I was maybe ten. I remember I'd just heard about the Holocaust and was now stirring it slowly in my mind. I remember asking at dinner. How did he get to be in power? How did people decide on him? People chose him because they'd been living without. Times were hard. He promised them a better life. More food on the table. More jobs, he promised. And over time, he told them the reason they didn't have the life they wanted was because of the Jews. And he could help them with that, he'd said.
The Jews were the reason life was bad. The Jews had all the money, he'd said. They ran the banks. They had all the wealth. Without them, life would be better.
I stared at my dinner. I remember I asked them Did you know? Did you know what he was doing? They said they had heard rumors. Stories. But no one knew really until after the War.
I remember telling them, Well I wouldn't let that happen. I would have told on him, or some sort of anger a ten year old has. At him. At my parents.
Never again, they say. I think it used to be a promise. Now I think it's just hopeful.
Children don't know that deadly waves retreating from the beach roar back to shore over time. Or they know in the way we all do by learning in school. This happened then to people who were around before we knew them so we really only need to know it for a test. Not because they were real. Not because we can imagine them. Not because it can happen again.
I've seen images showing tour buses headed to Auschwitz and school groups touring the camp. There was laughter as the young kids walked through the gas chambers. I was angry watching. I wouldn't have laughed. I wouldn't even have smiled. But people my children's age stood in the very place where murders happened and were as far removed in that place as we all become from slavery, from devastation, from war. The human part of the story can't even be captured once the survivors die.
So here I am now a week away from an election where someone has made promises without care, without thought, without plan, who encourages hatred and ignites its fuse. Just 70 years have passed and we are here again. Who will be asking Did you know? I will have known. I will have. And yet what more can I do than share my fear? What more can I wish for than that people around me will hear me?
