The Screams of the Mothers
A short distance between us and the unimaginable
Today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Listening to the morning headlines, I heard a survivor tell BBC News about the day she entered the infamous Nazi death camp. The guards ordered all parents to hand over their children. “Can you imagine the screaming?” she said. “The mothers crying, ‘Almighty God, help us!’ ”
I was sitting in my car in the driveway, minutes after dropping my own son at preschool. I couldn’t move. My heart pounded, overcome with grief. Maybe it was a visceral reaction to the relatives my family lost in the Holocaust. My 97-year-old grandfather and his siblings were first generation Sephardic Jewish Americans who served in War II. Back home, in their father’s village of Monastir (in modern day Macedonia), the relatives who remained were rounded up and killed.
I am now a Jewish mother with a blond-haired boy who, despite his Episcopalian father, would have been deported with me to the camps. When the guards ordered us to separate, would I have been shot trying to save him? Probably. It would be less painful than the alternative.
But that’s not where my mind went first. Listening to the news broadcast, I thought instead of the kids in cages. All the immigrant children who were separated from their parents during the first Trump administration. Can you imagine the screams of the mothers?
And now Trump wants to take away the citizenship of American children born to undocumented parents. He wants to deport undocumented “criminals.” How many families will this rip apart? How many mothers and fathers will swallow their screams as they are separated from their children?
As my grandfather says, 80 years is not that long ago. If you think Auschwitz was an unimaginable horror, look around at the people who still deny its existence. Look at Elon Musk, Trump’s right-hand man, pretending a Nazi salute is not really a Nazi salute. When we say “never again,” isn’t that just a matter of degrees?