Tag Archives: Nazi war crimes

What the Texas and Terezin Camps Have in Common

It chilled me to the bone when I heard Joel Rose on Morning Edition (June 27) report on his visit with other press reporters to the facility in Clint, Texas, a reaction to the appalling conditions reported by attorneys earlier in the week. When Joel reported on how clean the facility was, with shelves of snacks, all I could think of was how the Nazis hoodwinked the International Red Cross at Terezin. The IRC visit and report bolstered world confidence that things just couldn’t be that bad for the Jews in the camps, and made Hitler’s story credible.

Clint Texas Detention Center

Terezin from above

The Border Patrol invited the press to Clint because of the horror stories that emerged when attorneys interviewed some of the more than 250 children in the facility. They reported appalling conditions, then demanded court relief: unsupervised children living in filth, hunger, no basic sanitary materials, sleeping on the floor. A government attorney, Sarah Fabian, had earlier argued that beds, soap and toothbrushes were not necessary to provide safe and sanitary conditions for migrant children, which are required under an earlier court order.

Even after its director resigned, the Border Patrol had to fight back against all this bad publicity, and after a couple of days they opened the doors to the press—no cameras of course, and no access to the children. Before NPR host Steve Inskeep put these remarks in context, here’s what reporter Joel Rose said:

“And what I saw is really totally different from the picture painted by these lawyers. The facility was clean. They did not let us talk to the kids, but they showed us the holding cells where more than 100 children are now staying. They showed us the pantry full of snacks – microwavable burritos and soup – and the supply room, where the agents keep toothbrushes and soap and clothes. And the Border Patrol says that these lawyers who visited the site last week did not see any of this, that they only interviewed the children in another room.”

Inskeep quickly reminded us of the lawyers’ testimony about actual conditions, and Rose interviewed Clara Long of Human Rights Watch, who said “You’re going to a facility that has been prepared for a tour. They’ve also moved out . . . children from the facility before you visited. And they didn’t give you access to speak directly with children so that they could tell you what was happening and what they had been through in detention.” Here’s the full interview.

The Fox News View: Just as Grim

By the way, the Fox News reporter present on the same tour reported that:

117 children are there now, down from about 250 when the lawyers visited. This means that about 133 have been shipped off elsewhere. The peak, according to Fox, was 700 two months ago, in a facility designed to hold 105 adults.
Children being removed from Clint Center
The children are eating only oatmeal for breakfast, ramen noodles for lunch, and burritos for dinner. Anyone who knows anything about nutrition can understand why they are hungry. There is no kitchen on site.
To serve those 117 children, there were seven Port-a-Potties outside and military-style showers. The picture below is of such showers at Fort Lee. The full Fox story is here.

Military style showers at Fort Lee

Parallels with Terezin

Now let’s go back to Terezin. In that case, it took months to prepare, not just a few days. To their credit, Danish leaders insisted that they wanted to interview the Danes who were interred at Terezin. Finally, after much stalling, the German authorities agreed, and they set about preparing for the June 1943 visit. This photo shows children greeting the Red Cross:

Terezin children greeting Red Cross

Here are the similarities:

• The camp was cleaned up and “beautified,” in this case with Jewish women sweeping up streets with hairbrushes, and planting flowers throughout. At Clint, all they had time for was cleaning. I wouldn’t have liked to be on duty those few nights.

• 7,503 inmates were sent to Auschwitz to reduce overcrowding. In Texas, they transferred about half the kids elsewhere.

• Special attention was given to fool the Red Cross into thinking that food supplies were adequate. A chilling testimony by survivor Eva Erben tells us that the children were told to go to a certain corner, where they would receive bread and butter and sardines, as opposed to the usual starvation fare. Then, when the camp commander came by with the Red Cross officials, they were to say “Oh, Uncle Rom, not bread and sardines again!”

Children at Terezin during Red Cross visit

Not content with this performance, the Nazis prepared a propaganda film to reinforce for the world what only a few had seen – then deported and murdered the director and cast.

What now?

The Red Cross bought it, and so did the world. Whom will we believe now– the children speaking through their lawyers, who say they are hungry, who were visibly dirty, had no beds or care or education – or the Border Patrol, who has staged this “visit” just as unscrupulously as the Nazis did at Terezin?

Rounding up Children, Then and Now

Marian Pritchard with Erica Polak, a Jewish baby she was hiding, US HMM During my 13 years researching and writing An Address in Amsterdam, I often tried to imagine how I would have felt as a Gentile as the Nazis rounded up my Jewish neighbors – especially the children.

We know of at least one young woman, Marian Pritchard, who just couldn’t bear it when she saw Nazis storming a home for Jewish children and tossing them into trucks. Although she was only 19, Pritchard became a staunch resistance worker who kidnapped, stole, lied, deceived and even killed by the end of the war, protecting 150 Jewish lives in the process. Here she is in 1944 with Erika Pritchard, one of the Jewish babies she hid (photo from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum).

Far more people looked away from the roundups, or walked past the groups being marched through the city, or wished the war was over already. Their indifference and collusion were a factor in the mass murder of 80% of Amsterdam’s Jewish population of 75,000.

Now, when I see stories about the children we are incarcerating at the border, I understand the position of the Dutch in 1940-45 so much better. Something terrible is happening in my country, and I have a share of responsibility for it – more than the Dutch did, because they were occupied by a foreign power. In this case, my money is paying for it. My elected officials are allowing inhumane policies unless they are out front and center opposing and organizing against it. How should I respond when I see photographs of young kids sleeping under mylar blankets and nothing else? “Basic child welfare standards do not apply,” according to the Huffington Post.

File photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP

I have read that no one is allowed to touch or comfort them. Hundreds have been separated from everyone they love, and many have little hope of reunification. Toddlers are taken into court hearings with representation that is a complete charade. In fact, 12,800 children were in custody in September 2018. Two have actually died under our roof, 8-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonzo and 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin.

The prison (called a “tent city”) in Tornillo, Texas has been releasing some children for the last few weeks, and is slated to close – but this is no guarantee that the situation is better. According to WLRN in Miami, “With the recent releases of children, migrant advocates are cautiously hopeful. But they question why more of the 12,400 children who remain in the HHS shelter system have not been released. And they wonder why the government is closing Tornillo, but expanding another unlicensed emergency shelter in South Florida?”

Immigrant children now housed in a tent encampment under the new “zero tolerance” policy by the Trump administration are shown walking in single file at the facility near the Mexican border in Tornillo, Texas, U.S. June 19, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

It’s so easy to feel sickened by all this and turn away, to agree with those who say “It’s just too depressing” or “I can’t stand it, so I try not to think about it.” Those are understandable reactions. But they don’t help the kids. How can we take personal responsibility to stop the cruelty we are engaging in as a nation?

Maintain the pressure on our Senators and Representatives. Praise those who are taking action, such as California Rep. Ted Lieu (D), and those who are starting investigations in the House of Representatives. If your Congresspeople are not among those who are leading the charge, goad them until they do, or ensure that they are hearing the full range of their constituents’ views.

Write or speak directly to those who perpetrate these crimes against humanity – the President, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Kevin K. McAleenan. Write them, but also call their staffs. These people are paid to listen to you – except right now they aren’t, because of the government shut down. They’ll be back one day.

Get together with others to take creative action to protest and resist. Link up with the peace and justice organizations in your community to see what’s possible as a group. Depending on where you are, children and adults are being held in multiple locations. Just as in Amsterdam under the Nazis, the invisibility of these prisons makes it possible for the outrages to continue.

People protest against U.S. immigration policies on the American side, right, of the Mexico-America border near Tijuana on Dec. 10, 2018. RNS photo by Jair Cabrera Torres

Support the organizations which are providing humanitarian and legal aid to these persecuted people, both adults and children. No one will help them but you and me. Many groups are worthy, but for whatever it’s worth these are my choices:

Keep the stories alive. Pass them along. Don’t let these children be forgotten – or their parents. Talk about them at home and in your places of worship, write and post about them on your social media. Tell your kids and grandkids what is going on. Get them involved in trying to communicate why their country shouldn’t treat anybody this way, much less another child. If we involve children now, maybe we can face them when they grow up.

The Echoes of Kristallnacht

Synagogue in flames

Kristallnacht is significant because it was a moment of warning about what was to come. What appeared to be individual violence carried out by thugs was specifically sanctioned and incited by the state. What happened that night of November 9-10, 1938? As always, there was an excuse.

Thousands of Polish Jews had been expelled from Germany, and an enraged Jewish teenager shot a German diplomat as a result. The diplomat died about the same time as a big Nazi celebration, and Goebbels used the occasion to call for a rampage – but not officially. “The Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.” This was both a call and a license to vandalize Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. The word was passed down from party officials and the Security Police to their local outlets. Although the Nazis later tried to maintain the fiction that these events happened locally, it’s clear that they were orchestrated from Berlin.

The numbers tell one part of the story of the night of November 9-10: 91 people dead, 267 synagogues desecrated or destroyed, some of them burning through the night in full view of fire departments which were ordered to watch unless nearby buildings were threatened. More than 7500 Jewish businesses were destroyed and looted. But that’s only part of the story.

Kristallnacht was the moment when the German state first arrested people only because they were Jewish. They took 30,000 Jewish men, mostly young and vigorous per the orders from above, shipped them off to work and concentration camps. (The men below were marched through the streets and forced to watch as a synagogue burned.) Some died of the camp conditions, but many were released when they agreed to immigrate.

Men arrested during Kristallnacht

That’s where Kristallnacht and my own life’s work intersect. Kristallnacht sounded a warning that German Jews could not ignore. The Netherlands had been neutral in World War I, and there was a longstanding, well integrated Jewish community there. After Kristallnacht, it’s not surprising that more than 40,000 German Jews applied for a visa to enter the Netherlands, but only 7,000 got one, and even they were put in camps. In desperation, 2,000 more refugees snuck in, and at least the Dutch didn’t send them back, although they did incarcerate them. Is this an echo of the situation of refugees who try to enter the U.S. today? We’ll come back to that point.

Unfortunately, most of the German Jews who made it into the Netherlands were rounded up and murdered. Volumes have been written about how and why the Holocaust could have happened in as open and tolerant a society as the Netherlands. One factor was surely the superior systems the Dutch developed to identify who lived where, in an orderly population register which made it easy to check whether an identity card was genuine or not. It also greatly facilitated roundups by showing where the Jewish people were living. The Holocaust was also facilitated by the fact that the Dutch were and are traditionally a law-abiding people who basically trusted their government. There was no tradition of resistance there, as there was in countries like Belgium, France and Italy. Many other factors have been explored in response to the question, “How could the Holocaust happen in the Netherlands – and to such a devastating degree?”

Whatever scholars may differ about, the collusion of ordinary people was an absolutely key factor. Many minded their own business and tried to keep life going on as normally as they could, activities which would have been benign in a different time, but in this time made them colluders with the Nazis.

women in front of store with smashed windows Kristallnacht

Looking at the situation instead from the Dutch Jewish point of view, it seems strange that most of them simply did not believe that they would lose their homes, their businesses and professions, their freedom of movement and ultimately their lives. We cannot underestimate how safe they felt. Let’s hear from Dr. Jacob Presser on this point. Dr. Presser was a Jewish historian who himself survived the war by hiding, and he spent 12 years researching and writing the classic volume Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry. Here’s how he depicts the mood of his Jewish countrymen at the beginning of 1942:

“Many pinned their hopes on the likelihood of Germany eventually losing the war, and consoled themselves with the knowledge that, however bad their position, it could have been much worse. Moreover, few Jews believed that the Germans would carry their policy to the limit. True, there had been raids and hundreds had died, but, thank God, most Dutch Jews had been allowed to remain in their old homes. True also, the Germans had sounded the ugly word of ’emigration,’ but had they not prefixed the comforting adjective ‘voluntary’ – and was the measure not directed at foreign rather than Dutch Jews?” That gives us a sense of why only about one Jewish person in seven hid.

woman emerging from underground hiding place

We’ve all heard of the Dutch resistance and revered it. Having studied it for 13 years as I researched and wrote An Address in Amsterdam, I honor what those people did, in fear of their lives – especially those who had the double jeopardy of being Jewish. That’s why I chose to write about a young Jewish woman who joins the resistance. But as much as we honor those resisters, we can never forget how few they were. Yes, historians say 24-25,000, and I think we can double that safely if we include people who only helped occasionally. But even so, we aren’t up to ONE PERCENT in a country of 8.7 million.

No one can review this history without a sense of apprehension. Yet there are so many differences between our situation now, and that in Germany or the Netherlands under the Nazis.

We live in a constitutional democracy
Our press is still speaking up to some extent
Violence against persecuted groups is still sporadic and occasional, and
We do have elections so we can correct the course.

And yet – who among us has not wondered

Are we sliding down the slope from civilization to barbarism? Because it is a slope, not a single moment of choice.
Is the American Jewish community not, like those in Germany and the Netherlands, deeply integrated into society at large? Yet the fact of assimilation did not protect them.

Kristallnacht broken windows

If we look back to the times that began with Kristallnacht for inspiration as well as horror, what can we find to guide us now? Kristallnacht was a time when many people woke up and realized that the Nazis were in earnest, that their hatred had turned to broken bones and windows, desecrated synagogues and 30,000 Jewish prisoners. Some of those people who woke up resisted, by fleeing or becoming active against the Nazis or both.

Can we make this anniversary of Kristallnacht our own moment of awakening?

When we hear code words for white nationalism and supremacy become acceptable in public discourse, can we speak up against them?

When we hear of hate crimes – whether they are in Charlottesville or Sacramento or Omaha – whether they are against peaceful protestors or African American men or someone who looked Muslim — can we respond with empathy and unity, as we did for Pittsburgh.

low candles lit

Can we say that whatever acts of hatred the U.S. government itself is committing must be stopped – and by us? To take a single example, think of children who are refugees and immigrants like my impoverished ancestors and perhaps yours. They are being stolen from their parents, just as they were at the gates of other camps. Can we claim those children, imprisoned in “tent cities,” that barbarous euphemism? Can we fight for them as strenuously as we would for our own children? Are they ours? If our tax dollars are paying for them to be kidnapped and imprisoned, are they not ours?

Let’s change gears and focus for a moment on the people who stayed home for Kristallnacht. They may have been quieter anti-Semites, or they may have been friendly to the Jewish people and disgusted by the violence in the streets. But they didn’t stop it. This is the story in the Netherlands, as well.

I wish I could offer you more words of comfort today. But all I can bring you is what your people have always done – to continue your hard work in the service of other persecuted people and yourselves. Work that everyone is morally and ethically required to do, whether or not we ever see the results. We are in a time when that spirit is more needed than ever.

Let’s not allow the 80^th anniversary of Kristallnacht and the murders in Pittsburgh to terrify and dishearten us. May they instead awaken us to be even more active on behalf of justice, and what used to be called “the human family.” As I need not remind you, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

Untitled, by Barbara Chen

This talk was part of the Shabbat service at the Israel Congregation of Manchester, Vermont, on Friday, November 9, 2018. Many thanks to them for inviting me.

From Dachau to Durham, North Carolina

Sharon Halperin and Mike Roig Sculpture Dachau Memorial

In my home town of Durham, North Carolina, I was led to a Holocaust memorial unlike any I’ve ever seen before. It’s the only place in the U.S. to memorialize ashes from Dachau which are proven human remains. The ashes came into the right hands: Sharon Halperin’s, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors who became the “guiding angel” of this memorial project. The ashes were donated by the family of Mr. Joseph Corsbie, a GI in Germany in May 1945.

Sent on an errand to Dachau, he encountered a liberated Jewish prisoner who handed him the ashes from a crematorium, enjoining him never to forget what he had seen. Although Mr. Corsbie did not speak of the incident for decades, he began to discuss it with his family as he neared death. They felt that the ashes should be returned to the Jewish community to be treated with the respect the victims were denied in life.

Once the ashes were analyzed and proved to be those of human beings, Sharon and her family commissioned a sculpture and signage to mark the site. Yesterday, the generous Jane Gabin of the Beth El Synagogue took me to see the resulting memorial, where we met Sharon. Rather than use the expected barbed wire or smokestacks or other conventional imagery of the Holocaust, sculptor Mike Roig chose to depict a moving flame of polished steel. It stands on a low bridge which says in Hebrew and English: “Remember. Do not stand idly by.”

Approaching the memorial, one feels a sense of uplift, as of flames rising to the sky, still surging from the ashes below – but also a sense of something growing, emerging, and transcending. The sculpture is taller than a person, but not so monumental that we can’t feel part of it. The geometric shape twirls in even a slight breeze, and suddenly I began to recognize my reflection in it – first blurry and indistinct, then sharper as I moved closer. I was literally in the picture: both in the flames, and in the resurgence of life. Stones at the base waited to be placed in memory. Much like the Tomb of the Unknowns, this place is an honored grave for so many who never had one except in our memories.

Dedicating the Memorial

At the dedication in 2015, sculptor Mike Roig’s eloquent words speak of his intentions:

“The “eternal flame” in this sculpture will surely never extinguish. It moves according to the currents of air like those interred here were moved and shaped by the flow of history, and like we are by the ever-evolving now.

“In its surface you will see a reflection of us all as we stand before it. It is necessarily indistinct and impressionistic, and our reflected forms waver and distort as it moves, and that reflects a truth that in trying to see ourselves in that history most of us cannot know with clarity how that history would have drawn us in, or how we would have responded. There are those [survivors] here who can because they were there, but the rest of us we can only to strive to conceive of a vision of ourselves where we would have responded with courage and dignity, empathy and compassion, resistance and defiance.”

May it be so. Deep thanks to Sharon and her family for creating this sacred space, to Jane for taking me there, and to the Beth El Synagogue for welcoming me. Sculpture with stones below it

A Long Labor: A Dutch Mother’s Holocaust Memoir

Rhodea Shandler’s A Long Labor: A Dutch Mother’s Holocaust Memoir is a treasure.

A Dutch Mother’s Holocaust Memoir

When I first began to learn about the Holocaust and resistance in the Netherlands, I expected the stories to be grisly and the heroes to be larger than life. Very few stories have a happy ending in that time, and even those that do involve loss, terror and many shades of grey. And yet. There’s inspiration to be gleaned by seeing that ordinary people acted with courage, and that they were human, too, sometimes failing to do what they knew they should.

Rhodea Shandler faced many of the same dilemmas as the fictional characters in my historical novel, An Address in Amsterdam, about a young Jewish woman who risks her life in the Resistance. Rhodea gets pregnant while in hiding on a farm, and the formerly welcoming hosts freeze her out emotionally and practically (less food under worse conditions). Only because another Jewish woman in hiding with the same family is a nurse does she successfully deliver her baby in breech position, of course with no anesthetic or proper sanitation. Similarly, when my novel opens, my heroine Rachel is making a delivery to a wardrobe full of hidden Jewish people in a basement. They all crush in together as the police raid the house. Rachel feels another woman’s rounded tummy mashed against hers, and wordlessly learns that she’s pregnant, and of course it must be a secret. The hazards of the noise of childbirth, much less a baby itself, were more than most hosts could take on – especially given that they were already risking deportation, execution, imprisonment and/or torture.

Like many Jewish people who survived the Holocaust, Rhodea did not feel compelled to record her story until very late in life, and in fact died in 2006 just before this book was published. She takes us through the warning phase before the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, when the small NSB (Dutch Nazi Party) was still being seen as innocuous:

“Since Holland was a democracy, the NSB had the right to try to influence the people by means of rallies, hate mail, newspaper articles and so on. Initially, most Dutch people just made jokes about them. It was such a small party that it did not seem strong enough to make trouble. We knew they were there, but we thought they were ineffectual. . . What could we possibly have to fear?” Page 52

In fact, it was the NSB and their followers who beat up on the Jewish community after the Nazis invaded, far more than the German soldiers. They were under strict orders to behave properly toward their Aryan brothers – a situation which changed radically after many Dutch made it clear that they regarded the Germans as oppressors.

Although Rhodea was never in the resistance, her perspective fascinates me as that of a young Jewish woman, and one who survived the war in hiding. Her story is different from the Amsterdam situation with which I am more familiar, because she lived in the small northern city of Leeuwarden, where the Jewish population was virtually exterminated. Although she moved several times from one hiding place to another, Rhodea was not betrayed by her hosts, only treated badly when she was pregnant. She herself understands why her situation terrified them. Again and again, she shows what a big heart and compassionate perspective she has.

However, a moment arrives when she does something that haunts her forever. She was working with mental patients at the Jewish asylum at Apeldoorn, where the staff had advance warning to get out. Her husband spoke to her by telephone and insisted that she leave immediately. After helping some of the patients prepare to evacuate, Rhodea decides that it is time to save herself, even though other staff are remaining. She takes off her Jewish star, dresses in street clothes, and leaves her identification behind. Her colleagues are angry:

“They looked at me as a traitor; they were so dedicated to their work. . . I probably would have stayed too if my husband hadn’t been so adamant on the phone that I come home. I knew I had to look after myself first. It had really come to that point.” page 80

Her agony is compounded when she encounters some of the patients already wandering around the town as she heads for the train station. They of course recognize her as she shoos them away, an action which haunts her for years. “Was I a deserter?” she asks herself, even knowing that staff and patients were all seized and deported a few hours after she left. There were no survivors.

I’d read about the horrors of persecuting and exterminating the residents of this asylum and their caregivers, although this is the first time I’ve read a first person account. The situation appears in my novel because my heroine’s father is a physician who had recently admitted a patient there. When he hears of the Nazi raid,

His conscience was wracked by the thought of all those unstable people being subjected to even more terror. “Just before we came here, I had a man who attempted suicide admitted there. He was a peddler who couldn’t support his family anymore because of the Nazis.” He shook his head, looking like an old man who doesn’t understand the world anymore.

Like Rhodea, An Address’s heroine, Rachel Klein, comes to the point where she must save herself and her family – but by then she has done months of work for the underground. She is tired and terrified, and something happens which is a last straw for her. Even knowing that she had to do what she did, both the real Rhodea and the fictional Rachel are haunted by saving themselves, a particular kind of survivor guilt. They also respond to their persecution and predicament as Anne Frank did, by becoming more broad-minded and humanitarian. Rhodea puts it beautifully:

“Even now, the knowledge that all our loved ones, friends, family and everyone who suffered in concentration camps and jails did not survive their ordeal makes me jump out of bed in the middle of the night with tears running down my cheeks. although it was 60 years ago that all this happened, even now it is unclear to me why the Jews were so hated and even nowadays continue to be persecuted in certain groups.

“It causes me to try to be benevolent and understanding, and to avoid confrontation or judgment of others who are different from me. This is the only light that I see now.”

For more information about the book, click here.

The Dutch thought it couldn’t happen there, too

Marcher places flowers at Amsterdam’s Auschwitz memorial

The New York Times reports that the Dutch are constructing a memorial wall and Holocaust museum in Amsterdam’s old Jewish Quarter because memory is fading or inaccurate – despite the worldwide readership of The Diary of Anne Frank. There is so much more to the story than one brilliant child writer’s account, despite her humanitarianism and universal appeal.

Historians have grappled endlessly with the question of how and why one of the most tolerant nations in the world allowed almost three-quarters of its Jewish population to be murdered. It’s especially ironic since the Netherlands was a refuge for Jewish people since the Spanish Inquisition.

While the answers to “Why?” are many and complex, a primary one is that the Dutch believed it couldn’t happen there, even after the Nazi invasion. The Jewish people had been assimilated for centuries, in professions from symphony conductors to medicine and art, shopkeeping, peddling, diamond cutting and trading. The head of the Dutch Supreme Court was Jewish. It was preposterous to think that people so integral to society at every level could be isolated and shipped off somewhere. Much less murdered. No matter what the Germans were doing in their own country, it couldn’t happen in the Netherlands. Dutch people wouldn’t allow that.

Hiding was the best policy

Nor was it only the Dutch Gentiles who believed this. In doing the research for my historical novel, An Address in Amsterdam, I learned that many Jewish people themselves refused to believe that persecution would turn into isolation, much less deportation and mass murder. At each step – registration, identity cards, restricted travel and business, stars, even deportation – some people continued to rationalize the Nazis’ actions. Others, like my fictional heroine, resisted. Only one Jew in seven hid, which turned out to be the best way to survive the war other than pre-emptive escape. Dutch Jewish citizens felt a misplaced confidence in their country and countrymen – much like the confidence many in the U.S. are feeling now, as we complacently believe that Donald Trump can’t win. Instead, we hear more and more hate rhetoric aimed at Muslims, refugees, and undocumented workers and their families. What can we do to provide them with the protection which the Dutch failed to give the Jewish part of their people?

What are we refusing to believe in 2016?

Donald Trump says we should bar members of one religion, Muslims, from entering our country, targeting them in a way that violates the core American value of religious freedom. He wants to build a wall to keep out the citizens of a particular nation, again singling out a group of people rather than judging them as individuals. This is directly contrary to the lessons of the Holocaust.

Fortunately, one of these is that resistance can have some effectiveness, even in the very worst situation – especially when it happens broadly and quickly as a unified action (as in Denmark). We live in a democracy where we can work to ensure that Trump does not get into office. Even if Hillary Clinton were a far less progressive candidate than she is, we should still work as hard as we can to elect her – persuading not only the lukewarm voters, but those who, like me, supported Bernie Sanders. If we believe not just in him as an individual, but in what he stands for, we have no choice but to learn the lessons of history. Let’s stand beside him and work for Hillary.

Another Side of Dam Square

Identified as in public domain: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/536491374335302561/

I’m doing this by eye, but I’m pretty sure that this building is on Dam Square on the Royal Palace side. The SS sign you see was designed to attract Dutch recruits, particularly after the invasion of Russia, when some were motivated by the idea that they could fight the communists. Nazi imagery like this was commonplace in major public places after the invasion in 1940.

Siert Bruins could have been recruited by this office on the Dam. He is a Dutch-born SS volunteer who was accused in 2013 of murdering Aldert Klaas Dijkema, a Dutch resistance fighter, as a reprisal. However, the judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence. Earlier, Bruins was convicted in absentia by a Dutch court for several other murders after the war, but he had already fled to Germany and taken German citizenship. Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal found him living under a false name in a German village, and he was convicted there of two other murders and imprisoned for 5 years.

As I researched my novel, I learned that reprisal killings were all too common. When the Resistance took some strong action, the Nazis often killed someone, or in some cases, a whole group of randomly assorted people. No wonder my heroine is afraid for her life.