I recently read Natalia Zuckerman’s very moving account about attending the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some years ago I was part of a week-long, Buddhist-led retreat at these two camps set three miles apart. The retreat was called Bearing Witness, and still takes place annually. About 200 people of different faiths and nationalities spent the days bearing witness to the atrocities committed, reading the names of the dead, saying Kaddish and other prayers, sitting in silence in areas where unbearable suffering took place. A few attendees were children of survivors, a few children of Nazi soldiers. Our nights were spent in discussion and communion.
If you have spent any time at these concentration camps, your life view is forever changed. Therefore, It is unimaginable to me that VP Vance would visit Dachau in the morning, only to meet with the leader of the far-right German party in the afternoon. Vance’s belief in some version of white Christian nationalism "trumped" his ability to understand where such ideology, based on the supremacy of one group of people over everyone else, led in the past and could lead in the future.
Making one group of people into “the other”, as Trump has done with the undocumented, with trans people, and other groups, is therefore right out of the Nazi playbook in which anti-Semitism was used to bind together and blind the German people. The astonishing fact about the Nazis was that after their extermination of the Jews, dissidents, homosexuals, the Romani, the disabled, they planned to double the size of Birkenau — already 10,000 acres! — to kill all the slavs, a vast group of people that numbered hundreds of millions. By this means they would gain world domination.
I am not making any direct analogy to the present, only suggesting that using an Us vs.Them mentality as a political tool, and focusing on the differences in people, be it skin color, origin, status, religion, is a tool that can be used to gain domination and bring suffering. We must recognize it as such in order to stand against it.
Barbara Maltby
Lakeville
