Holocaust Comparisons Are Not Always Wrong
My father escaped from Germany (Hamburg) in 1938 as a ten-year old boy. He and his family ended up in Peru, and he came to the USA in 1949. I was born in Washington, DC, in 1963. Quite a few of our relatives did not escape, perishing by suicide or in the camps. When the Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, compared ICE’s actions in Minneapolis to those of the Nazis, he was evoking a time that played a central role in my childhood and that still looms large for my family.
Many, often thoughtful, Jewish people and institutions have criticized Mr. Walz for his words, notably the United States Holocaust Museum argued he was making a false equivalency and exploiting the Holocaust. I wish to offer an alternative perspective. The similarities of government-sponsored armed paramilitary thugs seeking out people to imprison and to then remove, with no regard for due process and largely on the basis of their ethnicity, seems a striking parallel to me. The actions of the of the current US Federal Government have more similarities to actions of the Nazi Government of the 1930’s than could be listed in one blog post.
I took my wife and three children to Germany over this past winter break and saw the stumbling stones in front of my family’s former house in Hamburg. Seeing the Lerdau name on those slightly raised brass-colored blocks is more than sobering. It is a reminder that the evils of Fascism can touch each of us. Indeed, the call for memory contained in the Stolpersteine is also a call to recognize that the human capacity for the hatred and dehumanization of the Holocaust did not end when the camps were liberated. We must acknowledge that the obvious similarities between Germany of the 1930’s and the US Government’s actions of today are more than embarrassing. They are heartbreaking.
If “Never Again” is to be more than a platitude, we must be vigilant regarding current versions of the fascist threat. Pointing out the vivid similarities between Nazi Germany and current Minnesota, is not “exploiting the Holocaust.” Calling the violence and oppression ongoing there merely “tensions” is offensive both to Minnesotans today and to the memories of people such as my father, who lived through lawless attacks from government agents. We in America have to acknowledge the very painful truth of what we are experiencing. The Holocaust is, indeed, unique. But that uniqueness should not blind us to the very real possibility of its recurrence.
