Never Again Holocaust Remebrance Day

Yom HaShoah

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day it feels more important than ever that we understand how such a nightmare could happen so that we ensure it doesn’t happen again to anyone.

It breaks my heart to see Jews taking away the lesson that it’s us against the world (as Prime Minister Netanyahu said today) instead of taking away the lesson that we must not allow fascists to divide us and turn us against each other by fighting over scraps of land and resources.

Yom Hashoah 5784

they told me

never to forget the Shoah and then reminded me every day

i have never needed their reminders the Shoah lives always in me in my life far, far way from the shtetl and in the absence left by family i never met and in the righteousness cradled deep in my heart and in the fear that clings to my doorstep like grave dust and that every morning i try to sweep away

they told me, cynically that we would never let it happen again but deep in their hearts, they cradled the fear and flocked to false idols

now i am reminded every day by images beamed to me across seas from the phone of a journalist murdered in my name

i feel the terror and confusion of unarmed men loaded onto flatbeds i feel it through remembrances of my great grandfather, who i could never know he was loaded onto a truck by men with guns and never seen again

i am reminded how we found his final resting place a mass grave in the forest floor just a few miles from the shtetl just a few days later they did not try very hard to conceal their crimes

that which is buried must always be unearthed that which is obscured, brought into the light

today they closed the offices of the journalists they have not yet murdered they have remembered, cynically and melted our memories into a golden idol shrouded in cloth, blue and white

Yom Hashoah 5784, by Noah Gordon
A crowd of protesters photographed from above. Some are wearing Jewish prayer shawls and yarmulkes. IN the middle is a sign with large letters reading "JEWS SAY CEASEFIRE NOW!"

Ceasefire yesterday. Ceasefire now. Ceasefire for the future.

There are many many of us Jews that don’t feel that our own safety depends on the control or suppression of others. While many of the refugees who came to Palestine as pioneers after the Holocaust had intentions to live peacefully in harmony with the Palestinians*, almost every action of the Israeli government since it was founded has been to treat Palestinians just as badly as we had been treated in Europe.

The ultimate consequence of this has been to harm and dispossess several generations of Palestinians which is extremely effective at ensuring they continue to resent Israel’s existence and feel that they must do anything they can by any means necessary to ensure the survival of their people. If Israel can’t exist peacefully with Palestinians, what gives Jews the greater “right” to the land than they have? How can we go from being refugees with no safe place to go, to violently forcing the exact same situation upon another people just for the gall of wanting to continue to exist with their families on their own ancestral land?

Even if I was a Zionist I would think that the last 6 months were creating long term curse on the country of Israel by creating a whole new generation of Palestinians with nothing but rage for Israel and nothing to lose. You can look at even the most sanitized accounts of the assault on Gaza see absolute cruelty on the part of the IDF as well as no concern for human life or international law.


(*) For anyone interested in the politics of Israel’s founding, I highly recommend I. F. Stone’s book Underground to Palestine about the heroic (as he tells it) journey of Jewish refugees trying to reach Palestine in 1946. In 1978 it was republished with 2 new essays from him. One about how Zionism was hijacked by Jews with no regard for Palestinians’ rights or well-being, and the other about how it has become completely impossible to have rational conversations that are critical of Israel.

Children leaving the Lodz ghetto for the death camp at Chelmno

The price of collaboration

From visiting the wonderful Dutch Resistance Museum many years ago, I knew about the “Judenrat,” councils of Jewish leaders that Nazis used to facilitate the implementation of their own annihilation.

Although I’m Jewish and believe it’s important to remember the Holocaust, I never really spent that much time learning the political history. I foolishly thought that “never again” was an obvious and redundant slogan. But the similarities between Trump and the Republicans to Hitler during the Weimar Republic are unmistakable. And this week I discovered World War II Today, a site that walks us through the history as it happened, but exactly 75 years later.

The entry from a few days ago was shocking to me on two levels. First, that Nazis specifically targeted children for “deportation” (ie: death and torture at concentration camps). The parallels to Republicans efforts to rescind DACA are transparently clear.

“When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time.” ― Maya AngelouBut equally disturbing is how, even after it was clear what their fate would be, the Judenrat leaders continued to facilitate the execution of their own people in the deeply misguided, arrogant, and counterfactual belief that they could somehow lessen the impact by collaborating with the Nazis rather than resisting them. First it started with seemingly-acceptable policies like registering all Jews and distributing rationed food. You can imagine how some thought it would be helpful to do this. But like the frog in a slowly-boiling pot of water it became clearer and clearer that the end goal of all of these efforts was to extinguish the Jews.

With the benefit of hindsight, I have to wonder why Jewish leaders thought that they could trust German Nazis. How did they do the moral calculus comparing the value of collaboration against the possibly-deadly consequences of resisting?

Chaim Rumkowski was the Chairman of the Judenrat in the Polish Lodz ghetto. He gave this unbelievable speech to his community on September 4, 1942:

A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess … the children and the elderly.

I was unworthy of having a child of my own, so I gave the best years of my life to children. I’ve lived and breathed with children.

I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, hand them over to me!

Fathers and mothers, give me your children! [Transciber’s note – Horrible, terrifying wailing among the assembled crowd.]

I had a suspicion something was about to befall us. I anticipated “something” and was always like a watchman on guard to prevent it. But I was unsuccessful because I did not know what was threatening us.

I did not know the nature of the danger. The taking of the sick from the hospitals caught me completely by surprise. And I give you the best proof there is of this: I had my own nearest and dearest among them, and I could do nothing for them.

I thought that that would be the end of it, that after that they’d leave us in peace, the peace for which I long so much, for which I’ve always worked, which has been my goal. But something else, it turned out, was destined for us.

Such is the fate ofthe Jews: always more suffering and always worse suffering, especially in times of war.

Yesterday afternoon, they gave me the order to send more than 20,000 Jews out of the ghetto, and if not – “We will do itl” So, the question became: “Should we take it upon ourselves, do it ourselves, or leave it for others to do?”

Well, we – that is, I and my closest associates – thought first not about “How many will perish?” but “How many is it possible to save?” And we reached the conclusion that, however hard it would be for us, we should take the implementation of this order into our own hands.

I must perform this difficult and bloody operation – I must cut off limbs in order to save the body itself – I must take children because, if not, others may be taken as well, God forbid.

[Horrible wailing.]

I hope as you read this, you are wailing too. I hope that like me you will dedicate your entire soul to never trying to appease or compromise with those that would oppress and destroy people, even if you think your collaboration will lessen or delay the oppression. We can’t always imagine what others will do, but we know who our friends are. Never forget.

Image source: http://ww2today.com/4th-september-42-nazis-order-that-children-be-deported 

Take Action: There’s nothing OK about the idea of a Muslim registry

My colleague Khadija at MomsRising asks how we will explain this to our kids. How can I tell my son, who only has a dawning understanding of how our nation was founded on the principle of religious freedom, that our own government is preparing to single out people based on their faith or ethnicity and take away their rights?

As a Jewish family we are even more profoundly aware of how dangerous this kind of thinking is. The racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim fervor that has been inspired and embraced by Donald Trump is more than reminiscent of Weimar Germany when Hitler was able to step in to a leadership vacuum and wasn’t taken seriously by the people who thought he was crazy until it was much too late.

Please join me in signing this open letter to President Obama now to protect Muslim families from having to register.

 

(Photo: Dorothea Lange – American internees in mess hall line at Tanforan Assembly Center San Bruno CA April 29, 1942.)

Pragmatism versus morality

Trump: The Choice We Face, another insightful and important essay from Masha Gessen.

We cannot know what political strategy, if any, can be effective in containing, rather than abetting, the threat that a Trump administration now poses to some of our most fundamental democratic principles. But we can know what is right. What separates Americans in 2016 from Europeans in the 1940s and 1950s is a little bit of historical time but a whole lot of historical knowledge. We know what my great-grandfather did not know: that the people who wanted to keep the people fed ended up compiling lists of their neighbors to be killed. That they had a rationale for doing so. And also, that one of the greatest thinkers of their age judged their actions as harshly as they could be judged.

Armed with that knowledge, or burdened with that legacy, we have a slight chance of making better choices. As Trump torpedoes into the presidency, we need to shift from realist to moral reasoning. That would mean, at minimum, thinking about the right thing to do, now and in the imaginable future. It is also a good idea to have a trusted friend capable of reminding you when you are about to lose your sense of right and wrong.

Trump: The Choice We Face | by Masha Gessen | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books