Looking back on my growing up years in New Jersey, I’m amazed at how much I absorbed about the world and the good and evil of it.
Did you have neighbors who could tell you of seeing their children pulled from the arms of their mothers, thrown into the air by Nazi soldiers and caught mid-air on bayonets? Just for fun.
I did.
Did you have neighbors who had sets of numbers tattooed on their forearms – their identification in Hitler’s death camps? Some would talk about it; others wouldn’t.
I did.
Did you have neighbors who spent years in American internment camps and lost all of their personal possessions during that time, simply because they were Japanese and this country feared their loyalty during World War II? The young people would talk about it; the elders were too ashamed.
I did.
Did you have neighbors who were Russian white émigrés and who settled in an area that was a Russian colony and religious center that provided them freedom to celebrate their historic way of life?
I did.
Did you grow up in a town in which the majority of the population was Jewish refugees from Europe who had been victims of Nazi atrocities and violent anti-Semitism?
I did.
Did you have a grandmother who spent World War I, separated from her husband because of the war, who had to leave her two children with family members while she walked from her small country across the border into Italy, selling eggs door-to-door, to raise money for their survival?
I did.
Did you have another grandmother who immigrated with her family through Ellis Island, where her eldest sister contracted smallpox and mother and daughter were quarantined?
By the time the girl recovered and the two were released, the mother’s hair had turned pure white and everything they owned had been stolen – clothing, jewelry, papers, etc.
I did.
The area where we lived in central Jersey, as I look back at it now, was a fascinating mix of people from around the world. They were people who brought with them their personal experiences of events that shaped the world.
I watched and listened.
It was a simple life, lower middle class by today’s standards. My parents worked hard to support our family and never asked for help from anyone. We never went hungry and had what we needed, but there was no excess and, thanks to my mother, no waste.
My parents were FDR Democrats and over the years were involved in local and state politics. Many of those smoke-filled, political-discussion rooms were our dining room and kitchen.
I watched and listened.
I am not an historian by any stretch of the imagination but I admit that over the years, I’ve learned a lot about history, recent and otherwise.
Ancient history, I once dismissed with the callowness of youth, as just that – ancient – with no real influence on my world.
Recent history I regarded as events that took place, had consequences but were over. I read about them in school, but, in my mind, they were old news with no effect on my life.
Current events, in my youth, just swept over me. There were many years when the reality of the world didn’t make much of a dent in my social consciousness – and certainly none in my political consciousness, which had yet to form.
But I grew up, and I took notice of what had occurred and what was happening. I also started paying attention to things I had seen as a child in Jersey and the people who lived around us.
My memories are more vivid today than ever before because I see now that history is repeating itself, and the dangers to our lives and futures are all too real.
One thing I’ve learned with great clarity is that history really does repeat itself. It’s not a cliché and, given what’s happening today, it’s a nerve-wracking fact.
What I know about World War II, I learned from history books, from newsreels, newspaper headlines and television.
Then, as I remembered the people of my youth, the reality of war and the Nazi horror became more than clear.
In 1945, the Soviet army liberated the 200,000 surviving prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. They were starving human skeletons with the spark of life still in them.
It was finally learned that more than 1.5 million people were killed in that one camp.
At my home, my parents were caring for their new baby – my brother, who had been born just weeks before.
The horror of the camps was something far from their minds but not for long, because in my father’s work as a photographer, he was soon privy to see and work with the photographs from the camps. The horror of it never left him.
He never told us specifically what he saw, except to warn us it could happen again.
I also knew our family had been touched by the reality of the war. My mother’s Uncle Henry – who, because of large immigrant families, was in fact only two years older than she, was in the army, eventually fought and was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.
He lies buried in an American cemetery in Belgium. I have the flag that covered his casket, which had been returned to his young widow. They’d only been married a few months. My brother was named for him.
He recently died, an Air Force veteran, and I also have his flag.
I am not alone with flags like that – and the reasons for them continue apace. We are being attacked by those who hate our beliefs and our way of life, and yet we have elected officials who are reluctant to identify the enemy. In Europe, the flames of anti-Semitism are again rampant, yet we deny reality.
I remember the tattooed numbers and the babies on the bayonets, and I fear for our future.
Then, the enemy was German, Italian and Japanese – now, they’re militant Muslims.
The end result is the death of freedom and innocent people.
It happened before, and it’s here again.
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