Holocaust Remembrance Day

My Birthday

January 27, 1945. It was the day I was born in Austria. Last week was my 77th birthday. I never saw any yellow stars or burning books or cattle trains full of human beings or swasticas on flags. My history classes in grade school always ended—conveniently—in 1939. I can’t say with certainty when—at what period in my life—the horror dawned on me. I had/have relatives who were/are sympathizers. My aunt was 100 years old last August, and I haven’t spoken to her in years. I acknowledge the very hard time they went through at the time between the wars. They were hungry. And there was no work. And there was no social safety net such as we have in America today. So yes, they believed that “Arbeit macht frei.” Because the work they found again under Hitler freed them from the hunger.

I left Austria in 1964. I lived in England for a while, then in Jamaica. I had three children there. There was no issue with Jewish people. The issue was with Black people and the poverty they endured. I was not politically inclined, one way or another. But the political violence is what caused me to beg my husband to take us to America. We came to Miami in 1978. Chain migration—with the help of my husband’s sister who had been a citizen for a number of years. We became citizens in 1986 when Ronald Regan was president. Still, I was hardly even aware of the presence of any Jewish people.

I did not know, for example, that one of my professors at Florida International University was Jewish. I was in a Children’s Literature class, and we were reading translations of Der Struwwelpeter. I still have that book. I grew up with it. It caused me to eat my soup, to not suck my finger, to look where I walked, to not play with matches, and to not tease little Black boys (as if there were any little Black boys where I grew up). To me, it was a “don’t do this, or such and such a bad thing will happen” book. I didn’t think twice about it. Our professor pointed out the extreme violence, the deadly consequences, of the children’s actions and how detrimental such pedagogy was to German children. I was not a shy student. I was about 38 at the time and loved to engage in class discussions with all my professors. I don’t remember the specifics of this one and would have forgotten it altogether had it not been for a class mate of mine who informed me that my professor hated me. Couldn’t I see it? No, I said. Why do you think so? He is Jewish, she said. He hears your German accent. Wait. What? Why? Why me? I didn’t say much in that class for the rest of the semester. Not only was I unaware of my professor’s ethnicity, I was unaware of his hatred of me because of mine. Looking back, I’m not sure my classmate read the situation correctly. But it certainly jolted me to consider whether I had ever said anything that would be hurtful to any Jewish or any minority person.

It was not until 1978, when I first came to America, that the full horror of my country’s guilt in the Holocaust slowly dawned on me. For 40 years after the Anschluss in 1938 Austria presented itself as the first victim of Hitler’s National Socialism. The Holocaust was taboo until then, which is why I learned nothing about in school. And it was only in 2005 that Austria’s foreign minister composed a text for a new memorial in Auschwitz that declared that “This picture of history (that Austria was a victim) does not reflect the understanding of today’s Austria.”  Better late than never, I suppose. Austria has made some strides. The Judenplatz memorial in Vienna https://www.visitingvienna.com/sights/museums/holocaust-memorial/ is only one of a number of such sites. I had occasion to visit Braunau a few years ago. There is no marker on Hitler’s birth house, but the sidewalk in front of it has this stone taken from the concentration camp at Mauthausen.

The country’s present politics are another matter altogether. The so called Freedom Party (which, in fact, is the old Nazi Party) has been rising in power for decades now. It has outpaced the socialists and is in a ruling coalition with the conservatives. The targeting of others in Austria is mostly centered around Turkish people, especially Muslims. But Austria is not my topic here.

The present manifestation of racism in America has been growing for several years now. Not that America has ever not been a racist country. In fact, it’s economy was built on racism from the very start. The Civil War from 1861 to 1865 ostensibly eliminated constitutional racism, making it illegal to own slaves after the Northern states defeated the South. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed three years later, gave all citizens the equal protection of the law. But states discriminated against minorities (and women) until well after World War II, and it was only in the 1950s and 60s that Civil Rights laws began to be established. In 1954, the separate but equal policy was overturned with the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Other rights followed after much violence and bloodshed.

All of this was long in the past when I arrived in America. Racism was present, but mostly subdued, not in-your-face nasty. When my Haitian neighbor called her sons her two little niggers, I asked her why she would use a word like that to refer to her boys. She patiently explained to me that as their mother it was her term of endearment for them. I, on the other hand, was obviously not allowed to use such a term as they were not my boys. I’m not sure I understood. Was she getting them used to hearing the word, knowing that others would fling it at them? Was she hardening their skin? Was I supposed to call my son my little chink? Because he was half-Chinese? None of this made sense to me. I let it go. I understood then that there were things I would never understand. That was forty years ago.

Racism has been much more vile since the former president stepped into our daily limelight. He has made racism the go to mode for all manner of disenchanted people. He has given the whole country not only permission to be outright racist, but has encouraged racist language and action. It it not the same country to which I came in 1978, trying to get away from political violence in Jamaica that I was afraid would not leave my family unscathed. The violence has followed me. It is the violence that my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles saw but did not experience during the Hitler years. They were not Jewish. Nor did they, for all I know, speak out against the horror. My aunt, the 100-year-old, took on the philosophy, the rants against the damned Jews who destroyed the German civilization by owning all the banks, the art works, and god knows what else. Growing up, I did not see her often. She had a husband, but no children. When my children were small, we visited from Jamaica once every two years or so and got to spend time in her very primitive mountain cabin, which was a lot of fun for the children. There was a pit toilet in the house and a door with a heart shaped hole cut in it. Her husband took videos of the children through the hole, using the shape as a frame. Many years later, during my mother’s last weeks, she came to see her sister. I was appalled—the first time I was actually appalled—at her treatment of my mother. Her “hurry up and get better,” “don’t be so lazy, get up now,” “pull yourself together” was cruel and affected my mother visibly. I had to tell my aunt to leave. At a restaurant dinner later, she gave me orders as to what I had to do for my mother. I let her know in no uncertain terms that what I was doing for my mother was none of her business, and that her behavior earlier in the day had greatly upset my mother, and that, therefore, she was not allowed to visit her again. It occurred to me that she had finally shown me who she was. The fascist student of Hitler who controlled all her family, including my mother. It was time I broke this control.

Racism is a state of mind. It can take many forms. Most obviously, it is a hatred of people who look different from us. But it is also a feeling of superiority—or rather, weakness disguised as superiority—as in “I’m more powerful than you, and I’m using my power to subjugate you, to make you feel small and insignificant. You are less than human.” That’s what my aunt did to me and my mother. It was what her husband did to my children when he filmed them on the toilet through the heart shaped hole. It is what he did to my daughter-in-law when he felt it was cute for an old man to grab her breasts and compliment her on their firmness. It was what they learned during their Nazi youth and never unlearned, what they never questioned, for which they never experienced consequences.

Whoopi Goldberg recently said that the Holocaust was not about race. It was about man's inhumanity to man. Goldberg was immediately taken to task and called racist herself, but that doesn’t fit the facts. Certainly Hitler targeted and exterminated the Jews as well as other non-Aryan races because of race, and Goldberg should know that. Perhaps to Goldberg racism occurs only against Black people, but whatever she is thinking about who and what race is involved, racism certainly does result in man’s inhumanity to man. I do not see her as using her power to subjugate anyone, to make anyone feel small, insignificant, less than human. Goldberg is not racist; she is ignorant and needs to widen her vision on racist issues. I have no doubt that she has been victimized because of her race, and perhaps it’s too personal for her to consider that people who are not Black are victimized for the very same reasons she has been.

Fascism and racism are blood brothers. One cannot exist without the other. History teaches us in order to subjugate a people, they must be worth less than you. You cannot subjugate your peers. So you must devise a narrative that argues people who look or behave differently than you do, those who have different customs, are worth less than you so you can use them to do your bidding. It is why slaves were brought from Africa and sold in America. They were sold as property and they became property to do with as their owners pleased. The devised narrative included various “studies” “proving” lower IQs, superior body strength, and devious desires. The narrative before the Holocaust was similar. The Jew was a devious creature out to destroy the German culture. Unlike America, Germany was not in need of forced labor, and thus Jews and other non-Aryans were exterminated rather than enslaved. The fascists in both countries saw to it that their authority was unquestioned. Yet, both countries managed to pull out from under the authoritarian rule. Slavery was abolished. Hitler was defeated. Both countries had the privilege of becoming democratic societies who are governed by consent of the people who choose their leaders in open elections. And we have all grown used to it. We are complacent. We take it for granted that we vote for the person of our choice and that that person will hold office for a time to conduct the business of government the best he or she knows how.

Not any more. All over Europe and America, fascists are once again rising. Their language—first allowed and then encouraged by America’s former president—mirrors the language of people calling out the dangers facing everyone. They call epidemiologists fighting COVID by encouraging vaccinations fascists, comparing them to Hitler’s Dr. Mengele who conducted unspeakable experiments on Jewish people in concentration camps. They call it “offensive” that President Biden wants to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. The former president threatens to pardon all the insurrectionists in prison now and calls for “big, the biggest demonstrations” in cities where he is going to be indicted. The last time he called for “demonstrations,” we had a blood bath at the Capitol. And his crowds still roar. They roar the same way Germans roared when Hitler screamed his speeches back in the 1930s. The Germans didn’t know what was coming. We do.