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Daniel Teeboom

Separation issues

There are endless amounts of articles, comments, celebrities, journalists and officials who feel the need to associate the separation of parents and children at the US Mexican border with the Shoah.

They wag their finger and solemnly declare “never again” to score their trivial political points. Urging their opponents to remember that of which they themselves have no clue. “This is how it began”, they say. “This is what Hitler did”, they argue.

I look at the list of murdered family members. I see no separation between parents and children. The Nazi’s killed them all: The fathers, the mothers and their children. The grandparents included. They killed the elderly, the young, the rich, the poor, the healthy and the sick. All of them, everybody, no exceptions. And this is somehow reminiscent of temporarily separating parents from children? Parents who crossed the US border illegally by their own volition and who are guaranteed to be reunited with their children within a few weeks? How? In what world?

Have they never heard of Janusz Korczak who, together with the nurses from his orphanage, would not be separated from the orphans in their care, almost 200 of them, as they were herded into a gas chamber at Treblinka to be murdered?

Have they never heard of Babi Yar where 33,771 Jewish men, women and children were executed in a period of two days? You can easily find pictures online from the massacre showing huge crowds of men women and children walking towards the ravine where every single one of them was machine-gunned and shot. The women, some holding infants, together with the children and the men together with the boys.

Perhaps our great moralizers also never heard of the Einsatzgruppen. The mobile German killing squads who killed over 2 million people, including 1,3 million Jews. Shooting men, women, and children without regard for age or sex, and burying them in mass graves.

Yes they separated the men from the women before murdering them. Score a victory point for Trump’s opponents. Shout cheers and hold  celebrations. But are we really to believe that as centuries of Jewish life was stamped out in utter cruelty, this was the injustice on the victim’s minds? Or that if the men and the boys were shot together with the women and the girls, we would have been relieved from the asinine need of the left to appropriate our history for their political purposes?

Of course not. When it’s about the Jews the left doesn’t care how offensive they get. Compare a black woman to an ape and heads must roll. Despite it being a scientific fact that all of us are indeed descendant from apes. But when it’s about our history, it only exists to be appropriated and raped without regard for either feelings or facts.

Finally, I stumble upon an online album from Yad Vashem called “Last Moments before the Gas Chambers” showing men, women and children in Auschwitz about to be gassed. I look at the pictures knowing I am not observing state secrets. Instead I see the history we are so strenuously urged to study by those ignorant of it, and wonder where that famous separation is that they go on about so much.

If only those people about to be murdered had fallen into the hands of Trump’s cruel border guards. They would have happily continued with their lives.

The history of the United States knows many dark pages, as do all histories of all nations. But there is one thing that makes the United States of America stand tall above everybody else. Especially Europe. Those who criticize the USA and who wish smear it with accusations of Nazi sympathies would do well to remember these simple facts:

No outside force ended slavery. No foreign invasion imposed civil rights. Jim Crow wasn’t defeated by overseas armies. Americans did it. Americans alone.

When an American of any minority meets another American of any color or creed, he sees the descendants of those ended slavery and racism. He knows his freedom wasn’t imposed on his neighbors by outside forces. He knows the changes that made the United States of America the most tolerant country on earth, save Israel, came from within. While at the same time they helped crushing Nazism, defeated the Imperial Japanese on their own and brought down the Soviet slave state.

So cut them some slack. Of course it’s tough for the illegal immigrant parents that they are being separated from their children, but it’s only temporary. They’re in good hands.

 

 

 

 

About the Author
Born in Switzerland in 1973. Raised in Holland. My parents were Holocaust survivors.