The Boy Who Cried Nazi

It was a chance, unfortunate juxtaposition. As was our tradition I had just taken my grandson to get his back-to-school haircut. Returning home he hurried upstairs to take a shower while I started the prep for his favorite soup. Mrs. Poppy joined me in the kitchen, filling me in on the events of the day at home and abroad. She read aloud a post on social media equating the arrest of some trying to enter the country illegally to Nazi Germany and the holocaust. It was silly, but sadly not uncommon. We gave it no more thought until the next event.

My grandson has discovered the joys of the original Twilight Zone episodes. We are slowly working our way through the series. We filled our bowls with tortellini soup and settled back to enjoy the next installment. It was titled, “Deaths-Head Revisited.” The story was about a former SS officer revisiting the Dachau concentration camp a decade and a half after World War II. It was rightfully disturbing. It is hard to comprehend the death of six million humans by mass shootings, gas chambers, and starvation. Six million people; grandparents, moms, dads, teenagers, toddlers, babies. The final sentence of the story was this …

All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.”

There are things that are so pure, so holy that they must not be diluted. Conversely, there are things that are so evil, so vile that they also must not be diluted … lest we forget.

To compare anything going on in American politics today to Nazi Germany and the holocaust is intellectually weak and historically inaccurate.

To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice.”
Elie Wiesel

Poppy (with no apologies)