I think I committed a faux pas. But I’m not 100% certain.
I cried during an interview.
The interviewee didn’t seem to notice – I didn’t wail or tear at my hair or anything. My face simply went screwy and got hot and a few tears spilled over my lower eyelids.
That’s probably not something you’re supposed to do if you’re a truly professional journalist.
It happened when I was out on assignment for my Manhattanite book-author friend who I’ve been helping on his latest project. I interview concentration camp survivors living in Israel in their Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, etc. homes asking questions e-mailed by my friend.
So far the work has been incredible: hearing stories, witnessing two survivors compare numbered arm tattoos, looking through old photo albums…
Spending time with survivors I realize how very privileged my life has been and how honored I am to sit with them and document their lives.
But maybe I’m hardened. Because in all the years I have covered all sorts of stories nothing has reduced me to tears.
And there have certainly been moments. Like interviewing a man hours before he was to attend the double funerals of his wife and daughter, both killed in a Tel Aviv suicide bombing. Or witnessing an elderly man sitting despondently in the rubble of his just-bulldozed home. Or sitting with an inner city teen who stared blankly into space in the aftermath of his sibling’s shooting death. Didn’t cry.
What did it for me yesterday was a certificate.
To be exact: The Certificate of Liberation i.e. the “Provisional Identification Card for Civilian Internee of Buchenwald.”
On April 22, 1945 the survivor I interviewed was liberated from Buchenwald Concentration Camp by the American army. He has held onto the wallet sized, brown leather-bound document signed by American General Bertel something or other for 64 years. It’ states that “Herr (blank blank in the interest of privacy) was kept in captivity from 16.4.1944 to 22.4.1945 in Nazi-German concentration camps and was liberated from the concentration camp of Buchenwald.”
It blew me away to see the authentic signed military document. I traveled in my imagination to the place and time that document was received and imagined the officer handing it to the survivor and the incredulity on both parts. The significance of holding onto that document for six decades struck a chord.
I know, though, that I’m not the only journalist who has ever broken down on the job.
Some years ago B.Z. Goldberg’s documentary Promises was shown in cinemas worldwide. In what was the film’s most poignant scene, Palestinian and Israeli children are shown sitting together in the West Bank living room of one child’s home after having spent the day playing, laughing and getting to know each other. Separated by politics and army checkpoints, they live a mere 20 minutes apart but would have never met had the filmmaker not brought them together.
Suddenly, one of the Palestinian boys begins crying.
What’s wrong? director B.Z. queries.
They’ll go back to Israel today and then we’ll never see them again, the boy answers, knowing all too well the reality of his situation.
The camera then pans to B.Z. who is also crying.
I was awed by that scene because B.Z. allowed himself to spontaneously shed tears and he kept the shot in the film.
It was nominated for Best Documentary Oscar in 2001.
So about the crying thing…I dunno. Mypersonal jury’s still out.
All of that’s true. But I’m a woman. And our 10-month-old black 
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