Monday, March 14, 2016

Send Him to Auschwitz


This guy's been making the rounds on the Internet lately. He seemed to take great pride in throwing up a "Heil" salute and telling a Jewish
reporter to "Go to Auschwitz". (Watch the Video) My come-back quip has been, "That guy couldn't find Auschwitz on a map!" Funny. Ha ha. Ha. How sad is it that I'm probably right?

Talkin bout my Generation

As a Jew raised in post-WWII America I was inundated with Holocaust history from a young age. It wasn't at all unusual to run into someone at the synagogue with a number tattooed on his or her arm. A forever brand of what it could really mean to be a Jew in this world. I read every page of the Time-Life book series on WWII and would wonder which of the living skeletons I would have been? Which way would the Nazi have pointed during my selection? Die Now or Die Later I knew in my gut that I would have been one of them. A child with a yellow star on her coat. A prisoner huddling with her own children in a crowded cattle car. A body in a mass grave dug with my own hands. And I also knew the more difficult truth, that many of my neighbors would have actively participated in my persecution, or turned their backs, or worse, stood silent and watched others do the heavy lifting of evil.


How naive was I to think that the rest of my generation, the rest of my America, was receiving the same education? That they were devouring the same books, watching the same documentaries, staring at the same gruesome photos and wondering
How could this happen?
Why didn't anyone stop it?
The man in the video, raising his hand in a Nazi salute, telling a reporter to "Go to Fucking Auschwitz," is one of the poorly educated that Donald Trump loves so much. Those who don't learn history at all won't even recognize when they're repeating it.

Educate him. Send him to Auschwitz.

I'm not kidding. If not Auschwitz, then the US Holocaust Museum in DC.  

Let them see. Let them learn. Let them stand at the wall of photographs, the piles of shoes, the remnants of normal lives. A pair of glasses. A wallet. A schoolbook. A toy. And let them see also the uncensored photographs. The bodies. The skeletons. The rare color photographs that humanize the victims and make them, unmistakably, human. Then let them come back and see who and what they salute.

Do something.


Never before have I felt the immediacy of this quote:
"In order for evil to flourish, all that is required is for good men to do nothing." -- Edward Burke.
If I do not write. If I do not protest. If I do not use my most powerful tool -- my words -- I am doing nothing. What will you do?