{"id":7106,"date":"2010-09-11T22:16:02","date_gmt":"2010-09-12T02:16:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wendybrandes.com\/blog\/?p=7106"},"modified":"2012-04-06T21:22:35","modified_gmt":"2012-04-07T01:22:35","slug":"thoughts-on-911-the-devil-is-in-the-details","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wendybrandes.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/thoughts-on-911-the-devil-is-in-the-details\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on 9\/11: The Devil Is in the Details"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The devil is in the details” normally means<\/a> that the biggest challenges of a project are contained in its smaller elements. But I always think of the expression in relation to the personal stories told by or of the victims of catastrophic events. Such is particularly the case for me today, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, which I witnessed from my office across the West Side Highway. It’s easy to become inured to any big story, no matter how horrifying.\u00a0 Eventually, it becomes something in a history book. But an individual’s heart-breaking story — one that might never merit a line in a book or a newspaper article — is always a shocking reminder that the disaster is made up of hundreds, thousands or even millions of stories just as unbearable. The phenomenon of empathy for the singular rather than the masses is best summed up by the line, “One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic” — a quote attributed by many<\/a> to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin<\/a> and by some to anti-Nazi German journalist Kurt Tucholsky<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The detail-oriented devil was on my mind in July, when I visited my friend Al Radley<\/a> in London. Al likes to reminisce about World War II, when he was just a teenager serving in the British Navy. He was on a ship called the Monowai<\/a>, which transported repatriated prisoners of war and concentration-camp survivors. One of them was a refined man whom Al later realized was Otto Frank, the father of teenage diarist Anne Frank. Al told MrB and me about repatriating Soviet POWs. He expected they would disembark to a warm welcome: a band playing, streamers fluttering, relatives hugging. Instead, he said, the soldiers were taken off the ship and shot on orders of Stalin, who didn’t want anyone who had been exposed to the West to tempt comrades away from Communist values. Word got back to the next group of POWs and when the ship was docked at Malta, some of them leaped into the sea to try to swim to safety. They were fished out and taken back home to be shot. On another journey, the ship took back to France the French women who had been forced into prostitution by the Germans. The women were seized on the beach, forcibly shaven to identify them as collaborators, and take into town to be displayed as traitors —\u00a0 scapegoats for the willing collaborators of the Vichy government<\/a> who helped the Nazis identify and deport about 76,000 French Jews, of whom 2,500 survived<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Al also recommended that I visit the\u00a0Mus\u00e9e Nissim de Camondo<\/a> while in Paris,<\/a> our next stop. The museum is a grand mansion built in the 1900s by a wealthy Sephardic<\/a> Jew named Mo\u00efse de Camondo and painstakingly decorated in 18th-century style. Mo\u00efse’s only son, Nissim, died in combat during World War I and his daughter, B\u00e9atrice, was more interested in being a socialite and equestrienne than in caring for furnishings from the 1700s. So, Mo\u00efse left the building and all it contained to France, mandating that the museum be named after his son and the collection remain intact.\u00a0 Mo\u00efse died in 1935 and the museum was inaugurated in 1936. My enjoyment of Mo\u00efse’s strange obsession with the Ancien R\u00e9gime<\/a> was severely hampered by the knowledge that B\u00e9atrice, her ex-husband and two children died in Auschwitz less than a decade later. (What’s the French for “Thanks for the cool house! Prepare to die.”?) In the cruelest of ironies, B\u00e9atrice was a Catholic convert. The Camondos were among the Jews expelled from Spain in the late 1400s for their refusal to convert. They landed in Turkey where they flourished as bankers. Centuries later, the family line died with B\u00e9atrice, who made the conversion that her ancestors refused, only to discover that neither her money nor her new faith could save her.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t planned to go to the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art et d\u2019histoire du Juda\u00efsme<\/a> (Museum of Jewish Art and History) that day but I needed to go as a sort of palate cleanser after the the Camondo museum. A recent exhibit on the Camondos had ended<\/a>, so I got postcards of the family in the gift shop.<\/p>\n

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Mo\u00efse's cousin Isaac, who donated a massive art collection to the Louvre. Click for more info.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Family patriarch Abraham-Salomon and his grandson Nissim. This Nissim is the grandfather of the Nissim for whom the museum is named.<\/p><\/div>\n

Back in the here and now, my father last week told me about a man he met who had lain injured next to two wounded women outside the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. While rescuers tried to assist them, the two women were killed by people who had jumped from the towers<\/a>. (The man suffered head injuries that kept him in the hospital for a year.)\u00a0 Just when I thought I’d heard it all, I heard that. The devil is, indeed, in the details.<\/p>\n

Here are my previous 9\/11 posts:<\/p>\n