www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2010-07/massengrab-new-york

www.time.de/society/current events/2010-07/mass grave new york

Translated from the German by James J. Cleary, Jr., August 2010 Copyrighted. ©

Island of the lonely dead

Every year prisoners hurriedly bury thousands of corpses in a mass grave on Hart Island, one of the islands of New York. Not only the homeless and lonely drug addicts land there.

Photo

Prisoners on Hart Island dig out the graves

It could be a place of mourning, of dignity and of respect. But Hart Island is a restricted area. One can best catch a view of this small island from the air. A LaGuardia Airport approach corridor goes right over the mysterious island. People are extremely busy there despite the general prohibition against entry. Sentenced prisoners attend to their gruesome work there.

Almost every day a ferry brings new wooden coffins from the mainland. The names of the dead, as far as they are known, are on the boxes. When someone dies in the municipal area of New York City, the relatives have a two-week time frame in which to assume responsibility for the corpse and the burial. If no one makes a claim or if the relatives do not have the money for a funeral in a cemetery, then the dead automatically land on Hart Island. About 1500 people are hurriedly buried each year on the island. Altogether there should be about 800,000 dead who have found their last resting place here. There were also religious reasons that the corpses were not cremated. Traditionally, Catholics and Jews reject cremation.

“Why does this place exist?” is the question that Melinda Hunt has been raising for 20 years. This artist has made it her life’s duty to remember the dead on Hart Island. Hunt says: “The city tries to make them invisible.” “It is like an attempt to cover up evidence.” Evidence for a society that excludes the poor, in life as well as in death. Hunt has filled galleries with her works, and now she is building a databank with all the names of the forgotten. “I want to make them visible, that’s what it’s about,” Hunt says. “The internet makes this possible, everywhere, all the time.

Many New Yorkers have the idea that only the homeless and drug addicts are buried on the island. There is something to that, of course, but even the Big Apple does not have so many homeless people and drug addicts. Hospitals in the city only have to keep the dead for two weeks. If no one states that they will take over the costs of the burial during this time, the corpses are taken away – cold storage is a cost factor.

Many times poor families simply cannot get hold of the necessary money during this time. Or the relatives live quite far away and receive the news too late. Besides, many New Yorker do not speak English. Illegals fear the police. They don’t even go to the police when they miss someone. And many times, and this is also part of an anonymous big city, the survivors simply don’t care. They wouldn’t want to take care of the grave anyway.

On Fridays, the coffins on the ferry are smaller than on the other weekdays. The past week’s stillborn babies also end up on Hart Island. In their shock, many mothers turn over the dead bodies to the hospital. At that point in time, only a few know about the mass grave in the East River. The bitter truth first comes to light when the question comes up about the child’s grave – there is none.

Even tourists land on Hart Island. In this time of smart messaging systems and Facebook Updates, it very seldom happens that someone doesn’t check in with their family during the day. But even up to a couple of years ago, no one wondered when the visitor to New York didn’t keep in touch for even longer. A heart attack while sightseeing was then enough to have one’s final resting place found, not in their homeland, but on Hart Island. A yearlong Kafka-like nightmare then began for the survivors – having a corpse excavated again requires a tough struggle with the authorities.

“My father died last week in New York,” narrated Katelijn Mesman from the Netherlands (named changed at the family’s request). “Because we did not have enough money to pay for transportation, we gave his body over to the care of the American authorities.” Mesman first learned about Hart Island after that. “Now I am ashamed that I could not bring him back home. It makes me so sad. Some one told me that there is no grave and that I can’t visit the island in order to say goodbye.” The official reason for the general prohibition against entry is the prisoners, who work on the island. Hart Island is de facto part of a giant prison for which the prison authorities are responsible.

Of course there is no grave stone, but which coffin lies under the earth in which sector of the mass grave is precisely documented. At least anyone who had identification at the time of death can be found again. Every corpse is photographed, and fingerprints are also taken to make later identification possible. There are cases in which the bones are dug up after 20 years in order to clear up a murder. But the list of the dead often contains only “unidentified black man.” And “Jose Gonzalez” is so common in New York that this clue often leads the bereaved nowhere.

Beata Swiecinka was four years old when her father left Poland in the 1980s in order to look for work in New York. Kazimierz Szymanski did so well there was contact with his family. Suddenly, there were no more letters, nothing. Many years later, during this Spring, Beata Swiecinka, who in the meantime moved to the USA, first stumbled on to Melinda Hunt, the artist, and her data bank during her research.

Beata now knows that her father is buried on Hart Island. He died on January 13, the birthday of Beata’s own daughter. “It hurts me that my father is buried on Hart Island, but now I know at least where he is. Now I am doing everything I can in order to be allowed to visit the island.” In rare opportunities, those who can prove that a relative is buried on the island are allowed to set foot on the island. But many survivors cannot muster the strength for the struggle with the authorities.

Kenneth Jackson, Professor of History at Columbia University, says, “Deep sadness swirls around Hart Island.” “The worst of it is that the island is cordoned off.” When in the future historians or anthropologists concern themselves with New York, they will very well come to the conclusion, Jackson said, that “We have a society here that doesn’t take care of its weakest members to the extent that other societies, which are clearly poorer than ours, do.” “The inequality in life even continues after death for us.”