A Hero Passes...

I was thinking the other day about a book I read a very long time ago, allegedly written by Mickey Mantle, about heroism. It was patterned after JFK's Profiles in Courage, but the part that stuck with me all my life was a special kind of heroism, the true moral compass, the heroism that happens all around us every day that doesn't glitter, or call attention to itself. The willingness to risk something of yourself financially, emotionally, reputation-wise, to do what you know to be the right thing. That kind of heroism happens all the time to people who wouldn't dream of equating it with heroism.

We've also really tortured the word mercilessly. Baseball players hit heroic home runs, movie stars save the world heroically; the idea of heroism has been cheapened by the culture. Why else would we even tolerate radio commentators calling Iraq veterans who are voicing their doubts on our Iraq policies "phony soldiers." Were they shooting fake bullets? Were their injuries cured by simply taking off the make up? My belief is that they served their country, as they were honor-bound to do, and their experience in doing so was an epiphany, something they never expected to realize- wrong place, wrong time. I thought going there to fight was heroic, while I opposed the reasons for intervening; but having done that and tried to tell America to look at what we are really accomplishing there-- now that is courage.

Lt. John Withers, because he was in the middle of pursuing a PhD, went into the Army in 1944 with a commission and the responsibility for commanding a group of men who literally traveled across the U.S. and Europe for deployment in segregated vehicles. The Lt., and his command were black, the army policy was segregation. And the soldiers in his command were given the stick end of the jobs- supplies,cleaning, cooking, digging graves.

Many of Withers' troops were illiterate; he taught them to read and write, and wrote letters for them. He was well-liked and respected.

After they had been at their station for several months, a soldier in his unit confessed to breaking an order. He told Withers that, despite the Army policy that there should be no contact with the survivors of any of the concentration camps, for fear of pestilence, his unit had taken in, and was hiding two survivors. They were sick, and hungry, and the arrangements made up to that point by the Allies for handling the situation amounted to little more than they had experienced in the camps. Withers, inclined to send the men back to the Refugee camp, asked to have the two men, affectionately named Peewee and Salamon by the soldiers who couldn't pronounce their real names, brought to him.

He saw the condition they were in, and countermanding orders and risking an honorable discharge, which would forfeit access to the G.I. Bill to finish his education, he agreed that keeping them and sustaining them until their health had returned was the right thing to do.

They spent a year with his unit, ducking higher command when there were inspections. All of the men developed great affection for one another.

An entire unit, and their commanding officer risked their careers to perform a simple act of decency. They never thought twice about it. I think I understand a little bit more about courage each time I hear these stories. Courage is when you don't believe you have a choice, the thing you need to do is so blatantly obvious.

Lt. Withers, Ph.D., passed away on Sunday. There is a lot more to this story, which was captured by the Wall Street Journal article to be found at this link:

http://isurvived.org/InTheNews/WSJ-folder/wsj-article-112503.html

My Great Aunt Salka Hilsenrath, my Great Uncle Shulim Hilsenrath, and my two cousins, Henik and Jumek; Great Uncle Jakob Rosenberg, my Great Aunt Heniah Rosenberg, and my other cousin Henik Rosenberg could easily have been the beneficiaries of the human decency so abundant in Lt. Withers and his unit, abundant despite their status as second class citizens and soldiers.

But as my personal research is beginning to reveal, and has been chronicled in an astonishing book called Lost, by Daniel Mendelsohn, they probably never made it much farther than the fields surrounding their small town, Stryj, where they were executed and tossed into mass graves they themselves dug.

About 1,100 people who fought in World War II die every day. Most of them, who struggled to find the words during their lives to talk about it, were heroes, or did heroic things that we will never hear about.

I always tell kids not to look for heroes in the movies or the comic books. Find them all around you, they are abundant, and blissfully ignorant that they are heroes. They are a 21 year old survivor of muscular dystrophy publicly confronting Mitt Romney on his opposition to medical use of marijuana, which was recommended by five of his treating physicians; they are Al Decie and Gloria Braunhardt, standing up for the environment against both government and corporations; they are the teacher who somehow finds a way to connect an autistic child to the world in a meaningful way; and that child, working against a stacked deck with support services, trying day after day to discover meaning and linkage with others, that child is my hero. Those are the moral values we should be teaching and showing in the Schools and on the School Committee.

David Bowie was right. We can be heroes. We need to be them, recognize them, and spend less time expecting them to be someone else.