"Nonviolence gives me hope"

An Interview with Liliane Kshensky Baxter

by Richard Deats

Liliane Kshensky Baxter, national chair of the FOR, is director of the Lillian and AJ Weinberg Center for Holocaust Education at The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. For over a decade, she served as director of nonviolence training and studies at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. Lili holds a PhD in women's studies and human development from Emory University, where she also teaches. She is married to Tom Baxter, a political journalist, and is the mother of Miriam, Joshua, and Amanda, and grandmother of Avram, Zane, and Danny.

RD: What is your family's background?

LKB: Both my parents are Holocaust survivors from Poland. My parents were married before the war and lived in Krakow, where they worked and where they were immersed in the political and cultural activities of their time. My parents marched for Sacco and Vanzetti. They saw themselves as members of a great international movement for the poor and downtrodden, but with a Jewish twist. They were members of the Jewish Labor Bund, the largest Jewish organization in Poland to flower between the two wars—an organization as dear to them as FOR has become to me. My paternal grandfather was a religious teacher and writer, Menachem Dovid Kshensky. Only one book of his has survived, a commentary on the Song of Songs written in Hebrew and published in Russia in 1908.

For my parents, pre-war Krakow was a vibrant cultural center. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel grew up in that milieu and writes about it in The Earth is the Lord's. He called it "the golden period in the history of the Jewish soul." My father was a shoemaker by trade and my mother a bookkeeper. They were modern freethinkers, inspired by the optimistic message of Western enlightenment. They rejected religion for politics, but only somewhat. I say "somewhat" because, although my father was a devout atheist before, and especially after, the war, he loved Jewish religion with all the intensity of a renegade son. Heschel captures it so well: "The fervor and yearning of the Hasidim, the ascetic obstinacy of the Kabbalists, the inexorable logic of the Talmudists, were reincarnated in the supporters of modern Jewish movements." Marc Chagall's portrait of the rabbi in his shtetl hung in our living room.

Their pre-war lives revolved around family, politics, sports and cultural activities, theater, music, poetry. My parents were progressive, adventurous—they lived in the first apartment building in Krakow with an elevator. Their lives were good before the war. I learned this years later, when I accompanied my mother back to Poland in 1988.

They had one child, a son called Danusz, born in 1939, the same year Hitler invaded Poland. My brother Danusz did not survive the war. He was sent to the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz along with my grandmother and his two little cousins. Danusz was three; they were five and eight years old. Actually, none of my grandparents survived, and much of my family was annihilated. Those who did survive are widely scattered—Australia, Israel, Venezuela, Poland, France, Canada, and the US.

All my life, I have felt the presence of my missing older brother's absence. An older brother who died so much younger than I am now. My younger brother, Marcel, has also always carried this felt sense of absence. At twelve he wrote a poem that won him lots of attention in scholastic circles: "One Child." It's a remarkable poem, at once horrific and beautiful. In the poem he calls this presence a "screaming silence." This is how acutely children of Holocaust survivors can empathize with their parents' loss.

RD: Where were you born? and where did you grow up?

LKB: I was born in a displaced persons camp in Sweden. The war had separated my parents. They were driven through a series of prisons, labor camps, and death camps so that when the war ended neither had any idea whether the other was still alive, or where he or she might be. My mother was in Auschwitz when the war ended. My father was in Bergen Belsen. Emaciated and near death from typhus, ailing from horrendous beatings, my father was saved by the Swedish Red Cross and flown to a sanitarium in Sweden, where he was nursed back to health.

My mother returned to Krakow from Auschwitz, which is on its outskirts, and became manager of the clearinghouse providing welfare, housing ,and other services to returning Jewish refugees. That's how she learned that my father was alive and in Sweden.

With no other means of transportation, my mother walked from Krakow to the Baltic, and convinced the captain of a coal barge to ferry her to Sweden. There, my parents were reunited and, in due time, I was born.

Out of eleven brothers and sisters in my father's family, only four brothers survived, all scattered to the winds. The yearning to once again be with family, to reconnect, was very strong after the war, and my father joined his brother in Paris to work as a shoemaker. Before I turned two, my mother and I joined him, and there my brother Marcel was born. Postwar France was a hard-bitten place economically, and oftentimes my parents had nothing more to eat than an onion or a potato. I remember the bitter poverty, but more vividly, I remember my mother's mourning, since I spent most of my time with my mother and brother those early years. Now, we have terms like PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] to help us understand what so many survivors suffered from after the war. But then my mother was held responsible for her sudden overwhelming fears, her obsessive ruminations on the moments of family separation—especially the moment when she lost both her son and her mother in the blink of an eye.

I was glad, at eight, to leave France for the United States—the Golden Land, the Land of Opportunity. We crossed the Atlantic in seven days, and on the last morning stood together on deck and watched the Statue of Liberty hold up its lantern to us, too: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I felt right at home. Loved being an America. English became my fourth language, after Polish, Yiddish, and French.

In New York, I was raised in a community of Yiddish-speaking, politically liberal Holocaust survivors, many with children the same age as Marcel and me. I became a naturalized citizen in 1960. I attended New York public schools, the Bronx High School of Science, Hunter College. I also attended, in a parallel world, the Workmen's Circle Yiddish shuls. I was even valedictorian of my high school class. I then went on to the Jewish Teachers Seminary, until I left New York for graduate school and married life in Pittsburgh in the late Sixties.

Like my parents before me, I entered the thick of my times—in this case, the growing civil rights, student, antiwar, and women's movements. I joined SDS at Hunter, and by 1970 was one of the founders of the Pittsburgh Radical Women's Union. I went on to teach some of the earliest women's studies courses at the University of Pittsburgh and then at Emory in Atlanta. That was in the early and mid-Seventies. In the late Seventies I started working at The King Center as director of nonviolence training and studies.

RD: What got you involved in working for social change? Any persons, any experiences?

LKB: My mother's stories and basic decency. One of her stories is of being selected by the other women in her barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau to equally divide the daily loaf of bread among all the women. This was when people were starving and life hung in the balance over a crumb! She was a fair-minded person with amazing stories—ones filled as much with tales of rescue and decent Christians as of persecution and horrible cruelty. I was also very influenced by my father's lifelong political involvement and consciousness. And I was very lucky: I grew up in the midst of a vibrant, resilient, leftist-liberal Yiddish-speaking tribe of survivor families that inhabited New York in the 1950s and '60s.

I was raised with the stories and songs of the heroes and heroines of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, of underground couriers and forest partisans, of those who gave up their lives so that others might live. I was a counselor at Camp Hemshekh, a leftist-liberal camp in the mountains of New York State started by Holocaust survivors. We read Michael Harrington's The Other America and Martin Luther King's Why We Can't Wait. Alongside the Yiddish songs, we sang songs of the civil rights movement, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan.

Few people realize that Yiddish is a nonviolent language. It has no vocabulary for military arms, ammunition, strategy and tactics. Isaac Bashevis Singer pointed this out in his 1978 Nobel acceptance speech. Instead, it is a language of endearments and diminutives—as in children's names and anatomy, as well as all things dear, including God, who is referred to as Gotinu in intimate conversation.

RD: I have been struck by how many Jews are active in progressive social causes, as well as by the fact that while some are religiously observant, others aren't. How do you account for this?

LKB: Jewish tradition encourages the practice of tikkun olam, of individual people healing and recreating our broken world. Deep in the marrow of Judaism is the notion that acts of decency and righteousness can restore a separated and suffering creation. This can be expressed in a spectrum of ways, from being devoutly religious to being highly secular. I recently heard a lecture by Rabbi Philip Kranz of Atlanta, who spoke of Judaism as being not a religion of faith (one concerned with questions about the presence or absence of God), but a religion of deeds, mitzvahs. At their best, Jews are voices for progress and fairness in professional organizations, the first to invite excluded minorities to the table in membership and leadership. Religious, secular, or in between, all Jews are called to contribute to the betterment of humanity—this is our calling.

RD: What about your own spiritual journey? How has your life been shaped by your faith?

LKB: Faith has not been a prime motivator. Good deeds have. Like many drawn to the teachings of nonviolence and to the work of FOR, I'm a practical mystic. In other words, I have tried to put my lofty beliefs into useful practice. That's how I ended up working at The King Center, and now for the Weinberg Center. Maybe I would have come to it some other way, but my parents' intimate knowledge of the Holocaust convinced me of the sacredness and dignity of each human life. I want the weakest of the weak to feel cherished and loved. I want to help create a world of justice and righteousness in which every child can thrive. It makes me think of my brother's poem "One Child." My spiritual journey is a response to that poem.

When Rabbi Heschel marched with Dr. King in Selma, he said he felt as if his feet were praying. I understand that.

RD: How did you get involved in the work of the MLK Center for Nonviolent Social Change?

LKB: When I first arrived in Atlanta in the early Seventies, I immediately went to Dr. King's tomb. When Dr. King was assassinated, I had led a petition campaign at Hunter to name a building then under construction after him. He was a great hero of mine, like so many Sixties activists. I met Mrs. King in the mid-Seventies at a summer institute on nonviolence sponsored by The King Center. I was then attending Emory University, teaching and working on a PhD in English. When a position opened directing educational programs for college students and teachers, I jumped at the chance.

I interviewed for the job in Mrs. King's kitchen and began working there in 1979, in a makeshift office building next to Dr King's birth home on Auburn Avenue. In 1983 we moved into the King Center complex that now surrounds Dr. King's tomb. My office window faced the tomb—a marvelous window on the world. I saw people of every description, at every hour of the day or night, coming to the tomb, just as I had done earlier. Their hopes for a better world, for those things that uplift and free were written on their faces, their bodies. It was a marvelously inspiring place to work.

I met some of the finest people anywhere during my years at The King Center, from the sung and unsung heroes and sheroes of the civil rights movement, to the students who came to The King Center to learn how to change their world. Those students became our finest nonviolence trainers, leading workshops and conferences every January for the massive King Week celebrations. I met Nobel laureates like Mairead Maguire, Nelson Mandela and Corizon Aquino; leaders of popular movements like Lech Walesa of Poland and Shen Tung of China. In that kind of setting, it was hard not to believe that nonviolence was winning its rightful place as a powerful force for democracy and social change in our world.

This year for my birthday Mrs. King invited me to the theater to see Ruby Dee. Afterwards, we returned to her house for dessert. Sitting in her kitchen, eating rice ice cream, we had a great time catching up on our families and now-grown children. I remembered my interview back in 1979 in that same kitchen. Nothing had changed, not the family photos on the wall which runs the length of the kitchen, not the counter and stools where we sat chatting. Except we were both older...wiser, I don't know! The closeness still remains.

RD: What are the experiences you had there that have made the greatest impact on your life?

LKB: There were so many experiences, it's difficult to name just a few. Ebenezer Baptist Church was an overwhelming experience. The history. The aura. This is where Dr. King and his father and grandfather had been pastors. The church abutted The King Center, and many large gatherings and massive meetings were held in its sanctuary during the Eighties and Nineties, when I was there. During national student conferences Ebenezer was filled to the rafters. During those events I often spoke from its pulpit. That was quite exhilarating. I found the spiritual confidence and bittersweet joy of the black church miraculously healing. It felt familiar, real. A number of years ago, Susannah Heschel wrote a piece about her father's friendship with Dr. King for Fellowship magazine. In it she claimed that her father recognized in the southern black church the same kind of fervor he had experienced in Hasidic worship in pre-war Europe. I wonder if that doesn't explain some of my own sense of familiarity.

I developed training materials based on Dr. King's teaching for these conferences and workshops. I found that very meaningful. As an graduate student in English I had been trained in close textual analysis, and I applied that to King's writings. My lead trainer, a brilliant graduate of Davidson, Debbie Williams (now Debra Cauley) helped me pull together the Six Principles of Nonviolence, based on King's chapter on nonviolence in Stride Toward Freedom, and the Six Steps for Nonviolent Social Change, based on his "Letter from Birmingham Jail." These two pieces in particular have become very popular training materials. They were used during King Center workshops and conferences, and from there brought to many groups nationwide and worldwide and used in many locations. My favorite of these was in 1991, when the Russian peace group Golubka tacked up the Six Principles and Six Steps on the walls of Moscow during the peoples’ nonviolent uprising that led to the dismantling of communism and the Soviet state.

The King Center drew remarkable people, and I've been privileged to have some of the finest teachers and students a person could want—intelligent, funny, caring, articulate. Many have become a second family to me.

A particularly powerful memory is of a conversation I had with Mrs. King after the death of one of my closest friends and King Center colleagues, Stoney Johnson. Stoney had been Mrs. King's press secretary and director of King Center media services. He was killed very suddenly in the prime life in a motorcycle accident while coming home from organizing Georgia bikers.

Stoney became the first white person accorded a homecoming service at Ebenezer, and I am the first white person, not to mention Jewish person, to organize such a service (Mrs. King and Rev. Roberts of Ebenezer leading me through this unexpected assignment). Stoney's funeral became a extraordinary coming-together of people from all races, religions, classes, ethnic groups, professions and callings. The Mayor, Andrew Young came. So did everyone from SCLC. Many movement veterans were there, and many people from every walk of life whom Stoney had befriended. He was a Southern boy: gregarious, generous to a fault, volatile, sincere, and born-again to nonviolence.

The ushers were a sight to behold. Down one side of the main aisle stood a row of elegant black women, staffers from The King Center, led by Mrs. Christine Farris, Dr. King's sister—gracious, beautiful, many themselves members of Ebenezer. Along the other side, gallantly shuffling and bowing, were their partners: sunburned, long-haired, denim-clad bikers with names like Popeye and Hulk. Outside Ebenezer they had parked their shiny hogs in a long row all the way down the street, as in a cortège.

Later that day, Mrs. King called to see how I was doing. We talked about the meaning of such things—the good cut down before their time. She described the gathering at Ebenezer as a glimpse of the Beloved Community, comparing it to her own husband's funeral. "Sometimes," I remember her saying, "it takes many years to understand why something tragic has happened. Sometimes the answer won't appear even in our own lifetimes. It might take hundreds, even thousands, of years for it to be revealed. But in the fullness of time, a reason will be revealed, one yet invisible to us today." I was so bereaved and numb I thought nothing could reach me, but I found this glimpse of eternity very comforting. A life could end without adequate explanation, but no life, however unfinished, is meaningless in and of itself.

There were many other experiences those dozen years that made a great impact on me, but those will have to wait for another time.

RD: How did you get involved in the FOR? What do you see as significant for the mission of the FOR at this moment in history?

LKB: You'll remember that it was while working at The King Center that I met you, Bill Anderson, and Brady Tyson (the only white person to sit on the board of SCLC). I knew of Glenn Smiley and Bayard Rustin and their work with Dr. King in Montgomery, and of James Lawson and the Nashville Student Movement. I also knew FOR had been instrumental in organizing the first Freedom Rides and creating CORE, so initially I joined FOR in the mid-Eighties because of its work in the civil rights movement. Later, I learned of André and Magda Trocmé and their rescue of 5,000 Jews in the French village of Le Chambon sur Lignon, and that after the war Trocmé became the General Secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR).

In 1990, I was a member of a delegation of nonviolence teachers and trainers you took to the Soviet Union as part of FOR's program on US-USSR Reconciliation. That's when we taught the Six Principles and Six Steps to Golubka. I met Virginia Baron and Paula Green on that trip. Paula was on the national council at that time and nominated me for an at-large position, which I won. That's when my involvement with the FOR intensified. Virginia and I have become very close over the years. She just finished serving a two-year term as interim president of IFOR, and I'm entering my second year of service on IFOR's international steering committee.

For me, FOR provides a vision of how life is meant to be, and through our programs gives activists an opportunity to make a difference in our world. I love the beauty and goodness of our statement of purpose. I see FOR as a living organism, continually recreating itself, challenging itself. It's quite something to realize that FOR began as a Christian pacifist fellowship largely led by Protestants, many of them white men. Today, FOR prides itself on being interfaith, and includes nonviolent activists of every religion, and spiritual tradition, or none, and of all races and sexual identities.

I remember Rabbi Mike Robinson pointing to the mantel in the Peace Room when I first joined the council, and telling me that back in the mid-Sixties it had had a cross affixed to it. When the Jewish Peace Fellowship merged with FOR during Mike's presidency, not only did the cross come down, but the Christian statement of purpose was re-written. The Catholic Peace Fellowship also came in at that time. Today the Peace Room holds a menorah, a statue of Shiva, a statue of St. Francis of Assisi, and other lovely objects from different religious traditions. A photograph of Dr. King smiles from a wall. We have an active Muslim Peace Fellowship and a vigorous Buddhist Peace Fellowship and perhaps a dozen other religious fellowships associated with FOR. As far as I know, I'm the first Jewish chair of the national council.

As for the mission of the FOR at this moment in history—it is to keep on keeping on, setting our sights on our global village, our world house, as Dr. King called it.

At this moment in history, the US is at war with Iraq (despite Bush's claim that the war was over) and operating according to a national policy that places military conquest and spending above all social needs—health, employment, education, the arts. Instead of using our great national wealth and resources for global projects of rescue and uplift, the present administration is squandering the lives of our sons and daughters in an arrogant and deluded drive for global supremacy. How to break through?

I believe one way is through our international people-to-people programs—including presently our work in Colombia, the Middle East, Puerto Rico, Iraq. The United Nations has taken on greater influence since the end of the Cold War and today may be better positioned to function as the international forum for peace and development it originally was meant to be. Certainly, it was the only way to forestall George W. Bush's rush to war, however unsuccessfully.

I think FOR-USA ought to develop more joint programs with the forty or so FOR branches in other countries and continents. It's quite something to be with people who may be outwardly different from you, who speak a different native tongue, have different rituals, but are as passionate about nonviolence as you are—about the potential of nonviolence for human redemption and reconciliation. I'd love to see an international summer youth program come into being, and I believe that one is in the works through FOR’s Peacemaker Training Institute..

RD: What keeps you going? Where do you find hope?

LKB: I find hope in my beautiful grandsons and children's bright faces. Nonviolence gives me hope—the quirky turns of events created by people both decent and imaginative, bringing something new, and desperately needed, to the status quo. Knowing FOR is here, and trying to do just that in our programs and throughout our individual actions, lifts my spirit and keeps me going.

©2004 Fellowship of Reconciliation