Where Are They Buried? (98 page)

Under his direction the best minds in physics worked to solve the riddles of the atomic bomb challenge. The efforts of the thousands who contributed to the Manhattan Project were rewarded on July 16, 1945, when the first nuclear detonation occurred at the Trinity Bomb site in the New Mexico desert. As Oppenheimer stood watching the mushroom cloud on that grimly historic day, the gravity of the accomplishment weighed on him, and he later recalled that a phrase of Hindu scripture floated through his mind, “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

A few weeks later atomic bombs were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompting the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.

After the war, Oppenheimer chaired the Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission and there voiced his opposition to the development of the next generation of atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb. Later, at the height of the hysterical Communist witch hunts in 1953, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was revoked and his advisor role terminated in light of his opposition to new mass-destruction weapons and his increasing support for liberal philosophies.

Oppenheimer served as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University for the remainder of his days and died of throat cancer at 62.

He was cremated and his ashes scattered off the Virgin Islands.

FEBRUARY 4, 1913 – OCTOBER 24, 2005

Boycotts are notoriously ineffective but in 1955 a defiant act by a run-of-the-mill seamstress who had “just had enough,” led to a boycott that perhaps made up for every other fruitless protest that had ever come before, or since.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution adopted shortly after the Civil War requires states to provide equal protection to all citizens. Nonetheless, deep racial inequalities existed in many areas of the country for much of the twentieth century, most notably in the Deep South where blacks were treated as less than second-class citizens, a practice that, more often than not, was supported by law and decree.

As recently as the 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama, black people were required to sit in the “colored” rearward sections of city buses and, as the front white sections filled, they had to give up their seats and stand in the rear or get off. Blacks could not stand in the aisle where a white was seated and, perhaps most humiliating, if a white was on the bus and a black wished to embark or disembark, he had to use the rear door so as to not walk past the white. Finally, if it so happened that a crowd of whites got on and occupied all the seats, the blacks were obligated to get off and walk.

On her way home from work one day in 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old black woman took a seat in the “colored” section of a Montgomery bus and as it filled up the driver demanded that she move so a white male passenger could have her seat. When Rosa refused to give up her seat, a police officer arrested her and as the officer took her away, she asked, “Why do you push us around?” The officer’s response: “I don’t know, but the law’s the law, and you’re under arrest.” Rosa was convicted of disorderly conduct and fined $14.

Four days later, the NAACP proposed a lawsuit to Mrs. Parks naming her as plaintiff in a case arguing the constitutionality of Montgomery’s bus segregation laws and, though her husband pleaded with her to drop the matter because of the very real possibility that angry whites would kill her, she agreed to the suit. In support of Rosa’s cause and in protest of all Jim Crow segregation laws, blacks boycotted city buses, crippling the transit company’s finances. The boycott was finally ended 381 days later when the U.S. Supreme Court found in favor of Mrs. Parks; the bus segregation laws were unconstitutional. That successful challenge to segregation empowered the fledgling civil rights movement, which
begat a decade of turmoil in the nation’s history, but ultimately resulted in social justice via the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

As for Rosa, her work was done. But for participating in a few peaceful marches during the movement and giving an occasional short speech in the years after, she settled in Detroit and avoided the limelight. In 1996 her place in history was universally acknowledged as she was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

At 92, she died of natural causes and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-75, follow Eight Mile Road (Route 102) west to Woodward Avenue, turn left and the cemetery is on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
After entering the cemetery and parking immediately on the left, you’ll see the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel behind the office.

JULY 4, 1916 – SEPTEMBER 26, 2006

In the summer of 1941 Iva Toguri D’Aquino, a daughter of Japanese immigrants, graduated from UCLA with a degree in zoology and then went to Tokyo to care for an ailing aunt. But when Pearl Harbor was attacked in December she became stranded in Japan and, refusing to renounce her U.S. citizenship, was labeled as an enemy alien and fell under constant surveillance by military police. Estranged and evicted from her aunt and uncle’s home for voicing pro-American sentiments, Iva soon found herself on the streets, knowing virtually no Japanese and without a food ration card but, nonetheless, finagled herself an office job at the Domei News Agency.

Meanwhile, an Australian POW named Charles Cousens was dispensing half-truths on a Radio Tokyo propaganda program called
Zero Hour
, a Japanese psychological warfare campaign designed to lower the morale of Allied servicemen stationed throughout the Pacific. In exchange for reading a Japanese-written script, Cousens was allowed to read the names of prisoners of war. In 1943 his captors hit upon the idea of using an American woman disc jockey to further taunt and humiliate the Allies, and Iva joined Cousens on the show.

Iva took the post and, though she introduced herself on
Zero Hour
every day as “Orphan Ann,” American servicemen invented and indelibly attached to her the famous moniker of Tokyo Rose.
Six days a week, Orphan Ann or, if you prefer, Tokyo Rose, taunted servicemen with made-up stories of infidelity on the home front and issued false reports of battle outcomes while spinning popular and romantic records of the day in an effort to demoralize and make lonely the millions of listening soldiers and sailors.

Most Americans’ knowledge of Tokyo Rose ends right about here and, were there not a corollary to the story, she wouldn’t be included in this book. A clear traitor in a time of war, she’d be relegated to the dust bin of history, an interesting aside for historians. But as we know, it’s not often that history is exactly black or white …

The rest of the story is that through the subtle efforts of Iva and Cousens and others,
Zero Hour
became a farce. Japanese officials in charge of the show, though fluent in English, were clueless to sarcasm, inflections, and double entendres of the language, and Iva made a mockery of their propaganda bulletins. Though the Radio Tokyo broadcasts gained notoriety back home in the States as yet another way in which the devilishly cruel Japanese debased Allied fighting forces, most sailors and soldiers actually found the broadcasts ridiculous and silly. And after the war as the narrative of Tokyo Rose was propped up by books and film, the story developed into exaggerated folklore despite some veterans who acknowledged their memories of gathering around the radio with wartime buddies to snicker at her sham misinformation broadcasts. Though there were traitors that used the radio waves during World War II (Axis Sally and Lord Haw Haw, most famously), it today seems apparent that Tokyo Rose’s loyalties were always with the Allies.

When the war ended Iva was arrested in Yokohama and accused of treason but after spending a year in a six-by-nine-foot cell, she was released from custody when the Army and Justice Department concluded that there were no grounds for prosecution. But as loyalty issues became a national political flashpoint, the powerful and vitriolic broadcast personality Walter Winchell doggedly vilified Iva and denounced her as a traitor until a public clamor for charges gained traction. In what some historians see as a ploy by Harry Truman to appease voters in a tough election year, Iva was arrested in 1948 and charged with seven crimes against the United States. Ultimately convicted on a single count of treason for a broadcast in which she said, “orphans of the Pacific, you really are orphans now. How will you get home now that all your ships are lost?” Iva was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. In 1977 Iva was exonerated by a pardon from President Ford.

At 90, Iva died of natural causes and was buried at Montrose Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-94, take Exit 42 and follow West Foster Avenue east for one mile and then turn left on North Pulaski Road where you’ll see the cemetery a short distance on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, take the middle road at the three-way ‘Y’, and then make your next left. After about 150 feet, Iva is buried in the section on the left. Her grassy grave is unmarked, but it’s just a few paces from the Brady stone.

MAY 12, 1918 – JUNE 19, 1953

SEPTEMBER 28, 1915 – JUNE 19, 1953

In July of 1950 Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested on charges of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. The trial and subsequent conviction of the Rosenbergs in 1951 led to one of the most controversial sentences ever handed down in the United States, as many felt that they were the victims of the era’s Communist witch-hunt atmosphere.

Witch-hunt or not, it does seem to have been proven in court, and is generally agreed, that while employed as an engineer by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Julius stole military technology and passed along atomic secrets through an intermediary to the Soviet vice consul. However, Ethel’s prosecution may have been particularly unfair because, though she knew of her husband’s role and the role of her brother, David Greenglass, who testified for the prosecution to save his own life, Ethel had not actively spied.

Nonetheless, both Rosenbergs were convicted and sentenced to death under the Espionage Act of 1917 and, despite worldwide pleas that their lives be spared, President Eisenhower refused to commute their sentences.

On a hot June night at the Sing Sing death house in Ossining, New York, in 1953, Julius was led into the death chamber and killed in the electric chair by three shocks of 2,000 volts each. While thousands of people gathered in protest around the country,
Ethel was placed in the chair next. The top of her head had been shaved to ensure a good contact with the electrodes, she wore a green print dress with white polka dots, and she was stoic and defiant. It took five jolts before Ethel was declared dead at 8:16 p.m. Julius was 35 and Ethel was 37 at the time of their deaths.

They now lie side by side at Wellwood Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-495 on Long Island, take Exit 39 and follow Pinelawn Avenue south for exactly three miles. Wellwood will be on the left. There are a lot of cemeteries in this area, nine different ones bordering each other, so be sure to turn into the correct one.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Turn into the first Wellwood entrance, which is North Avenue. Follow North Avenue for a short distance and then, between Akiba and Bialik roads, there will be a marking on the left curb for Walkway F-G. Fifty feet along this walk is the Rosenberg plot.

APRIL 28, 1908 – OCTOBER 9, 1974

Oskar Schindler grew up the son of a wealthy family in what is now the Czech Republic, but during the deep economic depression that gripped Europe before World War II, the family business was lost and the Schindler family went bankrupt. In 1939 the first German divisions marched into Czechoslovakia and Oskar was inclined to join the Nazi Party. In a short time, Poland fell to the Germans and Oskar immigrated to its city of Krakow in search of opportunity.

In Poland, after developing a rapport with the local Gestapo chiefs, he was recruited by the German Intelligence Agency to
collect information about Poles who might not be sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Through the status he acquired in that post, Oskar was able to acquire two factories, previously Jewish-owned, that had recently become “available.”

Oskar ran his new pot-making business exactly as his fellow usurping Nazi industrialists did. Employing neighborhood Jews, the cheapest labor he could find, Oskar turned a profit and disregarded the realities that were responsible for his newfound business success.

But soon Oskar had misgivings, and he began to manipulate Nazi officials to prevent his Jewish workers from being carted off to the death camps. Oskar’s protection of his Jewish workers became increasingly aggressive but covert until he realized, in 1942, after witnessing a particular raid on a Jewish ghetto, that the Nazis wanted nothing less than the complete extermination of every Jew. While watching innocent people being packed onto trains bound for certain death, something awakened in him. “Beyond this day, no thinking person could fail to see what would happen,” he said later. “I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.”