Hava Hegenbarth volunteers as a puppy-raiser for Leader Dogs, and she’s been following my Safe & Sound blog for years. Hava is retired after a career in the diplomatic service, and after reading a recent post here about a Holocaust survivor, she commented that she, too, had survived a genocide — it happened when she’d been assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda. “People are always telling me I should write a book about this, but I think it would be too painful,” she wrote. “The people I hid did not survive. A shame and sorrow I live with to this day.” Knowing firsthand how therapeutic and cathartic writing can be, I contacted Hava and asked if she’d be willing to write a guest post about her experience. She agreed.

Night comes dark and early to the land of a thousand hills – Rwanda

by Hava Hegenbarth

I was tucked up under my mosquito net and dead asleep when suddenly awakened by a loud explosion. It was the practice for Hutus and Tutsis to throw grenades onto each others homes in the night, but this night it was a much larger noise. My embassy radio crackled to life. It was the ambassador, informing us that the plane carrying the Rwandan president had crashed. It was unknown what this meant or what might be the consequences but that we were to remain in our homes and not attempt to go out. I went back to sleep.

Some time later I was again jarred awake by numerous smaller explosions, mortar and small-arms fire going off all over the town. The embassy radio again squawked to life and we were told to keep away from all windows. I grabbed the radio, a pillow, and took refuge in my hallway. I spent the rest of that night trembling in fear and definitely NOT sleeping.

The gunfire continued on and when dawn finally came there were knocks at my door. I crept cautiously to it and peeked out the window. Africans stood there. I cracked the door and

That’s Hava holding Whistle, a puppy she’s raising for Leader Dogs. The big dog in front is Bax, a gift she brought home with her from her last diplomatic post in Mauritius.

whispered “What?” The whispered reply came back. “Madam, hide us!”

Just the week before I’d read the book Schindler’s List. I was amazed at Mr. Schindler’s bravery and wondered how I would react if ever I was in that sort of situation. Now I found myself in that very sort of situation. I took them in.

Four days and three nights we hid together in my house. Outside was hell. There was a high wall surrounding my house, I could not see what was happening but I could hear the horror. There was a pattern to it. There would be screams, then shots, then silence. Over and over again, coming closer and getting louder. I thought that when they got to my house and saw me hiding my refugees, the consequences would be very bad. I just hoped it would be over quickly.

They went past my house. My house was spared. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps at the time they were respecting diplomats’ residences. For whatever reason, we were not invaded.

The ambassador came on the radio and told us to prepare for evacuation. He had negotiated a cease-fire long enough for us to get out. I think they were happy to have us leave so that they could carry on their sinister work without outside eyes seeing it. We were to pack one bag and drive to a predetermined location, there to form up convoys and get out as best we could.

My car was still in customs — I was so new in the country, it had only just arrived in Rwanda. My closest American neighbors offered to pick me up in their car. When they arrived, I dragged my one bag out to the car, followed by my refugees. My friends said, “Hurry up, get in!” I motioned to the refugees. “What about them?”

My friends looked at me in disbelief. “Are you crazy?! No way are they coming!”

I turned to my refugees and feeling the most helpless I have ever in my life told them they could not come with me. They took my hands and pleaded. “Madam, please! You know what will happen to us.”

I knew. I also knew that I would not be allowed to stay with them. The ambassador would never have allowed me to stay nor would he leave until the last American was out of the country. I got into the car. The eyes of the Africans followed the car as it pulled away and out of sight. I still see those eyes. I learned later that they had all been killed.

I’ve relived this many times, wondering if only I had had my own car. If only this. If only that. If only. It all comes out the same. I couldn’t save them.

Groovy picture of my sisters and me in front of Cheryl’s lime green 1967 Mustang.

After publishing that post about 1968 last week, I have to make a confession: I was a square in the 1960s. While the hippies and peaceniks of that generation were worshipping Jim Morrison and grooving to Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, I was busy at the piano figuring out the arpeggio in Herb Alpert’s hit “This Guy’s in Love with You.”

By then I’d already been mesmerized by the woman in the whipped cream dress on the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album cover. Now Herb was setting down his trumpet for a tune, and in 1968 he was singing those lyrics to me, an awkward pre-teen in the Chicago suburbs. And so, along with so many other pop music fans from that generation, I was sad to hear that Hal David, the man who wrote the lyrics to that song and oh so many others, had died last week.

On Friday, National Public Radio’s Fresh Air re-broadcast a 1997 interview with Hal David, and when Terry Gross asked which of his lyrics were his personal favorite, he didn’t even pause to think. “Alfie,” he said.

Alfie? For real? “Alfie”? Not “The Look of Love”? “Walk On By?” “I Say a Little Prayer”? Of course I had to leave the radio to look up the lyrics right away.

You know what? If you take the silly name “Alfie” out of that song, the words are beautiful. Downright insightful. I’ll leave you with the lyrics sans the word “Alfie” here — you can judge for yourself. And hey, if you want to admit to enjoying an easy listening tune from time to time back in the day, by all means leave a comment and fess up. I’d be particularly interested in hearing what your favorite Bacharach/David tune is.

What’s it all about?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about?
When you sort it out, are we meant to take more than we give?
or are we meant to be kind?And if only fools are kind, then I guess it’s wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, what will you lend on an old golden rule?

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, I know there’s something much more.
Something even non-believers can believe in.

I believe in love.
Without true love we just exist.
Until you find the love you’ve missed you’re nothing.
When you walk let your heart lead the way,
And you’ll find love any day.

That’s me with writers from one of my memoir classes.

With all the talk about political conventions in the news lately, I can’t help but think of what happened right here in 1968. Many of the writers in my memoir classes were young adults in Chicago then, but when I assigned “1968” as a topic, few of them chose to write about the Democratic convention that year. Their essays definitely spoke of the times, though.

Judy’s essay opens in the 1950s, when she was lobbying the Yellow Springs, Ohio Board of Education to let her Antioch College classmate Corrie Scott student-teach there. Corrie was barred from working in the Yellow Springs schools, and when she and Judy got together at an Antioch reunion years later, Corrie said that school officials used to tell people she’d left “to marry some preacher.” Judy described the loving smile on Corrie’s face as the two friends shared the irony. Some preacher. The essay ends with a description of what a sad year 1968 was. It’s the year her friend Corrie’s husband, Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered.

***

Maria and her husband had immigrated to America from Italy in the early 1960s. Maria was enjoying a lovely April day in 1968 at a park with her three and four-year-old boys when she heard the news on her transistor radio. “The Dallas drama was repeating itself. This time it was Martin Luther King,” she wrote. “In what kind of country had I come? Were my children going to grow in the midst of this violence?”

***

Sheila returned from a six-week training course in NYC in 1968, accepting a job as a TWA Reservations agent in Chicago along with 19 fellow graduates. “Our triumph was short-lived,” Sheila wrote. “More than half the class was fired the first day in the Chicago office.” All the women who were fired were Hispanic, Black or Jewish. “We Caucasians spoke up about the obvious reason our friends had been fired. TWA told us to shut up, or we’d ALL be out of a job.”

***

Bob grew up on the South Side of Chicago and was raising his boys there, too. His oldest son would be starting high school in 1968, and with tuition so high at the Catholic schools, Bob and his wife opted to move the family to the suburbs.

***

Gwen’s essay came right after Bob’s. Gwen and her husband had decided to move in 1968, too, but that’s where the similarities in their stories end. From Gwen’s essay:

On the day of the closing we took our sons out to see their new home. It was located in the far South Side in the Rosemore area of Chicago. The boys were excited to have a larger home, although they didn’t want to leave their friends. My husband and I were happy that the house had been vacated by the former owners and we had immediate possession.

Gwen’s husband called her at work the next day with disturbing news. Someone had tossed a chemical into their house after they’d left – the chemical simmered throughout the night, eventually burning through the floor. A worker from People’s Gas Company who’d been sent out to take a final reading from the meter the next morning noticed the windows were all black from the smoke. He called the fire department. “The fireman, who knew how to enter a burning house, told us that if we had opened a door the house would have exploded and been completely destroyed,” Gwen wrote. “We were completely unaware that we were the first Black family to move into that block. Had we known we would have skipped that area. I did not want to put my children in danger.” Their three-year-old was afraid to enter the house, so the family moved into her brother’s attic for a few weeks until her husband decided it was time to clean up the house and move in. He checked on the house every evening during the process, hoping the culprits would return.

“But of course they didn’t,” Gwen wrote. “And I was glad. I didn’t want a confrontation.” The family finally moved in a year later, in March of, you guessed it: 1968. Gwen said it took a long, long time before they could relax in the house. “It seemed that every time we started feeling comfortable there, the weather would turn humid and the smoke smell would seep down from The attic.” They lived there for 20 years, and after the kids were grown they moved to the south suburbs. Gwen told me she’d buried this whole ordeal deep inside until I gave the assignment to write about 1968. “It all came back to me then,” she said, still refusing to allow the incident too make her bitter.

Her essay concluded with these words: “We cannot allow the actions of a few to poison our minds and cause us to react in a manner that would be completely contradictory to what Martin Luther King and other Black leaders have preached and marched against.”

A few radio stories I’ve heard lately oughta give NPR listeners an idea of what a powerful – and positive — effect men who are blind can have on their offspring.

That’s Bob Ringwald, Molly’s father.

Let’s start with Bob Ringwald. My brother Doug introduced me to Bob years ago — they’re both jazz musicians, and they play together from time to time. Bob is blind, and his daughter Molly (yes, the one in all those John Hughes movies in the 1980s) was interviewed on Weekend Edition last month about her first novel When It Happens to You. She told Scott Simon that as a child she enjoyed sitting with her dad during movies and plays to describe the action. “I actually think that that informed my writing,” she said. “That’s something that I’ve done for so long, that it’s made me, perhaps, observe things in a different way.”

And then there’s Gore Vidal. After the famous writer and critic died in July, Bob Edwards Weekend replayed an interview conducted at Vidal’s home in Los Angeles in 2006. Vidal was raised by his grandfather, a U.S. Senator from Oklahoma. Sen. Thomas Gore was blind, and Vidal was ten years old when he started reading to him. “I read grown-up books to him: constitutional law, the Congressional Record, American history, poetry,” Vidal said. ”He was extraordinary, he was my education.” Vidal guided his grandfather to Senate hearings, and he said he didn’t dare fall asleep while sitting in the balcony waiting for the session to be over — at any moment his grandfather might give a hand signal to let young Vidal know to skedaddle down the Senate stairs to guide him to the bathroom.

And then, the live performance of This American Life that opened with Vancouver writer Ryan Knighton telling a story about a walk in the woods he took alone with his young daughter. Knighton is blind, and when she started screaming about a bear, he panicked. After weighing his options, he realized that her frantic cries of “bear!” were only in reaction to dropping her teddy bear on the sidewalk.

My sister Cheryl met Ryan Knighton years ago at a bookstore in Anacortes, Washington when he was touting his first book. His latest, C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark, is about blind fatherhood.

Ryan Knighton’s daughter is too young now to tell us what, if any, positive effects come from being raised by a man who can’t see her. I may not be a gambling woman, but I’ll betcha this: she’ll have stories to tell!

Here’s my husband Mike Knezovich back with another guest post.

Chris Sale stands 6’7” tall, weighs less than I do (I’m 5’ 10”) and when he’s on the mound pitching for the Chicago White Sox on a windy day, his uniform flaps around him like a loose nylon jacket on a

Mr. Bones, comin’ at ya.

speeding motorcyclist. Legendary Los Angeles Dodgers baseball announcer Vin Scully refers to him as “Mr. Bones.”

And I love him. Chris Sale that is. He’s won 15 games and lost five. He makes great hitters look like me when I was a little leaguer. And he is the quintessential White Sox story—that is, a great story, but still somehow not the story.

This Sunday night on ESPN, Sale will be on the mound against the Detroit Tigers’ Justin Verlander—last year’s American League Cy Young Award winner and Most Valuable Player. For true blue baseball fans, it’s a match made in heaven. For lots of casual fans, it will be the first they’ve heard or seen about Mr. Bones. That’s just the way it is with the Chicago White Sox. They’re like the solid big brother to their shrill drama queen little sister on the North Side.

I grew up in a household where both Chicago teams were always on the radio and TV. My mom and dad were both baseball fans, but my mom was the greater influence – Esther was the type who talked and yelled at the radio or TV during games. She grew up near Pittsburgh and worked summers as a waitress in Cleveland. An independent-minded woman who embodied feminism before that word existed, she was a fan of the great Bill Veeck, who owned the Cleveland Indians and eventually, the White Sox (in fact, he owned the White Sox two different times). Veeck put up the exploding scoreboard and (gasp) added players’ names to the back of their uniforms while he was here in Chicago. He also got Harry Caray to sing “Take Me out to the Ballgame” at Comiskey, introduced uniforms that included shorts, and oversaw the debacle/triumph known as “Disco Demolition.” He was not boring.

Veeck was a renegade who irked the establishment. Exactly the kind of person my mom adored. Between that and our proximity (when I and other school patrol boys got a special outing to a ball game, it was to Comiskey Park on the South Side), the Sox became mine, and I became theirs.

Almost heaven. Me at Game 1, 2005 World Series.

A friend who works in baseball once said to me, “It’s important to care deeply about something that doesn’t matter.” That’s how it is with baseball, and for me, with the White Sox. There has been heartbreak (Damn Yankees and others in the 50s and 60s, Oakland As during the 70s, the strike in ‘94) and indescribable joy (2005!).

Back in 1983, I introduced Beth to my parents at a game at old Comiskey Park. The day after our wedding, Beth and I and some dear friends who had traveled in from Washington, D.C went to a game. In July of 1985, just before our first wedding anniversary, Beth and I visited her eye doctor for a follow-up visit after a last-gasp surgery to save her eyesight. We learned that she would not see again.

Before heading back to Urbana to face our new reality, we drove to Comiskey to have a Polish sausage with onions (“wit” onions is the correct pronunciation), and take in a ball game. Twenty years later, in 2005, Beth and I and her Seeing Eye dog Hanni got seats in the handicapped section for the playoffs against Boston. Later, I sprung for game 1 of the World Series.

This year the White Sox are defying low expectations and leading their division. They’ve had a parade of rookie pitchers come through in the clutch. They have a rookie manager who’s never managed at any level before. A starting pitcher who is excelling after unprecedented surgery to fix a gruesome injury (a chest muscle tore free of the bone). They have Yankee castoffs (Jose Quintana and Dewayne Wise) and a Red Sox throwaway (Kevin Youkilis) starting. A guy from Cuba nicknamed “Tank” starts in left and one of his countrymen, Alexei Ramirez (“The Cuban Missile”) plays a sparkling shortstop.

It can be irksome, the way the White Sox story routinely gets lost in the shuffle. Then again, on a whim, Beth and I can decide to get on the Red Line, get off two stops later, get tickets at a decent price, have some great food, and see this phenomenal baseball team. So really, it’s just about right. They’re not a media sensation. They’re a baseball team. My baseball team.

P.S.

If you want to learn a little more about the White Sox, past and future, I hope you’ll read one of my favorite writers–Roger Wallenstein–at one of my favorite Web sites–The Beachwood Reporter.