Learn from history, or repeat it
My sixth-grader is reading a young adult novel titled “Prisoner B-3087,” about a Holocaust survivor. Written by Alan Gratz, the book is based on the harrowing true story of Jack Gruener, who was just 10 years old when Krakow, Poland, fell to the Nazis. After his parents were murdered, he survived 10 concentration camps and two death marches before he was liberated at the age of 16.
Because the subject matter is so disturbing, I am also reading the book. I want to be able to talk to my daughter about the inexplicable hatred, the routine sadism, the depressingly random violence to which human beings were subjected by their fellow humans. Children — children — were slaughtered, too. The Nazis killed more than a million Jewish children and teenagers, according to historians.
As I read the stark but explicit details of Jack’s (called “Yanek” in the story) captivity, I wondered whether the subject matter was appropriate for a relatively naive and sheltered 12-year-old like mine. Then I turned on CNN to catch up with the news, and I was greeted by the murders of eight people at spas in metropolitan Atlanta. Six of the victims were Asian women.
While authorities work to establish an explicit motive, this much is already clear: Asian Americans have been subjected to a terrifying increase in hate crimes since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, according to California State University’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, there were 122 incidents of hate crimes against Asian Americans in 16 of the nation’s most populous cities. That represents an increase of 150% over the previous year.
So, yes, my child needs to read the grim details of the Holocaust and the concentration camps. She needs to understand how bullying and racist rhetoric escalate into violent attacks and how violent attacks can come to seem routine and ordinary. She needs to know that unhinged political leaders can persuade their constituents that millions of their fellow citizens deserve to be exterminated just because of their race or ethnicity or language or religion.
As early as 2015, my mother, an amateur historian, was comparing the rise of Donald J. Trump to the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. As Trump was drawing adoring crowds of thousands to his rallies, where he disparaged Muslims and denigrated Mexicans, my mother stared at her television screen and said, “This is
how it starts.”
She understood that an inexplicable suspicion of the Other lurks just beneath the surface of all diverse societies, that ordinary churchgoing citizens can rise up to slaughter their neighbors, that charismatic but crazed political leaders can provoke genocide. By the way, the impulse to hate and fear the Other is not restricted to white Americans or former colonial powers. This is an all-too-common human trait. (If you don’t believe it, watch “Hotel Rwanda.”)
As Americans, we believe that we are different. We are the “shining city on a hill,” the nation that lectures others about the value of democracy and human rights and pluralism. We have cocooned ourselves in comforting myths about our history rather than confronting the disturbing truth: This nation was built on the genocide of natives and the enslavement of kidnapped Africans. Throughout its history, many of America’s
white leaders have encouraged a violent oppression against people of color. As recently as World War II, Japanese Americans were rounded up and interred on the basis of ethnicity alone. Yet our triumph over the Nazis is a story often told without acknowledgment of American racism and antisemitism.
If we had confronted our history honestly, we might have been able to stave off the election of a racist demagogue who blamed Asians when he was slammed by a pandemic he didn’t have the wisdom or the character to control. Trump’s rhetoric at his political rallies was chock full of racist invective about the “China virus” and “kung flu.”
But we didn’t confront our history. We didn’t acknowledge our flaws. We allowed the racism to spread, to metastasize throughout the body politic. As my mother noted, “That’s how it starts.” My 12-year-old needs to know.