Nazis in the Mirror

The images before my eyes, from the time I can remember asking the first question, have always drawn my memories of my parent's Holocaust, of my Holocaust, to the scared child walking under the guns of Nazi thugs, the Jewish star pinned to his thin chest his death warrant.

Yesterday and today, with pain, tears and trauma, Israel forcibly removed fanatical Jews from their houses. The decision has and does tear families apart, throw doubt into the hearts of both staunch supporters and decriers of the disengagement, and creates, to hijack a phrase from the Palestinians, our own Al-Nakba.

The impact of this self-expulsion by Jews, of Jews, will reasonate for at least a generation. The toddlers will remember this forever, telling the story, reinforced by their version of history and the event and the omnipresent media documenting this disaster. Would the IDF induct the fanatics throwing acetone at police officers into its ranks? How will the IDF find loyal, Zionist, dedicated soldiers to be the next generation of leaders? How will families look each other in the eyes when one side demonstrated in orange, the other in blue?

This exodus from Gaza pitted 'great' rabbis against the government, the army and the will of the majority of the Israeli populace. Their defeat in this battle only signals that the war between the fanatic and the realist, the secular versus the deeply religious, the voices of peace against the strident chanting of doing god's will. How yeshivas that were born at the breast of the West Bank and Gaza Strip can survive this and remain Zionist is beyond my ken at this time. It must be, but tonight, from my far-away perch, I do not see the way.

One ripple of history, however, must not be allowed to propagate. Some fanatics, some sick, twisted settlers and agitators dared to do what we as a people have allways despised when done my others: compare anything less than a holocaust to the Holocaust. Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Serbia, the Iraqi Kurds, these are all holocausts worthy not only of comparison, but deserving of remembrance so that we, as a human society, can learn never to repeat. (So far, we seem to be developmentally challenged in that regard.)

With this disgusting display we have lost the ability to compain against PETA and their comparison of chickens in cages to Jews peering at the photographer from their wooden slats in Auschwitz. We can no longer blaze with righteous anger at the goose-stepping neo-nazis proclaiming Judenrein in podunk Polish or German towns that haven't seen one of my kind since they shipped us off to death camps in 1939.

My parents' town in Poland, in 1947, Nineteen Forty Seven!, committed a pogrom against the remaining few Holocaust survivors, to create a Judenrein city. They welcome us now, with our money to spend on touring the places where they and their parents condemned their visitors' families to death. My family, for the record, went to Auschwitz on September 8, 1943.

This is a picture of my father's friend who, after the war, posed in one of the uniforms, taken by a professional photographer. I never got a straight answer from my parents as to why so many survivors had their pictures taken like this, but I have a theory. While the Jewish star was a symbol of their subjugation, the uniform was their badge of survival, of having passed through the storm. I never saw any of my family pictures after the war with anyone wearing that star.

With all due respect to the Israeli citizens who have had their lives entirely disrupted, and their children whom they subjected to a life-crippling trauma, they should be ashamed that they even thought of comparing non-violent, crying soldiers and police officers to the cold, heartless bastards who murdered over three hundred of my aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins for the simple sin of being Jewish. May these victims of brutal murder be remembered, as the memory of these defilers of those of martyrs be erased.