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      37499

By John Boetjer  MPS

The numbers were faint blue, slightly
blurred, and a little irregular. Written on
human skin, what could you expect?

They caught my attention as I leaned
over her, slightly to the side of her small
desk, as she wrote the details of my in-
tended purchase on the back of her busi-
ness card.

For the moment the significance of the
numbers didn't register. I had never seen
them before, not in real life. This was
different from seeing them on a made-
for-television film or some other Holly-
wood production. This was real. The
woman bearing the number was only an
inch away.

Awkwardly, I blurted, pointing to the
number on the inner side of her left fore-
arm, "Is that what I think it is?"

She glanced up, looked frankly, matter-
of-factly into my eyes for a brief moment,
and said, " Yes . "

Then she returned to detailing my
order. I persisted. "But you're too
young! "

" I was thirteen when they took me in, "
she said, still looking down as she care-
fully wrote code numbers and prices.

"Where?" I said. She gave a name, but
it was strange to me, not Treblinka, Aus-
chwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen--
the names I would have recognized.

"Where was it?"

"In Germany. One of the smaller
camps. Not well-known."

She continued the order, completing it
and telling me when I could pick up the
item.

The matter, obviously, was over for her,
but it wasn't for me. My name, Boettjer
is German. My parents, with the aid of
relatives already living in Chicago, came
to the United States from Germany in
the early 1920s. They took menial jobs,
anything they could find. The Great De-
pression came as a surprise to them in
this land of prosperity and promise.

I still remember my father contrasting
the hard times of the 1930s in America to
the earlier good times in Germany, the
Fatherland, particularly how he took to
market in a horse- drawn cart the rich,
fresh milk from his father's farm.

Here, in down-town Washington, DC,
for the first time in my life I had met a
World War II concentration camp vic-
tim. History had been brought home to
me. I felt the weight of my heritage. I was
in touch with the past, the living past, a
past we too often prefer not to remember.
It is too painful. Yet over 6,000,000 men,
women, and children were extermi-
nated. And not just Jews, Poles, Gypsies,
communists, or anarchists. Outsiders or
dissidents of every type were shot, or
gassed, or starved, or sacrificed to med-
ical experiments.

Lest we forget, hundreds of thousands
of these were another type of misfit--
Freemasons. To this day, many members
of our Craft wear a blue forget-me-not
flower pin in tribute to the European
Masons who used this flower to identify
themselves to other Masonic brethren.

Today, just a short walk from the Wash-
ington Monument, a new edifice is tak-
ing form, the Holocaust Memorial and
Museum. Many regret the construction.
They see in it needless recollection of
mankind's inhumanity to man. True, I
am reminded of the horror, the brutality,
and the evil mankind can do.

At the same time, I am brought to a
realization of the endurance of the
human spirit, the courage innate in every
man and woman, the desperate pursuit
of freedom and tolerance by Masons who
were our Masonic forebearers and who
should never fade from the consciousness
and conscience of the Craft.

Today, as terms like "racial strife" and
"ethnic cleansing" are common, we
must not forget that man's hold on free-
dom and moral conduct is, at best tenu-
ous. We are all too willing to callous
ourselves to evil, to shrug off the mani-
fold violences of history and of daily life
as someone else's concern.

Those faint blue numbers are now
etched as deeply into my mind as they
are tattooed in the forearm of the concen-
tration camp survivor I met so recently
and accidentally in the center of our
nation's capital. May their significance
never fade. May we all, everywhere and
always, live aware of the enormity of
man's evil. At the same time, let us as
Freemasons and Americans remain ded-
icated to man's equally enormous im-
pulse toward good.

In the heart of darkness let us find,
nurture, and spread the dawn of light.

Note: The number in the title of this article is
not the actual identification number of the Ho-
locaust survivor described


The Philalethes, December 1992
