Trump Through the Eyes of a Holocaust Survivor
How do the rhetoric of the president-elect and the hate crimes unleashed after his election affect those who have witnessed the worst?
She had hoped that November 8 would be the postlude, not the prelude, to one of the ugliest political chapters in American history. She had hoped, but had never quite believed. When those around her insisted that the Trump phenomenon would inevitably collapse under the weight of so much hate, Vera sensed something else altogether: Donald Trump could do this. Her lived experience had not made her paranoid-it had made her prescient.
Vera grew up in Sopot (Zoppot), Poland, a seaside town outside Gdánsk (Danzig), the "free city" that gave rise to Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement. In 1933, the Nazi Party won a majority of assembly seats in the region. Two years later, after the Nuremberg laws were passed, Vera and her mother, father, and older brother were forced into hiding.
Her memories of Kristallnacht, the wave of violent anti-Jewish pogroms that took place during two nights in November 1938, retain a powerful hold over her. In her in-progress memoir, Blunt Edge, Vera writes, "We heard screaming from the street below … flames and smoke surged from the synagogue across the street, heating the windows of our cousins' apartment. We stood back, in fear of being seen from below as our pink temple burned."
This distant but still-painful past shapes Vera's responses to our American present. She knows that a storyline that blames "the other" for a nation's woes can have a horrible, dark allure, especially during difficult economic times. She understands how easily a charismatic demagogue, armed with a savant-like ability to speak to and conjure ancient fears ("They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists") can transform members of a community into a threat to that same community. She still wears the scars of being rendered a stereotype: no longer an individual but instead a nameless, faceless member of a maligned and hunted collective.
https://prospect.org/culture/begin-again-trump-eyes-holocaust-survivor/