Re White Shades Of Pale (Focus, March 20): My father, Henry Eisenman, was a survivor of Auschwitz. Like millions of other Jews, he lost most of his family due to the insanity of "racial purity."
He told me this story. A while after he was liberated, a German doctor saw him for a check-up. When the customary medical exam was over, he looked at my dad with curiosity and asked whether he could take some "measurements." My dad agreed, and out came the calipers.
Every aspect of my father's head shape, eyes and nose, and the ratios of all these to each other, were measured. When the doctor was finished, he proclaimed to my father, with no small sense of irony and almost laughing: "You'll be happy to know you have a perfectly shaped Aryan head. Congratulations."
There's only one race, and we're all that race: Homo sapiens.