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14 December 2004
The Confederate capital
I returned from a delightful trip to Richmond, VA visiting my cousins. I had made it a point to start on a book concerning the American Civil War at about the same time I embarked on the trip and that made my Richmond experience all the richer. The book titled Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency is an intriguing look into the 1864 Lincoln re-election campaign. While I have not ploughed through much of the book I have read enough to observe of Lincoln as an astute and principled man fully meriting mention amongst the greatest to have lived. The Richmond trip also included a visit to Washington, D.C and perhaps it was because I had not seen its downtown yet but I thought it easily the most beautiful major city I have visited in the United States. I do have to grant that I have yet to see much of San Francisco which I have heard has often been described equally gratifyingly but what appealed to me about Washington, D.C was its rich historic charisma. We had parked our car in Potomac Park and had decided to walk through the points of interest in the city. Our first stop was at the Lincoln memorial -- a rather grand construction comprising of an imposing statue of the president looking beyond towards the Washington monument and further towards the Congress. The walls were engraved with the Gettysburg address and Lincoln's second inaugural speech both of which were very moving. I had read of the speech in the book as comprising of 271 words and finished in two minutes in sharp contrast to the two hour grand speech prepared and read out by distinguished orator Edward Everett who later remarked, rather perceptively and against the tide of heavy editorial criticisms, to Lincoln that he could not have captured the occasion better with his two-hour saga than how Lincoln had with his two-minute note modestly referred to as a few appropriate remarks.From the Lincoln memorial, away from the Reflecting Pool we headed on to stroll past the White House. There was a huge influx of "delegates" of neatly attired boys and girls as part of the National Young Leaders Conference that was staring at and walking past the White House at the same time. The lawns were neatly manicured and the fountains looked good. After the White House we went across the many letter streets over to the Holocaust museum going past the Treasury building, the Commerce building and the Agriculture building.
We were frisked at the entrance and I was even asked to drink some of the water I had taken with me by a large, imperious African-American woman. This was security not even practised at the airports but I realised its necessity once I went past the initial exhibits. Not being very fond of museums, I was skeptical as to what I was going to see at the museum. The permanent exhibits at the museum were chronologically organised into three levels starting from the third floor whose theme was the rise of Nazism. In it were an array of exhibits from a number of events that marked the rise of Nazism in a post-war barren Germany. Along with charting the rise of Hitler himself through the ranks of corporal to chancellor, the exhibits portrayed the fast deteriorating plight of the Jews and rising anti-Semitism. There were replicas of books that were burned during the Nazi ethnic cleansing, edicts and written proclamations of laws curbing their liberties and basic freedoms and passports with the necessary J insignia. One of those laws required Jews with names not "sounding Jewish enough" to maintain a middle name of Israel or Sara. There were relics of the one-day boycott of Jewish stores, the Kristallnacht and the uniform of a typical SA (Secret Service) soldier.
On the second level was an excruciatingly elaborate reconstruction of the methods of Jewish persecution that included shoes retrieved from concentration camps left behind from those that went into gas chambers and never returned, a complete assembly of a coach from one of the trains used to transport Jews and prisoners of war from various parts of Europe to concentration camps and collages of personal pictures and family photos retrieved from Jews who either had survived to tell their tale or had been persecuted in the Holocaust. Throughout the second level, there were tales told of the vast Jewish refugee crisis and how no nation was willing to step up their own immigration quotas to meet with the sudden inflow of refugees from the occupied parts of Europe. The first floor embodied the fall of Nazism, the liberation of mainland Europe by the Allied forces and the emancipation of what remained of the Jews in the concentration camps. The level had stories and biographies of many of the survivors and the brave civilian souls that risked their relative security to help rescue the Jews from going into concentration camps. One such entity was Raoul Wallenberg whose mysterious disappearance intrigued me. Mr. Wallenberg was a Swede and a representative of the War Refugees Board which was a commission set up by the United States in 1944 as an eventual acknowledgment of Hitler's intentions concerning the Jews. He was credited with having saved the lives of nearly 100,000 Jews and prisoners of war in Hungary by preparing Swedish fake passports and according them "diplomatic immunity" by constructing houses that he declared were part of Swedish territory. Soon after Hungary was liberated by Soviet troops however, Mr. Wallenberg went missing. It is believed that he was taken prisoner by the Soviet troops and ultimately died in Russia.
Something else that piqued my curiosity was how Sweden and Switzerland managed to maintain their neutrality through the war. Upon a little investigation, I found that Sweden's and Switzerland's policies of neutrality were differently ordained. There are varying views about the role and culpability of each in what transpired in Europe more than sixty years ago.
My first trip to D.C, and I hope there are many others, ended on that note. I do hope that on my next visit I get to see the National Archives and the Library of Congress. From one epic war, we moved to the centrestage of another. At Richmond, I had the splendid opportunity to visit the Hollywood Cemetery which has the (unique?) distinction of being the site of two presidential graves -- those of James Monroe and John Tyler and one Confederate presidential grave, that of Jefferson Davis. The cemetery is spectacularly situated atop a hillock overlooking the James river which looked rather grand with its steady currents flowing eastwards. All in all, it was a fascinating trip that also included treats from HBO, yet another viewing of Michael Madana Kama Rajan and finally an episode of Desperate Housewives that somewhat stole perspective from the museums and the cemeteries or perhaps lent it.
