John Sibley

Riding the A-Train with Einstein John Sibley

" John did you know that the great physicist Albert Einstein in 1946 equated the ghettoization of Jews in Nazi Germany and the segregation of Negroes in America as a white man's disease?" "No I did not know that professor. That's not in the science books I read. How did you discover that?"" My grandmother is a Holocaust survivor. She used to tell me stories about how the Jews were treated in Germany by the SS who used the Zyklon B chemical in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdaneck and then their bodies were burned in crematorium furnaces in 1942. She also talked about how when Einstein moved to Princeton, New Jersey how he would walk in the Negro section of town and give candy to the children and talk to the Negroes sitting on their porches."Years ago, that conversation while riding on the A-train with a University of Chicago professor made me-re-look at the world with a more philosophical lens.