Sober recognition by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

Last week, I had dinner with some neighbors, people I don’t know well, and who knew nothing of my family history. We did know we were all on the same page politically, so, as we neared the end of our meal, the conversation turned to what is going on in the country.

I don’t remember what prompted me to start sharing my story (because my family’s story, though it happened before my birth, is so very much my story), but as I told about my mother’s escaping Nazi Germany in November of 1939, and the sixty-plus letters I have documenting her and her parents’ unsuccessful efforts to get them out (they kept trying, even when it became clear that such efforts would be futile), I could see something on their faces that I hadn’t encountered before.

In the past, I’ve seen compassion. But it was compassion that was filtered through the haze of history. That happened then; it was horrible, but it’s tucked safely away in the past. It happened in Europe. Racism and antisemitism are indeed threads in American culture, but we have systems in place—guardrails—and democratic principles that enough of us believe in to keep such things from happening here. Americans would never stand for the military in the streets or Gestapo-like tactics. Don’t tread on me, after all, was adopted as the motto of the Tea Party.

The thing about coming from a background like mine is that I’ve always known it—and it covers a lot of ground—could happen here. That’s not the same as saying I thought it would happen here. That only took deep root in my consciousness over the last decade or so. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny the direction we are headed in, and not to be heartsick about what is already happening.

There are signs the administration is not just trying to give the impression that Americans are rioting, but is trying to push them to do so… The establishment of a domestic quick reaction force to quell civil disturbances at a time when there are no civil disturbances that can’t be handled easily by existing law enforcement suggests the administration is expecting those conditions to change… the White House is reassigning ICE field officers and replacing them with officers from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP)…

White House officials, presumably led by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who has said the administration intends to carry out “a minimum” of 3,000 arrests a day, are frustrated by the current pace of about 900 a day. So those officials… have decided to ramp up those deportations by replacing ICE officials with far more aggressive CBP leaders.

Tripling arrests will likely bring pushback. — Heather Cox Richardson

Could this be why so many of the regime’s functionaries—Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio—have “adopted a bunker mentality” and moved onto military bases?

What I saw on my fellow dinner guests’ faces was sober recognition. There was still compassion, but that distance I was accustomed to seeing wasn’t there.

I told them I’d stopped working on my book a year ago. “I couldn’t see the point,” I told them. “We all know what happened in the 1930s, and here we are.” It was the reaction of a man in his early 40s that most struck and moved me. I don’t expect people so much younger and thus further removed from that time to resonate with my family’s story. “Those letters,” he said, “you’ve really got to share those letters. It’s important.”

I feel increasingly like I’m channeling voices from the past into a dark, unknown future we weren’t expecting. So, I’ll do my best to get back to the book and will remind myself of that young man’s words when I wonder what on earth the point of doing it is. Writing here is a start.