Charles van Heck's Woodhull Journal

This morning, I awoke feeling as if I were skating on a razor’s edge to the Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy for the Devil.”

I distinctly recall one of the last conversations with my father. This took place on an April afternoon shortly before he died in the line of duty with the Oakland, New Jersey, First Aid Squad. I vividly recall that warm, sunny afternoon. My father was looking around when he turned towards me. There was an unusual sadness about his demeanor. He said, “You are going to live to see another Holocaust.” At that moment,  it was as if he were passing on to me a burden he carried in his heart. I have carried that burden since that day 59 years ago.

During the Second World War, my father, who served with the 306^th Bombardment Group, was among those who argued for the bombing of the railroad lines that transported Jews and others east to the death camps. His position resulted in his transfer to Texas and the Pacific Theater. His photographs told the story he wouldn’t tell. What he did speak about was what his father’s and mother’s families endured in Nazi-occupied Holland.

I learned about the Kindertransports (Children transports), his cousin’s husband’s activity in the Dutch Resistance and capture by the Gestapo, and escape from the camp in Westerbork, then his journey to England to enlist in the Dutch Royal Marines. I recall this man with the camp tattoo on his left arm. My father spoke of the family hiding Jews and helping them to escape.  I was told about my great-grandfather’s death on a city street in Leiden during a round-up of Jews and non-Jews in 1944 as the Allies advanced—the Hongerwinter (Hunger Winter) of severe famine from November 1944 to May 1945. The hunger and privation the family suffered would be told to me years later by his sister.

“Never again,” my father would say and repeated that April day. But there was something different, unexpected⸺ grief.  What did he see that day?  “You are going to live to see another Holocaust.”

Over the past weeks, we have witnessed the capitulation of the Republican Party, academic institutions, prestigious law firms, corporations, families, friends, and neighbors to the Trumpian will. We watch silently as students with green cards are arrested and denied access to their attorneys.  We have watched the Constitution, the threads of the fabric that holds our nation together, be tugged and pulled almost to the ripping point.  We have witnessed attacks on our government agencies and judiciary. We have been silent as immigrants, some as young as fourteen, some innocent but judged guilty for having tattoos, are deported to a hellhole in El Salvador without due process. We have witnessed the sellout of our European allies, the betrayal of Ukraine, and heard threats against sovereign nations. Our silence carries over the Gaza Strip, Somalia, the Sudan, Lebanon, and other countries.  We have listened to the extremism of Christian Nationalists who misinterpret the Gospels to uphold hate. We, Jews and Christians, are divided on the Trumpian policies and how they affect us, and we tell ourselves that Trump and others in his administration aren’t antisemitic or anti-Christian. We witness racial, gender, and LGBQT discrimination. We hear the rhetoric that undermines our ethics. And we do nothing.   

We watch the darkness of fear descend across the nation. As in other nations that have allowed the choke weed of totalitarianism to sprout and spread like Palmer amaranth on farmland, many are silent. Do the silent think they can escape being guilty bystanders? Does it take a recession caused by the Trump Administration’s policy for those silent observers to speak up? Is freedom merely to be equated with personal financial security?

John Henry Newman observed, “Conscience has rights because it has duties.” At what point will we take adequate account of the extreme forces reshaping our social fabric? At what point do we put aside our fears to act? To paraphrase the sage and scholar Hillel, “If not now, when? If not us, who? If I am only for myself, who am I for?

As I write this, I can hear my father ask, “What does Never Again mean when we, Jews, Christians, and the secular do not stand together against tyranny?”