Our meeting on August 6 featured a return engagement from David Hosmer, mediator and attorney, who presented these observations on conflict and solutions: You will always find the solution to a problem at the intersection of personality, conflict and leadership. Look in a mirror while asking what do you contribute to the conflict? That’s the beginning of finding solutions. How can you fly like an eagle when surrounded by turkeys? Leadership is seeing into the future. You don’t like the people creating the problem, but you have to talk to them. How did you create this mess? If you do not know yourself it’s difficult to know other people. Wait, actually you can learn something from the turkeys. Before leading others, you must lead yourself or you will be a fifty-year-old acting like a fouryear-old. Perhaps your wife makes you made because she holds a mirror in front of you while pointing out all of your flaws. You have to understand your deficiencies before you understand your adversary’s shortcomings. Reconcile. Listen intently. The leader has to resolve conflict within its own group to take the group where it needs to go. What have you done to contribute to the situation in which you find yourself? With no solutions and a closed mind, you may be tempted to attack the adversary personally. Resolution can not come from this approach.
On August 20 Randi Biederman, co-author with Mark Biederman of Schindler’s Listed, told two overlapping stories—the story of a search for some gold coins resulting in an acclaimed book, and the story revealed by the book.
The most significant fact of Mark Biederman’s life occurred before he was born: his Polish-born parents survived the horrors of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. His mother Sally, with her mother, survived Auschwitz as a stunning 19-yearold redhead selected by Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, to be his personal cook. Regretfully, many emigrants parents/grandparents from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and through the twentieth century refused to talk about their lives before crossing the Atlantic to freedom in America.
Mark, nineteen at the time of his father Harry’s death, knew only one short story about his father who buried a collection of gold coins in the backyard of his home somewhere in Poland before internment at Auschwitz. Where?
Somewhere in a backyard somewhere in Poland. Over a twenty-year period, augmented by the miracles of curiosity and serendipity, endless frustration, non-cooperative Polish bureaucrats, careful observation, and asking the right question at the right time, Mark and Randi discovered the address in Poland where the coins were buried. In a Miami deli Sally, Mark’s mother, saw an unknown man named Izzy reading a local Polish newsletter. Turns out Izzy had been Harry’s next-door neighbor in the house where the gold coin collection had been buried. That led Mark to Randi to locating and finding the house of the story.
Did they find the gold coins? Randi did not tell us whether they found the gold. I bought the book and will find out.
Up Next: 9/3 Fifth District Supervisor Lisa Bartlett; 9/17 California Senator Pat Bates.
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—Robert Saint-Aubin
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