Black Hills

by Simmons, Dan

  When the war broke out in 1939, Belgium had a population of around nine million people, some 90,000 of them Jews. More than 80,000 of these Jews were concentrated in the two major cities of Brussels and Antwerp. More than three-fourths of Belgian Jews before the war were self-employed, with the majority of these involved in diamond cutting or the selling of diamonds. The diamond trade in the port city of Antwerp was almost completely in Jewish hands.

  Germany invaded and occupied neutral Belgium in May of 1940. Thousands of Jews fled Belgium during the invasion and thousands more were deported to France (where they would soon fall under German control again), so that by November of 1940, there were an estimated 55,000 Jews remaining in the country. Reports of the number of Belgian Jews killed during the war vary greatly, ranging from an American prosecution exhibit at the Nuremberg War Crime trials that “approximately 50,000” Jews deported from Belgium were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers between April 1942 and April 1944, to claims by some Belgian historians that “more than half of the Jewish population of Belgium survived the war” to arguments by even more recent revisionist historians that “Belgium lost virtually none of its native Jewish population.” The so-called Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry announced in 1946 that, out of a total of 5.7 million European Jews who perished during the war years, 57,000 were Jews from Belgium. One Jewish historian later put the number at 26,000. No two historians seem to agree.

  As one of the first wealthy Belgian Jews to take the rise of Hitler seriously and then take early action, Monsieur Vanden Daelen Adler’s plan was to get all of his extended family out of continental Europe by October of 1936.

  It helped that in 1936 the four most important diamond exchanges in Belgium (of which about 80 percent of the merchants were Jews) united in the Federatie der Belgische Diamantbeurzen diamond federation. Vanden Daelen Adler was elected the first chairman of that federation.

  If he’d wanted to, Adler could have easily stolen diamonds or cash for his purposes, but instead he used his own wealth, which was considerable (almost $1 million in 1936, equivalent to more than $15 million today). He had a list of 124 family members whom he thought he could get out of Europe in 1936: the majority of these family members outside of Belgium were in France (from whence his family had emigrated to Belgium in the 1780s), but some were in other European countries, including Germany. Adler saved 85 of them. The rest, for various reasons, refused to leave.

  In 1936, immigration laws in England, the United States, and most other countries were designed to keep Jews—even wealthy Jews—out, but Vanden Daelen Adler had been working for three years bribing officials and greasing those rules. Those family members he could not get to England or the United States (where he sent his elderly mother, two sisters, his daughter, his granddaughter, and her future husband), he managed to get to Latin America. Adler did not trust any place in Europe as being safe from the Nazis, and in 1936 he was having second thoughts about England. He did help twelve of his relatives and in-laws gain secret passage to Palestine, although it was a risky trip. Adler later admitted to his biographer that, in spite of his later success as a diamond merchant in the United States, he wished he himself had emigrated to Palestine so that he could have helped create the state of Israel.

  Adler’s position as chairman of the Federatie der Belgische Diamantbeurzen in those final months of his preparations for the family exodus helped immensely. No one in Antwerp or Belgium questioned his many trips to England, the United States, or other countries. And—except for some rare stamps—diamonds are the most portable form of wealth known to humankind.

  Vanden Daelen Adler would later say that his proudest achievement, after having saved eighty-five members of his extended family (not including himself), was that after doing so, he arrived in the United States with less than a hundred dollars left from his original wealth of almost $1 million. By 1940, Adler’s new diamond business in the United States had regained most of his fortune but he spent a large part of that wealth to buy guns and other weapons for Palestine after the war to help create a Jewish state.

  Adler died of a heart attack in 1948, just three weeks after Israel came into existence.

  DR. ROBERT ADLER OCHS, born in Denver, Colorado, in 1937, was once quoted as saying, “My profession is physics; my religion is humanity.”

  It’s true that Ochs began blending his brilliant career in physics and his ability to explain science to the public at a relatively young age. His first book, The Existential Joys of Physics, became a modest bestseller and an alternate Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1960, when Ochs was only twenty-three years old. His 1974 book, Mankind and Mystery: Science Looks at the Cosmos, remains one of the top five bestselling popular science books in publishing history. In the late 1970s, Ochs’s discursive, almost casual BBC series Man, Mystery, and Science, using Jacob Bronowski’s technique (from his series The Ascent of Man) of just chatting conversationally while stepping from place to place around the world to look into the history and humanity of physics and other science through the ages, was—Dr. Carl Sagan once admitted—one of the prime inspirations for the later hit American series Cosmos.

  Of the nine books that Robert Ochs published during his decades as a working physicist and science populizer, the one he admitted to being most proud of was a small, privately published and circulated volume entitled Conversations with My Tunkašila. In this little book, Ochs told of the “summer vacations” from the time he was fourteen until he was twenty-two that he spent visiting his Oglala Sioux great-grandfather in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In the early years, the two would go camping together, despite his great-grandfather’s advanced age.

  Conversations with My Tunkašila created quite a stir among some of Ochs’s academic friends around the world, since—besides long discussions about Lakota beliefs and attitudes about courage and life—the physicist’s elderly “tunkašila” had explained how knowledge of astronomy had given his Sioux peoples what the old man called Wakan Waśt’e, “ the cosmic powers of good.”

  The old man had described new constellations hidden within known constellations, such as Wi˙cin˙cala śa¸kowin, “The Seven Little Girls,” and how, when that constellation reached a precise point in the summer sky, the Natural Free Human Beings would gather at HiNan ¸Ka˙ga Paha, Harney Peak in the Black Hills, to welcome back the Thunder Beings. Ochs also cited his tunkašila on how to find and track the movement of the oval constellation Lo INaN¸ka O˙caN¸ka, the Race Track, and telling of how his people would, when Lo INaN¸ka O˙caN¸ka reached a precise position in the spring sky, gather together at Pe śia, the spiritual center of the Black Hills (a location the old man would not reveal, but which Robert Ochs hinted was where his beloved tunkašila had built his cabin), for what Ochs’s Lakota great-grandfather called the O¸kiśat’aya wowaĥwala, or “Welcoming back all life in peace.”

  There were dozens of other astronomical observations, all relating to specific geographic points such as Devil’s Tower in Wyoming (where the summer solstice was celebrated) to Bear Butte in South Dakota to various former winter camps of the Natural Free Human Beings in Nebraska and western South Dakota. Each celebrated a subtle shifting of certain stars within known constellations and each was tied to some ancient ceremony. But what astounded the astronomers who read Ochs’s privately distributed book was that his old great-grandfather had revealed cosmologies and levels of astronomical observations known by the Plains Indians that had never been guessed at by ethnographers, historians, or scientists.

  And everything in the night sky and on earth, as young Robert Ochs’s tunkašila revealed, was connected, more than symbolically or ceremonially, with what the old man called the CaNgleś¸ka Wakan, or “Sacred Hoop.”

  Scientists in a dozen fields, who had long been sure that the Sioux, Cheyenne, and other Plains tribes had had no serious astronomy, were forced to revise their beliefs and textbooks based on Dr. Ochs’s short little privately published book.

  It was in
the last summer that Ochs visited his so-called tunkašila, when Robert was twenty-two years old, that he published his revolutionary doctoral thesis, Revised Variations in Velocity Shear Induced Phenomena in Solar and Astrophysical Flows Due to Quantum Effects. He dedicated the thesis to his great-grandfather.

  Dr. Ochs retired in 2007, at the age of seventy, and is currently a professor of physics emeritus at Cornell University and a leading consultant on the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble telescope that will go into solar orbit far beyond the moon, currently scheduled for launch no earlier than 2013.

  DR. CONSTANCE GREENE, born in 1972, the paleo-ecologist, environmental expert, and ethnologist once called “the twenty-first century’s female Leonardo” by Time magazine, credits some of her interest in the human aspects of various Pleistocene rewilding efforts around the world to camping trips she took with her father, Robert Ochs, when she was a girl.

  In a BBC interview she did in 2009, Dr. Greene—known as Connie not just to her students and friends but to most of her peers around the world—said:

  When I was ten years old, my dad took me camping to a place in South Dakota called Bear Butte. You’re not allowed to camp on or near the butte unless you’re Native American, but somehow my dad got permission, so we camped near the summit of that interesting lacolith. Except for rattlesnakes, there was no danger up there, so Dad let me wander by myself a lot as long as I stayed within shouting range. There was this one afternoon—it was raining, I remember, and I met… I mean I had this dream about… at any rate, at age ten, I suddenly saw that if we were ever going to bring back the big predators to the world, in other nations as well as in the dying American West, the rewilding—it was already a term that I’d heard from my father and his friends—the rewilding would have to have a human component. Indigenous peoples should have a choice. You can’t just… I mean, you can’t… keep a culture alive by trying to freeze it in stasis while you’re embedded deep within a different culture. It’s impossible. It ends up amounting to dressing up a few days a year, chanting old chants that few believe in any longer, and doing dances that your great-great-great-great-grandparents did, too often to get a few bucks from tourists. It doesn’t work. But if we were really going to set aside these millions and millions of acres and hectares of land and reintroduce the closest genetic cousins to the megafauna top predators and other extinct species that evolved there originally, that used to live there, that used to own the damned place… I thought, why not the original people too? Why not give them a choice? I thought it was a good idea at the time—I was ten, remember, but my mom and dad had a weird habit of listening to me—and so did all my relatives.

  PAHA SAPA never worked for Gutzon Borglum again, although it is said that the two remained friends until the end of Borglum’s life.

  One piece of advice that Paha Sapa did take from his former boss was to consult with Borglum’s doctor. It turned out that the 1935 diagnosis of cancer by the “quack in Casper” had been false. In January of 1937, Paha Sapa underwent surgery for a long-term and very painful intestinal obstruction. The surgery was successful, there was no tumor or malignancy, the obstruction never returned, and Paha Sapa remained relatively pain free for the rest of his life.

  Sometime in 1937, Paha Sapa moved to a remote place deep within the Black Hills and built a small but comfortable home there. He was not a recluse; he traveled frequently to visit his grandson, his later grandchildren, and old friends such as Borglum. But after World War II, word got out among the Ikče Wičaśa that there was an old man in the Black Hills with the name Black Hills, and some people—at first it was just other old men, but later it was more and more young men—made the long trek into the Hills to visit with this Paha Sapa, trade stories, and, increasingly, to ask questions about the Old Days.

  Somehow the legend grew that this old man had carried the ghost of Long Hair Custer with him for sixty years.

  More and more young Lakota men—and then young Lakota women—came to visit Paha Sapa, traveling first from the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation, then from the Rosebud, then Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Yankton, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock reservations. Then, almost shockingly, young and old Cheyenne and Crows and even Blackfoot from their reservations way over in the northwestern corner of Wyoming and Montana. When members of tribes from California and Washington state began visiting the old man—tribes Paha Sapa had never even heard of—he laughed and laughed.

  Paha Sapa did turn away data-hungry ethnologists, Native American apologists, and at least one media-famous founder of the American Indian Movement, but he always had time to sit and talk and smoke a pipe with any young person or old person without, as the wasichu like to say, an agenda. Many of the Natural Free Human Beings who visited him during the summers of those last years remember his curious great-grandson Robert, and how the boy had a gift—unusual for wasichus, they said—of knowing how to listen. The old man also often had other great-grandchildren around or was planning a trip to Denver or elsewhere to visit them. Even when the elder’s arthritis became very painful near the end, he would neither complain nor curtail such travel.

  Many of those who visited Paha Sapa in those last decades remember that one of his favorite phrases was—Le aNpet’u wa¸ste! This is a good day.

  One of the younger Lakota visiting heard that and asked Paha Sapa if he didn’t mean to say Crazy Horse’s and the other old warriors’ famous old saying “This is a good day to die!” but Paha Sapa only shook his head and repeated Le aNpet’u wa¸ste!

  A good day to live.

  Paha Sapa died at his home in the Black Hills in August of 1959. He was ninety-three years old.

  As per his wishes—found written in pencil on an old napkin he’d kept—Paha Sapa was cremated, and the majority of his ashes were buried next to his wife, Rain, at the old Episcopal Mission Cemetery on Pine Ridge Reservation.

  But, as per those same wishes, some of Paha Sapa’s ashes were taken by a few of his friends and relatives, including his great-grandson Robert, and either scattered or buried somewhere along the small river called Chankpe Opi Wakpala where, it is said, the heart of Crazy Horse and the bleached bones of the old-days wičasa wakan Limps-a-Lot, whose wisdom was taught so widely and so well by Paha Sapa in his last years, also lie there undisturbed in places secret, sacred, and silent except for the sound of the wind moving on the face of the high grass and amid the leaves of the waga chun trees.

  Acknowledgments

  THE AUTHOR WISHES TO ACKNOWLEDGE the following sources for information used in Black Hills:

  A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn: The Last Great Battle of the American West by James Donovan © 2008, published by Little, Brown and Company; The Custer Myth: A Source Book of Custeriana, written and compiled by W. A. Graham, © 1953, published by Stackpole Books; Troopers with Custer: Historic Incidents of the Battle of the Little Big Horn by E. A. Brininstool © 1952, published by the University of Nebraska Press; Custer’s Fall: The Native American Side of the Story by David Humphreys Miller © 1957, published by Meridian, the Penguin Group; Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors by Stephen E. Ambrose © 1975, published by Anchor Books, a division of Random House; Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer by Michael A. Elliott © 2007, published by the University of Chicago Press.

  I’d like to make special mention of Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians by James Welch (with Paul Stekler) © 1994, published by W.W. Norton and Company. I was privileged to meet Jim Welch and his wonderful wife, Lois, at the Salon du Livre in Paris in the 1990s and always looked forward to seeing them again. His death in 2003 at the age of sixty-two was a shock and a loss to us all.

  Other sources to acknowledge include The Black Hills After Custer by Bob Lee © 1997, published by the Donning Company; Exploring with Custer: The 1874 Black Hills Expedition by Ernest Grafe and Paul Horsted © 2002, 2005, published
by Golden Valley Press, an imprint of Dakota Photographic; 1876: The Little Big Horn by Robert Nightengale © 1996, published by Robert Nightengale through DocuPro Services; The Custer Album: A Pictorial Biography of General George A. Custer by Lawrence A. Frost © 1964, published by the University of Oklahoma Press; With the Seventh Cavalry in 1876 by Theodore Goldin © 1980, privately published; Custer and His Times (Book 4) edited by John P. Hart © 2002, published by Little Big Horn Associates; “Carbine Extractor Failure at the Little Big Horn” by Paul L. Hedren © Summer 1973 issue of Military Collector and Historian; Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle by Richard A. Fox © 1993, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

  Reference material for Elizabeth (“Libbie”) Custer include The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth edited by Marguerite Merington © 1950, published by the University of Nebraska Press; Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth by Shirley A. Leckie © 1993, published by the University of Oklahoma Press; Touched by Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer by Louise Barnett © 1996, published by Henry Holt and Company; Boots and Saddles, or: Life in Dakota with General Custer by Elizabeth B. Custer © 1885, reprinted 1969, published by Corner House Publishers; General Custer’s Libby by Lawrence A. Frost © 1976, published by Superior Publishing Company. It should be noted that frequently cited dates for Elizabeth Custer’s death, including Wikipedia and multiple printed sources, are wrong. Mrs. Custer died on April 4, 1933, and her obituary appeared in the New York Times on April 5 of that year.

  Material referred to for the Lakota and Indian side of the Battle of the Little Big Horn and other details include Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life by Kingsley M. Bray © 2006, published by the University of Oklahoma Press; Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux as Told through John G. Neihardt © 1932, published by University of Nebraska Press; Counting Coup and Cutting Horses: Intertribal Warfare on the Northern Plains, 1738–1889 by Anthony McGinnis © 1990, published by Cordillera Press; Mother Earth Spirituality: Native American Paths to Healing Ourselves and the World by Ed McGaa (Eagle Man) © 1990, published by HarperSanFrancisco, a division of Harper Collins; American Indian Myths and Legends selected and edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz © 1984, published by Pantheon Books; Black Elk: The Sacred Way of a Lakota by Wallace Black Elk and William S. Lyon © 1990, published by HarperSanFrancisco, a division of Harper Collins; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown © 1971, published by Bantam Books by arrangement with Holt, Rinehart & Winston; Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places by Peter Nabokov © 2006, published by Penguin Books; My People the Sioux by Luther Standing Bear © 1975, published by the University of Nebraska Press; The Tipi: Traditional Native American Shelter by Adolf Hungrywolf © 2006, published by Native Voices Book Publishing Company; Lakota Belief and Ritual by James R. Walker (edited by Raymond J. DeMallie and Elaine A. Jahner) © 1980, 1991, published by University of Nebraska Press in cooperation with the Colorado Historical Society; Lakota Star Knowledge: Studies of Lakota Stellar Theology by Ronald Goodman © 1992, published by Sinte Gleska University; Stories of the Sioux by Luther Standing Bear © 1934, published by University of Nebraska Press.