honor-
ing diversity.
I called Lori at home. Lori plead-
ed that we all continue
to work together. Gail
and I should forgive
the reverend. We
could not. After the
reverend resigned,
Lori, too, resigned.
Her uncle is the
father-in-law of the
man who cuts my hair,
the father of a man
my husband works
with. Lori's sister cuts
my husband's hair.
How intertwined
our lives are. And yet,
despite the intimacy of her sister's
fingers in my husband's hair, her
cousin's fingers in mine, despite our
wishes and modern ways, like our
counterparts in the Middle East, we
felt governed by our beliefs and our
blood. But unlike our counterparts
in the Middle East, we have the
security of life in America: we live in
similar homes and work at similar
jobs.
Several months later, Lori came
back to our meetings. Ron had called
her and told her we still consider her
an integral part of our planning.
When we saw each other for the first
time since our schism, we hugged —
tenuously at first, and then she
pulled me close to her, and I drew
her to me. Then we released each
other, and went to work.
"Do you
think you
are the only
ones who
suffered?"
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FDIC
the Holocaust and I said that it
would be in the "Lessons" section,
the reverend said, "That's propagan-
da."
My head went into a spin. Ron,
the deputy superintendent, levitated
momentarily from his chair. Gail's
face turned red and beaded with
sweat. I turned to the reverend and
said in the most rational voice I
could summon, "What do you
mean
"It's history," the rev-
erend answered. "It's not
part of the religion."
I quoted Eli Wiesel,
still trying to remain
adult and reasonable.
"Yes, but in the Holo-
caust only Jews died
because of their religion.
Not all victims were
Jews, but all Jews were
victims."
"A lot of people have
suffered from geno-
cides," Lori interjected.
"The Armenians. The
Cambodians. The Bosnians."
Then Gail said she still lives with
the fear that it could happen again,
and she always keeps a suitcase
packed, her passport in it. And Lori
told how her mother fled her village
in 1948 on a bus in the middle of the
night with only the clothes she was
wearing. "Should my family have
had to lose their homes?" she . -
demanded.
And Gail, whose father survived
Auschwitz, whose half-brother sur-
vived execution when his young
mother pushed the 5-year-Old into a
pit of the already dead and dying just
before she herself was shot, demand-
ed, "Should my family have had no
place to go?"
Lori responded, "Gail, do you
think you are the only ones who suf-
fered? Not only do I understand your
suffering, but I've experienced it in
the same magnitude. I want to
understand you, and you to under-
stand me. We can move forward, but
how can we accomplish that without
openness?"
We had ripped past our trendy
clothes and civil facades. The beliefs
we all hide in such civilized ways
erupted. In that room of mustard
yellow walls, fluorescent lights and
Formica tables, the power of history
was alive and painful. Fifty years
after the last Jews were freed from
Auschwitz, almost 50 years after the
last bus carrying young Palestinian
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