Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Jay Ipson: The Original Survivor, Part 3
NARRATIVE 1
2:30
Trains rattle past with regularity. A whistle burst, the rhythmic clanking of box cars rolling down the tracks to deepwater ports. They run parallel to the Kanawha Canal, which in turn runs alongside the James River. The trains whiz past on an elevated rail at eyelevel with the high ground where the old tobacco warehouses stand. Many of them have been converted into loft apartments and chic condominia. But the one I find myself in front of is still stark. A three story brick building occupying a full city block. It sports massive arched windows sealed behind an armor of green shutters. They’re permanently closed. On the southeast corner of the building there’s a slab of grey granite mortared among the bricks that bears the legend—The American Tobacco Company, 1899, CLIMAX. Here’s where American industry packaged slow death in the form of lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease, for the better part of a century. It was all legal, of course, taxed and sanctioned by the government.
Directly in front of this old warehouse is a cattle car resting on a spur line, it’s the same sort of cattle car that was used in Europe during the Second World War to carry human cargo to places like Buchenwald, Aushwitz, Mauthausen, Birkenau. There’s another whistle burst, clanking of steel wheels on steel rail. This is the Virginia Holocaust Museum. It’s my third time here in as many weeks and I’m meeting again with Jay Ipson, the man who created this place.
At ten years old Jay Ipson had already survived a lifetime of horror. First the Holocaust, then Soviet domination of his native Lithuania. He’d lived in an underground lair in total darkness for six months with a dozen other members of his family. He had seen his grandparents and aunts and an uncle deported to Riga, Latvia, where the Nazis exterminated them. After the liberation Jay survived the long trip to the new promised land. And once there, he even survived adolescence. He was a stranger in the strangest region of this strange land—the American South. This was in the late 1940s and attitudes here were parochial at best. Outsiders, particularly foreigners, weren’t readily accepted by many. He had few friends as a boy. Still, his father found a way to make a living. When Jay was in his early twenties he wedded Elly. They’ve been married fifty years now, have grown children. Life has been good, in the main, but Jay’s early experiences branded his memory with indelible scars.
(ACT 1)
2:43
(from Jay Ipson, 2; Track 3, 2:58-5:00)
I guess I’m unusual. I don’t hate. I don’t love, but I don’t hate. If I come across the person that I personally saw kill my grandparents I would be enraged, but basically I’m an unhappy person. I don’t find any humor when somebody falls off a chair and ends up bouncing on the ground. I don’t see anything humorous to it. A lot of people think it’s funny. I don’t find a lot of humor in many things. That’s what this situation has turned me into. A person that doesn’t sleep well at night, a person that’s sad, a person that’s emotional, a person that always looks behind him. So it’s not hate, but it’s a different emotion. I’m driven. I’m driven to the fact that I can’t be as good as anybody else, I have to be better. I have to be better just to prove that I’m as good as anybody else. I have to get up early in the morning so I get up before everybody else. (You’ve always done that, too?) I’ve always done
(from Jay Ipson, 2; Track 4, 0:00-0:29)
Done that. I need to drive but I don’t want to be driven.
(You say you’re unhappy?”
Yeah
(But you don’t seem unhappy?)
I don’t show it. But inside I am.
(You weep inside.)
I weep inside.
(from Jay Ipson, 2; Track 4, 0:44-0:56)
I was eight and a half when I was pulled out of line and I left them because I wanted to go to my father. Your father after all is closer than your grandparents.
NARRATIVE 2
0:15
From his experiences Jay has developed a sort of sixth sense, a certain watchfulness. His antenna are always trained on his environment, and when he finally dreams, he’s cast back into those times in Lithuania during the holocaust.
ACT 2
1:25
(from Jay Ipson 2; Track 5, 0:02-1:27)
For those of us that lived through it, not every body, but a lot of us we can feel it. (You can sense it.) We can sense it, it’s like a built in alarm. And I know for somebody that’s never had that feeling it’s hard to believe. (I can believe it.) I only, for many years, it’s only in the past ten fifteen years that when I fall asleep I don’t hear anymore what’s going on in the house, but up to that point I used to sleep so lightly that if one of my kids walked across the house I could hear it. Or if they were late coming in from a date I didn’t have to sit in the chair I could be asleep, but I knew when they came in I could feel the change. Now when I fall asleep I mean I’m asleep but I dream and I wake up four or five times a night. And that’s when you see things in the museum here most of that stuff happened at night. All of a sudden I would dream and a section would come back to me because something else triggered it during the day and I’d make a note. And in the morning of course I’d remember the incident and I could develop the exhibit.
NARRATIVE 3
:20
These exhibits are what breathe life into the Holocaust Museum of Virginia. You are there. The sights and the sounds transport you to one of the most horrific times in human history. It is both memorial and reminder, but more than that it is an institution of learning. Here people can learn to think for themselves in a critical manner. Not as if they are wildebeests driven by herd mentality.
ACT 3
2:12
(from Jay Ipson, 2; Track 1, 1:19-1:46)
Well it’s human behavior not to go against the crowd but with the crowd.
(My Daddy, God love him, he was only sixty-eight when he died. He used to say life is not a popularity contest that you have to do what you know is right regardless what anybody else thinks.)
That’s correct.
(from Jay Ipson, 2; Track 1, 1:54-2:07)
It’s upbringing keeping your eyes open and experience. Now everybody knows following the crowd must be safe, but is it.
(from Jay Ipson, 2; Track 1, 2:19-2:24)
Go right over the edge follow the rest of them it must be good he just went there.
(from Jay Ipson, 2; Track 1, 2:34-4:01)
There are some people that right or wrong this is what I belong to, this is what I’m gonna do. If John is a friend of mine and he say it’s safe but I’m not sure I’ll take John’s word for it because he must know what he’s talking about. Until I definitely know hey John are you sure this gutter’s going to hold us up if we hang on it. I mean after all it could just be a façade with a couple of nails holding just for the gutter but our extra weight are you sure it’s going to support our weight or are we gonna fall off.
(So can you change that part of man.”
Education.
(Which is obviously one of the reasons the Holocaust Museum exists in the first place.)
That’s the only salvation for humanity is education. Not necessarily reading the book but being able to analyze the errors in the book.
NARRATIVE 4
0:10
Jay Ipson worries that books, even those used by school children, are being written to misrepresent certain periods of history.
ACT 4
3:42
(from Ipson Tracks 2, from Track1; 4:02-4:24)
There are people now publishing books that are changing history and because it is written we accept it. The people that screen the books for our school system are skimming.
If they really would go into it thoroughly would find out on the news almost every morning and I see it where they’re talking about school books with tremendous errors in them, historical facts watered down, or the complete sentence, as I say complete paragraph is not there explaining what the situation was
(from Ipson Tracks 2, from Track 2; 0:02-3:22)
I will give you two quick examples. One, there’s a picture of me in line to be deported for execution with my grandparents which we talked about. A scholar said no that was not the selection you said it was, it was another selection. Well I was a young kid, my father always told me that this was the selection to Riga, Latvia. I wasn’t recording the dates and all this guy was a scholar he thought it was a different selection, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum recorded that picture as being a different selection so I say
well I must be wrong, so I changed it. Then I meet a gentleman from Atlanta and he says I have been selected to go to Rossbautem the IPPS project, the international tracing service, one of the scholars, I think I told you about that yesterday, and he says I’m gonna have x number of time to do something and I ask him to do me a favor look up my family the ones that were deported for execution and he did even though he had a stack of what to do he did me a favor, he did. And found the document of my grandparents demise in the same selection that I was in being deported to where I originally said that’s where I was (to Riga, Latvia) to Riga, Latvia) and I just got it on my desk, it’s now laying on my desk, cause I’m going to correct it back and I’m going to put that document as evidence because the Germans kept perfect records. And they showed where they were deported to Riga, Latvia and from Riga, Latvia to Klugar, Estonia where they were ultimately executed and the date of execution. Now, you can’t deny those facts.
ACT 5
4:15
Yet that’s what people do. They deny mass murder. Genocide is an odd word. Its roots are embedded in two languages—Greek and Latin. Genos means race, group, or tribe. Cide, of Latin origin, simply means killing. The word was coined in 1944 by a lawyer and Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin. He had witnessed what the Nazis had done to the Jews. And he knew this was not the first instance of this kind of wholesale slaughter.
Early last century Turks decided Armenians were somehow less than human beings. They arrested intellectuals, put them into forced labor camps, and gradually began rounding up and killing the remaining Armenians. They were driven into the desert where they died of exposure, thirst, hunger or brutal floggings. Before World War I there were an estimated 2 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, which later became known as Turkey. Fully two-thirds of these people were slaughtered by the Turks.
In the twentieth century alone as many as 200 million human beings have fallen prey to genocide. That’s four times the number of those killed in combat in all international and national wars fought during the same period. That includes both world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Civil War. In a seventy year period the Soviet Union exterminated more than 50 million people. The Khmer Rouge murdered 2
million Cambodians, fully one third of the civilian population. Out of some 60,000 Buddhist monks Pol Pot exterminated all but eight hundred. Ten million Chinese, under Mao-tse-tung, were starved to death in less than three years. In a little over 20 years Chiang-Kai-sheik, who headed up the Nationalist movement, murdered 10 million Chinese. During World War II Japanese militarists slaughtered six million civilians in China, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, Korea and the Philippines.
One of the earliest recorded acts of genocide is in the Torah. Yahweh himself ordered mass exterminations. “Thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canannites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.”
Between 1492 and December 29, 1890, more than 100 million native American Indians from Tierra del Feuego to Baffins Bay were killed in acts of genocide. It all started the moment Columbus landed. And it ended almost four hundred years later at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
The English have a long history of genocide. They slaughtered almost all aborigines when they expanded their empire into Australia. In Tasmania, they killed every single indigenous man, woman and child, more than 200, 000 in all. And here’s what they did in Ireland. There had been systematic purges for centuries. Under Queen Elizabeth I hundreds of thousands of the Irish were killed either by sword or starvation. Then came
Oliver Cromwell who unleashed his Puritan troops on the civilians of Drogheda. Of this massacre, he wrote, “I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.” Cromwell continued his butchery. William of Orange kept the heat turned up. He transplanted Scotsman into northern Ireland and took virtually all the Irish land in a period of a few years so the remaining indigenous people were reduced to working as tenant farmers. Then in the mid-19th century, when the potato crop failed, the British seized the opportunity and almost starved the Irish out of existence. Up to fifty shiploads of food per day was removed at gunpoint from Ireland. 12,000 British constables, an Army and a Navy saw to that. In five years nearly 2 million Irish people had been starved to death. Another one million left their homeland. When it was all over the population of Ireland was almost cut in half.
Power is a damnable thing. And it is the only condition absolutely necessary for mass murder. Once a government, no matter how seemingly benign, achieves unrestrained power, genocide in one form or other is sure to follow. Which is why checks and balances and freedom are all good things. Because in the end, government is the enemy of the people. And people frequently are their own worst enemies.
Not long ago, the world watched as Rwanda exterminated 800, 000 Tutsis and Hutus in a little over four months. And now, of course, there’s Darfur, and again the world is watching and waiting for God knows what.
ACT 5
1:43
(from Jay Ipson 2, Track 6; 3:21-3:25)
We know what’s going on over there, but does it bother you
(from Jay Ipson 2, Track 6; 3:53-4:15)
Most people could care less. . They see it on computers or maybe oh I’ve got so much email that’s another one I’ll just delete it.
Have you ever been to a demonstration about Darfur?
(Oh sure.)
Okay, I have too. How many people showed up?
(Not a lot.)
How come?
(from Jay Ipson 2, Track 6; 4:18-4:45)
It hasn’t hit our shore. There was more outrage on nine eleven where we lost three thousand but there you lost a couple of million but it wasn’t on our shores.
(Shouldn’t every human being, every concerned human being speak out against Darfur.)
Every concerned human being but are we concerned.
(from Jay Ipson 2, Track 6; 4:48-5:00)
How many people here in Richmond contribute to the Food Bank.
(Not a helluva lot.)
(from Jay Ipson 2, Track 7; 0:00-0:34)
Because they haven’t been hungry, they haven’t been cold. We complain when our power is off. Oh my God it’s cold, we’re freezing. How about the people that don’t have the money to pay for power and they’re cold. Anybody go over to see if maybe I can bring you a blanket. And that’s right here in our country, in our city.
NARRATIVE 6
0:10
Nazis killed his grandparents and other family members, but Jay’s own neighbors killed their share of Jews in the ghetto. It was a man of the cloth who led them.
ACT 6
2:05
(Jay Ipson 1; Track 10, 2:36-3:46)
But it wasn’t only the Nazis, our neighbors were killing us, they were led by a catholic priest, I’ve got his picture, I’ve got his name. He came to the United States, changed his name as a refugee a few years ago they found him here, deported him to Lithuania, and the Lithuanian government put him on a pension and he lived free and never served a day in jail and he served thousands. He was a Catholic priest that led the massacre of my community.
(A Catholic priest?)
A Catholic priest.
(Yet the two people who took you in)
Were Catholics.
(Who had conscience)
Who had conscience
They were illiterate too. Here this priest was an educated individual and all he did is preach hate. The Lithuanian community is a very religious, observant community.
(Jay Ipson 1, Track 10, 4:14-5:00)
(But how do you explain, you’ve got family, and you know what it is to have family you’ve got children and you don’t want anything to ever happen to your babies. Yet they were willing to put their lives on the line to protect another human family)
That’s correct.
(What does that tell you about the human spirit?)
That there are people that will risk all to save a neighbor or a friend. And there are more that will betray a neighbor and a friend.
(There are more that’ll betray than save?)
Right
(Is that true, is that your experience, finally?)
Yes.
(Really?)
(Jay Ipson 1, Track 11, 0:00-0:07)
(Why do you think that is?)
The bully will go along with the majority.
NARRATIVE 7
0:10
This is one of the reasons Jay is always scanning news stories. When he sees politicians trying to tear down the wall between church and state, he goes to battle stations.
ACT 7
2:15
(Jay Ipson 1, Track 16, 1:45-1:55)
If you’re not mindful and don’t watch and become proactive it can happen here.
(Jay Ipson 1, Track 16, 2:04-2:07)
All it takes is the right circumstances.
(Jay Ipson 1, Track 16, 2:30-3:33)
It’s been in the news what was it three months ago some police chaplain resigned because they couldn’t make a prayer the way they wanted to in a community setting. Now, how do I as a minority feel when I’m sitting with the majority and their prayer leaves me out, or belittles me. Is that equality. Yet there were legislators in our legislature that wanted to make that law. God is universal.
(Jay Ipson 1, Track 16, 4:30-4:47)
But when it comes down to it well my God is better than your God.
(MMMM. That’s holy wars.)
Exactly, but yet they tried to pass it in the Virginia General Assembly.
(Did you lobby against it)
You betcha.
(from Jay Ipson 1; Track 18, 0:32-1:10)
God is God. If you believe Jesus Christ is the son of God and he’s god, he’s still God. So it doesn’t make any difference. But most people who use Jesus Christ as their God or as God, do not stop to think well he was a Jew, how would he have felt as a minority sitting in the same congregation talking about another God.
(from Jay Ipson 1, Track 18; 1:17-1:28
People don’t realize that till his dying day he died a Jew, he did not die something else. (CELL PHONE music good interruption)
NARRATIVE 8
0:20
After answering his cell phone. It was a wrong number. Jay walks me out to the front lobby and then out to the street. The day is sodden. A train creeps by. He indicates the cell phone which he still holds in the palm of his hand and then he tells me about a teaching exercise he uses at the Holocaust Museum. It may be the most important lesson anyone will ever learn about humanity.
ACT 8
0:32
(Jay Ipson 2; Track 7 1:54-2:26)
I have a favorite thing that I do here with students and I discovered it by accident because right now almost every student that comes in here has a cell phone but they don’t know how powerful a tool that cell phone is. They know how to text message, I mean, they can really go on that thing. They know how to call their friends, but that’s all they know about that cell phone.
NARRATIVE 9
0:20
He’ll ask them how big their neighborhood is and when they tell him, he says are you sure. And they’ll nod. Then he says, Do you know what happens when you punch 14 digits on the key pad of this cell phone? They’re not sure so Jay tells them, It will take you somewhere else in the world. And the world becomes their neighborhood.
ACT 9
0:25
(Jay Ipson 2; Track 7, 3:14-3:22)
And when we start realizing that this is our neighborhood we’re going to start living different.
(Jay Ipson 2; Track 7, 3:44-3:51)
I can guarantee you one thing that every student that’s been through here his outlook on life has been changed.
(Jay Ipson 2; Track 7, 4:00-4:10)
But that one person is going to reach a lot of people.
(And they’ll understand that their community finally is the world.
That’s correct.
