[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:16963] Holocaust Survivor Leaving US - Sees What's Coming

[Al Kagan]

This message resonates with an experience I had yesterday at the AWARE 
table at the Farmer's Market.  An older women with a German accent told 
me that she had heard the Bush Administration's kind of rhetoric 
before.  It was very similar to what she remembers from Nazi Germany.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Dana Lubow" <danalubow at hotmail.com>
> Date: June 18, 2005 7:57:51 AM CDT
> To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
> Subject: [SRRTAC-L:16963] Holocaust Survivor Leaving US - Sees What's 
> Coming
> Reply-To: srrtac-l at ala.org
>
> FYI
>
>
>
>
> Tony Gallaher
>
> University Liggett School
>
> Grosse Pointe, Mi
>
> tgallaher at uls.org
>
> Holocaust Survivor Leaving US - Sees What's Coming
>
> By Joey Picador
> 5-27-5
>
>
> One of our neighbors is moving. I've been in this neighborhood for
> about six years now, but didn't really know them very well at all -
> just waves and nods, mostly.
>
> So I heard the moving van pull up this morning. When I got home this
> evening I happened to spy my neighbor (he's like 85 years old - I
> don't know exactly, but he's old, talks and moves very slowly)
> standing on the sidewalk next to the van. I walked over and shook his
> hand, and we started talking. I asked him where he was moving, and he
> said, "Back to Germany."
>
> I had been stationed in Germany for two years while in the military,
> so I lit up, and commented about how beautiful the country was, and
> inquired if he was going back because he missed it.
>
> "No," he answered me. "I'm going back because I've seen this before."
> He then commenced to explain that when he was a kid, he watched with
> his family in fear as Hitler's government committed atrocity after
> atrocity, and no one was willing to say anything. He said the news
> refused to question the government, and the ones who did were not in
> the newspaper business much longer. He said good neighbors, people he
> had known all his life, turned against his family and other Jews,
> grabbing on to the hate and superiority "as if they were starved for
> it" (his words).
>
> He said he was too old to see it happen right in front of his eyes
> again, and too old to do anything about it, so he was taking his
> family back to Europe on Thursday where they would be safe from George
> W. Bush and his neocons. He seemed resolute, but troubled,
> nonetheless, as if being too young on one end and too old on the other
> to fight what he saw happening was wearing on him.
>
> I gotta tell you - it was chilling. I let him talk, and the whole
> time, my gut was churning, like I had mutated butterflies in my
> stomach. When he was finished, he shook my hand, gripping it really
> hard, until his knuckles turned white and he was shaking. He looked me
> in the eyes, hard, and said, "I will pray for your family and your
> country." He let go of my hand and hobbled away.
>
> I have related this event to you in the hopes it will serve as a
> cautionary anecdote about the state of our Union, and to illustrate
> the path we Americans are being led down by a group of fanatics bent
> on global economic and military dominion. When a man who survived the
> fruits of fascism decides it's time to leave THIS country because he's
> seeing the same patterns that led to the Holocaust and other Nazi
> horrors beginning to form here, it is time for us to recognize the
> underlying evil inherent in the actions of those who claim they work
> for all Americans, and for all mankind. And it is incumbent upon all
> Americans, Red and Blue, Republican and Democrat, to stop them.
>
> *********
> The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations 
> establishes that all people have the right to self-determination and 
> national sovereignty.
>
> La Declaración de los Derechos Humanos, de las Naciones Unidas, 
> establece los principios de autodeterminación y soberanía nacional.
>
> Dana Lubow
> L.A. Valley College Library
> Valley Glen, California 91401
> (818) 947-2766
>
>
>

Al Kagan
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61820
USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax 217-333-2214
akagan at uiuc.edu
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