An Astronaut's Special Payload

By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, February 4, 2003

At a museum in Prague in 1989, I studied a picture painted by Gabi Freiova. It was of butterflies -- colorful butterflies fluttering over the countryside and bursting with exuberant freedom. Gabi had been a prisoner at Terezin, the Nazi concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. Sometime after she and other children made their paintings, she was shipped to Auschwitz, where, in 1944, she was murdered. She was 11.

It was one of those children's pictures that Col. Ilan Ramon took with him on the shuttle Columbia. The picture was titled "Moon Landscape," done by Petr Ginz, a 14-year-old boy at Terezin who, like Gabi, was later murdered at Auschwitz. Ramon also took with him a tiny Torah scroll that had been given to a young boy by a rabbi. The boy and the scroll survived the Holocaust. The rabbi did not.

None of the seven astronauts who died on the Columbia was worth more than any of the others. They were remarkable human beings whose achievements humbled us all -- fighter pilots, physicians, aerospace engineers, scuba divers, acrobats, marathon runners, brilliant students, mothers, fathers, husbands and wives. They were black and they were white, male and female -- in death, as in life, vivid personifications of the country we have become.

Kalpana Chawla had been born in India but went into space as an American. Hers was a remarkable story. Lt. Col. Michael P. Anderson was an African American, and who cannot appreciate the importance and the meaning of that? Laurel Blair Salton Clark was a physician, a flight surgeon -- virtually everything women said they could be back when many people said their place was in the kitchen.

Yet of them all, Ramon carried a special payload into space -- the burden of history. He was conscious of who he was and what he represented -- a Jew, an Israeli. And as such he blasted into the future with artifacts that linked him to the past -- mementos that would explain why he was what he was. He was not merely a pilot. He was a phoenix rising from the ashes of the Holocaust.

It has become fashionable, especially in Europe, to bash Israel. It has become fashionable, in short, to treat Israel as existing only in the present -- the here, the now, virtually unencumbered by what went before. The country has become the victim of photojournalism, the snap of a picture that tells you nothing about what went before and nothing of what will come afterward. Even when history is taken into account, it is often a malignant one -- Israel as the product of Western imperialism and not the refuge where the survivors of the Holocaust washed ashore. Where should they have gone?

I do not excuse Israel's transgressions. I find Israel to be too often truculent, self-righteous and just plain wrong. I cannot excuse its settlements policy, nor do I like the hold rabbis have over what should be civil life. As for the Palestinians, I know that they, too, have their history. I have been to their refugee camps and seen photos of houses or farms lost in this or that war. They are a poorly led people, but their grievances are real and their pain profound.

But by dying, Ramon reminded us all that Israel has a context. The mementos he took onboard the Columbia, the stuff grabbed from the ashes of the Holocaust, linked him and his mission to what had come before. He had been born in the new city of Tel Aviv, but his mother had survived Auschwitz. He was a man of action, a warrior -- but he was not only cause, he was also effect.

Ironically, had the shuttle completed what seemed a prosaic mission, few would have heard of Ramon. He would have been feted in Israel -- local boy makes good -- but largely ignored in the rest of the world. Now we must ponder his death and his life and appreciate, as he so clearly did, how he came to die over Texas. It was because a 14-year-old boy had died at Auschwitz.