Translator: Sebastian Betti Reviewer: Alex Appella Immigrants have no shame. They steal our jobs. Overweight people are lazy and undisciplined.
Homosexuals are perverts, and they are a bad influence for our children. How uncomfortable, no? I'm discriminating out loud.
And it's uncomfortable. But this uncomfortable feeling is a seed. A seed that demonstrates a social agreement among us that recognizes that discrimination causes harm.
Poor people are poor because they don't want to work. Jews are dirty. And they steal.
How much harm is caused by discrimination? As a family, we found out. By surprise, and decades after the fact, but we found out.
My grandparents were Hungarian, and they emigrated to the USA before the Second World War. Meanwhile, their siblings arrived to Córdoba, Argentina, from Hungary before and after the Second World War. When questions arose about our family history, the only person left who could answer these questions was my grandfather's brother who lived here in Córdoba.
I came here in 1994 to speak with him. Today, we are going to call him János. From János we learned that we were Jewish.
My grandfather hid it in the USA to protect us. János, here in Córdoba, did the same. His children and grandchildren grew up unaware of their heritage.
Why? Because János learned in the most definitive way how much harm discrimination can cause. In World War Two, János' son, an infant, was murdered because he was Jewish.
In his wife's arms. János' sister was also murdered, with her two children. Boys aged three and seven.
Along with his brother-in-law, his father- in-law, his other niece, and neighbors. Every one of them transformed into smoke in concentration camps. We had no idea.
As a species, how is it possible that we are capable of such atrocities? How is it possible that they continue to happen even today? Is there anything that I, or we, can do to revert this?
These are questions I visit every day. And with these questions, I always recall a memory my great-uncle shared with me -- one of the many gifts he bestowed me: In the spring of 1944, the last year of the war, they began to march the Jews from the ghetto where they were enclosed to the train station. They did not know where they were going.
Despite the rumors, they could not imagine what destiny awaited them. When they crossed the familiar city center, they saw a ghost town. No one dared to come outside.
If you were a Jewish sympathizer, your life was at risk. Either you discriminated, or you died. My family members were among the last group marching out of the ghetto that spring.
Despite the silent streets, someone walked with them. Despite the risk to his life, he walked with them. An older man, a Christian, a neighbor who had been a friend of our family.
He could not raise his voice. He could not save the lives of his friends who were different. But he could be a witness.
This was his seed; and he planted it where he was, in the moment in history that was his to live. It is the same seed that makes us uncomfortable even today when we hear or see discrimination. How much harm is caused by discrimination?
In the camps, side by side with the Jews, the homosexuals, the Gypsies, the disabled, communists, any kind of sympathizer—all were murdered. All of them transformed into smoke. Today, 73 years later, the seed our neighbor planted lives on.
And it shows us how much we have evolved. But it also demonstrates that we continue to harm others, as individuals, and as a society. The Muslims are terrorists.
People from the USA are brutes, and racist. Is that so? What do we achieve by perpetuating the jokes?
By not looking at ourselves? More questions I visit each day. If my great-uncle could not go to the grave with our family's history, neither could I.
So I wrote a book to honor all that he returned to us as a family, to honor our magical time together. And also to illustrate these ceaseless questions of mine. I was convinced that I created the book for personal reasons.
Some teachers in Córdoba taught me otherwise. As soon as the book came to life, they wrote me to share that they were using the book in their classrooms. The book has a very unusual format-- it's all color, a vibrant mix of testimonies, photos, maps, art.
And it's full of mystery. Right away these teachers saw something in the book that I-- despite having been immersed in this project for more than 20 years-- never saw: unique educational material that is potent and versatile for teaching a wide variety of subjects in the classroom: discrimination, identity, history, immigration, visual arts, ethics. And they could explore these topics simultaneously in different classes.
I readily confess that I do not have the courage to be a school teacher. But I do have the courage to listen to them. Because for me, there is no force more potent for generating positive change in society than an inspired teacher.
And I began to wonder. If just a couple teachers with a single copy of the book were so motivated by what happened in their classrooms that they wrote me to share the news, without knowing who I was, what would happen if a lot of teachers had several copies of the book? There, I found the “why” of absolutely everything that happened to us as a family and to my great-uncle and me along the way.
I found our seed. It is this. How about a suitcase?
That is a traveling library, that travels by bus. Free of charge for its users. With this excitement, I reached out to people I knew, and I reached out to total strangers, to help me create the traveling library.
Through what are now various suitcases, we equip teachers with several copies of the book, a study guide, and a registry where each school shares its experience with the traveling library. The seed grows and grows. Each year via crowdfunding campaigns, individual sponsors from more than five countries and from all of Argentina extend their hands so that the traveling libraries —the suitcases— continue to travel to schools, museums and libraries throughout all of Argentina.
They travel non-stop, and they travel without cost. Each place has the traveling library for one month. The first year, we had just one suitcase.
The second year, two suitcases, then three. Now there are four. Since they began traveling in July, 2013, they have been in the hands and minds of over 6,000 people.
They have visited over 150 schools. The suitcases come and go, they arrive and they take off. I'm the crazy lady at the bus station in Carlos Paz.
I pick them up and send them off again. Suitcases, sponsors, students, teachers, books, buses. Time and again in the registries that accompany the traveling libraries, and in the messages from the teachers, one can read and perceive that in the encounter, there is transformation.
There is empathy. I was 20 when I met my great-uncle, and I was innocent and unaware enough so as to admit to him that I didn't have much hope that the human condition was going to improve. How he yelled at me.
He was not very tall. And his light blue eyes were scary. “What?
How can you not be hopeful? I have seen the end of the world,” he yelled. “And it was not the end of the world.
I breathed every moment of the end, and it was not the end; so then how can you, at your age, not be hopeful? You silly little girl! ” Truly, a very silly little girl.
Everyone János held dear, everyone close to him was murdered. Everyone. Despite that, he died in peace here in Córdoba, at 93.
Not without pain, but in peace. So then how can we not follow his example? How can we not believe that it is possible to illuminate the moment in history in which we live?
With encounters, with our gaze, with dialog, with ideas, with art, with music, in any way possible, wherever possible. Planting seeds.
