Bergen City Quotes

The most important thing in life is your family. There are days you love them, and others you don't. But, in the end, they're the people you always come home to. Sometimes it's the family you're born into and sometimes it's the one you make for yourself.

Hitler was invading every European country surrounding Germany, and it was obvious that eventually we would also be at war. At the time, some Americans joined the German American Bund that backed what Hitler was doing. Others advocated that we stay out of the war.... Charles Lindbergh was of that persuasion and supported the isolationist “America First Movement,” advocating that the United States remain neutral. You could not blame people for their hostile feelings towards the German-Americans, when Nazi Bund meetings were being held at many locations around New York City, as well as in the neighboring Schuetzenpark, the German word for the riflemen’s or shooters’ park, in North Bergen. In April of 1941, after President Roosevelt accused Lindbergh of being a fascist sympathizer, Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the United States Army Air Forces. Later in the war, Lindbergh flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific Theater as a civilian consultant, but Roosevelt refused to reinstate his commission. The majority of Americans just wanted to stay out of what they considered a European matter.

He was sitting at his desk. He had to get some relief from seeing what he did not want to see. The factory was empty. There was only the night watchman who’d come on duty with his dogs. He was down in the parking lot, patrolling the perimeter of the double-thick chain-link fence, a fence topped off, after the riots, with supplemental scrolls of razor ribbon that were to admonish the boss each and every morning he pulled in and parked his car, “Leave! Leave! Leave!” He was sitting alone in the last factory left in the worst city in the world. And it was worse even than sitting there during the riots, Springfield Avenue in flames, South Orange Avenue in flames, Bergen Street under attack, sirens going off, weapons firing, snipers from rooftops blasting the street lights, looting crowds crazed in the street, kids carrying off radios and lamps and television sets, men toting armfuls of clothing, women pushing baby carriages heavily loaded with cartons of liquor and cases of beer, people pushing pieces of new furniture right down the center of the street, stealing sofas, cribs, kitchen tables, stealing washers and dryers and ovens—stealing not in the shadows but out in the open. Their strength is tremendous, their teamwork is flawless. The shattering of glass windows is thrilling. The not paying for things is intoxicating. The American appetite for ownership is dazzling to behold. This is shoplifting. Everything free that everyone craves, a wonton free-for-all free of charge, everyone uncontrollable with thinking, Here it is! Let it come! In Newark’s burning Mardi Gras streets, a force is released that feels redemptive, something purifying is happening, something spiritual and revolutionary perceptible to all. The surreal vision of household appliances out under the stars and agleam in the glow of the flames incinerating the Central Ward promises the liberation of all mankind. Yes, here it is, let it come, yes, the magnificent opportunity, one of human history’s rare transmogrifying moments: the old ways of suffering are burning blessedly away in the flames, never again to be resurrected, instead to be superseded, within only hours, by suffering that will be so gruesome, so monstrous, so unrelenting and abundant, that its abatement will take the next five hundred years. The fire this time—and next? After the fire? Nothing. Nothing in Newark ever again.

In 1945 Himmler ordered the camps to be evacuated and charged the commanders with ensuring that not one of the prisoners would fall into Allied hands. On January 17, some 60,000 detainees from Auschwitz were evacuated on foot and sent on a death march to the city of Wodzislaw. Those who could not continue or who fell behind were shot by the SS guards. Some 15,000 died during the march and the survivors were taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany where they were liberated by British forces in April 1945.

In the streets outside everything was still. The hour before five was the only time of day this city slept. In my earlier life, during the twelve years I had lived in Bergen I used to stay up at night as often as I could. I never reflected on this, it was just something I liked and did. It had started as a student ideal, grounded in a notion that in some way night was associated with freedom. Not in itself but as a response to the nine-to-four reality which I, and a couple of others, regarded as middle-class and conformist. We wanted to be free, we stayed up at night. Continuing with this had less to do with freedom than a growing need to be alone. This, I understood now, I shared with my father. In the house where we lived he had a whole studio apartment to himself and he spent more or less every evening there. The night was his.

Mill Basin was the only inlet of Jamaica Bay that had a drawbridge at its outlet, enabling tall vessels to pass through. Completed in 1940, the Mill Basin Drawbridge, which carried the Belt Parkway between Barren Island and Bergen Beach, had a clearance above water at high tide of 35 feet (when it wasn’t raised). The state is currently in the process of replacing this drawbridge with a fixed bridge, which will have a clearance of 60 feet.

I began to tell myself that if I’d survived Bergen-Belsen, I could survive anything,” said Irene. “I tried to focus not on what I’d lost, but what I had to gain. It was a struggle.” In