August 11, 2017, When Nazis Marched in America

 

Nazi flags and Rebel flags together in a racist medley at Charlottesville

Four years ago today Nazis with Tiki torches marched across the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.  The chanted "Blood and Soil" and "Jews will not replace us."  I was riveted to TV coverage of the march and worried about my daughter who lived 60 miles away in Richmond.  Hundreds of armed racists were in Charlottesville for a "Unite the Right" Rally.  Would the rally spill over into other parts of Virginia? I didn't know.  

The next day one avowed Nazi would murder Heather Heyer and maim several more people.  The coward-bully President we had at the time would waffle for days applauding then reluctantly condemning his fervent supporters waving Nazi and Rebel flags.  He finally said there were "good people on both sides."  

For more than fifteen years, my family and I had been members of Presbyterian Church that was part of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) denomination.  It was the conservative side of the denominational split in the 1970s.  

In the wake of Charlottesville, the liberal side of the split, the Presbyterian Church USA condemned the violence and the President for not speaking forcefully against Nazis.  The PCA did nothing. I already was bewildered by people at the Church who  supported Trump, some fervently.  I left the Church.  

By the end of the year I was attending a local synagogue.  I had learned a lot about the Holocaust since Trump won the election. Two months before Charlottesville, I visited Auschwitz and Yad Vashem.  At both places I learned about decorated Jewish veterans of World War I who were murdered in the Holocaust. I knew that my service to America means nothing to Nazis, or to the fascists who flocked to Trump. 

I also read about German Jews who became Christians, sometimes going back three generations.  In 1935, Jewish converts were expelled from all Churches in Nazi Germany.  By the end of the war, nearly all were murdered.  The Churches who expelled their ethnically Jewish members still called themselves Churches, but they were dead. Their god was Hitler.  

The Churches that openly worship Trump now and call him God's Chosen or a modern-day King Cyrus are no better.  There is not a word of the Sermon on the Mount that Trump has not spit on by his actions and life. So much of conservative America has shown itself to be shallow and shameless in following Trump.  The Churches that worship him, or simply allow worship of him, are as spiritually broken as Nazi Churches.  

Another Alphabet Makes Five: Arabic

 

Alif, Baa, Ta, Tha...the beginning of the Arabic Alphabet

Growing up I was mono-lingual. I still am mono-lingual if fluency is the measure language.  My father spoke Yiddish, but had no interest in teaching me the language of his home.  Except for a crash course in Hebrew six months before my Bar Mitzvah, I had no language training growing up. 

During my second enlistment, I lived in West Germany for three years, from 1976-79.  During that time I tried to learn German, but never got very far.  I also began to learn Ancient Greek, a language I studied on and off right up to the present moment. In the past two decades I have take six semesters of Ancient Greek.  

The Alpha to Omega of Ancient Greek

Somewhere in the nineties, I started to learn French.  It became very useful when I got a job with the American branch of a French chemical company.  I made a dozen trips to France and could carry on a simple conversation and read some documents.  

Although our ability to learn language is greatest when we are very young, my interest in language got deeper in the past decade.  I had always loved Russian literature since my first Russian lit. class in college.  Around 2013 I decided I wanted to go to Russia, riding south to north from Odessa to Finland.  The trip never happened, but I took three semesters of Russian and practice what I know several times each week.  Now I had three alphabets floating in my head.  

The Russian alphabet has 33 characters

In 2017, Nazis marched in America chanting "Jews will not replace us."  I joined a synagogue.  It had been fifty years since I had read or said any Hebrew, but I started to learn.  Now I have four alphabets.  My best friend Cliff also decided to learn Hebrew so we commiserate  about the difficulties of learning language at our advanced ages.  

Hebrew reads right to left and has script characters

that are really different from block characters. 

And now Arabic.  I probably should have tried to learn Arabic when I deployed to Iraq in 2009.  But I have been to Israel three times since 2017 and hope to return sometime in the next couple of years.  I saw a lot of Arabic and decided I should at least be able to read the signs.  

My language practice app is Duolingo.  They just added an alphabet feature for alphabets other than the one for western  languages.  So I decided I could start from nothing and see if I could get to some basic phrases with just Duolingo and some writing.   

Last month when I was in Germany for two weeks, I could order food in a restaurant in German. Language rests in strange places in my head.  

So I will keep struggling with five alphabets and six languages (there is always more to learn in English) and possibly read Arabic signs on my next trip to Israel.

Terezin: "Model" Concentration Camp and Death Camp for "Mosaic" Christians

The ironic lie at the gate of many concentration camps, including Terezin

Two weeks ago I visited the Terezin concentration camp west of Prague in the Czech Republic. Terezin is variously classed as a ghetto or a concentration camp.  Tens of thousands died in the camp both from execution and disease, but it was not an extermination camp with gas chambers.  

Dozens of people slept in these bunks

Terezin was used a "model" camp. It was the camp the Red Cross was allowed to visit in February 1944 to show that the camps were not as bad as the reports coming out as the Nazi Army retreated.  The Nazis gave the Jews in the camp some autonomy. Many Jewish children were sent to Terezin and not made into slave laborers or murdered, at least for a while.  

A memorial to Jews tortured and murdered in the small fortress at Terezin

Another group sent to Terzin was professing German Christians who had even one Jewish great-grandparent.  Christians with Jewish backgrounds were removed from Church leadership in 1933. All Jewish or "Mosaic" Christians were expelled from Churches in 1935. Many were sent there to be enslaved and eventually murdered at Terezin or sent to Auschwitz to be enslaved or murdered.

A memorial near the fortress wall that served as an execution site

After my first visit to Auschwitz in 2017, I began to see the area controlled by the Nazis, between the Pyrenees and the Ural mountains, as a place where 400 million people with a Christian identity lived and possibly one in a thousand acted like Jesus. All those Christians were living normal lives until the Nazis took over, then the trial came and 999 of 1,000 murdered and dispossessed their Jewish neighbors or averted their eyes.

The history of Terezin and the attempt to make it a "model" camp makes clear that even the worst of the Nazis knew that their actions were evil.