It’s Not That Bad Yet

The Most Dangerous Words May Be: “It’s Not That Bad Yet”

History is easy to understand after it has happened. We know which warnings mattered, which reassurances proved false and which decisions came too late. Looking back at Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, the progression toward catastrophe can appear painfully obvious.

It was not obvious to the people living through it. That distinction is at the heart of my new book, When Is It Too Late? Holocaust Lessons on Risk, Decision Making, and the Failure to Act. 

I am the son of a Holocaust survivor. My mother, Mary Katz Claman, was a Hungarian Jew who was forced into the Kisvárda Ghetto, deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, selected for forced labour and eventually liberated after surviving circumstances that would have been almost unimaginable only a few years earlier.

My first book was about preserving her story. When I finished it, I thought that work was largely complete. October 7 made me realize there was another question I needed to explore.

What troubled me was not only the horror of the attack itself, but what followed. Jewish communities strengthened security, schools reviewed emergency procedures, Jewish students reported hostility and intimidation, and many Jews began questioning assumptions about their safety in democratic societies that they had rarely questioned before. 

I began looking at my mother’s experience differently. Instead of asking only what happened to her, I began asking what happened before what happened to her.

If we begin at Auschwitz, we begin too late

When we teach the Holocaust, understandably, we focus on its horrific endpoint: ghettos, deportation trains, concentration camps and mass murder. But if we begin at Auschwitz, we begin too late.

The more difficult lessons are found earlier, when people still lived in their homes, went to work, sent their children to school and planned for the future. Institutions still functioned, streets remained familiar and ordinary life continued, even as the protections beneath that life were weakening.

Danger did not arrive all at once. It accumulated through discrimination, exclusion, increasingly acceptable hatred, institutional failure and the gradual narrowing of choices.

This is one of the central lessons I took from researching my mother’s experience and the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. A society can continue to function while becoming progressively less safe for a minority. Normality and security are not necessarily the same thing.

The danger of hindsight

Today, it is easy to look at European Jews before the Holocaust and ask: Why didn’t they leave?

But leave for where? Families had homes, businesses, parents, children and communities. Immigration barriers were formidable, countries—including Canada—often refused Jewish refugees, and information was incomplete and contradictory.

Most importantly, the future had not happened yet. People were not choosing between remaining in Hungary and going to Auschwitz. They were deciding whether to abandon everything they knew because of a future that remained uncertain.

Hindsight changes that calculation. Once we know the ending, warning signs become clearer, false reassurances become obvious and decisions that were extraordinarily difficult at the time can appear simple.

There is a danger in that. If we convince ourselves that historical danger was obvious, we may assume future danger will also announce itself clearly. History gives us little reason for such confidence.

History does not have to repeat itself to warn us

Canada, the United States and other Western democracies today are not Nazi Germany or Hungary in 1944. Their political systems, legal protections and institutions are fundamentally different. My book does not predict another Holocaust, nor does it argue that catastrophe is inevitable. 

But rejecting false historical equivalence does not require us to reject the lessons of history. History can show us how people respond when hatred becomes more socially acceptable, how institutions behave when enforcing their principles becomes difficult, and how reassurance can sometimes substitute for action.

It also teaches us something uncomfortable about certainty: by the time everyone agrees that a danger is serious, some of the choices that once existed may already have disappeared.

That does not mean treating every disturbing development as evidence of impending catastrophe. It means examining the direction and accumulation of events, asking whether protections are weakening and preserving the ability to respond if circumstances deteriorate further.

What risk management taught me about history

My professional life has been spent in security risk management, and that experience inevitably influenced the way I approached this book. My mother’s history taught me what happened; my professional experience made me ask when the danger could have been recognized.

Risk management does not require us to prove that something terrible will happen before taking reasonable precautions. We identify threats and vulnerabilities, examine warning indicators, assess whether safeguards are functioning and consider the consequences if they fail.

The objective is not to predict catastrophe. It is to recognize changing conditions early enough to preserve options and take proportionate action.

The same distinction matters when we study history. We cannot know the future with certainty, but we can assess whether conditions are changing and whether the institutions intended to provide protection are actually doing so.

October 7 changed the question

For many Jews, October 7 did not simply change their view of Israel. It changed how they thought about Jewish security in the countries where they live and about the institutions they had long assumed would protect them.

The question is not whether Jews should flee Canada, the United States, Britain, France or other democracies. I make no such argument. The more important question is whether the safeguards of democratic societies will continue to function when they are tested.

Will universities enforce their own rules when Jewish students are intimidated? Will governments recognize antisemitism when doing so is politically uncomfortable? Will police, employers, school boards and civic institutions apply their standards consistently?

These questions do not require suppressing criticism of Israel or legitimate political protest. Democracies require dissent, Palestinian civilian suffering must be taken seriously, and Muslims must be protected from hatred and collective blame just as Jews must be. Protecting one minority cannot require abandoning another.

The real test of a society is not how it protects a minority when doing so is popular and easy. It is whether those protections remain dependable when that minority becomes controversial, isolated or politically inconvenient. That is also one of the institutional questions at the centre of the book. 

Learning the right lesson

One of the conclusions I reached while writing When Is It Too Late? is that we have often asked the wrong question about Jews who lived through the Holocaust. The lesson cannot simply be that they should have recognized the danger and left earlier.

Many did recognize it. Some tried to leave but could find no country willing to admit them. Others escaped one country only to find themselves trapped again when Nazi Germany expanded across Europe. Money, documents, family responsibilities, geography and immigration policy all determined what choices were actually available.

The better question is: How do individuals, communities and institutions recognize when conditions are changing while meaningful choices still remain?

That question reaches beyond the Jewish community. It applies whenever governments, institutions and ordinary citizens must decide whether something that once would have been unacceptable is gradually becoming normalized.

We often say that we study the Holocaust so history will not repeat itself. But remembering what happened is not enough if we only recognize danger after it has become unmistakable.

History cannot tell us what will happen tomorrow. What it can do is teach us to ask better questions about what is happening today: Are hatred and intimidation becoming more acceptable? Are institutions applying their principles consistently? Are protections weakening? Are we confusing reassurance with action? Are we waiting for a degree of certainty that may arrive only after meaningful choices have narrowed?

Those are the questions that led me to write When Is It Too Late? The purpose of learning history is not to predict the future or assume that the past will repeat itself. It is to become better at recognizing danger while there is still time to influence what happens next.

Memory must be more than mourning. It must become responsibility.