The photo, taken in 1935, depicts a woman in a dark dress shuffling down a street in Norden, Germany. A large sign hangs from her neck: “I am a German girl and allowed myself to be defiled by a Jew.” She is surrounded by Nazi stormtroopers.
D.C. Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8) studied the image. “Are they protecting her?”
Lynn Williams, an expert on educational programs at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and White’s tour guide for the day, stared at the photo.
“No,” she said. “They’re marching her through.”
“Marching through is protecting,” White said.
“I think they’re humiliating her,” Williams replied.
White, who drew widespread criticism last month when he asserted that wealthy Jews control the weather, on Wednesday made a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. With him was Rabbi Batya Glazer of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, a group that has been heavily involved in the first-term Democratic lawmaker’s public rehabilitation.
“There’s nothing more powerful than visiting the Holocaust museum for understanding the culture of the Jewish community, and our concerns about anti-Semitism,” Glazer told an uninvited reporter who shadowed the tour.
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The museum allows photos for personal use, and the council member and his aides took many. As Williams explained the workings of the Nazis’ pseudoscientific race propaganda, White held up his cellphone before a poster with images of black, Native American and Australian men, titled “Rassen der Erde” — “Races of the Earth.” An aide took a shot of a pile of Torahs desecrated on Kristallnacht.
The group paused before grainy photos of German troops executing Catholic clergy in Poland by firing squad. “Were they actually manufacturing these weapons?” White asked.
Moments later, White was nowhere to be seen.
Glazer, the rabbi, texted him to ask his whereabouts. He wrote back that he hoped to see her outside the museum but he had to leave soon for an event in Ward 8.
The tour, scheduled to last 90 minutes, was halfway done. Seven of White’s staff members stayed with the guide, who soon was showing them an exhibit on the Warsaw Ghetto. As she explained the walling in of Polish Jews, one aide asked whether it was similar to “a gated community.”
Glazer spoke up.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t call it a gated community,” she said. “More like a prison.”
The group continued without White, past a scale model of a gas chamber and photos of the residents of an eradicated shtetl. They stopped at the famous exhibit of shoes confiscated from concentration-camp prisoners.
The tour over, the rabbi praised White for being “very sincere in wanting to come here.” But she was perplexed by his abrupt exit.
“I do not know what happened, and I find it confusing,” she said.
White, it turned out, was standing alone on the sidewalk outside the museum.
“I’ll be coming back to see more of the museum. I didn’t get a chance to see the whole thing,” he said. “But I think it’s a lot of education here, a lot of synergy here between what happened to the Jewish community and the African community.”
Asked why he left the tour halfway and where he went, he said nothing and held his cellphone to his ear.
I think we need to rename this ignoramus “Trayon Wreck.”
A law school graduate, David Lange transitioned from work in the oil and hi-tech industries into fulltime Israel advocacy. He is a respected commentator and Middle East analyst who has often been cited by the mainstream media
A law school graduate, David Lange transitioned from work in the oil and hi-tech industries into fulltime Israel advocacy. He is a respected commentator and Middle East analyst who has often been cited by the mainstream media
