State-sanctioned terror by armed thugs has kept me in a constant state of terror. As a Jew, reminders of Hitler’s Germany are triggered and like toxic waste that never degrades, old fears bubble up to the surface.

Despite having been born a full decade after the end of WWII, which in a child’s mind is an eternity, I was haunted by thoughts of Nazis as a little girl.

They infiltered my nightmares.

While other kids my age dreamt of scary monsters or spooky ghosts, in my harrowing dreams, it was goose-stepping rank-and-file members of the Nazi party that gave me the willies. I was terrorized that men in brown shirts, black jack boots, and Wide Sam Browne Belts would storm into my Long Island suburban ranch house and brutally drag me away from my parents. Their loud humming of the Nazi anthem, Horst Wessel Song, always drowned out my screaming.  

Are We Next?

I could never have imagined an America where government-sanctioned thugs in paramilitary gear and masks have been given carte blanche to grab an American citizen off the streets.  Or dragged from their suburban homes without a judicial warrant; violently pulled from their made in the U.S.A. cars. That innocent children could be snatched and whisked away.

The ICE Raids today are the modern Brown Shirts.

Just as the Gestapo operated outside the normal judicial system with authority to arrest and imprison without legal recourse or judicial oversight, our courts and congress have done nothing to stop this.

A Pure Homeland

We see our government freely using Nazi symbols, subtle and not so subtle. The rhetoric is cranked up full blast to Hitler’s Germany with banners proclaiming “One of Ours All of Yours.”

Social media posts, not from fringe groups but from the White House, Department of Labor, and Homeland Security, have included images, slogans, and even a song used by white nationalists.

They jointly posted a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Instagram, Facebook, and X, overlaid with the words “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.”

Also, this month, the Labor Department posted a video captioned “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” That phrase resembled a German slogan used by Nazis during World War II, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” or “One People, One Realm, One Leader.”

My skin crawls when I see Gestapo Greg Bovino strutting his authoritarian aesthetic.

Nazi wannabees now roam among us.

NEVER AGAIN

The Holocaust story was always history.  An unimaginable tragedy, important to remember as we do today on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but unthinkable in our America.

When I listened to my Holocaust survivor mother-in-law tell the story of how the Nazis broke into to her home in Poland in 1941, pulling her struggling parents and crying family outside and shooting them all multiple times in cold blood,  I shuddered.

Nothing like that could ever happen in our democracy.

Because what happened in Nazi Germany was such a terrible atrocity, it felt impossible to imagine ourselves capable of causing anything that resembled it. Certainly, societies would stop, reverse, and repair long before plunging into such appalling depths.

I wanted to think “never again” was a statement of fact. In my America, we don’t kill our citizens.

Except we do.

And we are seeing it with our own eyes.

If Donald Trump’s government can execute a registered nurse in broad daylight, calling him an assassin, shooting 10 bullets into him while he lies helpless on the ground, they can murder any of us.

No one is safe.

This is how it all begins. Not with gas chambers but with masks and lies and a population trained to look away.

The beginning of the Holocaust seemed harmless at the time, and many German citizens thought the politics of Hitler and the Nazi Party were exactly what their country needed at the time. Many didn’t realize that by silently accepting their neighbor’s deportation (whether Jewish, Roma, homosexual, disabled, or political enemies), they also accepted that they were being tortured and brutally murdered.

The brutality here in America is in full sight. People are being grabbed at random in states, in cars, at home, schools. Gassed and beaten.

Now the unthinkable is entering American Jews’ thoughts.

I wanted to think “never again” was a statement of fact. In my America, that kind of hate can’t exist.

Except it can.

Imagine in the “greatest country in the world one can no longer go to sleep at night without the fear of the ICE Gestapo charging in.

It’s the stuff of nightmares.