General Discussion

... my attitudes. I've written here about what my closet friend's mother told me about her experience in the camps. Her tattoo number on her wrist was the first one I'd seen in person. Out of all his family, with generations of his family in Poland, only Irv's mother, father, an aunt and uncle, and two of his mother's cousins survived. One cousin lived in Montreal and the other in Ecuador.

Up to then, I thought the war was just war. As kids, for some reason when we played at war and my sister, brother and I were always the designated Germans. We had never heard of the word "Nazi".

Once I found a red flag fallen off a truck with an overhanging load. I got my Uncle to draw a swastika on it and nail it to a 2 x2" length of wood and we three marched around the block. When we got to other side of the block, a fairly old man saw us and jumped over his fence and tore the flag apart, the whole time telling us the flag was bad, but we were good kids. Our neighborhood, now the gentrified Ohio City neighborhood, was then a place where hundreds of displaced refugees from the war settled.