My family, on my dad’s side, were Jews from Poland and Ukraine. His parents came to America before the shit hit the fan, but I grew up knowing two people who weren’t so lucky. Seymour Mayer lived across the street during my teens. And Annie Braunschweig, who we knew as Brownie, had taken care of my sister and me as four- and five-year-old kids when our mom – unusually at that time – went back to work full-time teaching at a university. Both Seymour and Brownie were survivors of Nazi concentration camps, with tattooed numbers on their arms.
I never heard Seymour talk about it. Brownie rarely did, though I remember one story about a mother who tossed her swaddled baby to a stranger as the train was leaving to take her to the gas chambers.
Very few survivors remain. And there are not many of us who have known survivors. I’ve thought a lot, over the years, about what happens when that kind of personal connection ends, and living memories fall off the continental shelf into the deep ocean of history. I suspect the Holocaust may seem no more real, to many born in this century, than the Spanish Inquisition.
I don’t know if Seymour and Brownie ever read “It Can’t Happen Here” but I am pretty sure they’d have thought it absolutely can, they’d be even more horrified in this moment than many of us are, and they’d reject the fatalism that I see taking root among friends and acquaintances.
“It hasn’t happened yet,” they’d say, “you can still prevent it, do not despair prematurely, there is still time, but you must find a way to focus your efforts and unite all whose votes can matter.”
It has *already* happened here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Executive_Order_44
I knew a Holocaust survivor, Raymond Rakower, a colleague of my father. He kept weapons on his bedroom wall, as that was the only way he felt safe enough to sleep. He passed away a year ago, a centenarian.
Few Americans have known survivors, maybe; many American Jews have, and many more of us have known the children of survivors. But nearly all of us live with most of the roots chopped off, family trees mostly destroyed. The remaining and regrown families tend to be small and dispersed. I live in a part of the world with enormous families and the expectation is that everyone has an enormous family, people who will, end of day, lend a hand. It means people have much less investment in societal goodwill and social safety nets than they otherwise might. People go intentionally blind to those in trouble without large families and generations of local connections. A legacy.
For young people you’re right, it’s too long ago. Even 1989 is too long ago. 9/11 is historical, before they were born. WWII, WWI, they’re not sure what difference there is; European history’s quite unfashionable these days anyway. And the Holocaust washes into the collection of global genocide stories, not special. The attention spans and taste for details are also limited. It doesn’t help that when schools do teach about it, it’s sentimentalized as much as MLK Jr. Day is. I’ve long thought that if you’re going to teach it, you should show Night and Fog.
I don’t see pessimism here, but I do see helplessness in the face of the ancient who refuse to let go and accept that their turn is over. Young people have never really known a middle-aged president. But then young people also have a much more tenuous relationship to government than older people do. The government stopped being about young people and their future, and then largely walled itself off, before they were born. I remember looking at stocks round about 2000 or so, and looking at the quarterly reports of something called the Student Loan Corporation, and realizing I was looking at a massive transfer of wealth in the wrong direction: young and poor to old and rich. I was looking at the beginnings of generational poverty. And I thought, oh man, we’re in trouble.
And then a few years later the same people nearly melted the global economy, and in the ensuing chaos I thought: these are historical problems, not political problems; we’ll swing back and forth between parties, looking to them to solve problems they can’t solve, and will give up and elect a strongman around 2020.
The kids are more hopeful than that, it seems to me. They want to live. And time and numbers are on their side. What they make of their advantage when they finally come into it, though, I don’t know. They’ve never known a middle-class world. No one has been training them to govern. They have a protest culture, but they’re not trooping off to law school, to civil-service jobs, because these things seem too far beside the point to them. I’ve been impressed all along by how quick and adaptable they are, though, and how readily and practically they work together, so — fingers crossed.
Thanks for sharing that story. I never personally knew any Shoah survivors – my people emigrated from Belarus many decades before failing to do so was a death sentence. What we’ve allowed to happen to USA in the decades after is an enduring source of shame to me.