It’s happening again by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

I got texts today from friends all over the country, checking in to see how I’m doing in the middle of a rather impressive snowstorm (I’m fine), but also to connect about our national nightmare.

“I am finding it really hard, trying to find some space of peace within all the raging feelings.”

“I want to run but know not where.”

“Fear is how the monsters gain power and how they rule. How to defeat fear? It’s heartbreaking that this is where we are.”

I’m spending my days and evenings reading and listening to coverage of what is happening. I take the occasional break, not to read a book (something I haven’t been able to do for months) but to play word games on my phone. At night, I will, on occasion, watch an English murder mystery to quiet my mind before bed (I don’t even want to look at the subtext of that one). I play Sudoku while brushing my teeth and before turning out the light. Actually, I haven’t been turning out the light at all for the last week or two. I wear a mask to bed, so don’t need the room to be dark. “Lights out” feels like a command to “go to sleep.” It is the dark, even when I can’t see it, that makes sleep’s elusiveness all the more obvious.

I keep wanting to add my voice to the conversation. At the same time, I wonder what on earth I have to say that so many others haven’t already said, people with more knowledge and information and intellectual heft than I will ever have. And while I don’t want to keep harping on my Holocaust roots, I know that the inherited trauma that is in my DNA informs my particular perspective. What happened more than eighty years ago, before I was born, is manifesting as a weight that feels almost impossible to move. Perhaps it’s the sense of inevitability and powerlessness. But I don’t want to succumb to that. I am aware of the importance that it not happen again. And I also see that it is happening again. As Gavin Newsom’s press office said, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino is “walking the streets of America dressed up as a Nazi.”

I spent two decades translating and editing and annotating the letters my grandparents—educated, intelligent, capable, savvy people—wrote, documenting their struggle with the Nazi regime, and the roadblocks put up by every country they tried to get into. As my friend Gerda Lawrence, the first translator of the letters and a German Jewish refugee whose family had seen the threat and left in the early 1930s, said, “By the time your grandparents were doing all this, it was too late. They weren’t going to get out no matter what they did.”

The trouble with tropes getting tired—like the quote from Martin Niemöller that ends with “There was no one left to speak for me”—is that it becomes easier to ignore the importance of their message. Perhaps if more of us knew the context of his famous words, more of us would pay attention to them:

In 1946, he traveled on a lecture tour in the western zones of Allied-occupied Germany. In his lectures, Niemöller publicly confessed his own inaction and indifference to the fate of many of the Nazis’ victims. He used phrases such as “I did not speak out…” or “we preferred to keep quiet.” . . . in the first years of the Nazi regime, he had remained silent as the Nazis persecuted other Germans, especially members of leftist political movements with whom he disagreed.

Despite his early support of Hitler, Niemöller was arrested by the Gestapo on July 1, 1937, and held in Nazi prisons and concentration camps until the Allied liberation in May of 1945.

So what am I saying? That I think it’s too late for this country? I don’t, actually, at least not consciously. I agree with the words of another friend, who texted today, “America is in trouble. This reign will get worse. We stay informed. We fight as we can. And win. We’re Americans.”

I’m looking forward to the time the “Don’t tread on me” and Second Amendment folks and non-MAGA Trump voters get the message that they’re no safer than the rest of us. And I am acutely aware that silence is complicity. So, tomorrow, I’m going to call my senators and representative and demand:

• full investigations into ICE’s use of deadly force against protesters and their murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and
• that they refuse to pass any DHS appropriations bill that maintains funding for ICE.