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“We Aren’t Very Different. It Could Happen Again.”
Europeans, young and old, share words of wisdom that the U.S.A. needs.
One August day back in 2015, I saw a new doctor. A man in his eighties who lived in Europe during World War II. He got to the subject of politics with me during my visit, particularly to the xenophobia that was running rampant across the U.S. during the presidential campaign then underway, when he recalled a childhood memory. A memory so devastating that, even though I hadn’t lived it myself, the moment of its telling instantly became one of my life’s indelible memories too.
“I was eleven-years-old,” he told me, “when I saw a train, filled with people. And the people were screaming. And they were on that train because they were the ‘wrong’ religion, and the leaders decided that they wanted them out of there.”
His words immediately conjured up a mental image so heartbreaking that I wanted to cry. I no longer saw the accomplished, self-possessed older man standing in front of me; I saw a small boy in the Italian countryside, confused and anxious, squinting from afar as cattle cars rolled past through heat-browned fields. The faceless shrieking. The arms waving wildly from tiny windows. The bloodcurdling understanding — shared by both the small boy and the unwilling passengers — that nobody…
