Liberation +70

Yesterday was the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau by advancing Soviet troops. January 27 is not an anniversary I usually note. This year, because it was seventy years ago, and the number of survivors is rapidly dwindling, it's been a bigger deal.

It occurred to me, maybe for the first time now, that this event happened only four years and nine months before my birth.  The same amount of time as a current eight-year old is removed from the events of September 11, 2001. Will these kids study 9/11 in school when they are older, or will it be pushed under the rug, as the Holocaust was for many of us?

My father was a World War II veteran. He fought in the Pacific. My sister and I asked him lots of questions, but he clearly did not want to talk about his experiences. In public school, we never talked about World War II. Even in high school, in both American and World History, our teachers expressed (probably fake) regret that we ran out of school year after World War I. At the fancy private university I attended, history classes talked about the rise of the Nazis to power, but skirted over the systematic murder of Jewish Europe. One of my fraternity brothers, a pre-med named Peter, had Holocaust survivor parents. They, like everyone else, would not tell him their experiences. He wrote a nearly book-length paper for a history class on the how the Nazis seized power. This was just before William Shirer's massive tome on the same subject.

I posted Tuesday on Facebook about how the liberation of Auschwitz was so close to the time of my birth. I got several responses from former public school classmates. One told me she also was not taught about The Holocaust; another said her father was with a US Army unit that liberated Buchenwald, and her father made sure she knew all about it.

I remember finding out in Jewish religious school that one of my friends was born in a refugee camp in Europe in 1950. I asked him why his family was still there nearly five years after the end of the war. He said "They had nowhere else to go." Since then I've met many Jews born between 1946 and 1950 in refugee camps in Europe. Many of them describe parents who refused to talk about their experiences, or had feelings of alienation when classmates went to visit aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, when they had none. One woman, born in Sweden and raised in Tel Aviv, told me she used to hear people scream in the night. She and her friends called these people "Mi Sham" ("from there") although, because no one would speak of their experiences, the kids didn't know where "there" was.

Many Jewish people I know still distrust the United States government because it refused entry to Jewish refugees from Europe, and because it wouldn't bomb the railroad entrances to the camps. Those on the left don't trust the government to run a war competently,or  stand up for civil rights for Jews, gays, African-Americans, or Moslems. They identify with oppression, with not having a voice.

On the right, friends have become hyper-Zionists. They believer the rhetoric of Moslem extremists, Iran and the Palestinian Authority needs to be taken at face value, because we didn't believe Hitler would actually do what he did, even though he made his intentions clear. A right-wing American friend living in Israel believes Israel or the US should bomb Iran's nuclear facilities because they threaten the US and Israel.

On my grandfather Sam Polk's last trip to Baltimore in 1974, he and I visited his cousin, Rabbi Mendel Poliakoff. The Rabbi's daughter had just gotten married, but it was the same weekend a closer cousin in my grandmother's family got married in New York. My grandfather wanted to express his regret for missing the wedding in Baltimore. For some reason, they got into a heated argument about Vietnam. I, veteran of anti-war marches, and not exactly a child at twenty-four, stayed out of the discussion.

"We have to stop the Communists, because we didn't stop the Nazis," said Rabbi Poliakoff. My grandfather answered "What if we are the Nazis in this case?"

In the Talmud, there are often discussions of interpretation of Biblical passages.
    "Rabbi X says because of thus and so it should be like this. Rabbi Y says because of that and this, here is a different interpretation. Rabbi Z says Rabbi X and Rabbi Y are both correct. The contradiction can be explained like this..."

Here too, the people on both sides, the hawks and doves, the liberals and conservatives are both coming from the same place. We live with the mistakes of the 1930s and 1940s, with the ghosts of ancestors and cousins we will never meet. We know or knew survivors, with their tales of horror. We read books about great heroes, political weaklings, mobs of people hating other people, our people particularly, and we want to make sure that doesn't happen again.

A gay friend on Facebook yesterday, not Jewish, expressed his fear of the rhetoric coming from Republicans and some Evangelical clergy. Ben Carson was widely reported saying that a baker forced to make cakes for a same-gender wedding might poison the cake. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said that, in the light of court approval of same-gender marriage, there should be a constitutional amendment to not allow such marriages. Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and other candidates have made anti-gay statements. My friend is afraid of what will happen if these people come to power.

What can we do seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz? I feel powerless. All I do is write this blog, letters to the editors of different papers decrying  anti-gay rhetoric, attempts to keep people from voting, the loosening of the few restrictions on gun ownership, or the apparent takeover of West Virginia by the management of coal, oil and gas producers. My big worry is not from the Moslems, here, in Iran, or Palestine. I worry more about a fascist takeover of the United States. In West Virginia, there is such a palpable hatred of President Obama because "He wants to take our guns away," or "He's making war on coal," or "He's a secret Moslem" or not as often spoken, "He's pro-choice and gay friendly," and, (of course), half African-American. Irrational hatred is frightening.

The whole world is on edge with the terror attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris, with attacks on Jews throughout Europe, apparently from Moslem youth, with the continuing uncertainty in the Middle East, and with what I see as inflammatory rhetoric from the Republican Party in the United States to outreach those who hate anyone they see as "other."