Daniel Terna

"Earlier this month, Daniel forwarded to me a letter from a Dr. Gabriele Hammermann, Director of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, inviting an escort and me to come to the Memorial Meeting in Dachau early in May 2015. The official title of the event was, and I’m translating here loosely from the German: The Memorial Proceedings Occasioned by the Observance of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Liberation of Concentration Camp Dachau, April 30th to May 3rd 2015.

After some early hesitation I agreed to go to Munich. My main reason for consenting to attend was my awareness that Daniel would have the opportunity to photograph, film, and write about a cluster of events to which he has a direct connection.

The entire trip will last only seven days, and a good part of it will be traveling from place to place. I’m aware of my physical fragility. Fatigue, lack of sleep, long travel, jet lag, the sudden immersion into a German speaking community, plus that long list of living with the past, will travel with me. Experience of earlier involvement with commemoration has taught me to be prepared for the unexpected.

We inmates during the war had promised each other that the one who survives would tell. Yet it took nearly a generation before the word ‘Holocaust’ came into general use, and before the Shoah became a subject of study. Today, seventy years after the liberation of Dachau, there exist centers of Holocaust studies at all major universities across the globe. We kept our promise."

Fred Terna, April 22, 2015

"A COPY OF NOTES MADE ON MY NEW TOY, AN I-PAD

This set of notes are preliminary jottings made while thinking about a more consistent page planned. It is a raw version elaborated upon in the following set of notes in Archive28.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Thus far mostly Dachau and commemoration.

A cold and rainy day, quiet in tone with the occasion.

Starting early from the hotel in Munich, eventually filling up the bus with people from different hotels. 

The central event, the speech by Angela Merkel; beginning with a larger meeting and religiously focused ceremony at the Jewish memorial site; people sitting in a tent in front of the place, the tent too small to accommodate the number of people, probably several hundred. Speeches by various officials, including a woman, the present head of the Jewish community in Germany. All speeches much too long, recapitulating history with the evident effort of leaving a historical record, and repeating the obligation of Never Again.

A rabbi, a Chassid in full uniform, supplied the Jewish religious angle. Central Casting would have been proud of supplying the perfect stereotype. His tone was Eastern Sub-Carpathian heavy ultra orthodoxy, the volume at maximum, the occasion probably a good excuse for a performance of a right wing far right politico. I sat at the outer ledge of the tent, barely shielded from the continuing heavy rain. At the conclusion, other men in a variety of religious garb appeared. Various Greek Orthodox that I could not identify were to do their thing, but I left the tent then. The sum of religious expressions exceeded my tolerance. The notion of theodicy never came up. There should have been the presence of a Muslim clergyman. The absurdity of religiosity at Dachau seems to have been ignored by all.

I wonder about the depth of religious awareness of the survivors attending. I wonder how many of the attending survivors were Jews. The percentage of Hungarian speaking was rather high, Hebrew was perhaps second. The percentage was probably determined by the choices of the organizing group. 

After a break for food, ceremonies were to continue. A big tent. Having had to deal with a measure of chaotic planning, this was a well-planned performance. The attendance to the tent was limited to the survivors plus all the officials, dignitaries, diplomats, VIPs of the German establishment, U.S. Army, film crews, musicians, all adding up to many hundreds of people, all this underlining the importance of the political, nay, historical moment of the speech by the head of the German government at the site of Dachau. Angela Merkel's speech was mercifully to the point, comparatively brief, and rather predictable. Then came a group of students, more speakers, trumpeters, wreath laying, plus the usual basic ceremonial performances.

Sitting there fairly far back and aware of my role as one of the props, I thought that I would just sit through the various program points. At the end, I was in an emotionally fragile mood, and in need of some quiet and calm, and it was not available there. Earlier during the morning I had promised a reporter of the German equivalent of PBS to be interviewed. The inside of the tent was too noisy and chaotic after all the action there. The film crew wanted to have a Dachau Camp background, and the remaining place was the outside, and it was still raining. Three barely adequate umbrellas had to do. I think that the reporter and crew got exactly what they wanted, a somewhat frail old survivor, emotionally not quite back in balance, talking on the Appellplatz in Dachau, in the rain doing what seems to him an obligation to remembrance. Daniel meanwhile was somewhere moving around filming, perhaps adding footage to his file."

Fred Terna, May 3, 2015