Talking About the Holocaust After Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally

Nazi and Confederate flags fly together in Charlottesville, Va.

How do you talk about the Holocaust?  Sadly, the events of 2017 gave me clarity I never had before. The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville has given me a way to look at the Holocaust that connects with injustice in America, not only as a terrible event that happened thousands of miles away. 

A friend who is the child of Holocaust survivors told me that she has always seen slavery as central to the Holocaust. Jews in the Death Camps were not just murdered. They were worked till their health failed and then murdered. 

American slaves were dragged from their homes in Africa, stripped of everything, then sentenced to permanent and perpetual slavery, a much more cruel slavery than that in the ancient world. 

In Charlottesville, the Confederate flag and the Nazi flag marched together. The two slave and murder empires flew the flags of their losing armies together.

In my family, our conversation about the Holocaust and slavery began together when my daughters were in middle school.  We had just adopted our son Nigel as a baby.  When Nigel was between one and two years old, I read the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin to my daughters while their cute baby brother with the poofy hair slept in the next room.

Before reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, America’s history of slavery, of buying and selling and owning people, was abstract.  But as I read the book and Liza and her son had to escape across the frozen Ohio River to freedom, we could talk about just how horrible slavery really was.

At about the same time, my daughters were reading “Night” by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust memoir, at school.  The parallels helped us talk about what it meant to tear people away from their friends and family and land forever, and to be treated as less than human, less than an animal. 

Nigel is now 18 and a senior in high school. We talked about the Holocaust recently in the context of Charlottesville.  The racists who want to kill and enslave Jews rallied together with the racists who want to enslave and kill African-Americans.

Before Charlottesville, the Confederate lovers could pretend they were just preserving their heritage. But since August, they flew their flags with Nazis. The history of slavery and lynching and Jim Crow oppression is not heritage, it is hate.