Washington Post (Opinion)
By Dana Milbank
January 27, 2016
International
Holocaust Remembrance Day is always a somber time for Auschwitz
survivor Irene Weiss. But this year’s observance had an additional layer
of grief: For the
first time, Weiss is worried about her adopted homeland.
“I
am exceptionally concerned about demagogues,” the 85-year-old Weiss
told me at Wednesday’s commemoration at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum. “They touch me in a
place that I remember. I know their influence and, unfortunately, I
know how receptive audiences are to demagogues and what it leads to.”
She
knows better than just about any person alive. The Czech-born Jew lost
her parents and most of her siblings in Hitler’s death camps. Now, when
she hears about plans
to register Muslims and to ban Muslims from entering the United States,
“I’m worried about the tone of this country,” she said.
To
Weiss, the ugly political environment in 2016 has an ominous precedent
in Weimar Germany. “It has echoes, and maybe more so to me than to
native-born Americans,” she
said after lighting a candle for Hitler’s victims. “I’m scared. I don’t
like the trend. I don’t like how many people are applauding when they
hear these demagogues. It can turn.”
This
year’s Holocaust remembrance comes at a time when Donald Trump, the
front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, retweets to his nearly
6 million followers a
message from @WhiteGenocideTM based in “Jewmerica,” and a time when his
nearest challenger, Ted Cruz, brandishes the endorsement of a minister
who says Hitler was a “hunter” sent after the Jews by God. There has
never been a more important time for Americans
to heed the moral authority of the Holocaust survivors still among us.
“It’s
really frightening,” said Al Munzer, hidden as an infant in the
Netherlands with a Dutch family and their Muslim nanny. “When you see
these mass rallies that Trump
is able to attract, you really wonder: How are they buying into this
message of hate?”
Munzer,
who lost two sisters and his father to the Nazis, said he never thought
such things could happen in America, but now he’s not so sure.
“Thinking that Germany was
somehow unique is wrong,” he said.
Wednesday’s
ceremony was in a hexagonal atrium with the names of death camps on the
walls. The participants recited Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer,
and listened to
the Hymn of the Partisans, the Yiddish ballad of resistance: Never say
you are walking your final road.
At
this time of open hostility to Muslims in America, museum staff
arranged for Johanna Gerechter Neumann, who fled with her family to
Albania after Kristallnacht, to
talk about how Muslims protected them from Hitler. Her father, a
patriotic German and World War I veteran, “certainly thought that it
could never happen in Germany,” she said. “It did happen. Slowly, but it
did happen.”
And
now the aging survivors worry it is beginning, slowly, to happen again.
“It is repeating itself, and it is again the inattention that people
pay to real cues that
one should understand,” said Margit Meissner, almost 94, who fled on
foot through the Pyrenees from occupied France.
“It’s
not Weimar,” she said, “but it could become Weimar Germany if you have
Mr. Trump here and people keep believing what he says. . . . I think one
has to speak up.
And that’s the one lesson from the Holocaust: Do not be a bystander.”
In
Wednesday’s ceremony, German Ambassador Peter Wittig gave a moving
tribute to Martin Weiss, 87 this week, who survived Auschwitz as a
15-year-old but lost most of his
family. Wittig read aloud Weiss’s recollections: “We could also smell
flesh burning, and then we saw the chimneys, the big five chimneys with
black smoke coming out.”
Now
an American presidential candidate has made scapegoats of immigrants,
Muslims, Latinos, African Americans, the disabled, women. And for the
first time, Martin Weiss
hears echoes of his youth. “The guy scares me,” he said after listening
to the ambassador’s tribute. “I don’t want to make any comparison to
Hitler, but believe it or not his delivery and the way he conducts
himself is very similar to Hitler’s way of doing
things. He discredits everybody who disagrees with him. He’s insulting.
He discriminates against everybody.”
Weiss
continued: “Sooner or later, you know what happens in a case like this?
That’s how Weimar Germany went to hell, because when Hitler came in, if
somebody disagreed
with him — guess what — he put them in prison or he had them shot or he
opened the concentration camp.”
We
are still far from that in America. But if anybody has the right to
make the comparison, it is a man who saw the ovens of Auschwitz.
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