What was most disturbing to me about Sachsenhausen and The Holocaust Memorial was not the sheer extent of the human depravity that made the systematic murder of so many people possible. It was not the fact that within a few years, about six million people were killed. It was not the glee with which Nazi officials carried out their atrocities and indifference with which some other Germans watched . What disturbed me most is how closely the rhetoric in the years preceding the official beginning of systematic murder so closely resembles the rhetoric I see in the world today.
This time, “Jewry equals crime” has been substituted by “Immigrants equals crime,” and anti-Jewish rumblings have been replaced by anti -Semitic carnival floats in Belgium and white supremacist parades in the United States.
I can only hope for the best: that what happened then will not happen again. However, it would be foolish of me to say it could never happen again.