Joyce Wagner, 97, Auschwitz survivor
Meeting Joyce Wagner
Sometimes I wonder what I'll write in one of these newsletters. Not this week. This week, I'm writing about my encounter with Joyce Wagner, a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor I had the honor of meeting, ever so briefly, at yesterday's rally for racial justice in Wheaton.
I certainly didn't start the weekend expecting to meet Ms. Wagner. My big plans for Saturday were to get a much-needed haircut and then participate in a protest rally along a stretch of Roosevelt Road. Last weekend, I had been in Chicago, participating in some small demonstrations and taking in some of the damage from rioting and looting the night before. This week, Becky, the kids, and I decided to join voices for racial justice in Wheaton. I had been recruited as a "Corner Coordinator," which for the most part meant encouraging responsible social distancing.
We were assigned the corner of Roosevelt and Washington, one block east of the major intersection and traffic light at Roosevelt and Naperville. Red lights at that intersection would back up stopped cars past our corner, so that we frequently got to chat with people driving by. Some of them we knew. Others we had never met before. Some just happened to be driving by. Others had intentionally driven the length of the rally -- about two miles -- showing signs of support as their way of participating in the protests.
That's how I met Ms. Wagner.
At one point, the light changed at Roosevelt. Traffic slowed and then stopped. As I stood holding my sign, which read "Black Lives Matter," an elderly woman in the passenger window of the car right in front of me motioned to a few standing nearby. I waved hello. The driver leaned over her and said, "She wants you to come see this."
I walked over with my son and the man standing next to me. When we got to the window, we realized that the woman in the window was showing us a tattoo.
As soon as I saw it, I knew how she got it. Something about her urgency and gravity, her voice, her age, and the tattoo itself, told me it had come from a Nazi concentration/extermination camp. (I learned only tonight that the Auschwitz complex was the only concentration camp to have tattooed prisoners.) I had spent just enough time, during trips to Berlin over the past seven years or so, at memorials and museums meant to teach us about the horrors of the Nazi regime that I had seen a few of these tattoos, even if only in photos. I knew.
But at the same time, I didn't know. Just to presume would feel in so many ways inappropriate. One doesn't presume that someone is a Holocaust survivor, but out of respect for the awful particularity of that experience, one asks. Presuming would also, in some ways, have robbed the woman I was meeting of her own opportunity to tell me what it was or what it meant. So I asked, with a lump in my throat, feeling too small for the moment and afraid of even hearing the truth that I had already guessed: "Where did you get that?"
"Auschwitz. Auschwitz," she said.
"Thank you for sharing that with us," I barely mustered. "Would it be alright if I take a photo?"
"Yes. Yes," she said. The driver confirmed.
The woman stretched her arm out just so that the tattoo could be more clearly seen, and for a moment, before the light turned green, the driver reached over and helped the woman turn her arm (which you can see in the photo below).
As I snapped a few photos, I heard the woman say, "They're all sons of bitches. You should see what they did to my brother."
Traffic started moving again and the car pulled away before I could ask for her name. Th encounter took my breath away.
Tweeting Joyce Wagner
"If I never have a tweet go viral again -- unless it's another photo of a Holocaust survivor championing racial justice -- it'll be too soon." -- Me
I shared one of the three photos to social media, where I have a very modest presence. I posted it to Instagram, which automatically added it to my Facebook feed, and I tweeted it, along with a simple description of the woman and the exact parting words, as I heard them, without gloss.
I thought my friends, many of whom were also at the rally, might see it, and some did right away. A friend about a hundred yards away commented that they had seen me walk out into the street to talk to the woman in the car, but they hadn't known why. Others commented that they had seen her driving down Roosevelt supporting the protest.
A few minutes later, I noticed it had been seen already by a lot more than my friends. I had realized that I had let autocorrect or autocomplete get me again. I had somehow posted, "There all sons of bitches..." Easy enough to correct on Instagram and Facebook. I was about to delete the tweet and repost it when I noticed it had already been retweeted multiple times. I left it alone, unworried I'd earn a reputation as someone who doesn't really know the difference between they're, there, and their.
By the time I got to a meeting later in the afternoon, the post was well on its way to viral status and, along the way, revealing quite a few things about Twitter, and the present state of our society.
I first noticed something strange as I sat, adequately socially distanced, talking with friends from church. My phone buzzed incessantly. Not wanting to check my phone during the meeting, I didn't really know what was going on. When I left the meeting and looked at my phone, the first notification was a question from Twitter, asking if I wanted to turn off notifications. I clicked, "No thanks." That might have been a mistake.
As I write this, the tweet is closing in on 30,000,000 impressions, or views, and 9,000,000 "engagements" of one sort or another. It's been retweeted more than 200,000 times and liked more than 725,000 times. Someone shared it to Reddit and it was, at one point, one of Reddit's top posts. It was shared on Instagram by an account that has 19,600,000 followers, and more than a million liked it. On Facebook, early on, a friend asked me, "Can you make this shareable?" So I changed the privacy settings from my usual "Friends only" to "Public." It's now been shared there 2,814 times. Some people have screenshotted and shared it -- some with attribution and some without -- and so I don't know all the places it now shows up.
It would take far more than a newsletter to tell the depth of my ambivalence toward this virality.
On the one hand, good seems to have come of it:
- This is how I and others learned the name of the woman in the car: Joyce Wagner. As people identified her and posted about her, I learned more about her story and about her brother. I learned about the book she wrote and her appearances at local schools, educating students about her experience of the Holocaust. I found a 1988 interview that is archived and available online with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- I had very much gotten the impression that Ms. Wagner would have been standing among us at the rally for racial justice, if she could have been, and I hope that in some way this means she has been able to participate in the protest at a scale that no one would previously have imagined.
- Many have liked the post, and many of those who have replied or retweeted it with comment have expressed deep admiration and respect for Ms. Wagner -- the kind of admiration and respect that I think is due to a 97-year-old Auschwitz survivor who finds a way to show her support for others crushed by brutality.
- Many are encouraged by Ms. Wagner's courage, conviction, and willingness to join her voice to the voices of others who have faced oppression.
On the other hand, it is still Twitter and we are still a very sick society.
- By far the least significant of the negative experiences: There are the people trying to find ways to discredit me or to make some joke about bad grammar. One person implied that the post wasn't believable and threated to "embarrass [me] in public." I decided that if Joyce Wagner is tough enough to survive what she's survived and join this weekend's protests, I can deal with the jabs from folks so unmoored from meaning and significance that they try to get picky about the exact location of the encounter or their takeway is that I can't spell.
- Much more importantly, there are those people who are enlisting Ms. Wagner for all sorts of causes that they can't know for sure that she supports.
- There are the people who can't seem to listen for a second, but misunderstand or twist Ms. Wagner's words in order to represent her as making some unreasonable claim. It's hard to know whether they are dense or deliberately disingenuous. I suppose it's a little bit of both: unsupple minds and unprincipled rhetoric.
- Then there are the trolls. The people who will say anything for the lulz. The Holocaust deniers. I wonder what it's like to hollow out one's soul like that. I hope I can never understand it.
This morning at church, our Old Testament reading was Psalm 12, and it struck me as a "psalm for social media:"
I wonder how Psalm 12 might have seemed relevant to Polish Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.
Recommending Joyce Wagner
To listen
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the repository for this oral interview with Joyce Wagner.
(At about minute 41, you can hear Joyce say it was Josef Mengele, himself, that separated the victims coming off her train into groups bound for work or bound for immediate extermination.)
To read
I rarely recommend a book I haven't read, but I did just order Joyce Wagner's book, A Promise Kept to Bear Witness, and I recommend that you order it, and read it, too.
At 97, Joyce Wagner is still fulfilling her promise to bear witness, as she joined a rally for racial justice on the anniversary of D-Day.