Real activists live their responsibilities. They don’t talk. They do. I met many important persons at MIT, but none was as significant as Ivan Massar, a Black Star photographer who collaborated on many of the MIT projects, not just with me, but also with Jackie Casey and Ralph Coburn.
From 1945 on, I grew up with people around me whom I did not trust. It may have been unfair to many, because my measure was instinctive not researched or informed other than measuring individuals’ behavior towards others and sometimes born out or proven through artifacts, like newspaper accounts, photographs, or verbal recollections by neighbors. What was the real truth about the behavior of many Germans? How did they participate in the horrors? My teachers all were, just one moment before 1945, Nazi card carriers and over night had morphed into very devout Christian citizens. Meanwhile, there were photos of military rallies that showed my teachers in Nazi regalia, also clergy, sending young men into war. There was no way that allowed me to believe in their integrity.
After my mother died, while my father was still missing as a prisoner of war, the Catholic church decided that I should not live with my mother’s sister, because my aunt had “married into a protestant” family. So, for nearly one year I lived as a foster child with an arch-Catholic family, with their six sons, like organ pipes, from about eight-years up to the oldest in the twenties. To show the family’s piety, we were seen crossing every early morning the plaza, even on the most miserable of days, to get to the church next to the town hall. Everyone could see us, and maybe there were some mutterings about us: “What a pious family!” or “What happened to them?” This family was seriously intertwined with Fascism—to the point that they later were rewriting the military marching songs to fit the newly established agenda of the Catholic Youth Movement. They did not miss a beat. They also became one of the richest families overnight, because they were privileged. As apothecaries, they were able to procure raw materials that were forbidden to be owned by any other individual or group outside of maintaining the health of the people by the Allied forces. Although alcohol was meant to be part of medicines, it became one of the barter chips in an underground market. While others were literally starving, this family lived in abundance. They closed their shutters to the outside world and toasted their good luck.
In my family, we were not as fortunate. We never had enough food. My father, an academic, was incapable of using any workman’s or gardener’s tools. In worlds of survival, one is better off having down-to-earth physical skills or one is not going to make it. This Catholic family would always invite me for one of the weekend’s suppers, but never my father or my sister. I used to hate it, never looking forward to my totally twisted responsibilities. I would arrive to dinner and claim that I had just eaten and filled up to the till, and then when I returned home, my father and sister would query me about the food I had been served. When I explained that I refused to eat, my father would slap me very hard, because this meant further obligations for him, as head of the family. It too clearly showed his lack of skill to provide for his daughter and son. Those were tough times.
There was never an open discussion about where family members stood, either for or against the Nazis. The pervading answer was either that nobody knew anything about anything, or “a malignant god let these atrocities happen.” I always knew the very stark reality; namely, that from the center of Weimar, the city celebrated “as the German cultural center” or for the “Weimar Classicism”—a synthesis of ideas between Romanticism, Classicism, and Enlightenment, represented by intellectuals, poets, and playwrights like Goethe, Herder, Schiller or Wieland—to the KZ Buchenwald, the distance was about 5.75 miles. From my house in Middleborough, Massachusetts, to the local post office are about 5.8 miles. The fact is, I have always known where our post office is. So why was nobody in Weimar aware of KZ Buchenwald, through which during that time 266,000 prisoners were funneled?
I can understand that everyone wanted to leave things behind, even when one can never escape this miserable German history. I always and still resent that I was saddled with this history, which I have to shoulder, even if I had nothing to do with anything. Luckily, I was too young. The fact is, every German, born into this world will have to face this miserable history for many more generations until other events overtake them or the lazy minds let these memories fade. Does anybody but Ed Tufte care about Napoleon’s victories and defeats? Has he ever thought about the issues beyond statistics, namely what happened to the families of those fallen Frenchmen? Funny enough, Napoleon now is a device whose ethics no longer matter, but the eye-opening diagram about Napoleon’s attempt to defeat Russia and its subsequent defeat make a Tufte successful.
My experience with Ivan Massar is so different. I met him as soon as I joined the design staff at the MIT Office of Publications, and over the following years he became my ethical conscience. He brought some sanity into my life, because my experience with the interpretation in the United States of German history was always very uncomfortable: “Look at the great Autobahn; at the early development of jets; he could not have been all bad.” People showed support for me by putting aside the unfortunate reality of the Holocaust.
Ivan had studied Thoreau and felt kin to his concepts of the ethics of civil disobedience. He was genuine in his beliefs. He lived across from the Concord cemetery, often visiting the graves of many of the American literary and ideological giants buried there. Although I don’t know if he embraced the Religious Society of Friends, I know that their peace mission and method would have suited him very well. Clearly, Ivan objected to the Vietnam War, and we began to work together on projects for PAX, an American organization advocating world peace, like disseminating the truth about the Skull Valley sheep incident, a 1968 sheep kill that later was connected to United States Army chemical and biological warfare programs. Six thousand sheep were killed on ranches near the base. We became involved with many issues, like Three-Mile Island or the Biafra Famine Relief, that had a supportive and humanistic agenda.
Ivan never had be told to put his foot where his mouth was. He marched to his own and Thoreau’s different drummers. He stayed with Martin Luther King and marched with his own family, babies, and grandparents to support King on the road to Montgomery, Alabama. He was there during the Washington rally. He always agreed with me, “Persons at corporate desks, have a tough time to save anything . . . not even whales, because that rarely lies in the purview of their employer’s mission!”
Ivan became my missing father figure, pointing to the real injustices in society. He did not just entitle or empower individuals to speak against power, he made doing so their obligation to their own intelligence and knowledge. He later participated in sailing from Japan to North Vietnam in a humane rescue mission sponsored by the Society of Friends, the Quakers, who brought badly needed medicine to Hanoi. He had to fund his own participation in this symbolic mission by mortgaging his home.
He also had to endure harrowing strafing attacks by the American Air Force jets on the small, vulnerable sailing vessel carrying medical cargo. Then, when he came home, he was greeted by the anger of his neighbors, who dumped what seemed like truck-loads of garbage on his front lawn. It is true, activists do not sit behind desks, they are in the middle of the fracas.
I worked on a documentary of Ivan’s work in book-form, and if anything, I would have seen it as an honor to complete it, because Ivan was a “Mensch,” always aware of the other and concerned about his survival, even if worldviews or philosophies did not comfortably align.