80 - Washington, D.C.
The first effect of President Quaid’s Wednesday evening speech was to convince at least half of the people who had arrived in Washington for the March to turn around and go home. Parents who traveled across the country with their children intending to attend a peaceful rally were terrified at the prospect of their children confronting armed soldiers.
By 9:00 a.m. on Friday, an hour before the March was to begin, it was obvious to law enforcement officials, and the March organizers, that the crowd would come nowhere near the one million mark. Perhaps the best evidence of the withering effect the President’s speech had on the demonstration was provided by traffic helicopters from two of Washington’s AM radio stations, which reported that traffic leaving the city was heavier than traffic heading in.
What that also meant, though, was that the people who made the choice to remain in Washington were prepared to confront the authorities. Jews who were at all equivocal about demanding action from their government were on the road home. Those who remained were the hard core.
By the 10:00 a.m. starting time, the crowd filled only the half of the National Mall closest to the Capital, leaving nearly a half mile of open grass before the Washington Monument. The sixty-foot wide speaker’s platform was set up directly in front of the Capital Reflecting Pool. Rather than the exuberance with which most mass civil rights gatherings began, the mood among both the crowd and those on the platform was cautious.
Rabbi Garfinkle walked to the microphone at the speakers stand on the podium. He stood for several minutes looking out at the crowd. He’d dressed the part that day, wearing a suit conservative enough for a banker, except for the brightly colored crocheted yarmulke on his head. He lifted both hands high above his head and, in a loud, bold voice, carried across the Mall by powerful speakers, chanted in Hebrew, “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad. Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”
A murmur went through the crowd as people softly said the traditional response to the most sacred, most fundamental statement of Jewish faith. “Barukh Shem k’vod malkhuto l’olam va-ed. Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever.”
The rabbi nodded, as if thanking the crowd, the largest audience he was likely to address in his lifetime. He’d struggled over what he would say and was anxious to begin. He opened his mouth to speak but before he could say a word he noticed a disturbance off to his right, at the edge of the crowd in front of him. Young people were pushing their way into the crowd, carrying what appeared to be handfuls of plastic shopping bags. As they worked their way closer to the center, the rabbi could see they were distributing something to hundreds of people around them.
He was puzzled at this disturbance, visible from the podium but hidden from most of the crowd. He leaned closer to the microphone, prepared to begin. Just as he was about to speak over the noise made by the annoyance, a young woman burst from the front edge of the crowd and ran toward the podium. She was carrying two plastic shopping bags, apparently from a supermarket, in her right hand.
Rabbi Garfinkle stepped back. A bomb, he thought. She’s going to throw a bomb.
The woman did not look like a bomber, not that he would know what a bomber would look like. She stopped and tossed the bags onto the podium.
They landed softly, one farther away, the other right at his feet. He looked out at the crowd, where most people were staring at him expectantly, then reached down to pick up the bag at his feet. He spread the top open, looked in, then dropped the bag as if it contained burning coal.
People in the front of the crowd, closest to the podium, and people standing or sitting to the rabbi’s left and right on the podium saw all color wash from his face as his eyes opened wide. His head tilted back as looked far up into the sky above, his lips moving silently.
The rabbi then kneeled on the floor on one knee and carefully picked up the bag, holding it in two hands as if it contained something precious. He reached in and removed a small piece of yellow cloth. Without a word, he walked to the people seated on the platform and distributed the contents of the bag, more pieces of yellow cloth, one item at a time to the people to his right and then did the same for the people to his left.
He returned to the microphone and faced the expectant crowd. Rather than speaking, however, he held the yellow fabric straight out in front of him, displaying it to the crowd, then slowly returned his hands to his chest and carefully pinned the yellow six-pointed Star of David to his chest. In the middle of the star somebody had scribbled in black Magic Marker, “Jude,” the German word for Jew.
The badge he wore, Rabbi Garfinkle knew, was the same badge millions of German, Polish, French, Dutch and Russian Jews were forced by the Nazis to wear.
Rabbi Garfinkle leaned slightly forward, his mouth approaching the microphone before him.
“President Quaid,” he said, his voice quivering, not from fright but from the emotional weight of the yellow badge. “President Quaid. You want me to wear a badge saying who I am.” His right hand, knotted into a first, pounded against the star, against his chest.
“This is the badge I will wear. This badge at least tells the truth. This badge says what you really mean, Mr. President. You say I can not be both a Jew and an American. I say you are wrong, Mr. President. But even if you are right, sir, this badge declares who I am.
“Mr. President, I am a Jew.
“Do you truly believe you are the first political leader to tell Jews to stop being Jews? We have such a long history, we Jewish people. We teach our history to our children. We teach our history so that our children will not forget what has happened to us throughout our history, again and again and again.
“We teach that because what has happened before can and most likely will happen again, and if it does, when it does, we must prepare for it and we must resist it, using the lessons of our people’s history.
“Lawrence Quaid, over and over politicians have forced us to make the same choice you want to force upon us, are you a Jew or are you an American? We have been asked to choose, sir, are you a Jew or are you a Spaniard, are you a Jew or are you an Englishman, are you a Jew or are you a Russian, or a Pole, or a Turk, or an Egyptian, or, Mr. President, or are you a Jew or are you a good German?
“Mr. President, if you ask that question you will receive the same answer every tyrant throughout history has received. Mr. President, I am an American and I love this country. But I can give up being an American if I am forced to do so, reluctantly, sadly, but that can be taken from me.
“I will never, I can never stop being a Jew. And as a Jew, I will say to you the two words you have heard spoken so frequently in recent weeks.”
He raised both hands high in the air to urge the crowd to join him.
“Lawrence Quaid, never again, never again, never again.”
The chant echoed from the Capital Building as the crowd’s frenzy increased and continued for five full minutes, five minutes of those two words repeated over and over. The speaker finally raised his hands again and the exhausted crowd settled into silence.
“Mr. President. Never again will Jews march meekly to camps, to anybody’s camps, even your camps, Mr. President.
“Never again will Jews stand by and watch our homeland, the homeland promised to us by God Almighty, be snatched away from us. Never again, Mr. President.
“And if you can’t accept that, Mr. President, well, all I can say is ...”
He walked around the microphone and stood on the front edge of the podium, raising both hands in the air over his head.
“Never again, never again, never again.”
This time the chanting from the crowd lasted fifteen minutes.
Sarah Goldberg, sitting next to Ben Shapiro at the far left end of the podium, leaned close to him and whispered, “I guess I was right about my speech about peace and love and reconciliation being out of place.”
“If this is how the show begins,” Shapiro replied, “I can hardly wait to see where we go from here.”