If you grew up with the band (as I did) this is some compelling shit. I never knew this story:
If you grew up with the band (as I did) this is some compelling shit. I never knew this story:
”But in the end all of these ideas just manufacture new criminals when the problem isn't a lack of criminals.” -JRB
I have a deeper respect for Geddy Lee more now than before.
The lyrics for the song "Red Sector A" from the album Grace Under Pressure were written by Neil Peart about this.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sector_A
Geddy Lee explained the genesis of the song in an interview:
The seeds for the song were planted nearly 60 years ago in April 1945 when British and Canadian soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Lee's mother, Manya (now Mary) Rubenstein, was among the survivors. (His father, Morris Weinrib, was liberated from the Dachau concentration camp a few weeks later.) The whole album "Grace Under Pressure," says Lee, who was born Gary Lee Weinrib, "is about being on the brink and having the courage and strength to survive."
Though "Red Sector A," like much of the album from which it comes, is set in a bleak, apocalyptic future, what Lee calls "the psychology" of the song comes directly from a story his mother told him about the day she was liberated.
I once asked my mother her first thoughts upon being liberated," Lee says during a phone conversation. "She didn't believe [liberation] was possible. She didn't believe that if there was a society outside the camp how they could allow this to exist, so she believed society was done in."
In a 1984 interview Neil Peart describes writing Red Sector A:
I read a first person account of someone who had survived the whole system of trains and work camps and Bergen-Belsen and all of that (...) through first person accounts from other people who came out at the end of it, always glad to be alive, which again was the essence of grace, grace under pressure is that through all of it, these people never gave up the strong will to survive, through the utmost horror, and total physical privations of all kinds.
...I wanted to take a little bit out of being specific and, and just describe the circumstances and try to look at the way people responded to it, and another really important and to me really moving image that I got from a lot of these accounts was that at the end of it, these people of course had been totally isolated from the rest of the world, from their families, from any news at all, and they, in cases that I read, believed that they were the last people surviving.
Thank you for sharing!Originally Posted by Sidheshooter
The top band of all time on my scorecard. I knew the basics of this background but not these details. I'd love to know in inside baseball of New World Man.
“Remember, being healthy is basically just dying as slowly as possible,” Ricky Gervais
My old schoolmate's, (and later roommate for a short while), mother was liberated from Bergen-Belsen by a British soldier who later became her husband and the father of my friend.
What was interesting to me, even as a young boy, was how different they were. She was always a dour woman who I can't remember ever being anything but stern. I don't remember her smiling or the sound of her laughter. She rarely spoke of her experience but never hid the numbers tattooed on her forearm.
On the other hand, his father was always quick with a corny joke, and jovial by nature. (What inner demons his outward humor may have masked, I can't say.) He ran a small business in Brooklyn and never seemed to be out of sorts regardless of the events of the day.
I think of Mary and Leon often, the lives they lived, and the hospitality they showed me during the years I was fortunate enough to be around them.
There's nothing civil about this war.
Mine as well. Been listening to them since the 1980s and fortunate enough to see them in concert on the Power Windows tour. Have most of the live albums and "Red Sector A" with the Clockwork Angels string ensemble from that album's tour is amazing.
I have probably heard this song hundreds of times and the lyrics still give me the chills. Rush managed to distill the evil of the concentration camps into a song that is catchy on the surface and profoundly disturbing.
I met a couple of holocaust survivors, tattoo included... relatives of some friends. They were very nice, gentle ladies. GREAT people, raised their children well and cared about everyone. They were pretty well-off too. I often thought of the things they had to see and endure, and how they managed to not only survive, but also to keep the minds sane and a great spirit.
In the 70's Paraguay sometimes a concentration camp survivor could run across a high profile ex nazi officer, or even war criminal, in daily life.
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