F R I D A Y OCTOBER 4, 2002
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD Volume CXXXVII, No. 85
An independent newspaper serving the Brown community since 1891
www.browndailyherald.com
Author Appelfeld tells child’s tale of Holocaust survival
UCS discusses police arming, diversity at first town meeting
BY BAMBOO DONG
BY ELENA LESLEY
Acclaimed author and retired professor Aharon Appelfeld explored the division between fact and fantasy in his lecture, “Testimonies of Child Holocaust Survivors,” Thursday night. Appelfeld, once a professor at BenGurion University in Beersheva, Israel and the author of over 30 books, drew a crowd of students and Providence locals to Lower Solomon. He said that as the adult survivors of the Holocaust die, the testimonies of children survivors must now also be considered. “As long as the survivors lived among us, the Holocaust had a palpable presence,” he said. “How will the story of the Holocaust be continued without them?” Appelfeld explored the differences in the memories and written works of children and adults, using the works he has written as references to his own experiences. Appelfeld was separated from his parents at the age of eight when he was sent to live in a concentration camp. He managed to escape and live in the forests of Ukraine, eventually working in the Soviet army as a kitchen boy. He immigrated to Israel in 1946 where he studied Hebrew. He first started to write in order to understand his life, he said. “To write was to reveal myself,” Appelfeld said. His works, which are primarily fiction pieces on the Holocaust, also deal with the experiences of Holocaust survivors after the war, and the history of European Jewry leading up to the war. Appelfeld said the experiences and memories of children Holocaust survivors are different from those of adult survivors. “To understand the testimony of the child survivor is to understand the nature of the adult survivor,” he said. He said that while adult survivors present chronology and factual testimonies, children’s accounts are almost fantastical and distorted. It is the difference between a factual testimony and a reconstructed testimony, he said. A child survivor’s testimony is more like “literature,” Appelfeld said. He said while adults can repress their memories and emotions, children cannot. The memories of the Holocaust are a part of their body, he said. “They knew no other life,” he said. “The children had no previous life, or if they had, it was erased. It was the black milk, as the poets say, that they sucked morning, noon and night.” Appelfeld said the emotions and sensations revealed by child survivors are important in understanding the Holocaust. He said that children only absorbed the horror that they could take in, and “their limited experience is a profound one.” “The power of their testimonies lie in their limited horizons,” Appelfeld said. “It’s something more than testimony. It’s something that is transmittable to other people.”
The Undergraduate Council of Students outlined its agenda for this semester and provided opportunities for student feedback during its first town meeting Thursday evening in Upper Salomon. “Our purpose is twofold,” UCS President Allen Feliz ’03 told a crowd of around 20. “We want to share our goals, but, more importantly, we want to hear from you.” Members overseeing various UCS committees made brief presentations, discussing both their long- and short-term goals. Rahim Kurji ’05, chair of the Admission and Student Services Committee, described different strategies for diversifying Brown’s student body and faculty. “To ensure that Brown gets the best possible students,” UCS has been developing a list of impoverished high schools that are often overlooked by the admission office for socioeconomic reasons, he said. Admission officers will spend the next few years making in-roads at these institutions, he added. UCS also wants a student voice to be heard in the selection of President Ruth Simmons’ announced cabinet-level position on diversity, he said. In terms of student services, Kurji said UCS supported holding a cookout with the Department of Public Safety to foster communication between students and officers. “A lot of us see the officers, but we never get to talk to them,” he said. “We never get to see the other side — they also have families, also have kids in college.” Class Representative Samuel Hodges ’04, who stood in for Chair of the Academic and Administrative Affairs Committee Kevin Bennett ’03, said UCS hopes to continue events such as “Win Paul Armstrong’s Money,” a competition that was first held last year. He said UCS also plans to sponsor a “President for a Day” raffle, where students could purchase tickets for the chance to shadow President Simmons. Justin Sanders ’04, chair of the Campus Life Committee, described other social events UCS plans to continue this semester. “Our focus is on tradition-building through campus-wide events,” he said. UCS Hopes to “bring back” events such as Live on Lincoln, Wellness Week and Fall Ball, he added. After their presentations, UCS members invited comment from the audience. For much of the question-and-answer session, students expressed concern about the arming of Brown police, along with other recommendations made by the Bratton Report. When asked for the UCS position on arming Brown police, Feliz responded that the organization had issued a statement last spring saying “we should arm as a last resort after taking on a list of measures so as to decrease crime.” But Feliz added that UCS members would want to facilitate communication between officers and students before any
Amana Nagai / Herald
Ian Hutchinson Ph.D., director of one of five nuclear fusion projects worldwide, told a Smith-Buonanno crowd Thursday night that science and faith are compatible.
When science meets faith BY STEPHEN BEALE
Science and faith are complementary, said Ian Hutchinson Ph.D., director of one of five nuclear fusion energy projects worldwide, at a Thursday lecture. Hutchinson, who leads the Alcator C-Mod Tokamak Fusion Research Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told a capacity crowd in Smith-Buonanno 106 that science and theology were historically “friends, not foes.” He argued that Christianity contributed to the development of modern science through its belief in an intelligent creator. This belief in God implied that the universe was contingent, an important scientific presupposition, he said. He added that 60 percent of the greatest heroes of science were devout Christians, examining Michael Faraday as a primary example. Hutchinson characterized the differences between science and theology as “differences in levels of description of reality.” Hutchinson illustrated the idea through a selection of J.S. Bach’s “Jesus, the Joy of Man’s Desiring,” first describing it as a series of bytes on an MP3 file, then as a graph on an oscilloscope, and finally as the music played at his wedding. He defined science as “a particular way of investigating and understanding
the world, that by its very methods rules out some questions from the start.” These methods include repeatability and “clarity” — the ability to understand the results of an experiment. Hutchinson presented history as an example of something that cannot be explained by the scientific method. “You can only cross the Rubicon once,” he said, stressing the impossibility of repeating history. He said that science is also incapable of answering questions such as “Do you love your wife?” He labeled the assumption that science is the only description of reality as “scientism.” “Descriptions at different levels can be true simultaneously,” he added, emphasizing that the scientific view of man as a biological machine and the biblical understanding of man as a person with a soul are not mutually exclusive. Hutchinson emphasized that he holds the biblical view, meaning that biblical miracles can be described as both natural and supernatural events. He cited the crossing of the Red Sea as an example. He evaluated the claims of Christianity, focusing on the question of what intellectual methods were see SCIENCE, page 4
see UCS, page 4
I N S I D E F R I D AY, O C T O B E R 4 , 2 0 0 2 Prof. Elmo TerryMorgan’s ‘Hot Comb’ sizzles at Rites and Reason Theatre page 3
New findings show cities are improving their ‘e-government’ services page 5
Brown won’t face any penalties for refusal to adhere to new national admission policy page 5
TO D AY ’ S F O R E C A S T Alex Schulman ’03 debunks the ‘wrong reasons’ for opposing a war in Iraq column,page 7
Football heads to URI, looking for revenge and first win of the young season sports,page 8
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