A Story of Small Subversions

aqua regia: a highly corrosive mixture of acids capable of dissolving the noble metals, such as gold, silver, and platinum

You know that story about the King of Denmark and all his subjects wearing the yellow star the Nazis tried to force on Danish Jews? Never happened. The Nazis promised Denmark self-government if they didn’t fight back, never forced yellow stars on anyone. What is true

is that after the Swedish Academy gave a jailed dissident the Nobel medal, Hitler prohibited any German, Jew or not, from having one. Besides, a third of a pound of 23-karat gold would certainly be confiscated. So George de Hevesy, Hungarian Jew and chemist, took the medals of his friends the physicists von Laue and Franck, dissolved them in aqua regia, shelved the flask among dozens of others and escaped to Sweden. After the war he found his laboratory undisturbed, precipitated out the gold, and gave it to the Academy, who recast the medals and reawarded them.       And so I ask

what makes this is such a satisfying story? No lives were saved, no grand examples set. A story of small subversions. And yet. And yet

I love wit hiding treasure in plain sight, defying guns and muscles with learning, love the blend of spite, affection. And besides, it’s the story for which we all yearn, the one where evil’s beaten by smart and good, the one where everything we’ve lost returns.

But wait, there’s more. In 1993 a wave of hate crimes ripped Billings, Montana— Jewish graves defaced and rocks thrown through windows displaying menorahs. The editor of the newspaper remembered how King Christian and all the Danes put on the yellow star. So the paper ran a full-page picture of a menorah, and all over Billings people remembered something that never happened, and lived up to it, putting them in their windows. There were more rocks, a bit more vitriol, but in the end it worked. It seems that courage, like any noble metal, can be dissolved but also can be precipitated out and make a story true—whether it happened or not.