David Bruce: Don’t Fear the Reaper — Death

Death

• Shoah, a 1985 movie, is an over-nine-hour-long witness to the Holocaust. Among the people appearing in the movie are Nazis, survivors, and bystanders. One person interviewed is the survivor Filip Muller, a Jew who watched other Jews walk into a gas chamber to die. He watched and listened as a group of Czech Jews sang two songs as they walked into the gas chamber. One song — “The Hatikvah” — affirmed that they were Jewish. The other song — the Czech national anthem — affirmed that they were Czech. Mr. Muller says, “They denied Hitler, who would have them be one but not the other.” Mr. Muller felt that he had no reason to go on living, so he went inside the gas chamber with them. However, a small group of women came over to him, and one woman said, “So you want to die. But that’s senseless. Your death won’t give us back our lives. That’s no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us.” In his review of this movie — a Great Movie — Roger Ebert writes, “And that is the final message of this extraordinary film. It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness. In it, [filmmaker] Claude Lanzmann celebrates the priceless gift that sets man apart from animals and makes us human, and gives us hope: the ability for one generation to tell the next what it has learned.”

• On Groucho Marx’ You Bet Your Life TV quiz show, some of the guests were as entertaining as Groucho. For example, the Reverend James Whitcomb Broughter, a Baptist minister, told about getting dressed for a benefit. He had trouble tying his bowtie, so when the man who was going to take him to the banquet room showed up, he asked him if he knew how to tie it. The man did know, and he asked Reverend Broughter to lie down on the bed and then he tied the bowtie. Reverend Broughter asked, “Why did you make me lie down on the bed?” The man replied, “That’s the only way I can do it. I’m an undertaker.” By the way, when Groucho had just agreed to be the host of the You Bet Your Life quiz show, which started on radio, and then later moved to TV, he objected when he heard that one of the writers, Bernie Smith, was being paid $300 a week: “He can’t be any good. You can’t get a good writer for less than $900 a week.” John Guedel, the executive producer of You Bet Your Life, took the criticism seriously. He called Mr. Smith into his office, fired him, and then rehired him at $900 a week.

• In early 2011, Charles Nolan, a fashion designer and the significant other of finance writer Andrew Tobias, died. Before he died, he had a goal that he wished to achieve. The hallway that he shared with two neighbors was ugly, and Mr. Nolan hated ugly. Mr. Tobias writes that “a few weeks ago, Charles took charge. Designs were designed, frames framed, contractors contracted with, carpet squares ordered. Two weeks ago today, he said, ‘I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I don’t want to die until they finish the hallway.’” After briefly considering asking the contractors to slow down, but realizing that both he and Mr. Nolan knew that it was the right time for Mr. Nolan to die (except for the hallway), Mr. Tobias spoke to the contractors, who had seemed to him to be working slowly, and remarkably the entire job was finished in the next two days. Mr. Tobias says that the hallway went from being “the ugliest hallway in the building, possibly in the entire neighborhood” to being “the sharpest hallway in the building, possibly the entire neighborhood.”

• George Jessel was known as the Toastmaster of the United States because he spoke at so many dinners and gave so many elegies at funerals. He once observed a number of veterans at a dining room in a hotel. They had fought together, and some had been injured in battle, including a man who could no longer speak. At the table was an empty chair for one of their fellows who had been killed in battle. One by one they made a toast to their fallen comrade and drank. When it was his turn to make a toast, the veteran who could not speak stood up, raised a glass to the empty chair, then sat down, and all drank. Mr. Jessel says, “It was the most eloquent toast I’ve ever witnessed.”

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