Flowers for Ellen by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

I got my mother flowers for her birthday. Actually, since today is her 111th birthday and she’s been dead for 36 years, I got myself the flowers. For the first six or so years after my marriage ended, I did that every few weeks, buying them often enough to keep pink carnations or variegated Astromeria blooming in my home. Then Trump came in again, trailing tariffs and war and corruption in his wake, and, as we all know all too well, everything got a lot more expensive. The flowers became an indulgence I could live without.

Five months ago, I returned to my family Holocaust memoir, Get Us Out of Here: The Evolution of Desperation, Berlin 1939 – 1942, work on which had been another casualty of Trump’s reelection. It took that long before I could bring myself to reenter that world, slowly easing myself in, then out again when it became too challenging, working in fits and starts, and being as kind to myself as I can manage about how long it’s taking. It’s getting close, I know that, but the last pieces—focusing on my parents and the impact of what happened on them, and me—offer a different set of challenges than working with my maternal grandparents’ letters from inside Nazi Germany.

I always wondered how people lived as they watched fascism unfold and enclose them. I never anticipated that I would get to find out for myself what it is like to live in a country where it is happening. We can no longer deny that we have a fascist government. But this is still not a fascist country. As long as we continue — voters, courts, protestors, independent media — to fight for our democracy, they have not won. It’s a bitch, and it’s exhausting, and it ain’t over.

So here we are. The waking nightmare images of my childhood are personified by Stephen Miller, a Jew whose forebears fled pogroms. I can’t save anyone from that cruelty, any more than my mother could save her parents from the consequences of being Jews in Nazi Germany. But I can keep fighting as best I can, and I can tell their story. Sometimes, that is all we can do for those who came before us. And buy them flowers for their birthday.