By konigludwig
They came without warning late one night in 1943 and took 7 year-old Rebekkah Dunst and her parents from their home. The next day my mother cried and cried. Her older brothers too. Rebekkah had been my mother’s best friend. My grandmother wept bitterly for the Dunst family. They had been close neighbors, good friends, kind, decent and gentle people. They had done nothing wrong. Nothing.
My mother and her brothers were warned by my grandmother not to be seen crying for the Dunst family in public. In Nazi Germany, to show empathy for Jews, foreigners, the disabled, homosexuals, or anyone else who didn’t represent the Nazi ideal of an ethnically pure and glorious Greater Germany revealed a moral weakness that was not to be tolerated nor excused. The slightest sign of nonconformity was dangerous. Germans were afraid. Everyone was afraid. Not just Jews.
My grandfather was a soldier in the German Wehrmacht. His family had lived in Germany since 1482. But that did not stop the Gestapo from ransacking my grandmother’s house, a German soldier’s home, on several occasions. My uncles were in the Hitler Youth but that did not matter either.
They were looking for letters from my grandfather’s brother and sister, who had emigrated to Brazil when the Nazis first came to power in Germany. Even possessing a simple letter from someone whose loyalty to the Third Reich was suspect could be a death warrant.
And so here we are again. We have failed to learn the lessons of history. We have elected a president openly supported by Nazis and White Supremacists–a man who has refused to disavow their support–and who now finalizes plans to “relocate” millions of Hispanic immigrants and to forcibly register millions of Muslim-Americans. Suddenly, the American Right is no longer preoccupied with our constitutional guarantee of Freedom of Religion nor their abstract fears of imagined government concentration camps.
The majority of Germans didn’t vote for Hitler. But now, like then, a great nation has lost its moral compass, and the long established relations of the civilized world have been suddenly swept in a single night into an abyss of pure darkness.
Ⓒ 2016 by konigludwig
The Progressive Democrat 
Well written konigludwig. It gives me chills to read it.
LikeLike
Thank you. It was a terrible time. There were many Jews in grandma’s little town. In the beginning, they came for them at night, but later, toward of the end of the war, the pace of the arrests of Jews became more feverish. They came for them day and night.
Mom remembers an older Jewish couple, a butcher and his wife. In a small town like hers, everyone knew everyone else. I can imagine that the local butcher’s shop must have been a social hub, where the town’s ladies would come daily to buy meats for their family suppers, gossip and exchange pleasantries.
Before long it was no longer prudent to patronize a Jewish business, and the old couple rarely came out of their home. They were too afraid.
Many in town heard the screams of the butcher’s wife late one night, when the Gestapo came for them. Like many others, they were taken to an army compound located on a mountainside above the town. Jews there were tortured, and in the town below people could hear their screams.
The old Jewish couple survived the Holocaust and returned to reopen their butcher’s shop after the war.
LikeLike