I just finished reading the book "The Seamstress" by Sara Bernstein. It is one of the most disturbing books I have ever read. I nearly stopped reading it numerous times. I read it as an audio book and the reader's storytelling voice made it all seem almost normal by the end. What was normal, the experiences of a young Jewish Romanian woman, a victim of the Holocaust.
As I read, the old question kept surfacing, How could this happen? How do whole groups of people lose their humanity while they are working hard to destroy the humanity of others? Do the perpetrators realize they have lost their humanity? Is there any way to let them know what they are doing in time to save them and everyone else from the horrors to follow?
In the memoir, a young girl, her friends, and a multitude of Jewish women are brutalized, starved, forced to work as slaves, deprived of all dignity, herded like animals because of religion. Christians performed unspeakable acts on people they did not know just because they could. They had the power of the state behind them.
The hardest part to read was just how slowly and methodically it all happened to Ms. Bernstein and her friends and family. Pay was cut, jobs became harder and harder to find if you were Jewish. Christian citizens of Romania and Hungary had no problem hurting, spitting on, and otherwise humiliating people they thought were Jews. They restricted where they could live, where they could shop, where they could go. The Germans had not even entered these countries when these actions were happening, so they can only be indirectly blamed for the way things got started there. Much of the brutality was home grown in Hungary and Romania.
By 1942, life even in the cities became nearly impossible. People were arrested and accused of spying, when they were actually charged with being Jews. The military was everywhere and if they happened to shoot someone, well, that was only a Jew, so who cares.
The labor camps where thousands were driven by overwork to their deaths, then the concentration camps where millions were starved and murdered are so hard to imagine because there has been nothing like them. The Germans and other leaders built upon each other to devise more and more horrific acts to use against their captives while they pretended they were just doing their duty.
I have read other memoirs of the Holocaust, but this one was the recollections of a woman. Had I been born in a different time and place, it could have been I who faced the horrors of watching her sister shot in front of her, watching women beaten to death for singing, seeing the bodies of dead and dying women tossed onto piles to be carted away. The author was 44 pounds when rescued in 1945.
I know many conservatives don't like anything they do or say being compared with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s in Europe, but I am seeing clear parallels. We Americans are told "That could not happen here. No one would allow it." Having read this woman's story, I am not so sure. It came on so slowly most people didn't even recognize what was going on until it was too late to do anything about it.
A nebulous anger about jobs and working condition led Christians who felt entitled to good work at a decent wage needed someone to blame. For centuries, Jews had provided fodder for their hatred. How were Jews responsible, just by existing. It was easy to target Jews in small communities, but more challenging in cities where there was more education and more religious mixing. Begin limiting their rights, a bit at a time, make it difficult for them to earn money or have businesses. Call them "Christ Killers," so you are excused to do whatever you want, in the name of Christ, whether you were actually religious or not. See Jews as foreigners with no right to be in the country.
Some people in power in our country work hard to limit the rights of those they feel are beneath them, perhaps even inferior to them. They have helped to create fear of people of color, a disdain of women, resentment of the poor - the takers, a belief that their religion is the only true faith and that one religion in particular is filled with terrorists. They glorify the military, no matter what it does.
They champion a kind of American nationalism that leaves many in our nation and the world vulnerable.
Immigrants are bad, except my ancestors "who came here the right way." These folks are OK with incarcerating children for life, if they are of the feared groups. They will deport the parents of
American citizen children just because they can, they are illegal immigrants, you know. Racists and sexists are "fine people" and we have to protect our culture and its statues.
Remember, America has had its own concentration camps during World War II when more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were interned for being Japanese. We still have Guantanamo which can hold a lot of people in a place that could easily be closed off to all inspection.
Is this how it begins? Is this how it happens?
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