In Berlin the other day the Berlin
chapter of B'nai B'rith bestowed the Raoul Wallenberg award
on Paul Parks, 77, a Boston civil rights leader who has
long been active in Massachusetts politics. The occasion
of Parks' honor stems from his claim that he liberated the
concentration camp at Dachau, and was, in fact the only
African American involved.
Specifically, Parks has talked about how he "broke through
the gate" to liberate the legendary German camp, where he
saw a "mountain of gold teeth" extracted from prisoners
on the way to the gas chamber, and where Parks, after being
spat upon by a Nazi colonel, shot him dead in a rage.
By the way, this is not the only tall tale attributed to
Parks. He has claimed, for example, that while in basic
training in the Deep South he saw a fellow Black soldier
tied to the back of a jeep and dragged to his death by whites,
and he has also claimed that while in Leicester, England,
he witnessed a race riot in which as many as ten Black GI's
were slain, including one who was machine gunned along with
his white girlfriend.
Research has shown that none of these stories are true.
While many service records are lacking, there is plenty
of evidence that Parks was never in half of the locations
he describes, other evidence refutes his other claims, and,
above all, the evidence is persuasive that he was never
anywhere near Dachau.
So why give him an award? It appears that higher moral or
symbolic factors are at work. When he received his award,
Parks bowed his head on behalf of the "1.2 million African-American
soldiers" who fought in World War Two. Rabbi Jack Porter,
quoted in a recent Boston Globe series of exposes,
was perhaps more explicit: "We needed a black man to verify
the fact that there was a Holocaust and to verify the fact
that blacks and Jews could work together [….] The Jewish
community […] wanted to believe that blacks liberated Dachau."
Regardless of whatever one feels or thinks is necessary,
either as a social good, or as moral guidance, surely the
confabulation of history should not be one of them. In their
anxiety to teach some moral lessons, it appears that some
in the Jewish community have unfortunately acted in a way
which threatens historical integrity. And, many revisionists
suspect, not for the first time.
By pointing this out we don't mean to detract either from
legitimate Jewish suffering or from true Black American
heroes. In fact, the tradition of the African American fighting
man has many high points in World War Two: one thinks of
Dorie Miller, assigned as a cook on the USS West Virginia,
who nevertheless manned a machine gun and downed at least
two Japanese planes the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. One
thinks also of the 320 African American ammunition handlers
killed in the Port Chicago explosion in 1944: involved in
thankless and dangerous work far from the front and glory,
they gave their lives for their country as surely as any
man storming the beaches in Normandy or the Pacific. With
such a record of authentic heroism, Black Americans don't
need the imaginative exploits of Parks.
As for the Jewish people, it is doubtful that they need
the commemoration of Parks to mark their destruction. Rather,
it appears that Parks' utility is more a function of such
fractured eloquence as the following: "We can't forget the
Holocaust and we can't forget that it happened because if
we do that we have pulled the plug of safety on all humankind."
Yet again, what we see here is less history than storytelling
designed to teach us a lesson: less Frederick Douglass than
Uncle Remus. To be sure, the plantation stories of Joel
Chandler Harris have delighted generations of Americans,
but no one has ever pretended they were history. The stories,
built around the narratives of Uncle Remus, an elderly ex-slave,
describe the unforgettable adventures of Brer Fox and Brer
Rabbit and many other fictional characters in the Old South.
Although occasionally decried by some as racist, they are
more generally recognized, like the animal stories collected
by Aesop or the Panchatantra, as highly symbolic fables
designed to provide moral instruction and wisdom about the
human condition.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with moral meditations
on the past. But that is not the task of history. For the
sake of its own integrity, the historical record has to
be kept clear, otherwise one story just leads to another
one, and another to another, until historical truth disappears
into a gooey mess of fact and fiction.
"I think he's stuck in a web of lies" was the remark of
one retired US lieutenant with regard to the tales of Paul
Parks. Yes, the knowing reader might think, just like Brer
Rabbit and the Tar Baby.
Bradley R. Smith, Publisher 