Miriam was 14 when she and her sisters, Adele and Anna, as well as Anna’s baby, Esther, were rounded up with hundreds of other Jews in Poland during the Second World War and ordered to remove their clothes. Instead, the sisters ran, finding refuge in an abandoned tannery. It was very quiet. Suddenly, the stillness was broken by Anna’s voice pleading for her baby. Two shots rang out. They would never see Anna or her child again.
Then silence. After a cough from Miriam broke the silence, an armed collaborator discovered the pair in hiding. As the girls emerged facing certain execution, a German soldier looked at his watch and said, “Let them go. Enough for today.”
Eventually, the sisters were separated. Miriam, needing a ration card, attempted to register at an employment center using false baptismal papers, but she was met with suspicion. Her fate was now in the hands of German officers who had already murdered her sister Anna, baby Esther, as well as two brothers beforehand.
As she was waiting on the challenge to her credentials, a German officer walked in, looked at Miriam, and said, ”This girl will do.” That is how Miriam escaped certain death for the second time and became a slave laborer for the duration of WW II. My aunts, Miriam and Adele, survived the war and immigrated to the United States.
Holocaust Remembrance Day should be call to action
I often think of the horrors they endured but particularly on April 24, Holocaust Remembrance Day or Yom Hashoah. It’s a day set aside to reflect on the lives of survivors like my aunts, as well as the 6 million Jews who were murdered by the German fascists.
Miriam and Adele have passed. There are now few survivors left, but a cottage industry of Holocaust deniers has gained momentum. A recent survey reports that one in 10 young Americans believes that the Holocaust never happened; 23% think it’s a myth or that the number of those killed has been exaggerated. Far-right organizations like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have emerged and been legitimized. The Trump Administration has embraced White Christian nationalist leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia.
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These developments make Holocaust Remembrance Day even more important as a day to educate the public about the state-sponsored mass persecution and murder of millions of people by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. That genocidal campaign targeted opponents of Germany’s fascist government and people that the Nazis believed to be biologically inferior because of anti-Semitism, homophobia or a hatred of the other. During the Holocaust two-thirds of European Jews were murdered.
Remembrance days should be more than a time to remember and reflect. They must also be a call to action against the use of state power to persecute minority groups and engage in ethnic cleansing.
To honor the memory, we must oppose state sanctioned attacks on our freedoms and rights taking place in the United States today. That means rejecting the Trump Administration’s demonization of immigrants, refugees and the LGBTQ community.
U.S. experiencing same attack on freedoms as in Nazi Germany
Fascism didn’t start with the gas chambers. It began with banning books, censorship and attacks on individual freedoms of the press, speech and assembly followed by the persecution and arrest of political opponents and the persecution of “inferior races.” The death camps were the final stage of the state’s goal of establishing Aryan supremacy.
Today we are experiencing attacks on these same freedoms. School districts and the U.S. military academies are banning books that promote racial and gender equality. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student on her way to dinner was surrounded, handcuffed and kidnapped by unidentified masked ICE agents in a scene reminiscent of discredited Latin American dictatorships. Her only crime was engaging in free speech, coauthoring an article criticizing the United States support for Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people. Other foreign students have also been arrested by ICE agents and incarcerated far from their family and friends without due process. Hundreds have had their visas terminated.
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Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father of three who had protected status, was arrested and jailed in what the government admits was an “administrative error.” He remains imprisoned in a brutal El Salvadoran prison. The point of these arrests is to institutionalize terror as state policy much as the Nazis terrorized Jewish families.
These attacks are not confined to immigrants and refugees although this would be bad enough. Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian business consultant was “kidnapped” by immigration authorities and jailed for 12 days despite possessing a job offer and visa paperwork. And in a shocking statement, President Trump has confirmed that he intends to start deporting American citizens to the El Salvador gulag.
We cannot remain silent in the face of assault on liberties
Trump is pursuing these assaults on our freedoms in the name of fighting antisemitism by incorrectly equating criticism of Israel’s foreign policy with antisemitism. They are not the same.
It wasn’t long ago that Trump was praising a mob chanting “Jews will not replace us” as “very fine people” and claiming, reminiscent of Hitler, that “immigrants were poisoning the blood of the country.” His rationale is a smokescreen.
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As the son of first-generation Jewish parents whose father fought fascism in WW II, I was taught to never be silent in the face of injustice. That remains the lesson of the Holocaust. Silence in the face of the Trump administration’s assaults on our freedoms and democracy is complicity.
In August 1963 Miriam traveled to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with 250,000 others. If she was alive today, I know how she would celebrate Holocaust Remembrance Day: by actively opposing the Trump administration’s attacks on the rights and liberties of all of us, citizens, immigrants and refugees. That is the only way to give meaning to the saying “never again.”
Michael Rosen is a retired professor at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: US experiencing assault on rights similar to Nazi Germany | Opinion
