My Parents Have Been Spared

One week before the 2016 Presidential election, I was on a business trip in Florida. After a long day, I flipped on the TV and saw my first Trump commercial, since being from the blue state of Illinois, I had not before come across any Trump TV campaign ads. Fear gripped me immediately as I recalled my late father’s stories of how it felt to be a Jewish German teenager when Hitler became head of the German state. As the ad played on my TV, images of prominent financial leaders who happened to be Jews (George Soros, Janet Yellin and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs) appeared, and the narrator spoke of people from “global special interests” or the “global power structure.” The political TV commercial ended with an ebullient Trump, clapping while walking as he purportedly was ready to rescue America from the people who were responsible for America’s problems. Hillary Clinton partners “with these people who don’t have your good in mind,” but Donald Trump will save us all.

Earlier in the campaign, I had seen the internet meme spread by the Trump campaign with Hillary’s face next to a Magen David and piles of cash and saw that as the unhinged work of a few anti-Semites who were probably not central to the Trump campaign. I dismissed my worries at the time, since I am used to seeing other anti-Semitic memes, and I just assumed that you can’t run a campaign without some extreme crackpots who sometimes infiltrate campaigns. My fear that night in Florida was recognition that this TV ad was not the work of some radical fringe element in the Trump campaign; instead, this was a high-cost, slick production to represent the final push for Trump to win the election. The ad was the work of Steve Bannon, the Trump campaign manager, who as the former Breitbart publisher has had to continually defend himself and his publication from charges of white nationalism, Xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism, and of course, anti-Semitism. I recognized the ad’s themes as lifted from Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic fabrication published in Russia over 113 years ago describing a Jewish plan for global domination.

That night in Florida, my thoughts focused on my father, who was 18 years old when Hitler assumed power in 1933. I remembered a story my father told me about a German government contest he entered to submit a paper about the German state’s agricultural economy. Since my grandfather was a cattle dealer, this was a subject my Dad felt confident about, and his goal was to be a writer, so he was happy to be informed of his paper’s acceptance and that it would be read by Reich minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels on a radio broadcast. My grandparents and father eagerly waited as they gathered in their parlor around their radio. I can imagine the look of horror on their faces as Goebbels read several winning entries on the air, each paper concluding strangely that Jews had interfered in the German natural economic and agricultural processes to cheat honest Germans out of their hard work. Watching that slick update of Protocols in that Florida hotel room aroused the same fears my father and grandparents probably felt around that radio over 80 years before, but at least I knew that Trump would not win the election, so I was able to get a good night’s sleep.

For the past few weeks, I see people going about their lives and looking normal but I can’t seem to shake my thoughts as I walk my dog. I wonder if my father had the same problems in anchoring himself in daily life in post 1933 Germany. I realize that my Dad did not have the knowledge of what would happen next in Germany, while I very much know what could happen in the U.S.—so I’m probably a lot more nervous than my father was immediately after Hitler’s rise to power. My grandparents even assured my father that things would turn out okay, that the German institutions will save them, that life wouldn’t be so bad. I think about that a lot now when I see President Obama assuring us that this great American experiment in democracy and tolerance will survive Trump. My father instilled in me a great passion for social justice, and he told me: “Never normalize evil,” as we watched the Watergate hearings together. I was thinking of him the entire time when I went to Madison on December 19, 2016 to protest in front of the Electoral College in the Wisconsin State Capital.

As the German Jews found more and more challenges to earning a living in the mid 1930’s, my grandparents told their children that they should leave, but that they will be able to live comfortably in Germany on their retirement savings. My father and my uncle were able to make their way to Chicago in 1937. After Kristallnacht, my grandfather ended up in Buchenwald, before it became a death camp. It was used to house Jews until they could be relocated out of the country, but the immigration doors of many countries were shut tight. My father was desperate to get my grandfather out of Buchenwald, so he pounded on doors all over Chicago in 1939 trying to get affidavits from U.S. citizens. I think of the Syrian refugees now, and I know my sadness with Syrian refugees unable to find refuge is nowhere near the desperation my father felt. Once my father stood at the door of a prominent Chicagoan to ask his help in 1939 and was shocked to be told that since his parents chose to stay in Germany, “let them stay with Hitler.” Fortunately my Dad’s younger sister who had immigrated to Argentina was able to get my grandparents safely there in 1940.

Five years after coming to Chicago, my father and his brother joined the U.S. Army to fight the Axis powers. My mother escaped Europe in 1939. She was lucky enough to get forged papers in her native Czechoslovakia and escape from Nazi-occupied Prague. Mom came to Chicago, where she met Dad and dated him during his Army service. The pride my parents felt for America continued well after WWII, and I grew up proud of my special status of being a first generation American. My grade school friends could not understand why I spoke with a Chicago dialect and why my parents had such strong accents. Every July 4th, I used to watch my father as he put out dozens of little American flags all over our front yard and then place a huge Old Glory from his bedroom window. My father was strongly against the Vietnam War, and we lived in an upscale suburban neighborhood with a lot of anti-war sentiment. On one July 4th holiday, my 16-year-old neighbor who shared our feelings about the Vietnam War came up to my Dad in the front yard to object to my family’s boastful show of patriotism. My father immediately reacted, “Don’t give up our flag. It’s our flag and represents our values.”

My mother is now 98 years old and in her fourth year of Alzheimer’s, but even before she lost her memories, she chose not to talk much about her life before racism and intolerance overwhelmed Europe, as it was always too painful to talk about her brother, sister, niece, and brother-in law murdered at Auschwitz. When I visit her at a retirement home in Chicago that my late father helped establish for the generation of European Jews who survived the Holocaust, there is no need for me to talk about what is happening now in Europe. My most enjoyable moments are when we listen to concerts in the retirement home’s entertainment hall. My mother doesn’t remember the words to many songs, but she can sing loudly every stanza of God Bless America and the National Anthem. She sings so loud that the entire audience looks away from the stage to focus on my Mom in the back row loudly singing the patriotism she feels for the country she came to as a refugee.

If my father was alive today, he would have a better understanding compared to most Americans of the consequences of the lies of fake news delivered via Russian social media trolls or Breitbart articles. He would recognize it as propaganda unleashed on a population to condition a nation to hate and fear. He would feel the same anger he felt as he experienced in class as his teachers and friends started to treat him differently. Or he would remember his sadness when told he could no longer run for his high school’s track team and instead have to bond with other Jews to form their own athletic club. My mother too would be heartbroken today, but fortunately now she doesn’t understand much as she looks at the TV screen and watches Donald Trump and laughs as he gesticulates crazily while giving speeches.

If my parents could see how the world looks now, I am not sure they would be able to process the fact that the former head of Breitbart, today’s modern version of Goebbels, will now be leading an attack of hate and fear with fake news on their native Europe from the White House and joining with a despot in Russia to destroy the world order their generation helped to bring about after World War II.

On January 20th, Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as President of the United States. I will be sad and angry on that day as I have been every day since November 9 when I woke up to the results of the election. But I will be grateful for just one thing on that day—I will be relieved that I don’t have to see the hearts of my parents being shattered into pieces when this new President is inaugurated.

January 18, 2017