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I hate Nazis. For me, it is personal.
Nazis killed my great grandparents and other family members. Through their brutality and quest for a supposedly pure and superior race, they forever altered the course of my mother’s life. A happy childhood in Vienna was stolen from her, replaced by years as a refugee in England and resettlement in an America that offered both hope and derision.
Although she often said she led a good life and was forever grateful that her family was accepted for resettlement in the U.S. when so many others were turned away, I will not forgive the uprooting of her family and execution of her relatives.
When I see someone carrying a flag bearing a swastika or throwing a “sieg heil” salute, I think of my mother and her family, those displaced and those killed by adherents to a vile ideology.
I am also reminded of my father, who at the age of 19 was uprooted from his comfortable, upper class life. Shortly after his father passed away, he was drafted into the Army. He left Bowdoin College, where he was a freshman, and, after training in Missouri and Kentucky, was shipped to Europe. He landed on the beaches of Normandy and marched across Europe fighting back the Nazi evil that had spread across the continent.
He was a medic and saw horrors so terrible he never spoke of them. He returned to the United States a bitter and withdrawn man. The Nazis stole his life plan of becoming a diplomat.
My parents, from different continents, different faiths and different economic backgrounds, are a reminder of the widespread and long-lasting evil perpetuated by the Nazis. Their inhumane campaign to literally exterminate those who they deemed inferior is not some distant event only accessible in dusty history books. Their quest for a master race and mastery of a continent inexorably shaped my parents, and me.
Horrifyingly, these degenerate human beings are not long-lost relics of history. They, literally, live among us, pledging to bring their warped worldview, and their hatred, to our state, to our communities.
Everyone should condemn their hatred and their threats of violence. But, I believe it is especially incumbent upon those of us who lost relatives to the Nazi Holocaust, who heard stories – however, sparse and sanitized – of the horrors of the Holocaust to speak out, to educate our neighbors and friends, to remind them that, yes, the Holocaust was real. Yes, millions of people, 6 million of them Jewish, were systematically murdered. That is what Nazis stand for. That is the legacy of Nazism.
Never forget.
Perhaps ironically, if I showed up at the neo-Nazi training camp reportedly being built about an hour north of Bangor, the Hilter lovers there could likely be very welcoming of my blue eyes and once-blonde hair, and my rudimentary grasp of German. This is the idiocy of their quest to build a white ethnostate. Sure, they can easily identify many of those who are of a vastly different race or ethnicity. But, they likely can’t identify those who were a major target of the original Nazi hate. I am not readily identifiable as Jewish. But that does not make me any less Jewish or make my family’s losses any less tragic or pointless. And, it certainly doesn’t make Nazis any less reprehensible that their new targets of hatred and intimidation are Black or Brown, Muslim or Hindu.
Nazis are vile human beings. They are spouting the horrendous, and long discredited, rhetoric of a mass murderer.
America, belatedly, joined and fought a war over this. American soldiers and their leaders wept when they found the concentration camps, when the true horror of the Nazi regime became visible to the world.
Never forget, they beseech us.
This horror is the legacy of Nazis. Families, like mine, that were displaced and shrunken, branches of our family tree literally exterminated.
So, once again, it is encouraging that leaders in Maine are calling out and condemning the neo-Nazis who are agitating in Augusta and reportedly building a training ground in Maine.
Yet, it is disheartening that this weak, discredited and ugly world view continues to pop up, that a small group of fearful people thinks that hatred and ethnic division has any place in our state and our country.
They were horribly, murderously wrong in the 1930 and ‘40s, and they are wrong today.
