Seventy Thoughts on Turning Seventy
How would your WWII veteran father vote if he were still alive?
When I was a girl, about nine years old, I went exploring in our house's crawl space in the basement. I found my father's army trunk. I can still picture it - musty, mysterious and filled with secrets that I knew were not for me.
I couldn't resist.
There was barely enough light in the basement for me to see what I was discovering. But it didn't stop me. The first artifact I found was a folded up Nazi flag emblazoned with a menacing swastika and a terrifying bullet hole with blackened edges on the red fabric. I touched it and felt like my hand was on fire.
That was scary but what I found next, though beyond my childish comprehension, stayed with me for my entire life.
It was a small pocket folder which contained a series of black and white photographs. I opened the folder and a long line of pictures came spilling out, unfolding like an accordion.
It is still nearly impossible for me to find the words to describe what I saw. I had no reference nor context to make sense of the images of Dachau that my young father in his US Army uniform had apparently taken with his own personal camera.
I knew enough to know that difference between seeing pictures in a magazine and holding personal photographs in my hand. And I also knew that these images were of things my father actually saw... actually smelled... actually heard... actually witnessed and those images had changed him forever.
Piles of dead bodies with flies swarming their bones. Emaciated men and women, hands outstretched, clothing dirty and torn, barely alive. A line of German locals forced through the camp to witness what was done in their name.
At nine years old, this curious Jewish girl discovered the Holocaust while snooping through her father's things. I had no one to talk to about it. I couldn't tell my parents what I saw because I knew I would be punished for my transgression. I did my best to repress the horror that I had held in my hands and it wasn't until I was 11 or 12 that I began to learn of the Holocaust in Hebrew school. ( not public school -- I do recall ONE PARAGRAPH about the Holocaust in the chapter about WWII in our history book in 8th grade.)
This seminal moment has returned to my consciousness many times in my life. It came back when I was teaching school and wondering how and if I could include the literature of the Holocaust in my English class. And it came back to me again when as an educator, I visited Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek and stood inside the gas chambers, prayed before the crematoria and lamented the presence of young German boys riding their bicycles in their "backyard" or the tour busses of Europe's youth on their school outing to concentration camps.
My father's been gone since 1997. So has my father in law, also a member of the Greatest Generation and a veteran from WWII. My mother's husband, also a veteran, passed away at age 98 in 2021, living long enough to see the rise of trump and his embrace of Nazis and white Christian nationalists.
And it made him weep. "What was it all about? What were we fighting for? Not for this. Not for this." He was proud to vote for Joe Biden and elated to see trump defeated.
Sometimes I am glad that these men who put their lives on the line to fight fascism are not here to witness the politics of fear, lawlessness, division and disinformation that trump has wrought.
Other times, of course, I wish they were still here, because they would be leading the procession to the voting booth to defeat fascism again.
