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"A Touch of Green",,"While doing research in Nanjing, the capital city of Jiangsu province in China, I made a visit to a local neighborhood called Dafang Lane. There's no famous tourist spot here, but I was drawn to it by a Taiwanese TV series that I watched years ago -- A Touch of Green.
A Touch of Green is a 2015 TV series that is based on a novella of the same name by Pai Hsien-Yung, a phenomenal Chinese writer. The story unfolds the life of three Republic of China Air Force pilots and their wives from the Chinese Civil War period (1945-1949) to the White Terror period (1949 to 1987) in Taiwan. The story is not an ode to China's revolutionary past, but rather to the tumultuous and miserable lives of ordinary Chinese people who left their homeland and migrated to a new island after the KMT lost the Civil War in 1949. It is not centered on the bravery of the pilots or the strength of their wives. Instead, the drama portrays their anxiety and weariness over the war, their helplessness when confronting fate and history, and their grief over their loved ones' deaths. It touched me because it transcends macro-historical frameworks and narrates the bond, love, pain, and survival hardship of an ordinary group of people.
In the original novella, Dafang Lane is the military dependents’ village where the wives of the pilots resided. The old buildings still exist today, and there is a brief introduction on the wall explaining that they were constructed in the 1930s and are now protected historical sites in Nanjing. I walked around Dafang Lane, as if I was walking down the memory lane of modern Chinese history. The dripping sound of life echoed here, as I imagined how the wives of the pilots anxiously awaited their husbands' safe landing or their deaths. For me, the Dafang Lane is not just a place; it's also a humanities moment that intertwines the TV drama, the novella, and the untold history of a group of pilots and their families.",,"A Touch of Green (television series and novella by Pai Hsien-Yung)",,"May 2021","Jinghong Zhang, 26, history Ph.D. student",,,,,,touch-of-green,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"A Touch of Green,China,Families,Historic Sites,Historical Memory,History,Nanjing, China,Television Series,War",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/447/Dafang_Lane.png,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"“Il faut le savoir:” Reflecting on France’s Holocaust History and Memory",,"“Nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary blockhouse,” writes Jean Cayrol in the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ iconic filmic meditation on the Shoah, Night and Fog (1956). “Inside, a fake shower room welcomed newcomers. The doors were closed. The newcomers were observed. The only sign – but you must know this (il faut le savoir) – is the ceiling worked over by fingernails. Even the concrete was torn.” At this point in the film, like an insistent investigative eye, the camera pans to the ceiling of the gas chamber, revealing the telltale scratch marks. The image of fingernails clawing into concrete in a desperate attempt for survival recurs in another work about Holocaust memory that we read this semester, Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975). Recalling an exhibit he had visited with his aunt shortly after the war – the same one, in fact, that led producers to ask Alain Resnais to create the film that would become Night and Fog -- the child survivor narrator writes: “I remember photos showing the walls of the ovens, lacerated by the fingernails of those who had been gassed.”
Il faut le savoir. The phrase has haunted me throughout the semester. You must know this. Because it happened. Because many would deny that it did, depriving the victims of dignity and history of truth. Fingernail scratches in the crematoria walls of Auschwitz, asks the neo-Nazi website The Stormer? “Jewish mythology says ‘yes.’ Science says ‘no.’” You must know this, because soon there will be no more survivors, and those still alive often find it too painful, or shameful, to share their testimony, or else they have learned to suppress it so as not to trouble others. “No one wanted my memories,” writes Birkenau survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens in But You Did Not Come Back. You must know this, because 2/3 of young Americans, according to a 2020 national poll, lack a rudimentary understanding of the Holocaust. “Where did the Holocaust happen?” educator Rhonda Fink-Whitman asks a Penn State student in her 2012 documentary, 94 Maidens. “I have no idea.” You must know this, as Cayrol writes in Night and Fog, because “war is sleeping, but with one eye always open.” As I write, genocide continues to be perpetuated against the Muslim Rohingya people by the military in Myanmar. “Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners?”
But to know – and this is a second meaning of il faut le savoir -- one must be ‘in the know,’ know where to look, how to be on the lookout, how to decode the signs. You have to be tipped off to find the “Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation” (1962) tucked in a small square behind the behemoth of Notre-Dame Cathedral, just as you must be ‘in the know’ to be disturbed by the memorial’s identification of those deported from France as willing “martyrs” to a cause rather than victims of state persecution by both the Nazis and the Vichy regime. The French State headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain is nowhere mentioned in this memorial monument, yet it deported over 75.000 Jews from France to their deaths, along with, in smaller numbers, Roma, the disabled, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men and lesbians, and other ‘undesirables.’ Stroll around to the main façade of Notre-Dame to contemplate the two female allegorical figures framing it; only if you’re ‘in the know’ about the anti-Semitic underpinnings of European Christianity through the mid-20th century will you understand that one figure represents the Church triumphant, while the other, with downward cast, blindfolded gaze and broken Torah tablets at her feet, symbolizes the Synagogue. As only one photograph of this event remains, you need to be on the lookout for the tiny plaque at the foot of a bustling Parisian office building marking the site of the former Vélodrome d’hiver, an indoor bicycle track where over 11,000 Jews, including over 4,000 children, were packed for several sweltering days in July 1942 before being herded to their deaths. “A peaceful landscape,” writes Cayrol, “An ordinary field with flights of crows, harvests, grass fires. An ordinary road where cars and peasants and lovers pass. An ordinary village for vacationers – with a marketplace and a steeple – Can lead all too easily to a concentration camp.” Il faut le savoir.
“Every hour of every day,” writes Hélène Berr, a young upper-class French Jewish woman who survived a year in deportation before being beaten to death in Bergen-Belsen, “there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill. There are men wo know and who close their eyes, and I’ll never manage to convince people of that kind, because they are hard and selfish, and I have no authority. But people who do not know and who might have sufficient heart to understand – on those people I must have an effect.” Let us – we who in Primo Levi’s words “live safe in [our] warm houses,” armed with all we have learned this semester, make the “painful effort to the tell the story” to all those who will listen, “those with sufficient heart to understand.” Because the world must know. Yes, il faut le savoir.
","Jean Cayrol, Alain Resnais","Night and Fog (1955)",,"Spring 2021","Willa Z. Silverman, 62, Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Professor of French and Jewish Studies, Penn State University",,,,,,il-faut-le-savoir,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"From one of my graduate students at Penn State (Morgane Haesen, whose ""Moment"" you published)","Documentary Films,Emotional Experience,Film and Movies,Historical Memory,History,History Education,Holocaust,Memorials,Memory,Teachers & Teaching,War",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/433/syn-ecc_NotreDame1-296x300.png,Text,,1,0
"The Fish on Marchmont Street",,"I live and teach in Madison, Wisconsin, but I usually spend my spring break on a research trip in London, England. On a cold and drizzly day in March 2019, I was walking down Marchmont Street through London's Bloomsbury neighborhood on my way to the British Library. My head was down and I was busy thinking about the documents I would request at the archives, when I noticed what looked like a metal fish embedded in the sidewalk. As I kept walking, I noticed other oversized articles cemented into the walkway: a split coin, what looked like a compass, a winged heart connected to a pineapple, a diamond-shaped plaque with the initials M.S. In one case, a heart was inscribed with ""Meriah Dechesne, Born August 8th 1759.""
Soon, I came across a sign that explained these objects. These were enlarged replicas of historical tokens that mothers, usually young and poor, left when they abandoned their babies at the Foundling Hospital. The hospital took in babies given up between 1741 and 1954. Today, the Foundling Museum sits on the site, around the corner from the stretch of sidewalk where I noticed these tokens. The mothers were supposed to leave a small physical object with their babies to help them re-unite later, if possible. It was a kind of identification system or secret password. Only the mother and the Foundling Hospital would know that she had left her baby with a metal fish, for instance. As it turned out, reunifications were rare.
On my way to one of the world's most famous collections of paper documents, I was shown another kind of artifact from the past. These metal tokens were mementos of heart-break and loss, of lives spent apart because of poverty and social stigma, and of stories and people that were probably absent from the written records housed three blocks away. The metal fish and its companions were a quiet and understated form of memorial. They were flat, trodden upon by thousands of people every day, plain, and potentially unexplained for most pedestrians. But they created one of the most moving monuments I have ever seen. Because of them, I think about two centuries of desperate mothers and abandoned babies whenever I walk down Marchmont Street.
",,,,2019,"Mitra Sharafi, 47, legal historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison",,,,,,fish-on-marchmont-street,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"I am a NHC fellow in AY 2020-21.","Architecture,Archives,Historical Markers,Historical Memory,London, United Kingdom,Memorials,Museums",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/8/432/Fish_on_Marchmont_St_[photo_by_MS].jpg,Text,"National Humanities Center Fellows",1,0
"The Day the Star-Spangled Banner Played at Buckingham Palace",,"On September 13, 2001, the royal orchestra played the American national anthem during the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. This was two days after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers when many first responders and innocent bystanders lost their lives in the attack.
I watched this after a day of hearing stories about people I knew, from less emotional stories like the ones of my parents to the personal stories of those who lost loved ones. Both of my parents were working that day and rushed home when they found out, which they still remember, but they didn’t know anyone personally. But it is the stories of those who were there, or who actually knew people there at the time that really affect you. My psychology teacher, when prompted, told the story of a close family friend who had flown to New York for a business trip, only to lose his life during a meeting in one of the towers.
When I got home, I was already primed with the sadness of those involved and feelings of pride for my country and humanity in general, when I got home and as usual, checked my phone. I saw an Instagram story posted by a close friend of mine shortly after opening the app and heard the national anthem being played by a band. Only after reading the caption did I realize why this was so significant. The caption at the top of the video informed me that this was during the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace and that the Queen had asked the royal band to play this instead of the usual marching music the guards play. After learning this, I noticed how many American flags were being waved, and how many tears were being shed. This was an experience I’ll likely remember forever.
This affected me in multiple ways. The first of course is the pride for my country I felt. I wasn’t alive then, but I do know my history, and the time following 9/11 was one of the most unified times in history. There were people on opposite sides of the aisle working together, neighbors mourning with one another, and a strong sense of pride that the fourth plane was stopped by the brave Americans in it.
The other way it affected me, was the fact that this was happening in London. This in itself means a few things, the first is that the USA is a symbol of freedom. In Hong Kong during the recent protests, there were many American flags waved by those who were protesting for their freedom, and there are other examples of the United States being a symbol, but for now, I’ll tell you the other reason this is significant.
It also reminded me that we are all human, and go through a lot of the same trials as others. While I’m sure some of the people waving flags were American, I’m also certain that most of the people in that crowd weren’t from the states, and that most of the civilized world mourned during that time. There were many lives lost in the attacks and many people mourned for those they didn’t even know.
This tells me that humanity always has hope, but sometimes we need to be reminded that we are actually one people regardless of race, religion, or any other distinguishing factor. That’s part of what makes this country great, how it’s a melting pot of different cultures, and everyone who lives here can achieve their dreams with hard work. This tells me that we always have hope.
",,,,"September 11, 2019","Spencer Taylor, 18, Student",,,,,,day-the-star-spangled-banner-played,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"For a school project","Historical Memory,International Relations,Music Performance,National Anthems,Nationalism,September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/428/Buckingham_Palace_HM.jpg,Text,,1,0
"The “Infinitely Human”: Life Writings, Locks of Hair and Lived History ",,"Like fellow humanists, I struggled to pick a single moment to describe and share with you. However, while delving into my corpus (life writings – mostly diaries, autobiographies and memoirs - from the Franco-German borderland, Alsace-Lorraine, at the turn of the twentieth century), I am reminded of a unique moment I experienced when I discovered these documents in the archives.
In May 2018, the week after finishing my first year of the PhD program in the French and Francophone Studies Department at Penn State, I set out on my first archival trip to Strasbourg, France. Once in the archives, my curiosity and intellect were quickly at odds with my limited resources and time. In most French departmental archives, researchers are allowed to order and go through eight archival boxes per day. They usually contain part of a collection, and can range from several pieces of paper to several hundred documents. Moreover, not all boxes are described in the archive’s “finding aid” or databases. The nature of their contents sometimes requires an educated guess based on the limited information available to you. As such, with only a month in France, my research choices needed to be strategic: I had to single out the boxes I believed would contain the best documents to help in my research. One collection in particular piqued my curiosity as the archivists Virginie Godar-Lejeune and Marie-Ange Glessgen described it as having an “infinitely human quality.” While these writings fell out of my delineated period of study, I nonetheless decided to follow my dissertation committee’s advice to “listen” to the archives, indeed to avail myself of what Alsatian-Lorrainers had deposited at the archives instead of narrowly executing the search for my anticipated corpus: I requested the boxes in question.
After weeks of mechanically opening hundreds of envelopes and finding papers, postcards or greeting cards, I was quite taken aback when my fingers touched locks of hair. In addition to entire life papers (birth, marriage and death certificates, school grade reports, passports, and photographs), the boxes included locks of hair of every family member. Although I was aware of the practice of collecting children’s or spouses’ hair, I had quite a visceral reaction to seeing and touching it firsthand. The Lambs’ family archives almost systematically included such documents and objects for most family members between 1790 and 1936. The breadth of these documents spoke to the Lambs’ commitment to passing on their history: a small family of modest background in the industrial landscape of Strasbourg, France at the turn of the twentieth century. The intimacy of the objects included illustrated the family’s need to preserve their loved one’s memory. I spent the rest of the day reading through the entire family’s collection, learning about the parents’ love for their children, as well as their fear of losing them to wars and subsequent political instability in the region at that time.
As a doctoral candidate, it can prove difficult to project yourself as a researcher who can meaningfully contribute to the world around you. This experience made me realize my role as a historian, specifically, as a link in the chain of “passeuses de memoire,” or living historians. While this collection is not featured in my dissertation, it has instilled in me a sense of responsibility to preserve and make available the life writings of ordinary people, which constitute my corpus. Literally touched by the history of the Lambs family, I felt compelled to pass on their history and memory as a means of understanding larger historical conjunctures. To this end, I assign some of their letters to students in French history courses to teach how individuals lived through the vicissitudes of Alsace-Lorraine’s history.
The picture shows the lock of hair and passport photo of Emilie Lorentz-Lambs (1869-1929). The family’s archives (17J) reside at the Departmental Archives of the Bas-Rhin in Strasbourg, France. The collection is freely communicable and under no copyright laws.
",,,,"May 2018","Morgane Haesen, 28, PhD candidate (French and Francophone Studies), Penn State University ",,,,,,infinitely-human,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Graduate Winter Residency (2020)","Archives,Family Histories,Historical Memory,History,Strasbourg, France",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/17/419/NHC_Humanities_Moment.JPG,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2020",1,0
Night,,"I came across Night by Elie Wiesel while in middle school. I found it at my school library and the barbed wire and shadow of a boy on the cover immediately caught my attention. I was captivated from the very first page and read the entire book that evening. I did not fully understand the power and life lessons of the work at twelve years old but I felt awe and knew it was special.
I have read Night several times since then and am reminded each time of its importance. One of the main themes is the struggle of faith. As a boy, Eliezer valued his faith but began to struggle once he was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager in 1944. He questioned why God did not intervene on behalf of the Jews and why he would allow such evil. Eliezer did not stay long at Auschwitz but it was the last place he saw his mother and younger sister alive. He was in three different concentration camps between the time he left Auschwitz and his liberation, and he became angrier and more spiritually broken as time went on. Eliezer's anger was the result of the atrocities committed to him, his family, and all others with him in the concentration camps. The death of his father, which came three months before the liberation, was the final straw that destroyed his will to survive. He was so emotionally, physically, and mentally defeated by the time he was liberated that he no longer felt human and could not even fathom revenge. He just needed to eat, heal, and begin the process of learning how to feel human again.
Night is haunting, real, and relevant. I was introduced to dehumanization the first time I read it, which affected me greatly. As a middle schooler, I knew bad things happened but it was hard for me to relate. My world was not perfect but I did not truly grasp that some people intentionally treated others inhumanely. This opened my eyes and it was the first time I really thought deeply about the experiences of others. Night helped me begin to learn empathy. It also awakened a desire to learn and understand more about human experiences, both past and present. In many ways, my interaction with Night helped shape the social and cultural historian I am today.
Night is relevant in the world today. The hate and dehumanization that is happening in American and around the world is not new. So often people look away when injustices occur because they are not affected, do not care, or hate the particular people of group. Wiesel’s work stands as a reminder that we are all equal and that no one should be unempathetic to the suffering of others.
“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.” ~ Elie Wiesel",,"Night by Elie Wiesel",,"Middle School","Samantha Lack, 38, PhD Candidate",,,,,,night,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,VGSSR,"Books & Reading,Cultural History,Education,Historical Memory,Holocaust,Night,Wiesel, Elie,World War II (1939-1945)",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/17/400/HM_Wiesel_Night.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2020",1,0
"The Only Person of Color in the Room",,"
At 95, Betty Reid Soskin is the oldest active U.S. Park Ranger. Having lived through wars, racial segregation, and other turbulent times in our history, she says empathy and world peace are possible through the humanities.
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.
",,,"California Humanities",,"Betty Reid Soskin, U.S. National Park Service Ranger","Standard YouTube License",,,,,betty-reid-soskin-us-national-park-ranger,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"African American History,American Civil War & Collective Memory,Ancestors,Collective Memory,Empathy,Historic Sites,Historical Memory,History,National Parks & Reserves,Peace,Race Relations,Slavery,United States Park Rangers,Women's History",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/5/56/1985_ribbon_cutting_African_American_Park_Ranger.jpg,"Moving Image","California Humanities: “We Are the Humanities”",1,0