I looked outside the bus and began to think about Truth and the phrase slight of hand entered my consciousness. I was always impressed with the magician’s trick of the coin, appearing in one hand, and then somehow the coin appearing in the other (I fool rather easily as you can see). I thought of this Truth, whenever someone tries to articulate just what is true, what is just, what is right in much the same way. I am currently reading a biography of Louis Brandeis, and thought of the observation of his biographer that for the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice and early Zionist leader, the most important aspect of the lawyer’s work is to master the facts as is possible. To understand the client and the law, most important was to understand the set of circumstances, be they business, personal, or whatever the subject that brought her or him to the office was most important to become thoroughly immersed. This was no simple task. For example when it came to understand situations involving large railroad companies, and appropriate rate setting to serve the public good and the shareholders at the same time, Brandeis took his time in understand as much as he could about how the company went about its business.

So the lawyer, after immersion into all of this, arrives at those laws that she or he best represents his client (for Brandeis serving the public good and what was best for his or her client were not a mutually exclusive enterprise).

As I reflected on this, I thought, well that is all well and good. But isn’t the lawyer on the other side doing the very same thing. Taking all the facts, marshalling them, and presenting the case in light of the law, hoping for an entirely opposite result.

Who is ultimately right? Of course, one could say that a Judge has the final say, but as we all know, the Judge may be right in the sense of the exercise of power to decide, but could be wrong on an entirely different level. This leads me back to Auschwitz.

Judgment at Nuremburg presents the ambiguity of Truth and Justice. Serving one’s country and in the course of one’s duty must do acts that are morally repugnant on an entirely different scale. So, if that is what I am saying, then we are saying that Truth and Justice are relative.

This is on the road to Auschwitz. My thoughts then turned to the story of a German Offficer who fell in love with a beautiful young Jewish Woman at Auschwitz II Birkenau. This was no ordinary attraction. He grew to love her deeply. He expressed this love for her in two ways. The first was to make her life as comfortable as possible. I believe, this is all from memory in a book, that he set her up to work in Canada, a place so called at Auschwitz because it was believed that Canada was very wealthy. This was the place where all the wealth and belongings of the Jew, all valuables, were taken to for sorting, cataloging, and ultimately used by the Germans. If you could imagine, 1,200,000 Jewish men, women, and children will die there, each of them taking belongings, the task of sorting out the valuables, cataloging the, and so forth was quite extensive. Those assigned there would have it easier than the others as the labor was not crushing and they were better fed. This German officer, I believe his name was Franz, made sure that she was taken care of.

Here is the most remarkable part of the story. One day, a transport arrived from the town of this young woman and on it were members of her family, I believe her mother. Franz personally went into the gas chamber and pulled members of her family out before they were gassed.

It is a beautiful story on one level, and yet troubling on another. What do we make of anyone who participates in genocide or for that matter deliberately hurting another person, for whatever reason? Should Franz have been tried for war crimes, crimes against humanity, or is Truth and Justice more ambiguous. Who can make these judgments? Who is entitled to make them – can I, can the victims, or our ancestors who fought the battle, won the war, yet failed to bomb the railroad tracks to stop the genocide when they had all the proof necessary (were you aware that the 1/3rd of that 1.2 million perished during the last six months (I am told three) of the war – that is the Jews from Hungary, where over 400,000 Jews lost their lives? Truth and Justice I feel become almost crushed under such a weight of souls lost in the gas chambers and crematoria.

As I write this I find myself asking and perhaps someone knows this, were the manufacturers of the Zykon B, the gas used in those chambers? Does anyone remember the name of the company or its officers? Should they have been prosecuted and sentenced to death as was Rudolf Hess, the commandant at Auschwitz?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I do know this. We need, we as human beings, must believe in something higher than the relative Truth and Justice that we as human beings must always strive to achieve, yet we never achieve it. Truth and Justice are complex, often ambiguous at our meagre level of understanding at best. I have a “crutch” as it were whenever I am faced with such decisions, and I am, as we all are, and that is would I have a satisfactory response to God were I to be so asked by the Divine? I know, or at least I believe, that G-d does not “act” on this level, yet for me it is helpful.

I know that participating with these young men and women is good for me and that there is some purpose, some meaning, in this as we continue to struggle with the unimaginable suffering that occurred as our transport of choice now, 68 years later after the liberation of Auschwitz, headed to this place that represents the ultimate injustice that I am yet to encounter in my lifetime. Perhaps it is why I went back there yet again. It was to acknowledge the lives of those who preceded, who gave so much to those (their immediate descendants who made it out or survived the war) who taught me, who have given me such a beautiful life. It is perhaps to say thank you, time and time again, to a people who gave so much and died. It is to tell them their death was nothing compared to what they gave to us, to the world, and that it lives on for those of us who are there to acknowledge that they are remembered and loved. I believe in my heart that there is Truth in this and perhaps some Justice that they are elevated and that the perpetrators are despised and will be forever by good and decent people. This is a Truth and this is a Justice.

Yesterday, Van Cliburn, one of the most celebrated concert pianists in history passed away. When I was six years old, I began to take piano lessons. My father, z”l, was insistent that his children be musical, as he was quite the trumpet player, having studied with John Phillip Sousa’s first trumpeter, Frank Simon, at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music just before the outbreak of the Second World War. At the time that I had begun my lessons on our Gulbrandson spinet piano, Van Cliburn had triumphed, winning the 1st Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, then held in Moscow under the Soviet Union. For an exercise in humility, watch the Youtube of his historic performance. He returned to New York to a ticker-tape parade.

One year after his victory, my father enrolled me in the after school program at the St. Louis Conservatory of Music. He had continuously exposed us to classical music and I will never forget when he brought home the RCA recording of Van Cliburn’s performance of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 performed at Carnegie Hall with Kiril Kondrashin as the conductor. At first, I did not like it all, for I was far more enthralled with the likes of Gershwin and his Concerto in F than with this music that began with such a simple theme and then became increasingly complicated; not enough melody for this nine year old boy, except that ‘boring’ little phrase at the beginning. I truly did not understand it and did not connect to it at all. However, over time, thanks to my father’s incessant behavior of putting the record on for me to listen, nearly every Sunday afternoon, over and over again, I began to understand. Much later on in life, whenever I would go for a run in training for marathons, I would put that record on in my head (the ipod had not yet been invented) and when it finished, I was about 43 minutes always into my run. It was a wonderful way to pass away the time, the adrenalin rushes from the music, the uplifting themes, the demonic aspects, all of it to this day remain forever etched in my consciousness.

As an aside, very early on, any hopes that I had of becoming a concert pianist quickly subsided when I listened to others play; even those of my own age. I did not have even the rudiments of the “gift.” It would take me forever to get the music into my fingers (a phrase used by pianist Sally Pinkus once when I was talking to her about how she memorized these great works). Moreover, I was far too emotional in my playing. Whenever I tried to play at recitals or for anyone, my hands would simply shake uncontrollably; not a good foreshadowing if someone wanted to fulfill the following terrible joke. A man walking in the streets of New York, asks another, “How I get to Carnegie Hall? The man responds, “Practice.” No amount of practice would ever get me to that level. It was true then as it is today for me. However, this never deterred me from listening and being moved by the music.

Later on, while a teenager in Chicago (we had moved), I became a concert pianist aficionado, and overtime I saw the likes of Horowitz (twice), Ashkenazy, Dichter, and others whose names escape me. At Orchestra Hall, there was a Sunday afternoon piano series and I would often take the L Train (the Lake Street L for those from Chicago) down to Michigan Avenue to buy the tickets, often waiting in line.

The true inspiration for all of this, was Van Cliburn. After I had first moved to Oak Park, Illinois, I learned that Van Cliburn was coming to, of all places, Concordia College, a Lutheran College, in River Forest, Illinois. It was about three to four miles from the High School. I was so excited that I called Concordia and spoke to a woman, who was impressed, but told me that tickets would soon be gone. She promised that if I came there, by the end of the day, she would hold a ticket for me. This was in the morning – somehow I had managed in-between classes to use a pay phone and called.

Chicago was then known for its unpredictable weather and on that particular day, there was a terrible snowstorm. Nonetheless, I walked the 3 miles up Lake Street, making a right on Harlem Avenue to Augusta Avenue and then left onto August and into River Forest; another half-mile or so and on the north side of the street was the College. I barely made it in time.

When I arrived, I was drenched in snow and a little cold. The woman and I began to talk about Van Cliburn. I told her of my ‘relationship’ to this artist, and she must have sensed how excited I was to go to this recital. I paid for the ticket and she said for me to wait, that she had to get something. She said, “I want you to have this.” It was a ticket to go backstage for an after concert reception to meet the artist that was obviously for very special people (i.e. big donors and supporters of the College).

The concert was on a weekday evening. My seat was in the center of the balcony. The hall was filled to capacity. I sat back and if memory serves me correctly, he played an entire recital of Chopin. Of course, it was so very moving and ovation after ovation filled the audience at the end of every piece. Even from the nosebleed section where I sat, one could see the very large hands, the thin fingers, and the grace at which he played. I had never seen or even heard anything like that before and perhaps since. There was power to his playing to be sure and a moving gentleness as well; a sight of grace.

However, the most memorable moments for me were yet to come. After the concert, I went backstage and the kind woman, who handled the tickets, introduced me to Van Cliburn. I was a fourteen year-old, awe-struck really, by this person. This man, who had conquered the Soviet Union, bridged the cold-war, had received standing ovations in concerts all over the world, and whose recording of the Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 3 I had now committed to memory, was standing right in front of me. What did he do? He graciously extended his hand to shake mine and said, “So very nice to meet you.” When I extended my hand eagerly in response, he took his other hand covered the entirety of my hand easily, as if I was someone he had known before, like an old friend. I still remember it to this day; his warm smile, his graciousness, his gentleness shown to this young boy who had just moved and had very few friends. It was one of those moments in a person’s life you never forget.

I followed his career, his personal triumphs, his retirement, his return to Russia to play and the critics who often said he needed to do less concertizing and more study. However, two things stand out.
First, he was the true “rock star” of that age and introduced many, many people besides me, to the great classics who might never have listened to the likes of Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev, were it not for him and in my case, a father’s exercise in ‘tyranny’ on a Sunday afternoon.

His gender orientation perhaps today would have been more easily accepted than in his own time. As long as it was kept private, and he was a private man to be sure, he could enjoy the enormous responsibilities that come with such fame, notoriety, as well as the burdens and that come with transcending one’s art and one’s time in history.

As beautiful and as wonderful as his pianism, the touching of the heart, his graciousness and his love for everyone that he encountered were equal to the beauty of his playing. He gave these gifts to the world, and especially to a young, lonely boy, who, years later, still remembers the touch and embrace of his hands; hands that were the conduit to the greatest of composers the world has ever known. His smile and his love for each soul, large or small in stature, is something that I learned on that beautiful night, so long ago. In our tradition, we say “May his Soul be Bound in the Bonds of Eternal Life.” May it be forever so for a man who gave so much to make the world a beautiful place for all.

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