Susan still does not have access to the Internet as she is on her way to Budapest to attend her Grandmother’s funeral. However, she called and asked me to post a thank you note to thousands of people who emailed and sent warm messages on this blog, the www.chessdiscussion.com forum and on www.facebook.com.
Her beloved Grandmother, the last member of Susan’s family who survived Auschwitz, just passed away earlier yesterday in Budapest, Hungary. She is survived by her daughter Klara (Susan’s mother), 3 grandchildren (Susan and her sisters), and 6 great grandchildren (Tommy, Alon, Leeam, Yoav, Oliver, and Hanna).
Once again, on behalf of the Polgar family, thank you!
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
I love you Susan.
Me too!
Let’s hope she’ll never come back to the US. Long live Goichberg and Bauer!
My condolences for your loss. Don’t pay attention to those uscf idiots who are racist and sexist.
We all love you Susan. Don’t pay any attention to these Nazi trolls.
My condolences to the Polgar family.
Interestingly enough, yesterday with my wife on one of our visits to a long-time neighbor who is now in a nursing home, I heard a German accent and struck up a conversation in German with one of our neighbor’s table-mates. Turns out he fought with Hitler’s army 1940-45 mostly in Russia, not anything he was proud of but just a fact about his life which he didn’t mind coming back into English with. I didn’t press his memory any further than what he was willing to say, about what those years were like.
His memories are important to him and his loved ones, but there is a difference to your grandmother’s memories which I can state even without moral judgment. It is incumbent on all of us publicly to preserve her memories, because they speak like Jeremiah and Ezekiel as the more terrifying lesson, and not merely because we have crazy Holocaust-deniers even as heads of state. It is difficult to preserve memory, because the world will not naturally do it for us—indeed, according to an article this year co-written by a college classmate I knew well, Nature will not even preserve memory of the Big Bang. To quote the fourth excerpt in this link, even this memory will require “civilizations [with] deep historical archives…[that] can survive billions of years of wars, supernovae, black holes and countless other perils”—which I say to put the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum into some perspective.
Yet scientists also believe that the micro-world automatically preserves all information. The closest I’ve seen to a human-level understanding of this paradox is actually from a relevant religious source, the Jewish concept of God as Ha Makom, “The Place”. So let us say, HaMakom yenachem et’chem b’toch sha’ar aveilei Zion v’Yerushalayim.