Calling Trump Hitler - The Real Horrors Of The Holocaust And The Spiteful, Vengeful Hatred Of The Left

Esther Pilchman, a survivor of the Holocaust and now nearing 100 without losing one bit of her acuity, composure, and articulateness, was nonplussed - no, angered and incensed - at the way 'Hitler', 'Fascist', and 'Nazi' were so casually used were used to describe the President.  She had survived the camps, had suffered for three long years of brutality, uncertainty, rape, and torture at the hands of prison guards, and nothing applied to him at all.

Before being rounded up from the Warsaw ghetto, herded onto boxcars and sent to Auschwitz, she and her family had been threatened, intimidated and badgered - spat upon by the Nazi SS who treated Jews worse than pigs, bullied them, laughed at their fearful humility and their abject submissiveness.  

One by one Jewish families disappeared, never to be heard from again, interned, gassed, and burned in the ovens of Sobibor and Dachau; but even this unsettling disappearance gave the ghetto hope. 'The Nazis need workers', Jewish families told each other.  'The war is not going well', they said despite the panicked fear that they were next.

Esther's family had been jewelers in Warsaw before the Nazi occupation, prosperous and respected with business connections in New York and Johannesburg, a spacious apartment on ______Street, with hopes of a good marriage for their daughter.  There were rumblings about the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, but that was still far away, contained, and for the time being at least remote. 

Yet the clouds of war could not be ignored, overseas radio reported the concerning rise of Hitler and the re-militarization of Germany, and the Fuhrer made his hegemonic intentions clear. Rumors of Jewish disappearances and murders surfaced but could not be believed.  It was too horrific to consider.  Humanity had had its shares of war, Jews had always suffered prejudice and exile, but never anything so unconscionable as this. 

 

Then the nightmare began, and the Jews were branded, condemned, and intimidated.  Herded into the ghetto they still kept their collective composure but could not help but think of what might happen, the horrendous and the unthinkable.

Esther, her mother and father, aunts, uncles, and aged grandparents were all taken on one April day, stripped of their belongings, marched through the ghetto to a destination they surmised but never knew.  As soon as they got to the railhead, her family was split - men in one car, women and children in another.  Her mother protested, and grabbed the coat of a Nazi soldier on the platform, and shouted to her husband.  The soldier raised his rifle, smashed the butt against her head, and left her bleeding and unconscious on the tracks to be decapitated by the moving train. 

How Esther stayed alive was a miracle, she told a chronicler of the Holocaust; but it was only because of her striking beauty that she did. She was raped continually, tossed aside with an extra crust of bread, allowed to wash and cut her hair before the Obersturmführer came to visit but otherwise lived like a street dog with the other women in Block 34, scabrous, hungry, cold, and spiritless. Every day one woman would be singled out and beaten, bloodied and bruised, an example to the others.

Every day women were dragged from their beds and taken to the gas chambers.  By now the prisoners knew what was happening.  They could no longer pretend otherwise.  As soon as one bed was vacated, a new woman, shocked, panicked, and beaten laid down in it.  The deadly machinery of the camps was efficiently cruel. 

 

Soon all her aunts were gone from the barracks, sent to the gas chambers, leaving Esther entirely alone, fearful, abused, and barely alive.  The rapes continued until the Nazis tired of her. Sick of her now almost skeletal body, sunken cheeks, and hollowed eyes, they tossed her aside. She waited for the call, the herding, the death march to the ovens. 

It never came, for on a bitter cold, snowy day in January 1945, American forces liberated the camp.

It took decades for the horrors of Auschwitz to recede - never to be erased - from her memory, and her dreams were still of her mother's body on the tracks, of the brutal rapes by the Nazi soldiers, of the cold, the hunger, and the misery; so when asked to recount her experiences, she hesitated.  Why face it all again? Why relive such a past? But in the end, in the spirit of Never Again did she tell her story. 

So it was no surprise that when the terms 'Hitler, Fascist, Nazi' were so casually and cavalierly used to describe the President of the United States, she could only shake her head.  The Left which she had always supported for its unfailing commitment to the poor and disadvantaged, had lost its moorings and their bearings and had ventured into perverse fabulist imaginings. 

She warned them of the dangers of such dangerous perversion.  Unless the real horror of the Holocaust was remembered and left undiluted in all its exterminating inhumanity, it might happen again.

Calling Trump a Nazi, a reincarnation of Hitler was a bizarre absurdity, a callous demeaning of the office of the President, and craven attack on the democracy she loved, and nothing less than sheer, blatant ignorance. 

It was the same Left that called the January 6th frat boy folly an insurrection.  The Left that had never experienced the brutal civil wars in Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Liberia - brutal, bloody affairs with wigged out child soldiers trained to kill and dismember, death squads, exterminating phalanxes of government troops razing entire villages.  

An insurrection was a fearful thing, a murderous, hateful, morally unredeemable thing; and the folly of the Halloween-painted, Viking helmeted, drunks storming the Capitol, as regrettable and staining as it was, was no insurrection. 

Her cherished Left, her progressives, her liberals had lost their compassionate, understanding center.  They had become unhinged with hatred. Nothing remained of the progressives of past - LaFollette, Debs, Dewey, and Brandeis were done and gone, their ideas only remnants, scraps of a forgotten history.  In their place was only foulness, hysteria, and intemperance. 

Her skin crawled when she heard 'Hitler' shouted and 'Nazi' bandied about.  Each time called up memories of the camps, the ghetto, the SS, the boxcars, and the ovens.  She wanted to step out onto her balcony and yell to the streets below, 'Stop it!; but she was an old lady who thought she would live out her last days in peace, and drawing on still powerful reserves of spirit and rectitude, sat down, and waited for the awful moment to pass.