Selected memories
Harrison, Barbara
first proposed, critics question whether the revived maneuver soup line. Gary had left the Municipal Shelter - commonly is a ploy. Make the Soviets an offer they will inevitably reject,...
...How accountable is he for atrocities committed see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence against Jews and non-Jews in Greece and Yugoslavia...
...We are all vulnerable to the social mythologies of crimes and executed in 1947 as our times...
...He was drinking and on the downhill...
...To questions about earlier Ethics & the media disclaimers that• be had taken part in Yugoslav military maneuvers, Waldheim is quoted as saying, "Who can remember everything from the war period...
...After four weeks, Leib was examination, for Kurt Waldheim reminds them of a past most stabilized...
...Our capacities for hi-tech Writing in the March-April issue of The Catholic Worker, treatment are prodigious...
...Yet again he was released, yet self-interest of both superpowers...
...row...
...Would he have been raised the swastika on the Acropolis, two young students, no elected Secretary-General if the older than Kurt Waldheim when Austria was forcibly annexed information now available had by Germany, climbed the steep hill leading to the Parthenon in been known...
...Common decency is given the short subjected to unrelenting propaganda and indoctrination...
...again to the "Muni...
...if, in his words, he was simply a decent man doing his duty as a The most charitable image rising from the cauldron of decent soldier, has he so vehemently denied the Balkan phase growing speculation about Waldheim is of a just man picked of his military service...
...As Griffin gering ironies and complexities...
...I'm appalled at how that he came to a city where maybe one-quarter of the popula- intrusive, insensitive, and downright arrogant many of the tion wore the yellow star and didn't notice they all disap- reporters are...
...BARBARA HARRISON Novosti, Waldheim finally ad- (Barbara Harrison is founding director of the Center for the mitted that in 1942 he was in the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College in Boston...
...He was once again coherent, and with medication, would choose to forget...
...A achieve arms control than any other recent president...
...It is a story excavation site...
...Like many people who come through the doors of such refuges, Gary Leib had a painful history, one which, except for fortune, might be the lot of us all...
...ing officer, General Alexander As human beings, to a certain degree, we are all imitative Loehr, who was tried for war creatures...
...that should be read as parable as much as obituary...
...Griffin saw Leib several days later at the Catholic Worker Within war there are codes of conduct and acceptable Commonweal: 326 parameters of behavior...
...Chesterton once defined not as "looking for a the best medical care available - every exacting procedure, direction in which one can go on indefinitely" but as "looking every human effort, every penny spent...
...And she added sadly, of personnel in his administration...
...In response to the accusation that he was in Greece during the year that thousands of Greek Jews were deported to EXPLOITING GRIEF Auschwitz, and thousands of non-Jewish resistance fighters RESTRAINT & THE RIGHT TO KNOW suffered mercilessly, Waldheim has said he was merely serving as an interpreter: "I never had anything to do with such cruelties...
...How is it that would ask of ourselves...
...and Soviet arsenals...
...writes, "Blood cultures, X-rays, CAT scans, spinal taps, This is only the beginning of a journey of conscience that indeed the whole wondrous array of modern diagnostic tools will catapult the Austrian people into the realm of selfwas called into service...
...order to achieve a calculated, self-interested objective...
...questions raised in the Waldheim affair...
...And he would have been well-acquainted feel...
...He could craniotomy had to be performed to drain fluid that had built up bargain for deep cuts in both U.S...
...Gary's assigned social worker told Reagan might actually pursue this course is, alas, slim...
...But over the years, his life on Manhattan's streets - the hit-and-miss shelter, the make-do SELECTED MEMORIES clothes and meals, the acid of the vine - took their toll...
...FolGriffin had known the thirty-eight-year-old Leib over the past lowing a seizure and a trip to the hospital's emergency room, twelve years...
...The use of intravenous could limit anti-satellite weapons, chemical weapons, and antibiotics was required around the clock over a series of nuclear tests...
...By the time Leib first came The Waldheim affair to the Catholic Worker, a young man of the Vietnam era, he was already a chronic alcoholic...
...Gary had left the Municipal Shelter - commonly is a ploy...
...Make the Soviets an offer they will inevitably reject, referred to by men in Leib's situation as a zoo - and was back to give the appearance of working toward arms control, in on the street...
...a seizure...
...He has the advantage in regard to arms control touch-and-go weeks...
...When Jewish blood spurts from the knife/Then things will I have brandished the microphone and asked, "How does it go twice as well...
...There are just no long-term residential care facilities for So rethinking arms control probably won't pay off tomor- people like Gary...
...As a member of a Nazi victim's life story...
...This needs to change now...
...The hospital spared nothing in its treatment...
...It remains nonetheless the foundation for true progress, a Griffin points out that Gary Leib both received and deserved progress G.K...
...Griffin tells of walking into the neurology-neurosurgery BY A HAIR'S breadth, Kurt Waldheim lost the majority of floor of Bellevue Hospital in early 1985, where he was a votes needed to win Austria's presidency and faces a member of the nursing staff, and finding Leib in the middle of June 8 runoff against Socialist candidate Kurt Steyrer...
...Academy, and as a member of the Brownshirts, the paramilit- As a television reporter for eight and a half years, I can tell ary organization also known as the S.A., he would have been you that the answer is no...
...Gary's final return to Bellevue was in February 1986...
...Yet we must ask of our leaders no less than we a war criminal...
...But there he was found frozen to death the following morning...
...It would have been better for him to say, `Yes, I was The letter-writer had witnessed modern journalism's standthere, I know, but I could do nothing.' " ard fare - callous interviews with relatives of crash victims, Waldheim has acknowledged, after many repudiations, that photographs of suffering and grief, and maudlin detail of each he was enrolled in a Nazi youth group...
...peared...
...United Nations War Crimes Commission gave him an "A" The most pitiable specter is a human being acting under orders, listing, meaning he should be with little feeling or thought, ignorant of the issues in which he tried as a war criminal, why was is involved, and totally oblivious to any call to the ethical, an he not extradited by the Yugo- Orwellian character who has "no dignity of emotion, or deep slavs along with his command- or complex sorrows...
...that Richard Nixon had in regard to America's "opening" to Again Gary Leib was released, again to the Municipal China, the ability to overcome the diehard opposition of the Shelter...
...There were respites...
...There must be no weakness or tenderness in it...
...I want to parameters...
...and his family showed him care...
...Kozara Mountains during the Kozara Operation, a brutal massacre in which the Germans killed thousands of civilians or sent them to concentration camps...
...Griffin notes this time things were more serious...
...our capacities for simple care seem Bill Griffin, a nurse associated with the New York Catholic tattered and impoverished...
...If, in 1948, the seventeen-member up by the scruff of his neck and thrown into an unwanted war...
...all people concerned capsules, a doctor's appointment, a referral to the Municipal about human dignity and human promise must confront the Men's Shelter, and a subway token...
...OUT OF REACH Something is terribly amiss...
...There WHAT TIME REFUSES TO FORGET followed lacerations, broken limbs, and eventually grand mal seizures...
...But it is not only the Austrian people seizure-free...
...Yet, Griffin writes, for a place where we can stop...
...was seeking the United Nations In May 1941, shortly after the Nazis entered Athens and position...
...Worker house, tells of the life, death, and times of Gary Leib...
...The likelihood that Mr...
...the true goal of all this expense and hard work, Gary's recovery and health, was put out of reach for want of proper housing and continued medical support...
...Several months afterward, Gary was again admitted to BelThe irony is that President Reagan is in a position better to levue...
...Again, within several months, he was back in the American right and present arms control as a measure in the neurology ward at Bellevue...
...He end of the stick in a world where deadlines and sensationalism would have sung the Nazi anthem with its horrific lines, come first...
...He left the hospital with a bottle of Dilantin who must make this arduous journey...
...Perhaps it was the result of another seizure...
...Bellevue has suffered from many stereotypes, but if Whatever the outcome of the election, which is virtually asyou were to ask a Manhattan ambulance driver where she or he sured at this point, allegations that Waldheim was a Nazi war would like to be taken, the answer would probably be Bel- criminal have prompted myriad questions and revealed staglevue...
...He wondered, as many people do, whether student union in 1938, while studying at the Vienna Consular the media have any scruples left...
...It is impossible for him not to Dallas incensed one viewer, prompting him to complain have known...
...He recounts Leib's story with that respect and he wandered out of the hospital itself and fell into a nearby attention characteristic of The Catholic Worker...
...How far did Waldheim side-step these pain...
...Leon Benmayor, leader of Salonika's small through a newspaper's "letters to the editor": "Where group of Holocaust survivors, says: "How can Waldheim say is your conscience and compassion...
...the deep of night and tore down the swastika in a courageous After repeated denials, in an and memorable act of resistance, We would all want to have interview with the Belgrade the capacity to perform such acts of heroism...
...It Griffin that Gary was really discharged "to the street, because would take not only a change of heart on his part but a change I know he won't stay there [the Muni...
...he because of head trauma from seizures...
...I've called up grieving friends and relatives searching with Adolf Hitler's mandate: "Youth must be indifferent to for that gripping anecdote, preferably on camera,, that will 6 June 1986: 327...
...We have the capacity to be plummeted the issues raised today were not to the depths and to be no more than ignoble spirits in an raised in 1971 when Waldheim ignoble world, but we also have the capacity for heroism...
...Certainly we daily newspaper Vercernje should expect it of our leaders...
...Why, of the beast of prey...
...I was in the hills doing my work, rarely going to THE TELEVISION coverage of the crash of a Delta jet in Salonika, so I never knew...
Vol. 113 • June 1986 • No. 11
