A lesson this scholar didn't sign up for
| Sunday, Jun 14 2009 04:41 PM
Last Updated Sunday, Jun 14 2009 04:41 PM
On the 11th day of Peter Hayes' comprehensive, borderline-grueling 12-day seminar for university faculty, "Teaching the Holocaust," the topic was to have been Holocaust denial.
But the lesson came through the door one day early. Carrying a rifle.
Liora Gubkin-Malicdem knows these curriculum details because she was there Wednesday, in the basement of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. D.C., when 88-year-old white supremacist James Wenneker von Brunn allegedly showed up, one floor above hers.
The Cal State Bakersfield professor of religious studies had correctly guessed that the exhaustive seminar would thoroughly prepare her to teach the awful but powerful history of the Nazis' attempted extermination of European Jewry.
She couldn't have guessed just how profound -- and tragic -- that lesson would be.
Security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns had greeted Gubkin-Malicdem and her fellow academics practically every morning since the conference began May 31. It was Johns who opened the door for von Brunn that day, no doubt assuming that the elderly man needed assistance. Johns didn't see the rifle until it was too late.
Downstairs, the Holocaust scholars were well into their Day 10 discussion. Having covered the postwar trials, they had moved on to restitution issues.
"When we heard the shots, we sort of knew immediately," Gubkin-Malicdem said. "One of my professor colleagues was a law enforcement officer for 18 years, and another one had experience in the military, and they took the lead. Was that (noise) a cart falling down the stairs? No, that's gunfire. That's screaming. That's panic. Stay or run?"
They elected to stay in the basement classroom, hunkered down on the floor, the door barricaded as best they could manage. Problem was, the door locked only from the outside, and with a key, meaning the one museum staff member on hand who could secure the door would then be potentially exposed himself. So they left the door unlocked -- for 25 terrifying minutes, until a security guard came down to give the all-clear. Even then, they weren't sure: Initially, the security guard didn't identify himself to their satisfaction.
Johns, the friendly and courteous security guard, was shot and died later at a Washington hospital. Von Brunn was critically wounded when two other guards fired back at him, hitting him in the face.
Until that day, the seminar had been fascinating but extremely demanding. Hayes, the Theodore Z. Weiss Professor of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University, had assigned conference attendees -- 19 scholars from across the United States, Canada and Mexico -- almost 200 pages of reading every night.
They'd been in the bubble of intense focus, but they'd heard about Barack Obama's Cairo speech, in which the president called out Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust. They'd heard about Obama's subsequent trip to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where Obama declared "those who insist that the Holocaust never happened" are "ignorant and hateful."
Apparently von Brunn heard about it too. A search of the suspect's car, found double-parked outside the museum, turned up a notebook which contained such gems as this: "Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do." Yes, apparently the president is a pawn of Christian, Muslim and Jewish extremism. Quite a feat.
Gubkin-Malicdem came home late Friday night, having missed her and husband Richard's seventh wedding anniversary -- and, worse for a mother not accustomed to such separations, two weeks of her 16-month-old son's life. But she returns with a new grasp of her career mission.
"Some people call Holocaust deniers crazy," she said. "But to dismiss them as crazy removes the responsibility. And we've seen how perfectly sane, rational people managed to participate in the murder of 6 million Jews."
Gubkin-Malicdem teaches her course on the Holocaust for the first time this fall. She'll be well prepared.
E-mail Robert Price at rprice@bakersfield.com. He's also at www.stubblebuzz.com and twitter.com/stubblebuzz.
