Defragging the Brain

”The existence of forgetting has never been proved:  We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in?  That’s how it begins.  Then one morning, you open the refrigerator for some orange juice and find the sponge you were looking for last evening when you did the dinner dishes.  So far, it’s all a laughing matter, until one day, your husband tells you that in your hurry to keep an appointment that morning, you neglected to flush the toilet.  It never occured to me that the day would come when routine tasks once performed by rote, like locking the front door or sweetening the coffee, would require that I stay focused on the task.

My memory is sometimes so retentive, so obedient, so dependable; at other times, so bewildered, so tired, so not there.  Why is it that I can remember that Hattie McDaniel was the first black woman to win an Academy Award, but can’t tell you the name of any actor or actress who won an Oscar in the past few years?  And, how can it be that I remember my friend’s dress and her date for the senior prom fifty years ago, but can’t remember that I promised to bake a cake for her party next week. I can sing along to any Hit Parade song or Broadway Show from the 40’s through the ‘80’s.  I can even tell you the name of every song on every Neil Diamond album.  But when I read the headlines from the 2009 Grammys, my brain asks, “Who is Rihanna or Chris Brown?”

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could buy more memory for our brains, like we do for our computers?  I figure that the human brain is like the hard drive on my computer.  We should be able to clean it up, reorganize it, and throw away the clutter.  Then we would have made room for the new information that comes at us daily.  At the very least, we need to defrag the files, so that we can find the information more quickly. 

It’s so embarrassing when someone mentions that cute blond from Laugh In and I say, “I know, the one from Cactus Flower, the one who’s had too many lip injections.”  Sometime between the posing of the question and 3:00 in the morning, I’ll remember the name Goldie Hawn and be embarrassed that it took so long to make its way from my brain to my mouth.  I figure a good defrag of my brain would speed up the process by at least a few hours.

          One thing I am sure of.   Once something happens, it can’t unhappen.  Our brains have a way of holding on to the good times, the funny times, the sad times, all the events that make us who we are.  It saves and organizes all the facts we have learned along the way, all the music we have heard, the sunsets and storms we’ve seen and the fragrant smells of flowers, bonfires and cinnamon toast. We call this memory.  Memory is the compartment of our brain that stores the past, all the things we never want to lose. Where I left my cell phone doesn’t seem to fall into that category.  

          Scientists tell us there is a physiological reason for failing memories past age 50.  Without getting too technical, short term memory is stored in a different part of the brain than long term memory; and the short term area is less stable, more likely to be affected by medications, distractions, and lack of concentration, even something as simple as a lack of Vitamin B-12.  There is limited space in the area where short term memory resides, so every time you add something to an already full short term memory space, an older fact is deleted

One report suggests that when you have something very important that you really need to remember, you should say it out load a couple of times.  I’ve tried it and it works.  But now people are staring at me and wondering why I’m talking to myself in Publix.  Not only talking ... I’m even repeating myself.  But I don’t care.  At least I’m not forgetting to pick up the oatmeal.

Diamonds Are Forever

Written in 2004 after a family trip to Leipzig Germany.  – published in several newspapers and magazines.

Diamonds Are Forever

A reflective essay about returning to Germany

by Renée Snyder

      

      “Achtung bitte”, a soft female voice announces over the speaker system in the Frankfurt airport.  These are the first German words I hear spoken on German soil and the utterance stings a bit, as though it has been spoken by an SS officer in a movie.  Can’t they find another word instead?  After an hour of several more announcements initiated the same way, the words no long bite, as I board the plane for Leipzig ready for my personal evolution of tolerance and acceptance.

      I had expected that I would never step foot on German soil again, but three years ago, something changed.  In my role as family chronicler, I recognized my special duty as the guardian of our family history.  Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to just preserve it in a book.  I needed to see it for myself.   I wanted to see the city my parents called the “diamond of Germany”, and I needed to be able to see it through the eyes of my sisters and brothers, since I was just a child when we left in 1939.   The city that once expelled us has now invited us back.

      Our plane approaches Leipzig/Halle airport, flooding me with a dichotomy of excitement and trepidation.  My mind wants to be open and receptive, but I fear my heart won’t follow and my animus towards Germans will interfere with my objectivity.

      The moment we arrive and are greeted at the airport with a long-stemmed rose, and a warm welcome from Thomas, the coordinator of the EinladungsProgram, my fears begin to fade.   Thomas explains that we are part of a group of forty-two Jewish people who left Leipzig because of fascism.  Nine members of the group are my family of five siblings, some spouses and a nephew.  The other thirty-three people came from all over the world, and like us, many of them are back on German soil for the first time in sixty-five years. 

      The airport is in a suburb, which gives us the opportunity for some sightseeing on the way to the hotel.  As we pass two automobile manufacturing sites, Thomas makes a reference to the GDR and points out that since reunification, Leipzig and its surroundings form one of the fastest-growing economic regions in Europe.  It is the first time I notice that East Germans count time from the reunification of Germany in 1990, much like survivors speak of “before the war” and “after the war”.

      The sight-seeing conversation is interspersed with some meaningful references to the program that is planned for us in the coming week.  "We want to show how Germany has changed.” Thomas tells us.  His contempt for the Fascism of the 30’s and 40’s seems equal to ours albeit for different reasons, and his love affair with Leipzig reminds me of my parents’ affection for their diamond city.  My feelings of apprehension are turning to raw anticipation.

      As we approach the Marriott Hotel we pass Leipzig's Train Station.   The Hauptbanhoff has long been famous for being the largest railway station in Europe and a major transfer point for trains to just about anywhere, even though the station is a dead end, meaning trains pull in and then must back out.  My mind flashes a picture of trains filled with people on their way to concentration camps, but I quickly return to the present as we are told that the station also features three floors of underground mall.  This combination of railway hub and crowded mall creates staggering foot traffic in front of the station.  

      I wonder, “Is there anyone in Leipzig who might remember a family named Katz that used to live here in the 1930’s?”   Probably not; but one of the advantages of returning with a group of former Leipzig residents is the opportunity to find these connections through them.    On our first day of touring, we stop at the memorial to the Napoleonic Battle of Leipzig, where the group exits the bus to view the superb panorama of Leipzig’s city center.  My sister starts a conversation with a nearby woman and asks her name.  When the woman answers, Mary's heart begins to race as she asks a few more questions, locates the woman’s husband and queries, “What is your name?”?”

      “Hans Last” he replies.

      “Ich bin Mary Katz” my sister divulges.

      “Marichen” he screams, with uncontrollable excitement.

Hans was liberated from Auschwitz in 1945, one of only two surviving members of the family that lived on the same floor, in the apartment next to ours at 41 Nordstrasse. 

      “Your cousin Wolkowitz? … Did he survive?” Hans enquires about his childhood best friend.

      “See the tall man over there”.  Mary points to David standing a short distance away.

      “And Wolf, where is he?”  Hans asks, referring to his other close friend.

      “Over there.” Mary responds, designating my brother Billy.

        “We’re all here, together”, spreading her arms to include my other sister and me who are standing alongside.

      “You must be HelaLili” he says to Helen, and then turning to me he puts his hands in front like a fisherman displaying the size of his catch,  and with unbridled nostalgia he indicates the size of an infant, and declares ” little Regina”. 

      Hans had come all the way from Australia, hoping to find someone from his past to connect him to his early life and the wonderful times he had before Hitler’s regime destroyed life for every Jew in Germany.  The excitement is indescribable.

     

      During the first tour of the city, I am surprised by Leipzig's beauty.  I had preconceptions of a shabby, socialist metropolis marred with scars of WWII and grayed by it’s domination by the Soviet Union, but the refurbished city center and its magnificent historical buildings have an aura of charm and splendor.  We drive past Augustusplatz, which is unrivaled by any other area in Leipzig and is a fairly complete lesson in the architectural history of Leipzig.  The neo-Baroque Mende Fountain is a place where my father used to take the children to feed the pigeons and take family photos.  The north side of Augustusplatz is taken up by the new Leipzig Opera House, which replaces the structure seen in the background of our old family photos.  The new Leipzig Gewandhaus, which forms the southern side of Augustusplatz, is closely associated with Leipzig’s international status as a city of music.

      The University of Leipzig also has its home in Augustusplatz.   Since its creation in 1409, it has been home to many important people, most notably Goethe and our Aunt Mary who graduated from the University of Leipzig in the early 1920’s, one of the few Jewish women in attendance here at that time.   The bus takes us past the Mendelssohn Conservatory of Music.   We inquire if this is the same building that was the conservatory in the 1920’s, and the affirmative response confirms that this place is where Tante Gina and Onkel Abraham studied piano and violin, before their lives were cut short at Auschwitz in 1942. 

      Near the site of Augustusplatz is the oldest and largest church of Leipzig, the St. Nikolai Church.  It was here that the peaceful revolution began which paved the way for the liquidation of the communist regime and finally to German unification in 1990;  and it is here that a church leader heads an organization that is involved in actively bringing Jews and Jewish life back to Leipzig - a notion that boggles my mind. 

      Old family photos taken in front of our house, with the St. Michael’s church in the background, give us a landmark to guide us to the proper location of the place where we used to live.  We walk the five long blocks in the direction of the church steeple, looking for something familiar, but the area preceding our block is completely new, an indication that this area had been badly bombed during the war.  When we arrive at the vicinity of our home, we see many buildings that look similar to the one we lived in, but our house on the corner has been destroyed by the WWII bombings.  In its place is a Nursery School, sheltered by a piece of wall, painted with beautiful graffiti, which remains standing from the original building.  We continue walking to the next block where David lived with his parents in the same building with our grandparents.  The building is being renovated and is covered with scaffolding, but nothing can keep us from approaching the entrance.

      As we stand at the front door of 49 Nordstrasse, peering into the window, to the carved banister of the staircase leading to the second floor apartment where my grandparents had lived, I think about how my parents hid under that staircase on the morning after Kristallnacht, when they ran the short block from our house to this house to get my grandparents to safety; only to find the SS men, with guns drawn, already pounding on my grandparents’ door, ready to ship them to Poland.   David steps back to indicate the room that was his bedroom and then points to the glassed-in atrium style room on the corner of the building.  He remarks that our grandfather had kept his sewing machine in that room, but Mary recalls that room as our grandparents’ bedroom.   None of us worry about the discrepancies in their recollections. 

      One evening, there is a concert given in our honor at the Alte Handelsbörse, (The Old Stock Exchange) a gilded baroque structure.   The orchestra conductor announces they will be playing the music that was being played in Leipzig during the 20’s and 30’s; the room swells with the universal language of music and we are all swept away to another time. Mary nods in agreement when I whisper, “Mother used to sing this song”, and Billy sways to the strains of The Blue Danube Waltz which never sounded so rich or more fitting.  I look over at David, whose father was the orchestra conductor at the Crystal Palace Hotel, and I realize that this is exactly the music that Uncle Abraham must have played for the dinner guests in the 1930’s.  

      One day we shop in the magnificent city arcade Madler Passage and have lunch at Auerbachs Keller, where Goethe used to dine. Another day we stop for lunch in a restaurant that was frequented by the composer Mendelssohn. We make a trip to the St. Thomas Church, where Johann Sebastian Bach flourished as the organist and choirmaster.   At the site of the former Temple which my family attended, we visit the memorial to the 14000 Leipzig Jews who were killed during the holocaust.  We admire the original floors with their Mogen David pattern in the building which formerly housed the Carlebach School, the only school available for Jewish children during the Nazi regime.   We attend Shabbat services, banquets, meet with dignitaries, playfully kibitz with waiters and converse with shopkeepers.  We are enjoying the city, its history and its people without the intrusion of any more ghosts from the past.

      Towards the end of the week, we are invited for a group visit with the mayor.  After some poignant speeches, we are all asked to sign the city guest book, an honor that is extended only to visiting dignitaries.   I am deeply stirred by the Mayor’s comments, and moved to tears by the ceremony to sign the “Golden Book”.  The others in the group seem to be equally emotional and I realize how much healing and closure has occurred over the past week. 

      The Rotary Club arranged for us to be invited to the homes of some Leipziger citizens for dinner and friendly conversation.  Our hosts are a retired, world renowned orchestra conductor and a concert violinist, and the evening is filled with intoxicating conversation. Horst talks of how his travels allowed him to see that citizens in other countries had personal freedoms not granted to East Germans and tells of his involvement in the peaceful demonstrations of 1989.  His fascinating stories are filled with his profound love for music, liberty, and Leipzig.  By the end of the evening, we are making plans to get together again in Florida next December.  

      The last day of our trip, we are taken in groups of two to speak to school children about our holocaust experiences.   We take turns telling short anecdotes about our escape from Germany and what life was like for our families during that time.  Soon the teens begin to ask questions about how it feels to be a stranger in a new land and what it is like to be persecuted.   I ask if they have witnessed any sort of discrimination in their school.  They don’t even understand the word.  These children of parents who were educated by the Russians don’t understand segregation or social distinction, a characteristic of being East Germans.  Before we leave the school, one of the teachers takes us down the hallway to a display of a class trip to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.  Among the photos and descriptions, I find several original poems written by some of the students and I am moved by their sensitivity to the horrors of the holocaust.  Mostly I am touched by their strong desire to try to comprehend how such atrocities could have happened.

      I have no answers for the children, and no explanations for myself.  I can’t understand how the ideology of a madman was allowed to flourish, or how I could have returned to this country and made friends with its citizens.   Before this trip it would have seemed unimaginable to me that Jews are again settling in Germany and re-establishing Jewish communities here.   What seems unthinkable today is the often virulently negative comments from many Americans about Germany and my decision to visit there.  

      Leipzig is a city that invites one to take advantage of freedom and experience self-realization. They call this "Leipziger Freiheit".  Like my parents, who referred to pre-Nazi Leipzig as the “diamond of Germany”, Leipzigers still view their city in grand terms with perhaps a touch of arrogance.  Like a diamond found in the smoldering ashes of destruction, the city is being re-polished into a brilliant gem.   Refining and burnishing it to exceed its previous luster and elegance, the citizens are like jewelers who understand that diamonds are timeless treasures with history and urbanity; and Leipzig is just that.

Copyright 2004 © Renée Snyder

What This Country Needs Is A Good Five Cent Nickel

A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. - Senator Everett Dirksen

         

           It was little more than fifty years ago that the fictional John Beresford Tipton became famous for giving a million dollars, tax free, to a worthy individual, while the country watched the ensuing drama in the form of a weekly TV show.  It was hard then to put our arms around a million dollars, when salaries and expenses were so much smaller than the numbers we’ve become accustomed to in the 21st century.   To put things in perspective, in the early fifties, a college graduate, from a good university, could be offered $45 per week for his first job.  Minimum wage was 75 cents an hour and that was thought to be approximately one third of the average wage in the United States.   

          According to a survey from a well respected market research firm, the number of millionaires in the U.S. has grown to roughly 8 million, roughly 3% of the population.  Even more astounding, according to Forbes, there are presently more than 400 billionaires here, headed by Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates, and the majority of the ultra rich were born between 1952 and 1957. The word, “billion” is thrown around so much, we’ve become accustomed to hearing budgets and buyouts in the multiple billions, without really understanding the meaning of all those zeros.

          A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases. They asked us to think of a dollar in terms of time.  A billion seconds ago it was 1959.   A billion minutes ago it was the first century of our calendar. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age and a billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.   Now take a look at our national budget.  At the rate our government was spending money in 2008, a billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes! And that was before the current financial crises requiring even more government spending.

          So if John Beresford Tipton offered you a billion dollars, which you would only be able to spend after counting to a billion, consider this.  If it takes a second for each number (which is a little unrealistic), then it would take about 24 hours to count to 86,400. One can count to a million in less than half a month, but it will take more than 30 years to count to a billion.

          Now, consider this... In a blink of an eye, our understanding of the concept of a billion dollars has become almost irrelevant, because the word trillion has crept into every day language and budgets.  That's 12 zeroes to the left of the decimal point.  It would take a military jet, flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills. 

          The National Debt continues to increase more than $4 billion per day!   It might not be very long when a child says good night to his mother stating “I love you a gazillion quadrillion” and the Mother will be able to comprehend the scope of the number.