hypocrisy.com - The Eutychus Perch by Hurricane

A few years ago I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem with a group of Presbyterians.  “God’s frozen people” or not, a lot of tears were shed by those Calvinists, especially as we walked through the room dedicated to the children who were killed, whose names were continuously read through the speakers.  I dreaded hearing the name Samelson because I had heard from an older brother how their mother had chosen to go and die with her five-year-old girl rather than let her die alone at Treblinka.

One of the first “Righteous Gentiles” to be honored at the memorial was a Polish lady named Irena Sendler.  She had been a public health official in Warsaw during the Second World War, and so had access to the ghetto on account of an outbreak of tuberculosis or typhoid; sources differ.  She convinced many of the Jewish families to let her smuggle their children out and place them with Catholic families or in Catholic institutions, removing them in burlap sacks, caskets or whatever came to hand.  (Just imagine the terror of those children.)  She gave them new names and identity papers, but papers with their true identities were hidden under an apple tree in her yard.

Unfortunately, in the nature of the case not many of the parents survived to find those children.

Eventually—no doubt inevitably—she was caught by the Gestapo, imprisoned and mercilessly tortured, yet she refused to reveal the names of those working with her.  She managed to escape when a sympathetic organization bribed some guards.  One wonders how those guards managed to elude execution for letting prisoners go.  In all she managed to save some 2500 Jews, but she confessed that every day of her life she agonized over not having saved more.

One of the beautiful things that came out of her dedication was that when she was in a hospital later in life she was cared for by one of the people whose lives she had saved.

To my knowledge, hypocrisy first entered the scene when, in 1965, she was asked to visit Jerusalem to be honored at the Yad Vashem Memorial, and the Communist government of Poland refused to let her go.  Only years later was she finally able to travel there and receive the award.  Perhaps more tellingly, she was nominated for a Nobel Prize.  She did not win the prize.  It was won by Al Gore for a film he made of a slide show.

Those of us who work with the literature of Latin America are accustomed to hearing of such injustice by the Nobel Committee with regard to the prize for literature.  Sometimes it has been won by third-rate writers, and we wondered why.  Then we realized that several Latin American authors in a row who won the prize had exactly one thing in common:  they had attacked the United Fruit Company.  Yes, there were a couple of excellent writers in there, namely Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez.  But who in his or her right mind would award the Nobel Prize for Literature to a Miguel Angel Asturias when Jorge Luis Borges, who influenced the literature of much of the world, was ignored?

The fact is that Borges was relatively conservative in his political views, and thus was among those essentially blacklisted by the committee.  The same is true of a writer I have mentioned before in this column, Alvaro Mutis, who, according to García Márquez, has been writing better than he has for a couple of decades now.  Mutis, as I have noted, is a monarchist.  Don’t ask for Vegas odds on whether a snowball has a better chance in hell than Mutis has of winning a Nobel.

At some point one might come to believe that the prestige of a given prize just might be compromised by its consistent political bias when dealing with artists.  Or one of the greatest of the real heroes of World War II, for that matter.

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