Where does one start this week’s essay on democracy’s erosion in America? Do I focus on the criminalization of dissent in America? Should the latest threats of national guard and military deployments to democratic party led cities such as Chicago and New York lead this week? Or, perhaps, should the essay focus on Trump’s outrageous observation that slavery is being misrepresented by the nation’s premier museum system, the Smithsonian. Is there a positive argument for slavery…..ever? All part of his re-erasure of American history that includes people of non-European heritage. All that will be left of ‘official’ American history will be reinvented myths of dead white men.
I want to tell an authentic American story of liberation instead.
About a decade ago a cousin of mine, a doctor in residence at a military hospital on an Air Force base, was asked by a fellow resident if he was related to so-and-so. His response, ‘Yes, he was my grandfather.’ The follow up was startling. The name, he said, comes from his family’s lore. My grandfather, he revealed, rescued his family from certain death in a Nazis concentration camp.
This story of escape from death added an hitherto unknown dimension to my grandfather’s experiences during the second world war. His division, the 104th, landed at Normandy a couple weeks after D-day in 1944. In April 1945, his division helped liberate a slave labor concentration camp in Nordhausen, Germany.
According to my father, my grandfather never talked about the war, and not about Nordhausen in particular. The story of his father being a ‘hero’ of a Jewish family was new to him and brought tears to his eyes. My father never cries. While my grandfather did not talk much about the war, he did, however, write a description of what he witnessed at Nordhausen for the Minneapolis Star, based on a letter dated from April 5. Eighty years later they have not lost their punch and graphic images of that day:
“…….. I visited a town called Nordhausen where I saw the most horrible sights. You may have read about it or seen pictures. We overran a German concentration camp. It was filled with thousands of dead and half-dead POW’s and political prisoners. The bodies of the dead were unburied. Others were lying in rows and beds where they had died, most of them from starvation. The fields, for over a mile were strewn with bodies where the SS had mowed them down with machine guns.” He continued, “the living were mixed with the dead – too weak and too far gone to move. Several died while our medics were taking them to the hospital. Nearly 3500 unburied bodies were found, many which with evidence of torture before death, nearly all starved.” Observing that he had heard of such places before arriving a Nordhausen he added, “I have read stories of such places but never thought I would see such a thing as I did. Since then we have had reports of other camps that have been over run – nearly as bad. But I have seen enough…the brutality and inhumanity of the German SS Troops is beyond belief….If I had not seen the results with my own eyes.” I have his map that traces his unit’s route, with cities and towns they liberated — circled in red pencil — as they moved east.
One can only imagine what my cousin’s fellow doctor’s family must have endured.
That two grandsons – one from an American soldier and another from a survivor of a liberated nazi concentration camp – both bound by that same day in history, would meet by chance somewhere in the American mid-west some 70 years later is astonishing.
Furthermore, that same month in 1945, 600 kilometers directly to the north, my mom, then a girl of six, and her family were liberated from five years of Nazi occupation. While my grandfather is long dead and only his writings remain of that fateful month, my mom still lives. She doesn’t remember much about the German occupation, mostly recalling food rationing, but I think mostly because the occupation was relatively calm. The Danes surrendered quickly and the occupation mostly uneventful. The Danes weren’t ethnic ‘Slavs’ and thus spared the rage and violence that enveloped Poland, the Ukraine and eastern Russia. Still, she remembers the trucks coming for suspected collaborators that lived nearby after liberation. She fears Trump, and with good reason, it seems.
My grandfather was asked to stay on active duty after the war, rising through the ranks. His career was abruptly dead ended, however, when he was accused of communist sympathies during the McCarthy era. It seems that his running for mayor of Minneapolis in the 1930s as a candidate of the Farmer-Labor Party had attracted attention once again. In 1953, the army reopened old, pre-war accusation of his alleged communist sympathies and weeks before the McCarthy hearings focusing on the army started, the Army purged him from their ranks, recommending his dismissal and removed from command. He was eventually reinstated after appeal, promoted to Colonel, but was exiled to the Reserve Officer Training Corps at the University of Alaska for the remainder of his career.
Purges, massive interment and concentration camps, masked government agents, disappearances, politically directed criminal investigations, erasing of peoples histories, military occupation of the capital, and collapse of the constitutional system. They are not theoretical constructs, they are real and here today. For me it is all too personal.
Today, our country stands at a fork in the road, one diverging right to authoritarian rule, perhaps even fascist rule, the other, the well-trod path pathway of democracy now seemingly blocked, detour signs pointing right. My family’s roots scream at me to resist the lurch to the far, extreme right, with everything I have. My grandfather words about the “…the brutality and inhumanity of the German SS Troops is beyond belief….If I had not seen the results with my own eyes” speak to me clearly. We must not cease resisting, we must not cease caring, we must not give up.
We are heading down that path of brutality and inhumanity where so-called ‘superfluous’ peoples are erased. But we can stop it dead in its tracks if we stay engaged and active as wave after wave of Trumpian bullshit tries to overwhelm and batter us into submission.
This mean calling your representatives weekly or daily if needed, join protest/resistance groups, make resistance artwork, spread the word, donate to campaigns, write a blog, vote. Don’t let the fascist bastards get you down. Let us walk together down that road to democracy together. Please share this essay. Thanks.
