At the age of 88, Sigmund Schiller, with a mustache, goatee, and nearly bald pate, looks like an aging Lenin. These days he spends most of his time tending the small, immaculate garden behind the ranch house that he and his wife, Yaffa, have lived in for nearly half a century.
I had come to his house, in this sunny spot between Ben Gurion Airport and the Mediterranean coast, for an unlikely reason: not long ago, after decades of unwavering silence, Schiller spoke about his Holocaust experience. It happened once, and he says that it won’t happen again. But his words were filmed for a documentary. I had watched it with Daniela Schiller in Brooklyn, at the home of the director, Liron Unreich; the day I visited Rishon LeZion, Schiller’s parents were about to see the film for the first time. Unreich is a multimedia artist and a cofounder of the Ripple Project, which explores the multigenerational effects of the Holocaust through short documentaries. Schiller, who took part in the film, had been astonished when her father began to talk to Unreich and his crew. “To say I never expected it would be an understatement,” she told me before we went to Israel. “I still have trouble believing the sequence of events.”
Unreich told Schiller that he wanted to make a documentary about the connection between survivors and their children. Schiller had explained that her father would never talk—that it would be a silent movie. Unreich was undeterred, and said that he was planning a trip to Israel, where he grew up, and would be grateful for the chance to film Daniela as she tried to engage with her father. Her father had no objection, so she agreed. “I told him not to worry, they were aware that he would say nothing.”
Unreich had brought a young cinematographer who was born in Ukraine; he quickly established a rapport with Sigmund Schiller. His daughter asked him once again, for the film, to discuss his memories. He declined. “So we sat there in silence for a while, and I was happy that Liron was there to capture one of our ‘conversations.’” Then the silence ended.
“I was eleven when my little sister was born,” her father said, speaking Hebrew in a flat monotone, but with tears in his eyes. “I was very attached to her, and she was closer to me than to my mom. I taught her how to walk. Her first words, her first laughter was with me. I am the one who raised her.”
Schiller had never before mentioned a sister, even to his wife. Daniela fought back tears in the film, and was fighting them back again in the family’s living room. Her mother, who watched the film in silence, said in a whisper, “I never knew about your sister.”
“She never grew up,” the elder Schiller told Unreich in the film. “She was amazing.”
Unreich asked if he remembered the last time he saw her.
“I remember the last time I didn’t see her,” he replied. “We had a maid who loved the kids very much, but she lived in a different village. When we ran away to hide in the forest, my mom took my sister to her house . . . After a while, there was a rumor that she had been executed. Two policemen came and took her to the fields. One was a ‘humanitarian.’ He didn’t want her to suffer, so he took her toy, threw it away, and said go pick it up. That way he could shoot her in the back without her knowing.”
In the living room, surrounded by book-lined shelves and bright pictures of birds, painted over the years by Yaffa Schiller, we all sat stunned, in silence. Before we left New York, Daniela Schiller had told me that her father finds being called a Holocaust survivor demeaning. “When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about gas chambers, Auschwitz—the Holocaust is not just about that,” she said. “It’s about the little humiliations, the loss of dignity.”
Her father made much the same point in the film. “People talk about ‘Sophie’s choice’ as if it were a rare event,” he said. “It wasn’t. Everybody had to make Sophie’s choice—all of us. My mother left behind a four-year-old with the maid. You don’t think I was beaten and shot at? There are no violins in my story. It is the most common thing that happened.”
Nobody moved in the Schillers’ living room while the film continued. At times Daniela hid her eyes with her hands, and so did her father. For the most part, they were immobile. On camera, she asked him if he had consciously suppressed this information.
“Yes,” he said. “You must suppress. Without suppression I wouldn’t live.”
“I have learned in my research,” she told him, “that it should be the other way around. I think it’s good to cry—you should bring back memories and relive them. And since you are not in the war anymore, it might be a good experience.” At that, Sigmund Schiller shook his head and stopped speaking.
It’s not clear if the experience has altered his memory of those events. But it has transformed his daughter’s memories of him, and of her own life. She told me that she realized memory is “what you are now, not what you think you were in the past. When you change the story you created, you change your life. I created the story and brought these memories together, and now my past is different from the past I had before. Especially the memories of my father. He was a reserved man, a nontalking person. I know that, but there was this window when he was a different person. A very brief window, but now that is the person who inhabits each of my previous memories.”
She sat quietly for a long time. Then she continued. “I picture him from the time I was in kindergarten. But now I only can see him with all the insight I have gained. My memory has been updated. I have spent much of my life trying to find a way to reconsolidate my father’s memories, and ended up reconsolidating my own.”
MEERA SUBRAMANIAN
The City and the Sea
FROM Orion
TWENTY YEARS BEFORE Hurricane Sandy slammed into the slim spit of land that is New York City’s Rockaways, local artist Richard George was out planting trees. He was in his 40s then, and had shifted his home a few years earlier from Corona, Queens, to a 1920s bungalow colony in the Far Rockaways, abutting the Atlantic Ocean. He didn’t know anything about trees, had never given a thought to dune ecology or sea surges, but he’d joined the board of the local Beachside Bungalow Preservation Association, and a friend gave them $15,000. The directive was to plant trees, so that’s what he did.
“He planted the money in my hand,” George recalls when I meet him at his cottage, a bright white bungalow with turquoise trim that matches his T-shirt. “I said, ‘Where am I gonna plant trees?’” Then the artist saw the wide expanse of beach down the street, like a blank canvas in waiting.
George is convivial, a man who enjoys talking, which he’s doing at a rapid pace in a heavy New York accent as we head from the cottage toward the beach. It’s a clear spring day, making it hard to imagine the devastation that Sandy wrought when she landed on the shores of New York City, generating a 14-foot storm surge that dumped the Atlantic Ocean into thousands of homes, decommissioned trains, caused a Con Edison power station to explode, plummeted tracts of the city into darkness and others into fire, and took 43 lives. The storm cost an estimated $19 billion in damage and an unquantifiable amount of grief.
The street ends in a ramp that leads to an elevated boardwalk, rising a dozen feet above street level. In 1992, George tells me, you could walk right under the boardwalk with room to spare. Now, as we walk up the ramp to get to the length of the boardwalk, which was untouched by Sandy, we are surrounded on both sides by a dune so high that it’s packed against the bottom of the boards. It’s thick with plants, a seaside forest filled with bayberry, beach plum, autumn olive, wild rose, and Japanese black pine 15 feet tall. The first fiery hints of poison ivy inch out of the sand at toe level. This beach forest is what is considered a secondary dune; on the other side of the boardwalk, waves of beach grass cover the primary dune before sand takes over. The water appears so innocent, softly lapping onto the beach, sparkling in the sun.
“At first we just planted tiny little beach grass,” George tells me. He gathered up 35 volunteers, and they spent a couple of weekends planting the starts. “One blade, one blade, one blade,” he explains, his fingers poking into the air. Later
they planted trees.
In 1994 they got another $15,000 and planted more. This time they rented a machine to dig the holes, and a neighbor cooked the volunteers lunch. Once the plants became established—NYC GreenThumb, which supports the city’s network of community gardens, helped keep them watered through that first vulnerable summer—residents and beach bums could sit back and watch the sand grow. And grow.
“The beach grass grew by itself,” he says as he bends to show me the thick, matted root system, exposed at the edge where Sandy’s storm surge gnawed away half of the primary dune. He’d been standing in this very spot just five hours before the surge hit. The double-dune system that stretches for a few blocks on either side of George’s street seemed to help fend off Sandy’s deluge: the water breached on Beach 27th Street, where the dunes stop.
“The dunes were twice as high before the storm,” he says, looking at the remains of the sacrificial sands. “It saved us.”
Once upon a time, about 2 million years ago, the Pleistocene era locked up the world’s water in glaciers miles thick. Then it warmed. It was about 10,000 years ago when the water of the melting glaciers was released to reshape the world into the coastlines we now associate with modern-day maps.
By all indications, though, the shape of those coastlines is about to change.
The archipelago of New York City’s five boroughs has almost 600 miles of littoral zone between solid ground and watery sea, a place of straits and river mouths, bays and beachy backshores. It’s also a place whose contours have been radically transformed by its citizens. A large percentage of the city’s edges were created artificially, filled in and built upon with the false confidence that land taken from the sea is permanently allocated for terrestrial use. But on October 29, 2012, the record-breaking storm surge that swept over New York City flooded 51 square miles of that falsely allocated land—and like a finger from a watery grave, the high-water mark traced the coastline that once was and may soon be again. The mayor’s office says that by the 2050s, 800,000 New Yorkers will live in 100-year flood plains, double the current number.
In 2008, Mayor Bloomberg convened the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), a multidisciplinary group comprising academic and private-sector experts on everything from climatology to oceanography to law and insurance risk. Their task was to assess how climate change might affect the city and make suggestions about how to mitigate those effects. Sea levels vary around the globe, and models still vary wildly, but the NPCC settled on 48 inches—the average height of a seven-year-old child—as the informal figure for estimated sea level rise in the New York City area by the 2080s. They readily admit that this number is subject to change, especially if the polar ice sheets get caught in a feedback loop that speeds up the process.
Given the huge number of people who live on the world’s coasts, how will human populations—whether in Brooklyn or Bangladesh, Miami or Mumbai—adapt to an increasingly aquatic world? Do we stand strong and demonstrate our clever technical ingenuity with multibillion-dollar floodgates and waterproof buildings? Or do we humbly bid a hasty retreat, scrambling for higher ground while there’s still time, waving a white flag to Mother Nature?
It seems increasingly clear that there may be a third way: an approach that blends a trace of conciliation with an abundance of creativity, using hints from the ecological past to design the coastlines of the future—and it could be the key to surviving in coastal communities in an age of rising seas. The way forward will require an unlikely collaboration, not just between public institutions and citizens, but also between humans and the one player too often left outside, literally and figuratively: nature herself.
When it comes to prospects for human life within the increasing reach of the ocean, design answers fall into two categories, the soft and the hard, the yin and the yang. Dunes, wetlands, and oyster reefs fall on the soft side; hard is the stuff I know from my childhood on the Jersey Shore: tar-smeared bulkheads and jetties jutting out at perpendicular angles in an effort to stanch the natural movement of sand. A floodgate is as hard as it gets.
Speculation about the construction of a great surge barrier surfaced soon after Sandy. The largest proposed gate would run parallel to the expansive Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, nearly a mile long. Outright critics spoke of engineering cockiness, ethical and legal conundrums, disrupted harbor ecosystems, and a false sense of security. More cautious skeptics noted that comparisons to countries that do employ floodgates, like the Netherlands, fall short when one considers that the eastern United States routinely weathers storms the Dutch can’t imagine in their mild climate.
But instead of seeking out the big fix, most adaptation efforts are opting for a multifaceted approach. After Sandy, Mayor Bloomberg formed the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency, and in June 2013 it released a comprehensive 440-page report, “A Stronger, More Resilient New York.” In it the city proposes more than 250 different initiatives that would strengthen everything from the energy grid to communications networks to transportation systems. A proposal for a great flood barrier is notably absent.
The city’s response echoes what is rising up like wrack on the high-tide line, a medley of ideas from all sectors across the boroughs and beyond. Many seek to embrace the best of technological advances and apply them in ways that foster, instead of resist, the fundamental laws of the natural world: Let the wetlands be wetlands, bird-festooned sponges. Remember the shape of New York’s native coastlines. Cultivate sand dunes and beach forests. If Richard George and the Beachside Bungalow Preservation Association could save a bit of coastline with 35 volunteers and a neighborhood cook, imagine what a whole country could do if it acted with nature in mind.
The U.S. has over 12,000 miles of coastline, home to 53 percent of Americans. What can the rest of us learn about coastal infrastructure from the shorelines of America’s largest city? I’d come to the Big Apple to find out.
It is springtime when I visit the western end of the Road to Nowhere, where the legendary NYC Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, a ruthless mid-20th-century urban planner who favored parkways over parks, left his indelible mark on the Rockaways in Queens. Of the five-and-a-half-mile-long boardwalk that ran along the Rockaways beachfront, more than half was destroyed by Sandy, and afterward the city spent over $140 million to rebuild beaches. The work continues today. I see one man scrape his shovel across a basketball court, fill his wheelbarrow with sand, and walk a half-dozen steps away to dump the contents on the beach; nearby, bulldozers move between the skeletal remains of the boardwalk’s concrete stanchions. Annually dredges and offshore rigs vacuum up sand that is hauled onto the beach, where heavy machinery sculpts it into a shoreline in a continuous process called “nourishment.”
I turn my back to the men and take in the two-mile length of Moses’s Shore Front Parkway. In 1939, Moses orchestrated the divided four-lane parkway along the southern shore that was supposed to become part of a 90-mile road system along Long Island, linking the Hamptons in the east to Brooklyn in the west. (The project never came to fruition, hence the local nickname, Road to Nowhere.) But while Moses razed neighborhoods and built highways, a new generation of thinkers hopes to reshape the city with a gentler hand than the one he wielded. The Shore Front Parkway could be where it begins.
Watching the bulldozers do their work, I envision the space transformed into a system of forested beach dunes—it would be reclamation of the grandest sort. This is the idea of Walter Meyer and Jennifer Bolstad, the husband-and-wife team of Local Office Landscape & Urban Design, on-and-off Rockaway residents, and avid surfers. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, Meyer worked with others to form Power Rockaways Resilience, which delivered hand-built, shopping-cart-sized solar generators to the hardest-hit parts of the Rockaways so storm survivors could charge cell phones, laptops, and small power tools. The White House recognized him as a Champion of Change.
Now Local Office is looking long-term. They have set their sights on transforming the lin
gering Moses legacy of the Shore Front Parkway into a double-dune forest system, similar to what Richard George showed me on a small scale on the Rockaways’ eastern end. They propose downsizing the parkway from its current 80-foot width to a reasonable 30-foot road and using the new space to develop dunes planted with trees and shrubs that provide beachfront storm surge protection. The boardwalk would continue to exist, nestled between the primary and secondary dunes. They imagine a system like this stretching across the entire 15-mile length of the sea-facing Rockaways, a natural double-duty sea wall of sorts.
“This is a story about trees,” Meyer tells me. “It’s less about the dunes than what the dunes support, this coastal forest. It’s a living armor.” Globally, Meyer says that more and more nations are turning to softer approaches to dealing with sea level rise. “The Dutch don’t build dykes anymore, they’re building sandbars and sand dunes,” he says. “The Japanese are building forests. The Australians are building reefs.”
By late 2013 the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation had commissioned Local Office for drawings, the first step for a pilot project that may bring the double-dune forest vision to life. Meanwhile Meyer and Bolstad continue their community-based efforts, teaming up with reTREEt America, which plants in areas struck by disaster, to bring volunteers together to landscape with native plants on property where dunes are being developed. The most recent planting day evolved into a block party, where volunteers were plied with fresh fish and beer as homeowners gave their thanks.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015 Page 33
