 I'll be tonight and she is past president of the German Studies Association and the Dartmouth Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature. Professor Cacandes is the author of Daddy's War from 2009. Yes. A pair of memoir about her paternal family in occupied Greece and co-author with Steve Gordon of Hand to Heart of Let's Talk about Dad's in 2017. Welcome. Thank you. Great. Are we okay with the sound? Yeah. Super. Okay. So here's my title slide and some of you who saw it come on in, we're just getting started. Great. In fact, we know each other, don't we? We have met. We have met. Yes. Hello. Lovely to see you. So this is a really special event and I'm delighted that it can happen here in Randolph. I've never been to downtown Randolph before and it's a beautiful place. Hello. And Lynn's been an absolutely wonderful host so far with making the arrangements, etc. And as you can see from the last line of this slide, this lecture is part of a very, very special event that's been launched by the German government and I'm going to tell you a little more about it. But that's who's paying to the extent that there are expenses. That's who's footing the bill for this evening. So I like to, whenever I teach or whenever I give public lectures, I like to make sure everyone knows what I'm aiming for with the talk. And tonight, it's really to introduce you to this special year of events referred to as Wunderbar together to introduce you to the particular organization that I am part of the German Studies Association. I want to share some concepts that I think are important from memory or trauma studies as well as Holocaust studies and I want to show you how my own work on the Second World War and remembrance of traumatic events has helped me approach some aspects of the various kinds of crises that we're really dealing with in today's world, but specifically the refugee crisis. And finally, if I stick to my time appropriately, we should have lots of time for discussion about any of these topics that concern you. So let me just jump right in then and tell you a little more about Wunderbar together. It's a collaborative initiative of the Federal Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Foreign Office. It's run by something called the Goethe Institute, which some of you might have heard of. They're a worldwide organization to teach German in places that are not normally German speaking. And it's funded in great part also by the Federation of German Industries. I'm not sure we have any of the huge German companies right here in Vermont. Does anyone know about that? But there are quite a few in the United States, including auto parts for practically every major German car that are made in the US, but also several of the pharmaceutical companies and other industries have very, very large production in the US. So they have a real interest in making sure that German-American relations are as cultivated as possible. I'm trying to be diplomatic because some of you will know that when Trump was elected president in the United States, he made some statements about Germany and about the European Union that led Europeans to wonder, were we still going to have a transatlantic relationship? So this response of the German government was very much directly impacted by this new administration. And this is what I want to share with you as someone who has worked in German studies for a long, long time. The Federal Republic of Germany has, for years, decades, really since the post-World War, has tried to support the arts, higher education, job training, and certainly the transatlantic relationship. So I always tell my students, you know, study some German and just so you can take advantage of everything that the German government offers in the way of fellowships and training experiences. In any case, they threw, for starters, $10 million at this effort. It was launched on the 3rd of October, which is the new National Unity Day for Germany. That's when the coming together of East Germany and West Germany is celebrated. And it will run for a bit more, actually, than a full calendar year. And there are all kinds of events. I wrote some of them down because I didn't even realize how varied they were. There's a film series that's running in Washington, D.C. There's a fantastic photo exhibition called Lest We Forget that are amazing photographs produced in a very specific way for outdoor exhibition of Holocaust survivors from all over the world, but mainly Eastern Europe. There's a very special modern dance company that will be offering some performances in Brooklyn and in San Francisco. There's an unusual Internet digital music group that will be offering a series of events. There's an event on women in political leadership. There's an event on this just happened on November 11th, St. Martin's Latin Turn Festival. Does anyone know about that? It's a tradition in a few Central European countries. We're on St. Martin Day, November 11th. Everybody has a very pretty lighted lantern and you walk around, so evidently in Texas. What does that take place at? In some of the countries in Central Europe, and it was part of this festival that this lecture is part of. And finally, no event would be complete without German food and drink. And so there's something called Spoonfuls of Germany, which is a culinary event talking about German food and also offering German food. The German Studies Association made a proposal specifically to offer lectures on topics that explained some aspect of Germany and the United States. And to do that specifically in locations that don't normally get those kinds of lectures. And so that's why I'm with you here in Randolph tonight. Randolph, you're surrounded by universities, but they're just kind of far enough that it makes it hard to get there necessarily, especially maybe for an afternoon event. And so we wanted to bring this to you. And I am one of several lecturers for the German Studies Association offering topics. Okay, great. So let's get even closer to what we're really talking about tonight. What would I consider the current refugee crisis? First of all, it is absolutely worldwide, right? We have challenges in every part of the world. Asia, I'm sure many of you are familiar with the Rohingya, this Muslim minority that has been not just persecuted in Myanmar, but actually now recently the UN has enough evidence to say this is genocide. We have several different wars and warring groups, terrorist groups in Africa who are pushing Africans to be on the move. The situation in the Americas, I'm assuming, is pretty familiar to you and we'll be reviewing some of that. And of course, in Europe, they've been the recipients overwhelmingly of the people running from the war in Syria, but other wars and economic crises as well. So that's one thing. It's a worldwide phenomenon. Secondly, this movement of peoples is the largest that we have ever had in recorded history. It's not quite clear what might have happened before people started writing things down. But the last movement of peoples that came anywhere close to this was all the uprootings related to the Second World War. And this number of 68.5 million is actually a number from the end of 2017. So we're probably closer to 70 million people right now who have been displaced by war or economic or, of course, environmental catastrophe. The other thing that I think we need to say about the current situation is that it's very, very dynamic. And we're having a change in attitude about refugees and these changes are happening very, very fast. And I am witness to these changes. So I wanted to unpack them for you a little bit. Refugees or would-be asylum seekers are protected by international law. But we've seen that very, very quickly they've been reassigned the name of just migrants or even criminals, right? And very, very rarely are they looked at at the moment anyway as valued immigrants. So let me then turn to Europe, which is the situation that I definitely know the best. And I'm just going to remind you of a few things you know. The big push for what Europe began to feel, Europe has had asylum seekers for a long, long time. Internally displaced, by the way, from the Balkan Wars. That was a very large movement of people. But now with the long reigning from 2011 Syrian war, we had a huge push of refugees coming into the European Union, mainly via Greece at first, then mainly via Italy and now through Spain. But this first wave, I was in Europe in 2015. So I really experienced kind of the day by day adventures. And you see this image might be familiar to some of you from the Balkans. Large numbers of people simply on foot trying to get into Northern Europe. This is just another group at the Austrian border from the same period. And I thought this photo was particularly moving because you can see someone's actually marching with a photograph of Angela Merkel, the leader of Germany, who said, come, we'll manage it. And then there's a whole story with what happened with that. But the first reception in Germany was extremely warm. And you can see if you look closely at this photo, you can see the refugees arriving in Munich, for example, at the train station were greeted very, very warmly. In fact, the locals came with so many clothes, toys, et cetera, that the police had to actually ask them to stop bringing things. Well, that didn't really last that long. First of all, as just crowd control, I think you could say, some countries started to panic. And so Austria was a key domino in this process of saying, no, no, we're not going to have open borders, EU or no EU. We're going to close the Austrian border. Similarly, the new EU countries in Eastern Europe followed very, very quickly. Then we had a terrible tragedy. I was literally watching the soccer game at the stadium where several of the bombs blew up on the 13th of November in 2015. There were about 130 people killed in Paris that night with several hundred who were injured. And then there was a series of events that were first associated primarily with the city of Cologne. But then it turned out it was in quite a few other cities also where crowds of young men surrounded women and mainly stole their belongings, cell phones, wallets, et cetera. But there was also sexual aggression and probably several rapes. I'm being very careful with my language because there was enormous misinformation that spread about what actually had happened or not happened. The other thing that I'm very sensitive to myself because you've understood that my family is from Greece is that countries were bearing the brunt of this wave of refugees very disparately. So Greece, which had been in a prolonged economic crisis for a long time, was being bombarded by tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of people. Italy was not in much better financial shape, the same thing in Spain. So the way the EU had come up with the rules and we could talk about that later. I'm not going to go into the details now. Refugees were supposed to register in the first country in the EU that they touched. And if you just look at the borders of Europe, where is that going to be? That's going to be in these poor countries in the South. So very quickly for different kinds of reasons, we get the rapid rise of anti-refugee, anti-immigration sentiment, and specifically political parties that are taking anti-immigrant platforms. So just to remind you of some of the more recent events that are the results of this anti-immigrant, the foreign minister Matteo Salvini of Italy started to refuse to let boats that had rescued people in the Mediterranean land on Italian soil. And that's still going on in some kind of checkerboard way. In Germany, we get huge anti-immigrant protests. Although, and this is something I really want everyone to understand, you get immediately counter-protests against these kinds of right-wing extremist protests. I wanted you to see this picture for a couple of different reasons. If you look carefully at that flag, instead of refugees, rape fugies, and then not welcome. And in the middle, this is very disturbing for those of us who study Germany. We have some kind of girl in the dark. You can see her all the way here. And she's running from these horrible looking outline figures who have some of the stereotypes of what you might expect a Muslim man to have. And then if you look at this image here, that's no mosques. And that's not the rule of law in Germany. Mosques are allowed as our other religions. But again, the situation is very, very dynamic. So this anti-immigrant sentiment is certainly not the only thing going on. Have a look at this photo. The organizers of this protest in Germany, it was called Un Teilbar, which means indivisible, expected several tens of thousands of people to join in this protest. The police first estimated the crowd at 100,000. By the end of the day, the crowd was estimated at 400,000 people. This is much, much larger than any protest against immigrants, even if you added most of them together. So there is an enormous wave of sympathy and refusal to go with anti-immigrant platforms. Bless you, in Berlin. Now, for the politically-minded among us, a very important sign was really these recent elections in Bavaria. Bavaria is the largest German state by far. And Angela Merkel's party and her sister party, the sister party, the Christian Socialist Union, they've been ruling in Bavaria for a very, very long time. They lost their dominant position not to the far-right party that's referred to as IFD, the Alternate for Germany, but actually to the Green Party, to the originally started as an ecological movement. But in recent years has taken a very pro-EU, pro-humane immigration policy stance. And they made huge gains in these elections. And this didn't just happen in Germany, actually. These pro-Green, as they're called, parties have made huge strides also in Belgium and in Luxembourg. OK, so this is the part where you have at least as much information as I do. What's going on on this side of the Atlantic? Just to review a few of the lowlights, we have Trump introducing this zero-tolerance immigration policy. This leads to children being separated from their families at the border. This led to a huge backlash, including in our area against that policy. The policy was revoked, right? But hundreds of children were still separated and are still separated. There are more than 200 children from that particular wave who are still separated from their families. And of course, we also have had a lot of minors who have crossed the border illegally on their own so that our federal government is currently detaining about 14,000 children, so people under the age of 18. And there are a lot of images of the tragedies going on at the border. One of the most devious moves was taking children from these smaller homes they'd been in across the nation and in literally at 3 AM in the middle of the morning so that they wouldn't try to run away because it's dark out at 3 AM. The children would have had the right to run away, by the way, but not too many kids run at 3 AM. So they loaded them into buses and then took them on these very, very long bus trips to Texas where they've been housed now in the middle of the desert. So to go on to the next not very pretty chapter, we have this large group of Central American would be asylum seekers who were being described as a marauding horde, right? Trump orders the US military to the US-Mexico border and then a policy beginning of metering, right? That only a certain number of people will be allowed to ask for asylum at border points per day. And this has led to a bottleneck in Tijuana. Again, most of us have seen the pictures. Asylum seekers became so desperate that many of them tried to illegally cross the border when they were tear-gassed by border patrol on the other side. And then as if all of this wasn't horrible enough for them, there were horrible rains that happened that flooded the camps where they were being housed in the stadium, right? OK, so what does a professor do? A lot of things, a lot of worrying, a lot of sadness. But basically I asked myself, is there anything that I've been learning over the years that could possibly help me? That's what that boils down to, right? And I give myself a very faint but hopeful yes answer to that. First of all, I try to educate myself about what's going on. I am addicted to the newspapers. I spend a lot of money buying the paper copy of The New York Times every day. Obviously, that's not the only thing I read. It's very important, I think, to educate yourself about the facts of what's going on. And I'll return to that situation in Cologne where the facts were really misreported immediately, in both directions, by the way. So we can talk about that. Then I try to think of things I've learned that other people have done that maybe I could do. And what can I do as a professor? I can talk to the public. I've been talking about refugees in public for quite a few years now, at least since I got back from Germany in 2015. And I've participated in rallies and peaceful demonstrations. And I'm in a fortunate position that I can send donations to people who can actually help directly on the ground. So here's a picture. Some of you might have been there yourselves. This was on the Hanover Green in June, protesting the immigration policies of Trump. And I also was holding a sign against the tent camps that were created over the Highway 91 at the Fetford exit. And my shift made it through, two and a half hours of holding that sign. And then the next shift, the police told them they had to stop. So what I'd like to do now is run you through what I've distilled to be seven lessons that I have learned from Holocaust and trauma studies that seem relevant for me to think about at this point. You all have heard the statements never again, never forget. And when I hear these statements, I have problems with them for a number of different reasons that I'm going to try to remember. So for sure, I as a teacher and I as a citizen of the 21st century want people to remember the Second World War and the events that we group under the name Holocaust. And we get these particular reminders every time we get around anniversary. But if we really think about it, it makes sense that survivors are never going to forget what they experienced or what they witnessed, especially when their loved ones were killed in front of their eyes. And many, many Germans, even though they were born later, accept a certain responsibility to make sure that their country never turns into a dictatorship again or never persecutes groups. That's in great part what Merkel's response of will manage it was all about. But technically, those of us who were born after cannot remember. We can't forget something that we never remembered because we weren't alive when it happened. So just rhetorically and logically, there's a kind of problem to that. And then if you really look at a lot of these statements, it's also the case that this it is never really defined. What is it that we're not supposed to forget? What is it that we're supposed to remember? What is it that's never supposed to happen again? So we'll be having this in the back of our mind as we hit lesson two. So there are two terms that I'm kind of assuming people in the room have never heard before that I would love to make sure you understand before you leave tonight. And one of them is what I call post-remembering in the verbal form. But this concept actually comes from a dear friend of mine, Mary Ann Hirsch. She used to live in Norwich. She still comes occasionally. But she teaches at Columbia University now. And she and I are very good friends. And she coined this term post-memory to describe a very specific kind of activity that involves identifying with people who have suffered tragedies. But having to do that in some kind of creative work-like manner because you didn't experience it yourself. So it's not quite history. It's not quite memory. It's somewhere in between those two things. And there are similar terms that have been waged by people like Jeffrey Hartman from Yale, Witness by Adoption. And then I have used, this is the other term I hope you might leave with tonight, the term co-witness. And I'll talk more about that in a little bit. Now, Mary Ann's first examples had to do with Children of Holocaust Survivors. Some of you might know this book. I'm thinking it's in the library. If you don't know it, I recommend it really, really strongly. It's a graphic autobiography. It's the story of Art Spiegelman and Art Spiegelman's parents who survived the Holocaust. So it has this kind of two dimensions of what happened to the parents, but also how did the next generation find out about it. And I wanted to show you one image from this because you see that the artist, this is the persona of the artist, Art Spiegelman. And he is working really, really hard. It's hard work to do this kind of reconstruction. My lesson three is that in addition to work, we have to be very self-conscious about what we're doing. And we have to give evidence of that self-consciousness. There is a very large series of books that I have analyzed by children of Holocaust survivors. And I've done a companion set of research about children of perpetrators. But these books, like Art Spiegelman's book, try to reconstruct the story of what happened to the parents and also to tell the story of the next generation. And in that telling the story of the next generation, these books tend to be very highly self-conscious. Whereas there are some other books that have not been clear about what they're doing. And it turns out that some of those books are fakes, are people claiming identities that they didn't really have. So one thing that's been very important to me in terms of doing this kind of work has a distinction that was coined in quite a different context by a gender theory theorist named Eve Sedgwick. And she says, we have to distinguish between identifying with a group or a person versus identifying as. Identifying as would be appropriation. But identifying with could be something very, very positive. So I took these various lessons in mind. And I coined a phrase, the post-memory gap, that we have to have a certain awareness that it's, I'm learning so much about something. I am identifying so strongly that it's as if I had that traumatic experience. But I know that I did not because I am not that person. And one of the reasons I wanted to share this idea with you is that I, myself, diagnose one of the problems going on in the United States and not just the United States is a kind of appropriation of victimhood. There are too many people in our country who want to say, hey, wait a second, I'm the victim. Not that guy over there, not that woman over there, not that group over there. I'm the victim. And there's all kinds of reasons we should be very wary about that type of appropriation. So we're already at lesson four. And this is something you might not think about at first. But again, my friend, Marianne Hearst, with her partner, Leah Spitzer, helped me understand it. And that is this idea that objects can sometimes be our way to learning about the suffering of others. And Marianne and Leo point out that death does not preoccupy us all in the same way, that people who have knowledge that their group is targeted for extermination the way the Jews of Europe did in the mid 20th century can anticipate an untimely death. And so any action that they might undertake, especially to create something that would be hard to create or to save something that would be hard to save is likely to be loaded with meaning. So I want to give you two of Marianne's examples and then one of my own. This is not a book that Marianne Hearst and Leo Spitzer had anything to do with, but they analyze it in their articles. And it's a beautiful book. If you don't have it, I can really strongly recommend it for the library because it turns out that a group of women in Theresienstadt, right? One of the notorious ghettos of the Nazis, actually found the paper, the time hid themselves away and wrote down recipes for memory of things that they used to cook when they were home. And these recipes were smuggled out of Theresienstadt and it took decades before they reached the daughter of one of the women who had survived. And then much later in the 90s, these recipes were published in this beautiful book, Memories Kitchen. So if we just stop to think, those recipes, you know, this could just look like, you know, old piece of paper with handwriting on it, right? But to have been created in the ghetto, right? And to have actually managed to get smuggled out, you can see how important this was to these women, right? Now this is a book you're extremely unlikely to see anywhere else. It's one centimeter by two centimeters. That's Marianne's hand holding this book. And this is something that was given to them by a distant relative. And it was something that that person's father had received when he was in a concentration camp in Romania. And this place is Transnistria, right? This is the Nister River. So the other side of the Nister River. And there was a very notorious camp here that not too many people knew about called Vapniarca. And at some point, the people who were in this camp started dying after developing a paralysis, right? They couldn't walk. And this doctor figured out that they were being fed poisonous chickling peas. It was a certain kind of pea that they were being fed by the guards that the guards themselves were not eating. And so in appreciation for the doctor, they created that little tiny book that you see there. And Marianne and Leo surmise because they had to guess, right? That this was a going away present for the doctor. And they did, they surmise that by analyzing the little photos, learning about the disease, reading what was on the cover, et cetera. But again, you can imagine how difficult and how dangerous it must have been to try to create this little book, right? So obviously there's distance between us, no matter how sincere we are. There can be cultural distance. There can be geographic distance. There can certainly be temporal distance. And all those types of distance lead to this idea of a gap that I was talking about before. Could also hopefully lead to a certain amount of humility that we can't be sure about our hunches. But that somehow epically were obliged to try to make them. So here's my example of an object. It's quite a bit bigger than that tiny little book that I just showed you. It's a grand piano. And this was an article I ran across in the New York Times way back in 2004. And I was fascinated by the story and so I tried to learn more. So it turns out that this grand piano was originally purchased in Berlin. It was moved by this woman Helga Basel to South Africa. And her daughter also became a concert pianist. And when the mother died, the daughter just, every time she played the piano, she felt like something was going on. And like there was something the piano was trying to tell her. And she went digging and she found out some things that she had absolutely not known while her mother was alive. Starting with the fact that her mother had been born into a Jewish family. Tessa had been raised as a reform Protestant. She had no idea that her mother had anything to do with Judaism. She lived a very wonderful life for the very early period until the Nazis came into power. When they came into power, she converted to Catholicism for two reasons in the hopes that she could marry her fiance, but also because she was a concert pianist and she wanted to keep playing music. And the Nazis very quickly tried to get Jews out of professional organizations. So she was in fact ejected from the Musicians Association and she flees with her brother and the piano in 1936 to South Africa. Now imagine moving a grand piano from Berlin to South Africa in 1936. It's not kind of a neutral act, right? It's an act that begs for some kind of explanation of what was going on. And my own hypothesis would be that it was her way of talking back to the Nazis. It was her way of trying to reclaim agency, of trying to re-enfranchise herself after having been so disenfranchised, right? But she never told anybody any of this and it was only through a very complicated process. Remember I said this takes work that the daughter was able to put together this story. So what is it that the daughter now is doing, right? How does she honor her mother? How does she acknowledge her mother's suffering? Well, having learned all of this, she can tell someone else about it. So she told the press and then she also made this very dramatic decision to send this piano back to Berlin, okay? And specifically to the Jewish Museum, which some of you may know, it's quite an impressive Jewish Museum in Berlin, with the story. So that somehow the piano needed to return to Berlin. Now what for me is very key to what we can do here in this room is that the daughter made a connection between those traumas of the mid 20th century and her own times because before she shipped the piano, she gave a concert, remember she's a concert pianist, she gave a concert on that piano and the last thing that was played on that piano was the new national anthem of South Africa. So she connected up the suffering of her mother with the suffering of black South Africans and this dramatic change that had happened in her lifetime of the end of apartheid, right? So now I can go back to my term co-witnessing and I would like to try to help you understand more about how to do it, right? It involves some kind of emotional, very often verbal assistance that enables traumas to come into being, to be articulated, right? Because definition of trauma is somehow the story has not been able to be told. Now when there's not actually a witness available to help, so to speak, we often have to research and deduce what that story is. People like myself are obsessed with language so I just wanted to analyze the term for you a little bit. The root of witness is knowledge, right? So that from like the word wit that we have, okay, those are all related to knowledge. So to co-witness is to witness, to have knowledge along with someone else and to me the term then invites solidarity but because of that hyphen we realize we can't appropriate, right? I'm not the person, I'm not the person but I wanna be in solidarity with that person. So this brings me to lesson number five which is I've already hinted at even when we live at an historical or a geographical or a cultural distance we still have an obligation to my mind to try to co-witness to traumas, right? Because whatever it is that we're willing to say was a crime, right? Reflects on who we are, what is our value system, right? And I think we have a good example at this very moment with antisemitism, right? Antisemitism is a very old, very unfortunately ubiquitous phenomenon but I think a lot of us Americans thought we're in a different phase now, right? We're not antisemites, right? And what just happened in Pittsburgh, okay? So I think it's important for us to call antisemitism, antisemitism when we encounter it, right? Because again, it says we say that's wrong. We say that's wrong. Now I'm gonna go quickly through this part but I first developed this concept to talk about literature actually and how complicated the circles of co-witnessing were because we're not talking about direct access to a victim, right? We're talking about representation of traumatic events. And my example was this very powerful short novel called A Jewish Mother written by the woman that you see on the right, Gertrud Kolmar who was mainly a poet but somehow in 1930s Berlin felt the need to write this very dramatic story of antisemitism, misogyny and one of the forms the antisemitism takes is the rape of her, the protagonist's five-year-old daughter, right? Five-year-old daughter. So I had to ask myself why was Gertrud Kolmar writing this in 1932, right? And why did she not dare to publish it? So that's a longer set of explanations but it brought me to this idea of trans-historical or trans-cultural witnessing. Now can this do anybody any good this co-witnessing? It's certainly not gonna help the characters in the novel, right? They're just fictional. It's not gonna help Gertrud Kolmar, she's dead. It's not gonna help Hegel Basso, she's dead too, right? But many important thinkers like Martha Minow, an important legal scholar or Judith Herman, you may know her name from her important work on women's trauma, say yes, it's important, right? Because again, it says what we identify as wrong. And I would call your attention to another recent example which is the Me Too movement, right? I think that one of the reasons there are all kinds of details we can and should talk about. But one of the reasons why I count this movement so important is because as a people, as a large number of Americans, we are saying that's wrong. It's wrong to have gender discrimination. It's wrong to use sexual power to make someone do your will, right? And I think that's a good thing that we are trying to say we say this is wrong. Okay, so lesson six. One of the pieces of this puzzle is trying to understand, to embrace the idea that these other people, these victims, these sufferers could have been our friends and that we wanna treat them as our neighbors. And some of you, I'm sure speak French and you know the word prochant is one of the ways that the word neighbor is said and I'm gonna leave it in the French for a specific reason, I'll explain in a minute. But I wanted just to show you the cover of this book because it looks like exactly like our topic, right? Refugees, terror and other troubles with the neighbors by a very important philosopher from the Balkans. And Gizek says at one point in his book, the only true solution to the refugee problem is to address the problems that are causing people to flee their homes. And I agree with him 100%, right? We can't have everybody living in Europe. We can't have everybody living in the United States. That's just clear, right? We can't have all of Latin America moving to US, okay? I agree with that, right? So we have to fix problems. But then he makes another statement that I found really insulting and very, very problematic, which is that he said most of the refugees are not people like us. And I thought to myself, what is he talking about? Of course they're people like us. So I wanted to share with you how that lesson was underscored for me. This is a very, very beautiful book. It's a non-fiction book by Patrick Modiano, a French author who has published quite a few novels. Here's what the English translation looks like. Modiano won the Nobel Prize recently for literature. So luckily this book was reissued because it had gone out of print. And basically I'm sure this is the Spanish translation. It's been translated into a lot of languages. But I wanted to show it to you because the Spanish edition essentially re-enacts what happened to Modiano. Modiano was looking through a Paris newspaper from 1942 and he saw an ad where a man who has a very Jewish sounding name is reporting that his daughter is missing, right? And has anyone seen her, okay? Now for a Jewish man to point out the fact that he is Jewish, that his daughter is missing in 1942 Paris is very enigmatic, right? And so Modiano began to research what had happened, who was this person? And found out that she had run away from home not once but several times. He himself had run away from home. His father had also been a Jew in Paris during the war. So there are some interesting connections between his life and the life of this family. But again, he recognizes that he is not Dora Bruder, right? He is someone different. But he does this dance of affiliation and separation that I think is a very powerful model for me. And so from him and this book, I learned some other things to be very, very careful about in my own work. And what is it that we need in order to be able to co-witness? So the first thing could sound really obvious, but we should say it anyway, which is we have to decide to think about someone other than ourselves, okay? Just have to decide. It's not just about me, right? I'm going to make a decision to think about someone else. And then this enigmatic phrase that I've really come to love where he says, friends I have not known, right? The idea that there are people that if I had known them, they would actually be my friends. In fact, they even are my friends even when I haven't known them, okay? So we have to have this idea that they are people like us, right? The other thing that Modiano does in this book that I really, really love and that I tried to do in my own book that Lynn was nice enough to mention Daddy's War about my paternal family in occupied Greece is to point out what I don't know, right? Where are the limits to what I can know? Because I think that's respectful and I think it's honest, right? And I think pointing to gaps sometimes can be more effective in co-witnessing to trauma than trying to fill all the gaps in. So these are just some phrases from his book that comes up over and over again that he doesn't know something. Now, I don't know, anyone know this man already, Parkeker? Great, I'm so glad. So a French philosopher who died relatively recently at a good long life and my husband, I was lucky enough, pointed me to an early essay of his that I had never heard talked about before where he introduces this idea of the prochain. So I just wanted to explain it to you because perhaps you'll find it as useful as I have found it. So for those of you who can identify on some level with the Christian New Testament, that's the word that's used in the story of the Good Samaritan, right? So this idea of who is my neighbor, the French word in the French translation is prochain. And I wanted to say that first because this is what R. Carras says. He says, there's no sociology of the prochain, right? The science of the prochain is immediately blocked by a praxis of the prochain. One does not have a prochain. I make myself the prochain of someone else, okay? So let me try to do a modern English translation, right? This is not some abstraction for him, right? It's not something you can own, right? You can't own your neighbor. What you can do though is do something to yourself so that you can be in a neighborly relationship to someone else, okay? And I think again, that's just a really important lesson for our times. So we've come to my last lesson, which is now directly related to this idea of what am I gonna do to myself in order to be able to function as a neighbor for other people? And my suggestion, there might be other metaphors that you would like to use, but my suggestion is that we have a repertoire, that by studying history, we can learn what other people have done to resist violence, to witness to violence, and we can think to ourselves, what would I do if I saw it happening again? So let me give you some examples of what people have done. This is a documentary film, a very, very powerful one. It won the Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize. It won the Academy Award, excuse me, in 1988 for nonfiction film, and it's a very complicated story, goes over several continents, several decades, trying to trace the story of Klaus Barbie, who was a very evil SS officer who was operating in the city of Lyon in occupied France. So there were all kinds of issues, all kinds of complicities, but what I found so powerful about this documentary is that the filmmaker actually ends this story of all these horrible things with a final scene about telling about someone who behaved as a poche, right? So there's this young woman, Simone Cadouche, who tells Ophuz, the filmmaker, this is the last sequence in the film, about her family's wartime arrest, right? So Simone was quite young at the time, not super young, she was about 10, and the SS comes to arrest her family. One of the neighbors sees what's going on and shuts the door. Another neighbor, and someone I now would be willing to call a pochin in recurs sense of it, Madame Bontu, those of you who speak French know that this name is very apt, but it appears to have been her real name, she was good about everything, right? She tries to pull the child surreptitiously into her own apartment, right? There are quite a few people going down the stairs, so she's hoping they won't notice that she's pulled the child. But one of the SS officers does see what she's doing, and he kicks her so hard that she goes reeling back into her apartment, okay? So what do you think? Madame Bontu, she failed, right? She didn't get the child away from the Nazis, the child was deported with the parents to concentration camp, extermination camps. No, I would say she succeeded, right? Because her act stayed with the child and served as a sign of hope that not everybody was as awful as the people who had arrested her, right? That this one neighbor had tried to help her, and she remembered that her whole life, right? And by the filmmaker putting this at the very end of his film, and the film is dedicated to this woman, right? We hear that in voiceover at the end of the film. I think that the filmmaker is co-witnessing also to her and inviting us to co-witness. So here you see one of the scenes from this film. This is the actual building that this woman grew up in. She's climbing the stairs to try to show Ophuz, who's the figure on the left, what happened, right? Okay, so what is it that we're called to do then? I would suggest that we, for starters, can repeat the stories you've heard tonight. You okay? You can just repeat them. See if it helps anybody, right? But we can also store in our memory banks that action that sometimes we just have to act. We have to do whatever we can. And even if we fail, there's maybe it helped somebody, but at least I did what I could, right? So in this concept of co-witnessing, what I'm suggesting to you is that we look back to grab some ideas about what we might do looking forward. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay, so let me tell you about some people who are doing this right now. This is a guy I had the pleasure to meet in Switzerland in 2016 because he was trying to get money for his nonprofit organization called Swiss Cross. And here's the story of why he started that organization. In the summer of 2015, that infamous year, he was vacationing in Greece with his wife. They were just supposed to be having a little vacation. And he came to Victoria Square in Athens and saw this amazing squalor, right? Huge number of refugees, but especially children. And it was very obvious that these people had not had anything to eat. So he and his wife literally just left the square, went to the nearest grocery store, bought all the groceries that they could, went back to the square and started giving groceries out. And then they repeated until they had no more money, right? And then they wired home and they asked for more money and they kept feeding. Now, as the refugees started moving, they moved with them, right? So some of you will remember, unfortunately, it's eerie the way it echoes with what just happened at the Tijuana border. But there was the horrible rainstorms in early spring, 2016. So they went to the border. And then at that point, this is when the borders then into the Balkan countries closed completely. The Greeks had to try to do something to help these refugees and they put them into abandoned military barracks. And so this organization, Swiss Cross, went with the refugees into the military camps, which were very underfunded because the Greek government had no money and they just tried to help. And they are still doing that. This is a picture from the island of Lesbos where a lot of them, Syrian refugees in particular, had landed and they have a new offshoot of the organization called One Happy Family. They're helping on Lesbos. They've also helped set up refugees in small businesses in Athens, for example. Okay. So someone who saw something and did it, something about it. Okay. This is a different kind of seeing. It resembles a little bit. The story I just told you two stories back because this is another documentarian who made a beautiful film called Lampedusa in Winter. And this film is filmed entirely on the island of Lampedusa, which I think many of you know is only 110 kilometers from the North African coast. So many of the ships, many of the rafts that are trying to get to Europe have come into Lampedusa or the rescue boats have come into Lampedusa. And this young man, Brossmann, had asked himself, how does contact with refugees change cultures? And so he had done some research in Switzerland to all the refugees who went through Switzerland and he went to Lampedusa originally to talk to them about how refugees might have been changing their culture. This is just one scene from the island where all these boats have washed up. So this film contains a lot of representations of people doing acts of co-witnessing, right? As well as, for me, represents an act of co-witnessing itself. So I just wanted to share two examples of that. Giacomo is a local artist who decides it's important to collect the personal effects that have washed up in Lampedusa. And he does so in a very respectful way. And this particular example that I won't go into in detail, he found a diary and he can't read it. It's in a language he doesn't understand. So he goes to the trouble, right? That's the work. Remember the work, step one, work. To try to find people who can help him understand what it is. And it turns out that the diarist was a Coptic deacon and the person who's reading the diary can detect how the language starts to deteriorate as the man becomes more and more hopeless. The respect that's shown in this scene is absolutely palpable. And so that's something else for me that goes along. But the director himself was also acting as a prochain to the Lampedusans. Because unlike other media who had come and come periodically because of a particularly large catastrophe at sea, Brossmann actually stayed there and lived through a very, very difficult winter with them where they lost their ferry, for example. And the fishermen had a terrible season that and they had lots of refugees that couldn't get off the island because the Italian government was stalling. So he was trying to witness also to their hardships and that too is done in a beautiful way. So the last example from this film I want to give you is another local who is talking to the refugees who are launching a strike because they want to get off Lampedusa and get to Italy, right? So they're having kind of a protest outside the local church. And she says to them, I'm with you. I'm not with them. I'm with you. Because I'm just an inhabitant of Lampedusa. I'm just from here. Tonight, I hope I can come and I'll bring you some hot tea. So this leads me to the last part of my talk which is a question, right? That I have to ask myself, you know, what tea will I be bringing? And who will I bring it to? And that's a question I ask you also. What tea do you want to bring? And to whom do you want to bring it? So by way of launching what I hope will be a discussion and I think we're just about at the right time, I sort of summarize my own concept and then I have a summary from another organization I'd like to share with you. So co-witnessing again provides a role for individuals who are not present at the infliction of a trauma to someone who is, right? A way to witness to an injustice, right? It begins with the desire to think about somebody else other than the self, which means that you recognize someone else's subjectivity, you listen properly to what they have to say if the person is alive or you do the research if they're not, and you have an attitude that allows their story to get told. And then it also involves retelling that story to others, trying to involve them in this act of co-witnessing and conceiving of what you might do if you saw that same or similar injustice being carried out. And this is what my idea of never again actually could mean. So I'll close with just a very, very brief anecdote from the long journey I've been on in trying to be an ally to people who are suffering. And it comes from a seminar that I went to at the University of Texas at my first academic position. And it was how to be a white ally to people of color. And the two organizers told an anecdote that I've never forgotten. This is almost 30 years ago now where they said that they were at a concert, you know, Texas, big concert country, the weather's good, you can go to outside. So they didn't have enough money to pay for tickets. They were sitting at a certain location near the concert location where you could hear the music just fine, but you didn't have to pay to get in. And they, with a bunch of other people, were just kind of sitting there enjoying the music. And there were a group of Mexicans or people of Mexican descent, but they were all speaking Spanish, who were right near them, mostly guys, and they were drinking beer. And at one point, one of the guys had drunk too much or had had too big a day at work and he went into the back of the truck and fell asleep. Within minutes, the police showed up and they started to arrest the guy. And the two women marched over to the police and they said, what are you doing? He wasn't doing anything. He was just sleeping peacefully in the back of the truck, right? And they said, you know, they tried to brush off the young women and they said, no, we're coming to the police station with you because we need to tell whoever you're gonna try to tell what we saw, which is that this guy wasn't doing anything and he wasn't bothering anyone, right? So that could seem like a very small thing, but I think it was a beautiful gesture on their part and a brave one, right? To just say they didn't do anything wrong and I'm gonna tell whoever I need to tell, right? That's my concrete example from our today's world. So oddly, when I was finishing up this lecture, I got something in the mail from the American Friends Service Committee and this was the last page of the leaflet. Were these seven tips about how can we change the conversation that we're having as Americans about immigration? So I'll just read those out and then we're done. But hopefully we want to have discussion, okay? So one, don't repeat negative stereotypes, not even to counter them. Just don't say them in your own mouth and those of us who teach, we know don't put the wrong answer on the board, right? That is what stays with people. So don't repeat, oops, didn't wanna go there just yet. Emphasize shared humanity, right? Immigrants are us and most of us, I dare say are probably from immigrant families, right? Remind other people that all of us move if we're not happy with where we are and we can manage to move, right? We don't like our house. We don't like our apartment. We got some noisy neighbors. We need a different job. We move. So there's no crime in the desire to move and most of us do do that, right? This one I think is really interesting is not to say that the system is broken but to say we need humane immigration policies. Number five, it's been a very, very long time coming and there was a beautiful piece in the New York Times on this on Sunday. I could tell you about it if you care to hear it but we have finally agreed that all people have rights, right? That all humans have rights. So let's not backtrack on that, right? This language of chains, right? This is very misguided for all kinds of reasons. Chains don't migrate. People and families migrate, right? And finally, and I think this is also really important to our country and it's something I emphasize with my students a lot, be truthful and critical and complex, right? As complete as possible as you can be about the history of immigration in our country because it's not all pretty, right? Many of us come from groups that were discriminated at some point along the way. And in any case, even if it wasn't our own group, it's been a very up and down history that the US has had. So that from the American Friends Service Committee. And finally, I just wanna say I am dedicating this talk to all those individuals who have been trying to help refugees and that includes very much in the state of Vermont. I've been very moved by people who have gone to the border in the winter with gloves and coats and just tried to help people who are trying to sneak over the border into Canada, right? And then this very important, I try to tell my students, don't forget to credit the pictures you used. So thank you very much for your patience and let's have some discussion, okay? Great. Okay, okay. So I have as much time as you care to take. And if anyone is out of time because you got a babysitter or something like that, please, we understand. Anyone wanna have a question? Please, Christine. Yeah, they had planned to take in 100 Syrian families. Yeah, I mean, it was having a heartbreak. There may be some people in the room. Anyone here from Rutland? We, no, okay. It may have a, it probably would have had a heartbreaking and just from what was going on within Rutland, there was a lot of controversy about this decision, which seems to have come from the mayor and then some people backed him right away, but then some people were against the idea. But really it was put an end to by Trump because he then closed the numbers of refugees who could get into the country. So in that sense, I wanna imagine to myself that Rutland would have figured it out. But yes, that's correct. They were planning to take in quite a few families and they, in Hanover, we had participated in collecting lamps and furniture and all kinds of things. And unfortunately, then those people never made it into the country, yeah. So differently or better? What will I do? Right, no, I appreciate that. And I think, again, I was here in that period and I know there's something called the Upper Valley Refugee Group, right? There are a number of different groups in Vermont and New Hampshire who are trying to help refugees. The largest group of refugees, to my knowledge, is in Manchester, New Hampshire and groups periodically take stuff down there, collect funds, et cetera, offer English lessons. I think we just have to show our willingness and we have to say, this is who we are, this is what we want. I like Europe's. That's from, I don't wanna take credit for that, it's from the American Field Service. Because in just casual conversation with girls, you'll hear people make a statement. And we're all being cordial, lacy-nice, and it's easy to let a reinforcement slip. Yeah, and I think that the idea of civil discourse on complicated topics is incredibly important to all of us and so my hope, again, for Northern New England is that we'll try to model that. These are not easy conversations to have. People have real fears and we have to talk that through. So can I tell you a little more about Cologne? So something really not good happened outside the train station in Cologne as people were trying to leave, right? And I don't wanna minimize that in any way but there were at least two major sets of mistakes made. Well, let's say three. Because first of all, the police for some reason, just the local police in planning for New Year's Eve had not gotten the reinforcements they normally get, right? So they were very shorthanded that night. That's one mistake. The second mistake though, is that somehow very quickly on, an order came from somewhere not to talk about the identity of the perpetrators. Because people who were trying to report that they'd just been stolen from or had just been sexually aggressed were trying to tell the police what the guys looked like, right? And somehow there was a muzzle put on that information. And then it took off like wildfire. It took a long time for the truth to come out that most of those young men who were pretty carefully identified were actually refugees and were mainly from North Africa. And that's very sad. But what also was happening was a huge exaggeration of the numbers, right? And I lived this very, very closely because I published an op-ed about another tragic situation that had happened in Turkey where young boys were abused in a refugee camp by an employee of the camp. And when that came out, Merkel had just been there and praised the camp and somehow didn't know anything about it. It was a very complicated story. But one of the trolls who immediately responded to my op-ed, which was online, said, and what about the thousands of women who were raped in Cologne? And that's a problem, right? Because there were not thousands of women raped in Cologne, right? The latest figure that I saw was 22. Is 22 too many? Way too many. For sure, it's too many. But it's not thousands of German women being raped by dark men, right? So somehow we have to be able to keep talking to each other, learning the facts, sharing the facts so that we can then decide what do we wanna do? Please. Why did that person? You know, I thought about it. I'm not a big internet person and I definitely don't have a thick enough skin to deal with trolls. So in the end, I decided not to say anything. But whenever I talk to people, I always try to point out the figures about what happened that night because there is a lot of misinformation. And it's not even clear there were that many rapes, but that's the highest legitimate number I've heard. And again, way too many, way too many, right? Please. Yeah, it's our history of slavery. And I think that everything you said today applies, this is an all-white room, is a standard for the lot, right? And I think we don't say it out loud enough. I think it's like all those things that you went through talking about. And I think one of the reasons, as a country, we're having such a hard time with immigration now, is because we have never dealt with history of slavery. A lot of home statements have an underlying racism that's right there. He doesn't have to say it out loud, we all know it. And it's part of how we think. But I think because as a country, we've never come to terms with it. We've never co-punished. It's very, very rare that you get white people in that position where they can say, well, black person, what that must mean. That I didn't live that myself. But you're a great-grandmother here. We know that, we can't lie about that. And I think it's something that we have not dealt with that would be incredibly difficult. Absolutely, I really, really appreciate that you brought that up. I think it's very important that we have that be part of this discussion. I would just share with you that I was doing a little bit of research about the idea of detaining immigrants. And that was very tied up with racist thinking in the United States, the Chinese, Italians, Greeks, who were thought of as black. We had Japanese concentration camps. All these things are very little talked about today and they need to be talked about a lot more. But what was very interesting in the more recent history, we basically abolished detaining immigrants. And approximately from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, it was not standard policy to detain immigrants. Does anyone, can anyone think of what happened in the early 80s that changed that? Flipped it back. It was the boat lift from Cuba. And you will remember that Castro decided to use that as an opportunity to empty the jails. And so he said to the people who showed up with boats to take their relatives, you have to, you can take your relatives, but only if you take whoever else we're going to put on the boat. And this is a really great example of misinformation, right? Because most of those people who were in Cuban jails at the time were falsely accused. Or were accused of very, very minor crimes. But the word on the street, and that has to do, excuse me, your name is? Elizabeth. Elizabeth. It has to do exactly with what Elizabeth was just saying. We are only a tiny step away from racism at any point as Americans. And so immediately the idea of these darker skinned people, because even if they didn't have darker skin, that's how they were identified, put together with criminal, you know, it's like, oh my God, we're about to be, you know, the marauding horde yet again, right? So the reality of what was going on was quite different from the rhetoric of what was going on. And they immediately turned these policies around. And this was exacerbated also by Haitian immigration at the time, which was very clearly darker skinned people coming into the country. So the whole idea that we think it's normal to have people in detention when they're applying for asylum or when they want to immigrate, you know, that we had gotten somewhere else on that issue as a country and we backtracked. And some of you in the room are definitely too young to have lived that history, but some of us did live it and we forget it, right? We forget that it's not normal. I think people, when they saw babies being ripped from their mother's arms, it shook up something and we said something's wrong here. But until that extreme step, we weren't saying, what are you talking about putting them into jails? What are you talking about putting them into tent cities, right? We needed something that extreme to remind us of the fact that we're talking about human beings, right? It's all based on fear, you know? Yes. It's fear-mongering. Yes. Any time in history it's, you know, it's because they're different and they're going to do something to our way of life. That's what it was in Europe, you know, with the Jews. They're different than the rest of us. That's anybody coming in. It's all just fear-mongering. And it's not the, I can't speak French, Prussian, whatever that word is. It's kind of the opposite of that. You could just say neighbor. Neighbor's good too. It's the opposite of that. Yeah, it's the opposite of that. And so just as a German teacher, can I just throw out for you that in 1933 there were about 500,000 Jews in Germany. Germany had a population of 60 million. It was less than 1% of the population. But it was all based on fear and fear-mongering. Please. I'm not blaming others. Yes. We're in a bad situation because of them. Yeah. Yeah. But the them, most people didn't even know the them. They had never met a Jew. Right. Yeah, please. There's two things around today. This person is about the negative stereotypes line that you have on the slide. One thing that I find, it's not necessarily a stereotype, but it's just, again, kind of goes to misinformation is the word illegal. And a lot of people throw that word around. And they don't really know exactly what type of immigration is legal and what type isn't. Right. And also, just the idea that people can be illegal is really bothersome to me. They can be in the country without legal status. But the person themselves will not be illegal. Right. And so that's a word that, so I work in a legal clinic at the Vermont Law School. Great. And I work in the immigration project. And we're not allowed to use the word legal in the clinic. Great. Because it's such an inappropriate word to describe what the situation is. So I think that that's also a good thing to sort of add into that. Because it's not necessarily a negative stereotype. But it's like a word that doesn't necessarily need to be used in terms of immigration. Absolutely. Again, I thank you enormously for putting that out there. You know, undocumented or without papers or not yet filed, status not yet filed. You know, there are all kinds of ways. But this is where we have to kind of help each other out because I don't need to tell you all about the power of the media. Right. We hear it. And if we hear it 100 times, right, it's just somewhere in there. We heard it. Right. And so it can slip out even if that's not the way we think. Right. So we have to help each other. I have a lot of desire for people to correct me, call me on things because sometimes it's just because I'm living in this same polluted world that all of you are living in. Right. So thank you. That's really important. I think it can be especially when there's situations like this and people don't really know how they can be helpful and stuff like that. And earlier today I was actually in court for an immigration issue and I obviously can't go into detail about that. But one thing that I think a lot of people don't think about is learning about how federal law and state law intersects on immigration issues and actually writing letters and writing petitions and signing petitions. People think that those things don't make a difference or that sending in letters to senators and congressmen and even just state legislation won't make an actual difference. But there are certain very small state laws that can have huge impacts on immigration cases for people that can be changed really easily. It's just that people don't know that these things are happening. So that's also just one of those things that people often don't think about actually looking at the legal side of things and thinking oh like maybe I could say something or learn more about that. That's just a little... Yeah and again I think we need to help each other to learn what are the steps we can do that really are possible. I mean we had some very dramatic examples in the presentation but there are some things that are not nearly as dramatic that can actually be helpful. And in any case it's something to do that says who you are as opposed to doing nothing. But I do think with this constant assault of rhetoric of every day a new crisis people do feel paralyzed. I mean I'm not the kind of person who's prone to paralysis but I have felt paralyzed at certain times because it's so overwhelming. I mean just what's happening in Wisconsin right now you know they won, right? They passed those laws. I mean it can make you paralyzed. Yeah I'll just leave it at that. Please sir. I would just like to reflect on how complicated this is but agree that it is based on fear of people who are unknown in many ways. And that one of the best ways to get through this for people who have different opinions is for them to come together and with an open mind have a forum. And that happened not too long ago in the state of Vermont at the legislature when the issue of same sex partners was discussed. Yes. It was very open forum. Yes. Neighbors came and talked about neighbors and there was a wonderful resolution. So there can be hope. But it does take the ability to listen to people who have a different opinion on both sides very much like our town meetings. Everyone gets to talk. We don't agree. Everyone gets to say their piece and a decision gets made. Thank you for bringing that. I was alive and living in the area and it was a very powerful moment for exactly the reason that you've just stated was people who thought that they had completely different views and started out in many cases with completely different views changed their minds when they listened to each other and this is where the word neighbor is really beautiful when they discovered that actually the people living next door who had always been so helpful to them were in the same sex couple. And that revelation for many people turned it around. It turned it around for my mother. I mean, I don't think my mother is a particularly prejudiced person but I think she grew up in a world that had no room for the idea of homosexuality. And when she discovered that her next door neighbor had a male partner, she was like, oh, well I really like Ed and Ed's with Joe so I guess that's okay, you know? And I really give her a lot of credit because she was already quite a bit older but she tried to go with what she did know which is Ed's a good guy, right? So that happened over and over again in that situation. Yeah, that's going to be really hard to do when the Congress alone is so incapable of talking to each other, you know? It's really, it's a problem. I mean, that's why what just happened in Wisconsin is a national tragedy for me because it's an attempt to not have conversation. You know, we get to decide what's going to happen and I think that's always bad news. Always bad news, right? Other thoughts or examples people want to share or questions or... Do you want to give this talk at the White House? I don't think they'd have me. I don't think they'd have me. All right, so two words, right? Post-memory or post-remembering and co-witnessing and put together your repertoires. Maybe we can share when we have ideas. I try to share all the ideas I come up with. Oh, so let's end, we're close to ending time. Let me end with a great story because I try to keep track of those too. Okay, so here's another hero. His name was, he just passed away, Harry Leslie Smith. Many people referred to him as the world's oldest rebel. He was born in 1995 and his obituary appeared in Sunday's New York Times. He made himself from nothing. He survived the Great Depression and abject poverty. He fought the Nazis in World War II, managed to create a comfortable life for his family but suffered two painful personal losses. His wife of 52 years of cancer and a decade later his son Peter of lung disease. That led him to decide to write his memoirs and many books followed. So between the age of 87 and 95, he wrote six books, please. Well, he was working on the sixth one about the refugee crisis when he died on Wednesday. And the book, his previous book was called Don't Let My Past Be Your Future and it was a plea for social justice and defense of the poor. He evidently had 250,000 followers on Twitter and hosted a weekly podcast and he had a video essay in The Guardian on the refugee crisis that's been seen more than 2 million times. So in his late 80s and 90s continued all his campaigns for the poor. Harry Leslie Smith from Ontario. Thank you all so much. I can't tell you, I know it's cold out there. I really appreciate you coming out. Thank you.