Speaking truth to power

My mother's grandfather, Joseph Meyer, was one of a small community of French Jews near Donaldsonville, Louisiana.  His family, like many Jewish families, had their names changed in the 19th century -- Joseph's paternal grandparents were born Schillen Lévy and Mindel Bloch in Dauendorf, Bas-Rhin département, Alsace, France.  But the French authorities decided their names were too Jewish-sounding, and altered them by decree to Joseph and Minette Meyer.

Some of my Bloch and Lévy relatives chose to stay in Alsace, and a couple of generations further along one of my Bloch cousins, Céline Bollack, was born in the little town of Wintzenheim in 1893.  When the Nazis rose to power, Céline and her husband, Armand Simon, became involved in the French Resistance.  They passed out anti-Nazi literature, worked to organize people to fight the German infiltration into France, and even as circumstances looked darker and darker, would not be silenced.

In spring of 1944 they were in the town of Brive-le-Gaillarde, in the département of Corrèze in south-central France.  Brive-le-Gaillarde was a hub of the Resistance, and in fact had been the home of Resistance fighter Edmond Michelet (who was imprisoned at Dachau, contracted typhus, but survived both).

Armand and Céline were not so lucky.  They were arrested along with their fifteen-year-old daughter Irène in Brive-le-Gaillarde on April 4, 1944 for sedition and agitation (and not least because they were Jewish themselves).  They were transferred to a holding camp in Drancy, northeast of Paris, and on April 29 were part of Convoy 72 from Drancy to Auschwitz.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Nazis were meticulous record-keepers.  There were 1,004 men, women, and children on Convoy 72.  Only 100 of them were chosen to work in the camp; the other 904 were gassed.

Armand, Céline, and Irène Simon were among the 904 executed shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz.

It bears mention, however, that even of the 100 who were allowed to live after arriving in the camp, only 38 survived to the liberation of the death camp on January 27, 1945.

What always strikes me about the Nazi atrocities is the complicity of ordinary folks.  It is easy enough to imagine horrific things being done by people who are truly evil; what is hard to wrap my brain around is how thousands of regular people, with families and friends and hobbies and jobs and pets, not only sat idly by while the Nazis arrested their neighbors, but actively helped.  These are the people who became informants, prison guards, collaborators.

These are the people without whom the Holocaust would never have happened.

I would like to say that such atrocities could never happen again.  But I see the same things going on today -- ordinary folks excusing elected officials for saying and doing terrible things; ridiculing, denigrating, or threatening people who speak up; agitating anger against those who look different or think differently.  If you believe that such behavior couldn't escalate into violence and oppression, if you think we've learned our lesson from the horrors of World War II, you're fooling yourself.  Those same tendencies are still with us, waiting to be whipped into a frenzy by leaders who gain power from inciting hate, making us afraid, and teaching us to distrust the truth.

The only way to stop this is to speak up and continue speaking up.  Such acts of courage are risky; my cousin Céline and her husband and daughter paid for their resistance with their lives.  But the risks -- whether they are minor ones such as ridicule and condemnation, or major ones such as imprisonment or execution -- do not abrogate our responsibility to stand up for what is right.

When I have attended Passover celebrations and the time comes for remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust, I have spoken the names of Céline, Armand, and Irène Simon along with the words "May they never be forgotten."  But I'll go a step further.  May we never lose our courage to do what they did, to speak truth to power.  We must not simply remember the ones who gave their lives for a noble cause, but be like them --  be unafraid to put ourselves in harm's way to stop those who would see our country and our world once again descend into a maelstrom of hatred, violence, and despair.

I owe most of what I know about my cousin and her family to the research of my dear friend Dr. Diana Wagner, Holocaust Educator at Salisbury University (Maryland).  She has been working with the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center to hand-transcribe hundreds of documents related to the Holocaust, and to make those documents available through the World Memory Project.  I owe a debt of gratitude to Diana for not only my personal knowledge about my own family, but for all of the hours she has put in to make sure that these stories truly will never be forgotten -- and to help us to vow that we will never let such things happen again.

Misplaced nostalgia

I've never really understood people who pine for "the good old days."  I'm not saying that the time we live in is perfect, mind you; but I find that real nostalgia requires a very selective memory.

This comes up because of Donald Trump's slogan, "Make America Great Again."  Someone finally thought to ask him when he thought America was great the last time -- in an interview in the New York Times, Trump was asked what era he'd like to return us to.  His answer is as myopic as it is enlightening:

I'd say that the first time would be the time of military and industrial expansion at the start of the 20th century.  If you look back, it really was, there was a period of time when we were developing at the turn of the century which was a pretty wild time for this country and pretty wild in terms of building that machine, that machine was really based on entrepreneurship...  And the late '40s and '50s, it was a time when we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do.

It's no real wonder that Trump looks back with fondness at the first part of the 20th century.  It was the era of the Robber Barons -- people like John Jacob Astor, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew W. Mellon, James Buchanan Duke, Leland Stanford, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who became rich on the backs of the working poor.  The actions of the Robber Barons represent the beginning of corporate control over the government.  It was an era of unbridled free enterprise, which sounds good until you see the outcome -- a veritable plutocracy that continues up to this day.

Poor children working in a glass factory at midnight (1920s) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Similar things could be said about the post-World War II United States, a time in which we became a nuclear power, had our fingers in the governments of other countries (either by their invitation or not), and were setting ourselves up for the debacles in Southeast Asia and the Middle East of which we are still dealing with the consequences.  It was the last time the white patriarchy would go unchallenged, and was immediately followed by the civil unrest of the 1960s, in which so many institutions, social mores, and political edifices would be shaken to their roots.

So of course those are where Trump would like to return us -- to a time when there was unprecedented opportunity, as long as you were a rich, white, well-connected man.  If you were female, if you were a minority, if you were from the lower classes, well, pretty much sucks to be you.

I'm too young to remember the 50s, but I certainly remember the 60s and 70s well enough.  I grew up during the decades when we as a society were still struggling with throwing off enculturated rules of a social structure that prior to that time had been accepted without question.  When I was in high school, in the mid-70s, minorities were beginning to see more acknowledgement of their fundamental human rights -- but the powers-that-be were so terrified of the outcome that on Prom Night, they decided to crown a black Prom King and Queen and a white Prom King and Queen, because what if they had only one vote, and there was (gasp of horror!) a black King and a white Queen?  Can't have that.  There were several classmates of mine who were LGBT, but 100% of them were still in the closet -- some until years after graduation.

Boys couldn't have long hair, or they'd be brought into the principal's office and have it cut off.  Girls were tracked into home ec, boys into shop.  One female friend told me, years after, that she was told not to take physics by her counselor, because "why would a girl need physics?"  Fortunately for her, she basically told him "the hell you say," and took it anyway.

So the "good old days" turn out to have been good only for the select few.  To claim otherwise requires ignoring not only our own history, but the day-to-day reality of the vast majority of American citizens.  But it's not surprising that Trump turns a blind eye to the inequities of the 20th century; he, and people like him, are the ones who profited from them.

Despite the problems we face, I'll stay right here in the 21st century.  I'll take the growing pains and risks and uncertainties of 2016 over the unquestioned white male privilege of the Gilded Age and the post-World War II eras.  I have no particular desire to don the rose-colored glasses that would be necessary to look back in sentimental nostalgia at a period when things were not nearly as good for everyone as people like Trump like to claim.