From the "Houston Chronicle"...
(This is not the first time that an astronaut has been involved in a Darfur-related activity: Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne--in his capacity as a UNICEF ambassador--visited Darfur in mid-2004.)
Mark Polansky wanted to honor his Jewish father. So the NASA space shuttle commander worried a Jewish mother.
Polansky's father, Irving, died in 2001. To pay tribute to him and raise awareness of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, the astronaut asked the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum if he could take one of its artifacts on the Discovery mission in December.
"It's probably the strangest phone call the museum ever got," Polansky said at the Washington museum [on] Tuesday.
The museum gave Polansky, whose father's family emigrated from Russia in the early 1900s, a photo of a Darfurian child refugee. It also made him a replica of Refugee, the tiny teddy bear that a Holocaust survivor, Sophie Turner-Zaretsky of New York, was given by her mother in Poland after the war.
The bear was donated to the museum by Turner-Zaretsky in 2002. When museum officials told her of Polansky's plan, she reacted with happiness and gratitude — and, naturally, fear.
"He hasn't got a Jewish mother," Turner-Zaretsky joked about Polansky, whose mother, Edith, is a native Hawaiian of Korean descent.
Turner-Zaretsky had never spoken to Polansky until Tuesday, when the astronaut returned the bear in a ceremony at the museum. But she nervously monitored Discovery's status as if she'd had a relative aboard.
"I watched the (NASA) Web site every day and made sure they were OK," she said. "I worried when they delayed the flight (because of weather), and then I worried when he piloted it. And when he landed it, I think it was a Friday afternoon, I heaved a big sigh of relief."
Turner-Zaretsky has spent much of her life worrying. Born in Poland in 1937, her family was forced into a ghetto by the Nazis in 1941. Her father was killed in 1942.
Turner-Zaretsky and her mother escaped the ghetto, survived the war by pretending to be Catholic and fled Soviet rule by moving to England in 1948. But Turner-Zaretsky, who had come to believe she was Christian, was traumatized again when her mother told her they were Jews — people she had learned to despise. Then, in 1963, she had to start a new life once more, this time as a medical student in the United States.
Her bear was a mere 3 inches tall. Its eyes weren't quite aligned. But until she donated it to the museum, Refugee came with her every arduous mile she journeyed.
Of course, the original Refugee can't compete with its replica.
"Traveled 5,330,398 miles," Polansky read from a certificate he gave Turner-Zaretsky. "In space for 12 days, 20 hours, 45 minutes.
"Not bad for a bear."
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