
At the end of last month, after Joe Biden had announced him as his choice for Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken gave a speech that included a short version of a story that he had grown up with and has told many times before. After four years in a Nazi concentration camp, Blinken’s stepfather, Samuel Pisar, escaped from a death march. In the woods somewhere in Bavaria, he came across an American tank, which turned out to be from the 761st Tank Battalion – an African-American unit that formed part of General George S. Patton’s Third Army. Blinken has said before that a black American soldier “lifted him into the tank, into America, into freedom”. (Pisar tells the story himself here, though he does not say the soldier was black.) This time Blinken concluded by saying: “That’s who we are. That’s what America represents to the world, however imperfectly.”
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