What black camp survivor would have told Obama
By DeWayne Wickham
In his five-day swing through the Middle East and Europe, President Obama produced enough memorable talk to keep historians, and those who have a hand in making history, busy figuring out how his actions will eventually match his words. But it's the thought of a conversation I wish Obama had had that has left a lasting impression on me.
In his Cairo University speech Thursday, Obama described Israel's occupation of Palestine as just that — an occupation. He denounced Muslim anti-Semitism and defended the right of Israel to exist. And he challenged each side in the warring between Israelis and Palestinians, which has long burdened American foreign policy, to acknowledge the statehood rights of the other.
A day later, Obama went to Buchenwald, a former Nazi concentration camp where about 56,000 people — most of them Jews — perished, and called those who deny that the Holocaust happened "ignorant and hateful."
Absent from that speech was any mention of Gert Schramm, Buchenwald's only black prisoner. That's understandable. Schramm was, for many people, a missing part of the awful history of that place until an account of his life appeared recently in Die Zeit, a highly respected German weekly newspaper.
A year in Buchenwald
The article, written by John Kantara, a 44-year-old Afro-German documentary filmmaker and freelance writer, tells the story of how Schramm, then just 15, survived his year-long imprisonment in Buchenwald.
Schramm was protected by the older white prisoners, who surrounded him during the daily roll calls. "They knew if he were in the front lines at roll call that he would not last very long," Kantara told me. "That's his life lesson. 'If we don't act in unison in the face of real evil, we'll all perish,' " the filmmaker recounted from his interview with Schramm.
Parents of two nations
That's the lesson Schramm said he wanted to share with Obama. He wanted to tell the president about Jack Brankson, his African-American father, who was an engineer sent to Germany to build a bridge and where he met Schramm's mother. When Brankson returned to Germany in 1941 to take Schramm and his mother to the U.S., he was arrested and sent to the Auschwitz camp. What happened to him after that is a mystery.
"This place teaches us that we must be ever vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others' suffering is not our problem and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests," Obama said at Buchenwald.
I wish Obama and Schramm — both the product of a white mother and black father — had talked about the world they were born into generations apart. I wish Schramm had the chance to tell Obama his personal story, to drive home the point that the Holocaust, which took the lives of 6 million Jews, also had other victims. On one level, I'm sure Obama already knows this. But to put a black face on it reinforces Obama's point that we all have a stake in resisting "injustice and intolerance and indifference in whatever forms they may take."
Schramm, 80, a member of the prisoners' advisory board of the Buchenwald memorial foundation, talks a lot to German schoolchildren about the horrors of that Nazi concentration camp. "He's an old man who wants to share his story with young people," Kantara said. It's too bad he didn't get to share it with Obama.
DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.
