Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Do You Remember the 21st Night of September?

by Gregg Chadwick

I do remember the 21st night of September. September is one of my favorite Earth, Wind & Fire songs and of course resonates with me on this date every year. Seeing Earth, Wind & Fire at the Capitol Center in Landover, Maryland was one of the most memorable musical events during my high school years in the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. A friend's father had season tickets for the venue and graciously let his daughter take a group of friends along to the concert. It was the Bicentennial Summer of '76. A sense of possibility and freedom filled the arena that August night and mixed with the funky smell of parsley cut weed. The Emotions, a soulful sister trio from Chicago opened the night with songs from their album Flowers. Their huge hit Best of My Love would arrive the next year. But that night belonged to Earth, Wind & Fire. They opened their show with their band name spelled out in lights above the stage. A synthesizer riff offset with mock explosions and cymbal crashes called us together. Lead singer Maurice White sang out the word "Party" as if it were the meaning of life. And then the horn section roared in. Funk, fusion, jazz and film scores seemed to flood into the musical mix. The propulsive horn section, known as the Phenix Horns was a key element in the band's sound. Saxophonist Don Myrick, trombonist Louis Satterfield, trumpeters Rahmlee Davis and Michael Harris led us on our musical adventure. 

Reasons sung by Philip Bailey was the song of the night for me. Something about being 16 and a young artist embracing life. I was taking a pre-college series of classes at the Corcoran School of Art a few miles away in  DC and that song that night felt like the romance of the city.

"May love be one in all of your hearts" Bailey said near the close of the concert as he asked us in the audience to close our eyes and follow along with him into a fusion filled romp of guitar, vocals, keyboards, and horns. Then the band segued into "That's the Way of the World" with Maurice White back on vocals. "This song can set you free" declared Maurice. Bailey joined Maurice on vocals and they soared into the night. The song finished with a Johnny Graham guitar solo that brought echoes of Jimi Hendrix into the arena. Earth, Wind & Fire embraced an inclusive sound of possibility and joy on August 1, 1976.  The band members played off each other like a well oiled machine. Earth, Wind & Fire's deft mix of jazzlike improvisation, funk bass grooves, and aspirational lyrics spoke to me deeply. I was hooked.  

I was such a fan, that I wrote a short piece about Earth, Wind & Fire bassist Verdine White in an English composition class my first year at UCLA. The professor wasn't impressed with my essay but I did get him to listen to the group. In my English assignment I pointed out that Verdine's deep. sonorous and funky bass lines provided a bedrock for the band. Each musician would then add elements on top of Verdine's groove to build something bigger and richer. As an artist you have to let go and believe in the bigger composition. This was a form of faith in action. The next year Earth, Wind & Fire's song September was released on November 18, 1978.  I inspired a group of friends to get tickets and we would see Earth, Wind & Fire in concert twice on that tour. September was a highlight in those shows. 


 

Dan Charnas wrote a Morning Edition piece for NPR on Earth, Wind & Fire's September
Dan asked Jeffrey Peretz, professor of music theory at New York University's Clive Davis Institute, what makes September's feel good groove so powerful. Peretz says "a lot of it has to do with how the music unfolds. The song's very structure is an endless cycle that keeps us dancing and wanting more. There's four chords in the chorus that just keep moving forward and never seem to land anywhere — much like the four seasons. It's the end of summer, it's the beginning of fall, it's that Indian summertime, it's the transition from warm to cool."

I agree with Professor Peretz - Earth, Wind & Fire's music keeps us dancing and wanting more. 



Earth, Wind & Fire live at the Capitol Centre in Landover, MD on August 1, 1976. I was there. 
Video was originally provided by the Official Earth, Wind & Fire Legacy Facebook page.




Gregg Chadwick
Revolutions 
48”x36” oil on linen 2018





Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Remembering Stonewall




"The Battle of #Stonewall - 1969" 
by Sandow Birk 1999 Oil on Canvas, 96" x 120"
Collection of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA 🏳️‍🌈 πŸ³️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️
http://sandowbirk.com/stonewall 🏳️‍🌈 πŸ³️‍⚧️



Thursday, June 02, 2022

Darkness on the Edge of Town - 44 Years Down the Road

 by Gregg Chadwick

44 years ago today, Bruce Springsteen's fourth album Darkness on the Edge of Town was released. The wide open romanticism of Born to Run was missing from this new album. Instead we were greeted with a powerful mix of Steinbeck, Hopper, Woody Guthrie, and Springsteen's unleashed guitar. Bruce's new guitar sound was both lyrical and powerful. I put that sound into my artistic toolbox and pull it out when I need to. In the opening track Badlands, Springsteen howls that "It ain't no sin to be glad your alive." I've held on to that line as a call to action ever since. 


Gregg Chadwick
Love In Vain (Castro - San Francisco)
16"x20"oil on linen 2016

I had just finished my freshman year at UCLA and  this was my first summer on the Monterey Bay in central California. The pace of life was so much slower than Los Angeles or Washington DC and I found time for study and reflection in the hours after my temp job finished. I would go for a run through Point Lobos after work to clear my head and then would sit with East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath until the sun went down. I would paint late into the night trying to get these new inspirations onto canvas. I had a lot to learn but I was dogged and I let my failures lead me onto new paths. 


Gregg Chadwick
This Machine Kills Fascists - Woody Guthrie
14"x11"oil on linen 2012
Peter Himmelman Collection, Los Angeles


The highways around Monterey were wide open in the late 1970's. Like a character in a Springsteen song I would drive to find out where I was going. Images that still need to be painted flooded in:

Early morning light on farm workers in the fields outside Salinas.
The crumbling docks of Cannery Row seemingly melting in the sea air.
Rows of US soldiers waiting their turn on the target line at Fort Ord.
The seaside chimera of Santa Cruz glowing in the morning fog.



Gregg Chadwick
The Opal's Rim (Point Lobos)
72"x48"oil on linen 1997
Private Collection, Los Angeles


On July 1, 1978, I took Highway 101 up from the Monterey Bay to Berkeley. I met my brother and his future wife Cathy at the edge of the UC campus and we wandered until we found the Berkeley Community Theater. Throughout my high school years in the suburbs of DC, my older brother Kent was studying at UC Davis and I cherished the moments we had together. Each time we reunited seemed like an epiphany. We talked and argued about life, art, politics, poetry, spirituality and music. We had seen a few concerts together on the east coast starting with a J Geils gig in Asbury Park. But neither one of us had seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play live. Until that night in Berkeley. 





The concert was a revelation, almost a rock n' roll revival. But there was also an undercurrent of pain and empathy like the Darkness album itself. Springsteen's 1978 guitar improvisation opening to Prove It All Night got us all out of our seats. 


Two songs stood out for me that night. The first was Springsteen's haunting, solo piano version of The Promise which became a sound that I tried to get into my paintings from that day forward. 


The second was Bruce and the E Street Band's electrifying version of Because the Night


I knew that Springsteen had penned Because the Night and then given the not quite finished work to Patti Smith to complete and record. I took that song on as my romantic talisman. Somewhere down the line I knew I would find a partner who would feel the passion from those haunting lines and that searing music just as I did. My wife, MarySue, and I found each other in 2003 and  our friend, the singer/songwriter Kelly Colbert performed a scorchingly hot version of Because the Night at our wedding on 7/7/07.


MarySue and Gregg at Their Wedding  7/7/07
photo by Sabine Pearlman



My artistic landscape was growing in the Summer of 1978 and Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town provided a soundtrack for the film of my life. And most importantly Darkness inspired me to find the stories that I wanted to tell in my art and life. 



Thursday, January 27, 2022

MAUS by Art Spiegelman (Read for Free)



I am posting an online readable copy of Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus in response to the ridiculous decision by the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee who voted 10-0 to remove the book from the eighth-grade English language arts curriculum saying without realizing the horrible irony that the graphic novel should be replaced, if possible, with another book without content deemed objectionable. The Holocaust is arguably the most objectionable violence ever taken against fellow humans by a despotic regime. 

Maus recounts the horrifying experiences of Art Spiegelman's father during the Holocaust, in which he depicts Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. Spiegelman shakes us awake as he depicts the unspeakable through the language of cartoons and graphic novels. Maus is a story of survival and a study of the legacy of trauma.

Maus is presented here for readers of all ages. Welcome. 






Friday, March 15, 2019

RIP W.S. Merwin


Gregg Chadwick

The River Dreams

16"x11" oil on linen 2009

I learned tonight about the death of  W.S. Merwin. I had a chance to chat briefly with W.S. Merwin after his wonderful reading at the Hammer Museum on October 29, 2009. We spoke of elephants and mystery and nature. Inspiring memories.












More on W.S. Merwin:
W.S. Merwin Profile
Paul Holdengraber In Conversation with W.S. Merwin
Poem for Merwin 


Wednesday, May 23, 2018

The Late Afternoon of Time - San Francisco

by Gregg Chadwick




Gregg Chadwick
The Late Afternoon of Time - San Francisco
24"x20" oil on linen 2018

Cities, like people, grow and change. In this spirit, San Francisco continues to inform my paintings. Last weekend, at a friend's birthday gathering in Culver City, I recounted how one morning, when I lived in San Francisco, I spotted the artist Richard Diebenkorn leaning up against a BART entrance watching the cable car turnaround across Market Street. Diebenkorn was captivated by the movement of the conductors as they spun the cars around on a giant wooden turntable. I stopped, leaned up against a wall, and flipped through art writer Robert Hughes' book Nothing If Not Critical until I reached his essay on Diebenkorn. I read slowly, pausing often to gaze up at Diebenkorn as he gazed towards Powell Street. 
Eventually, I closed the book, walked over and thanked Richard Diebenkorn for his art and inspiration. He smiled and tears seemed to well up in his eyes, as he said "Thank you. I am glad that my work inspires you. Is your studio nearby?" I nodded and tried to say something "about the interplay between figuration and abstraction in his work." Diebenkorn was frail at this point and seemed to know that he didn't have much longer to live. I didn't want to take him away from his moment alone in the morning light on Market Street. I thanked him again and moved on. Richard Diebenkorn died soon after in 1993.
The late morning light, when it cuts through the fog in downtown San Francisco, opens the city up like an epiphany.  That morning was a revelation for me. Lawrence Ferlinghetti saw something similar in the City's light and wrote,"
                "And then the halcyon late mornings
                        after the fog burns off
                               and the sun paints white houses
                                    with the sea light of Greece
                      with sharp clean shadows 
                            making the town look like 
it had just been painted." 
I learned something profound that morning when I encountered Diebenkorn - my  heroes were mortal. And in turn, my family and friends also had a short time on earth. Life is fragile. I looked at the streets anew. Around us and beneath us memories dwelt.  A friend of mine who made his way from place to place along Market Street slid up to me one day at the corner of 6th and Market and showed me a horses skull in his battered shopping cart. "I was helping a man dig out his basement and I hit something hard", he said. "We found an entire skeleton buried there. Probably from the earthquake - from '07"
 Later I read that the cable cars were built because the horses kept breaking down on the steep San Francisco hills. The horses legs would snap under the weight. Maybe my friend's horse pulled a burden up Jones Street until collapse?  
 An immigrant from Scotland devised a system to carry cars and passengers up the steep slopes without animal power. Gary Kamiya writes in The Chronicle:
"At a little before midnight on Aug. 2, 1873, the men in the power plant fired up the boilers. The engines turned over and the cables tightened. The rope began to hum in the street, the first occasion of a sound that would become as familiar to San Franciscans as Bow Bells to a London cockney.
At 5 a.m., the team gathered atop Clay at Jones. Andrew Hallidie’s gripman, reportedly an old locomotive engineer, looked down the 16 percent grade into the fog and chickened out. But Halide, who had been hurled off scaffolding, buried in a tunnel and gone for a real-life Logger’s Revenge on roiling rapids, had confidence in his invention. He jumped into the dummy, took the grip, picked up the cable below and began to descend Clay Street. When the car reached the bottom, it was spun around on a turntable and pulled back up to the summit."
The turntable. Diebenkorn's gaze. The Changing Light. The Late Afternoon of Time.



Gregg Chadwick
The Changing Light - San Francisco
24"x18" oil on linen 2018


Gregg Chadwick's Palette
(Colors Used for  The Late Afternoon of Time and The Changing Light ) 




Sunday, October 16, 2016

Reading Jana Prikryl's "The After Party"

by Gregg Chadwick





I have been carrying my copy of Jana Prikryl's engaging book of poems "The After Party" with me for a few months now. Before I go out the door, I almost always slip the collection into an open slot in my bag. On recent travels from Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Carmel, to Milwaukee, to Memphis - Prikryl's book has been with me. Each destination flavors my reading of her poems, almost like memory itself. And in a sense that is what Prikryl does in "The After Party". In her book we travel with her through a series of moments, or times, or places, or memories. Unlike many books where the narrator disappears into the text only to reappear as an overbearing Disney-ride like explicator, in "The After Party" Prikryl joins us on a journey through time. Memory can be like an artist's drawing full of smudged marks, erasures, and fantasies. Prikryl acknowledges this in her poems and lets us glide through her veils of time. From the former Czechoslovakia to the "Thirty Thousand Islands" of the Georgian Bay in the Canadian realm of Lake Huron, Prikryl creates worlds of time-images. I urge you to carry "The After Party" with you. Read it on the train. Find a favorite passage while waiting in line at the pharmacy. Share it with your local barista. The book is that good. Prikryl reminds us that a life is made up of moments, upon moments, upon moments.

Monday, September 19, 2016

Hop On Pop

by Gregg Chadwick
Dad (General Robert J. Chadwick USMC)
circa 1978
photo courtesy USMC


Peter Clothier asked me a while ago to contribute to his series of Boyhood Memories which he is posting on his new blog site -http://www.boyhoodmoments.com/2016/09/hop-on-pop.html and eventually working into a book.  I finally finished my story and it has prompted me to continue writing about my life as an artist. 

Growing up as the kid of a USMC officer during the Vietnam era inspired me in unique ways. Please have a read and let me know what you think. Also spend some time on Peter's site. Masami Teraoka 's piece is timeless and magical and Michael Provart 's writing is funny and poignant. Peter Clothier also adds his own childhood memories into the mix. Every story Peter has received is rich in memory. 

Peter introduces my story with the following: "HOP ON POP
Here's another "absent father" piece, this one with the added leitmotif, perhaps, of a creative vocation discovered as a child! The Dad in question is caught in the black and white photograph, below. Gregg Chadwick is today a Santa Monica-based painter whose work is widely exhibited and acclaimed. His blog is titled Speed of Life. His boyhood memory skirts subtly around the pain of separation, deflecting it first, jokingly, onto a prank played on his mother with his toys; then on a treasured book, a parting gift from Dad. But by the end, we're left in no doubt that the pain is there..."


HOP ON POP

By Gregg Chadwick


As a kid, I liked to build private worlds out of drawings that I would cut up and paste into scenes with soft plastic bugs pulled hot from my Creepy Crawlers molds. I would squirt the Plastigoop from a small bottle into the empty molds and heat them up on my Thingmaker. Once, late at night, I cut out a darkly drawn semicircle, taped it to the kitchen floorboard in our rented carriage house, and placed dark rodent Creepy Crawlers around my invented mouse hole. As a last surprise, I hid one in my mom’s coffee cup. My brother and I would get a great laugh, because my mom hates rodents of all shapes and sizes.

I woke to the baconesque smell of Tastystrips and the caramel espresso smell of Mom’s percolating coffee. She was at the stove pulling strips from the pan and lining them up on a golden, grease filled sheet of paper towel. Her coffee mug sat nearby. My brother was already at the table reading a cereal box before turning to my mom to chat about a birthday trip to the Revolutionary War encampment up at Jockey Hollow with his friend Casey Jones. Yep, the same name as the famous railroader. Our portable transistor radio was on; it should have been playing "Cannonball Express" in honor of that other Casey. I sneaked a quick glance to be sure that my mouse hole was still there with its attendant rubbery rodents. OK, the plan was still in action. I walked over to the stove and looked into my mom’s cup. I gulped as I saw myself reflected in the dark liquid.

“How’s the coffee Mom?” That sounded wrong. Was I in a Folgers commercial or something?

“Fine dear. Careful of the hot stove. Don’t burn yourself.”

I sat down without a word and quietly ate my breakfast, glancing at the line of dark Crawlers on the floor.

A honk outside interrupted the quiet and my brother jumped up to run out the door. My mom called after him, “Don’t forget your jacket.”

“It’s June Mom,” my brother said.

“So it is," said my mom as she marked off another day on the calendar.

“One day at a time,” she told me. “That’s how we get on until your Dad comes home.”

I didn’t mention the Crawlers on the floor and especially not the one in her coffee cup. She never mentioned them either. I did make some Crawlers that day for my Dad, though, and Mom and I placed them carefully in an envelope and addressed it to his Fleet Post Office address in Vietnam.

My dad didn’t really need any more bugs in the jungle. But I kept sending them anyway. They were small packages of memories. And I wanted to thank him for the going away gift he had given me before he went to war in 1965. We were in the car. I remember ripping the paper off that package like it was the wrapper on a popsicle on a hot summer day.

It was a book! I could begin to make out the title as I shredded the wrapping. "'Op on Op” peeked out at me through a hole in the paper. “I can read it all by myself Beginner Books," it said.

I tossed the decorative wrap onto the car floor and held up my prize with its aqua, white, orange, and yellow cover. “Hop on Pop” by Dr. Seuss. I laughed at the two small bears jumping on the daddy bear’s tummy. “We like to hop. We like to hop on top of pop.”

“Thank you! Thank You!” I said, in between pages.

Mission accomplished. My dad and mom smiled as we made our way back to my grandmother’s house. But I was sad, too. I knew even then that a good little Marine didn’t cry, and that my brother and I would need to be tough for Mom.  I put the book down, held my tears back and looked out the window. As if in a movie, the scenes scrolled by. Even though I had been born here, it seemed a new landscape for me. 

We would have to run our recons without Dad for quite a while. 



Monday, March 30, 2015

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Springsteen at The Concert for Valor

by Gregg Chadwick

Bruce Springsteen's performance last night at The Concert for Valor was passionate, a bit gritty, and dialed in to the characters in his songs. The words of Promised Land, Born In the USA, and surprisingly for me Dancing In the Dark cut like a knife through the hushed crowd. Springsteen seemed to embody the underlying pain of the returning warrior and the scourge of PTSD.  Springsteen stood bare on the stage with just a guitar for a compelling reason. Like a soldier returning from war and moving on without a platoon and moving on without a weapon always at hand, Springsteen courageously stood alone. Through his lyrics, Springsteen gave truth to the fears that many carry home from war. Yes, you are alone now. Yes, your uniform is packed away and your weapons stowed. But, there is hope. I watched friends and family come home from Vietnam as changed men. I watched many stay in the military for years and then watched them put on their uniforms for the last time. And I watched them struggle to find meaning in life. Springsteen's songs on the Mall in DC last night, echoed that existential dread. And somehow as always, Springsteen helps us find hope in the darkness.






Wednesday, August 06, 2014

A Memory Museum

by Gregg Chadwick

Holland  Cotter has a wonderful new piece in the New York Times entitled A Memory Museum

Cotter writes," I’m also a curator of my memory, which carries traces of art encounters from over the years. A few of those encounters — with certain objects, books, buildings — have altered the atmosphere, changed how I see and joined a permanent collection that I regularly revisit."

He then challenges us to describe experiences with art that has changed our lives and to post them in the comment section in his article. I find this to be an enlightening question:
Which works of art have changed the way you look at the world? 

I answered Mr. Cotter with the following:

The place of memory in the arts is so revealing. One of my first experiences with an artwork happened in Amsterdam when I was a six year old and the experience changed me forever. My father had finished his tour in Vietnam as a USMC JAG and we reunited as a family in Europe. During that trip we visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. There I found myself slack jawed in front of Rembrandt’s iconic group portrait "The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers Guild."  I recognized it as the same image on the Dutch Masters’ cigar box, my father’s go-to brand. The connection was phenomenal; I was hooked and I knew that someday I would become an artist. 





Sunday, May 25, 2014

Santa Barbara Elegy


Gregg Chadwick
Buddha of the Adriatic
24"x18" oil on linen 2014


My heart breaks for the families who have lost their daughters and sons during this weekend's senseless massacre in Santa Barbara. There is so much to discuss, to argue over, to ponder. But tonight, I will continue to mourn and ask that attention be focused on the six University of California, Santa Barbara students who were stolen from us.

Thursday, May 08, 2014

President Obama Speaks From the Heart About the Holocaust

by Gregg Chadwick

“Memory has become a sacred duty of all people of goodwill.”
-Elie Wiesel


 

Last night in Los Angeles, President Obama gave a beautiful and powerful speech after accepting the Shoah Foundation’s Ambassador of Humanity Award from Steven Spielberg during a ceremony at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza.

I want to thank the President, Steven Spielberg and all those involved with the Shoah Foundation for recognizing the importance of remembering. The Shoah Foundation gathers and preserves the stories of those who experienced the Holocaust and other atrocities across the globe. Over the past two decades, the Shoah Foundation has recorded tens of thousands of interviews. Researchers and documentarians have traveled to dozens of countries, interviewing survivors of the  Holocaust, and documenting historical evidence of the Armenian Genocide, and other atrocities. The first person accounts that have been gathered are an invaluable resource for future students and scholars.

I remember vividly the moment I first stepped foot in one of the holocaust death camps. That day at Dachau, I was struck by the emptiness and silence of that cruel space. I could feel the absence and longed for humanity instead of barbarism. The Shoah Foundation, through its tireless efforts, gives voice to those whose voices were stolen.

 Full Transcript of President Obama's Remarks Below:

Thank you, Steven, for your incredibly generous words, for this great honor, for your friendship, and most importantly, for the extraordinary work which brings us here all tonight. To Robert Katz and all the members of the board and staff of the Shoah Foundation; to President Max Nikias and everybody at USC; to all the distinguished guests and to all the friends that I see in this audience — it is an incredible honor to be with you as we pay tribute to a remarkable institution and one that makes claim on our moral imagination.

Being here with you tonight, I’m taken back to the visit to Buchenwald that I took in the very first months of my presidency. And I was there with my dear friend, Elie Wiesel. As most of you know, he who had endured that camp as a teenager. And we walked among the guard towers and the barbed wire. We saw the ovens and the crematorium. We saw the memorial to the prisoners, a steel plate heated to the temperature of the human body, as a reminder of our common humanity. And at the end of our visit, as we stood outside the place where his father and so many other souls had perished, Elie spoke these words — he said: “Memory has become a sacred duty of all people of goodwill.” Memory has become a sacred duty of all people of goodwill.
Gregg Chadwick
Dachau
60"x49" oil and encaustic on linen 1987

And that’s what brings us here tonight. That’s the duty that Steven and all of you embrace — the sacred duty of memory.
Now, just a few decades ago, many survivors of the Shoah were reluctant to share their stories. But one survivor living here in Los Angeles, a leather goods merchant named Poldek Pfefferberg insisted on telling anybody who would listen about the man who had saved his life — a man named Oskar Schindler. And thanks to Poldek’s persistence, Schindler’s story was published as a novel, and the world eventually came to see and understand the Holocaust like never before — in Steven’s remarkable film, Schindler’s List, brought to life in a masterful way by Liam Neeson. And we were reminded that the Holocaust was not a matter of distant history or abstract horror. The voices — the memories — of survivors became immediate, and intimate, became a part of all of us.
I loved what the teacher said in the video about how it entered into our DNA. That’s what stories do. We’re story-telling animals. That’s what Steven does. That’s what Bruce Springsteen does — tells a story that stitches up our fates with the fates of others. And that film gave us each a stake in that terrible history, and a stake in ensuring such atrocities never happen again.
Now, if the story had ended there, it would have been enough — Dayenu. But Steven didn’t stop with Schindler’s List, because there were too many other stories to tell. So he created this foundation to undertake what he called “a rescue mission” — preserving the memories that would otherwise be lost to time.
Over the past two decades, you’ve recorded tens of thousands of interviews in dozens of countries and languages; documented the experience not only of the Holocaust, but of atrocities before and since. As you heard tonight with Celina’s incredible eloquence, you freed voices that could tell their own story in their own way. And as Michelle Clark described so powerfully this evening, you’ve turned that testimony into tools that can be used by scholars and students all around the world.
Now, Steven, I know that for you — like so many here — this is deeply personal. You lost distant relatives in the Holocaust, and heard your mother pass on stories told by survivors. And as you said just a few days ago, the story of the Shoah is the story that you were put on this Earth to tell. So, to you, to everybody at the Shoah Foundation — and for all that you’ve done, for setting alight an eternal flame of testimony that can’t be extinguished and cannot be denied, we express our deepest gratitude. (Applause.)
Of course, none of these stories could be preserved without the men and women with the courage to tell them. And I think sometimes how hard it must be to return to those moments, to remember those darkest of days, to recount how loved ones — husbands, wives, sons, daughters — were taken away. And as Steven mentioned, my great-uncle was a soldier in the 89th Infantry Division, helping to liberate Ohrdruf, a part of Buchenwald. And what he saw during the war left him so shaken that, upon his return to the States, he could not speak of his memories for years to come. We didn’t have a word for it back then, but he returned and closed himself off for months, so shaken was he just to witness what had happened, much less experience it.
So I want to say a special word to the survivors who are with us this evening — not just to the Holocaust, but as Steve noted, survivors of other unimaginable crimes. Every day that you have lived, every child and grandchild that your families have brought into this world has served as the ultimate rebuke to evil, and the ultimate expression of love and hope. And you are an inspiration to every single one of us. And on behalf of all of us, thank you for the example of your lives, and sharing your stories with us and the world. Thank you. (Applause.) We are grateful to you.
Now, let me add that, as Americans, we’re proud to be a country that welcomed so many Holocaust survivors in the wake of World War II. As President, I’m proud that we’re doing more, as Steven noted, to stand with Holocaust survivors in America. We announced Aviva Sufian as our first-ever special envoy to help support Holocaust survivors living in the United States. I’m pleased that Aviva is here tonight. (Applause.) We’ve proposed a new Survivor Assistance Fund to help Holocaust survivors in our country live in dignity and free from poverty. We’re already working with members of Congress and many of your organizations on this project, and tonight I invite more of you to join us. We need to keep faith with these survivors who already have given so much.
The work of this foundation, the testimonies of survivors like those with us tonight, also remind us that the purpose of memory is not simply to preserve the past; it is to protect the future. (Applause.) We tell stories — we’re compelled to tell stories — they’re stories that bring out the best of us, and they’re stories that bring out the worst. The voices of those recorded and unrecorded, those who survived and those who perished, call upon us — implore us and challenge us — to turn “Never Forget” into “Never Again.”
We only need to look at today’s headlines — the devastation of Syria, the murders and kidnappings in Nigeria, sectarian conflict, the tribal conflicts — to see that we have not yet extinguished man’s darkest impulses. There are some bad stories out there that are being told to children, and they’re learning to hate early. They’re learning to fear those who are not like them early.
And none of the tragedies that we see today may rise to the full horror of the Holocaust — the individuals who are the victims of such unspeakable cruelty, they make a claim on our conscience. They demand our attention, that we not turn away, that we choose empathy over indifference and that our empathy leads to action. And that’s not always easy. One of the powerful things about Schindler’s story was recognizing that we have to act even where there is sometimes ambiguity; even when the path is not always clearly lit, we have to try.
Gregg Chadwick
Sins of Our Fathers
72"x72" oil on linen 1990

And that includes confronting a rising tide of anti-Semitism around the world. We’ve seen attacks on Jews in the streets of major Western cities, public places marred by swastikas. From some foreign governments we hear the worst kinds of anti-Semitic scapegoating. In Ukraine, as Steven mentioned, we saw those disgusting pamphlets from masked men calling on Jews to register. And tragically, we saw a shooting here at home, in Overland Park in Kansas.
And it would be tempting to dismiss these as isolated incidents, but if the memories of the Shoah survivors teach us anything, it is that silence is evil’s greatest co-conspirator. And it’s up to us — each of us, every one of us — to forcefully condemn any denial of the Holocaust. It’s up to us to combat not only anti-Semitism, but racism and bigotry and intolerance in all their forms, here and around the world. It’s up to us to speak out against rhetoric that threatens the existence of a Jewish homeland and to sustain America’s unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security. (Applause.) And it is up to us to search our own hearts — to search ourselves — for those stories that have no place in this world. Because it’s easy sometimes to project out and worry about others and their hatreds and their bigotries and their blind spots. It’s not always as easy for us to examine ourselves.
Standing up to anti-Semitism is not simply about protecting one community or one religious group. There is no such thing as “targeted” hatred. In Overland Park, a man went to a Jewish Community Center and a nursing home named “Village Shalom” and started shooting — and none of the people he murdered were Jewish. Two were Methodist. One was Catholic. All were innocent.
We cannot eliminate evil from every heart, or hatred from every mind. But what we can do, and what we must do, is make sure our children and their children learn their history so that they might not repeat it. (Applause.) We can teach our children the hazards of tribalism. We can teach our children to speak out against the casual slur. We can teach them there is no “them,” there’s only “us.” And here in America, we can celebrate a nation in which Christians and Muslims go to Jewish community centers, and where Jews go to Church vigils — a nation where, through fits and starts, through sacrifice and individual courage, we have struggled to hear the truth and live out the truth that Dr. King described — that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, that we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
By keeping the memories alive, by telling stories, by hearing those stories, we can do our part to fulfill the mitzvah, the commandment of saving a life. I think of Pinchas Gutter, a man who lived through the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and survived the Majdanek death camp. Today he serves as a volunteer educator at the Shoah Foundation. “I tell my story,” he says, “for the purpose of improving humanity, drop by drop by drop. Like a drop of water falls on a stone and erodes it, so, hopefully, by telling my story over and over again I will achieve the purpose of making the world a better place to live in.”
Those are the words of one survivor — performing that “sacred duty” of memory — that will echo throughout eternity. Those are good words for all of us to live by.
I have this remarkable title right now — President of the United States — and yet every day when I wake up, and I think about young girls in Nigeria or children caught up in the conflict in Syria — when there are times in which I want to reach out and save those kids — and having to think through what levers, what power do we have at any given moment, I think, “drop by drop by drop,” that we can erode and wear down these forces that are so destructive; that we can tell a different story.
And because of your work — because of your work, Steven, and the work of all who supported you — our children, and their children, and their children’s children will hear from the survivors, but they’ll also hear from the liberators, the Righteous Among the Nations. And because of your work, their stories, years and decades from now, will still be wearing down bigotry, and eroding apathy, and opening hearts, drop by drop by drop.
And as those hearts open, that empowers those of us in positions of power — because even the President can’t do these things alone. Drop by drop by drop. That’s the power of stories. And as a consequence, the world will be a better place and the souls will be bound up in the bonds of eternal life. Their memories will be a blessing and they will help us make real our solemn vow: Never Forget. Never Again.
So thank you, Steven, for your incredible work. God bless you. God bless the United States of America. Thank you.