I CAN NO LONGER REMAIN SILENT

© Jeffrey Robinson, 2024

When I first signed onto LinkedIn, a good friend offered this piece of advice. “Do not get political.”

Until now, I have done just that. I’ve posted about money laundering and financial crime, about fraud, occasionally about one of my 30+ published books and, here and there, I’ve added what I call “amusements” - comments and observations from 50+ years of writing for a living. I’ve put up previously published pieces about my problems with the French post office, about the man who taught me the value of nickels, about Hemingway’s typewriter which I own, about old pals like author James Baldwin, French icon Brigitte Bardot and Prince Rainier of Monaco. I also post, every Christmas, the story about a little girl’s letter in 1897 to the editor of the New York Sun newspaper who famously assured her, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

I have dutifully stayed in my lane.

Until now.

Until this weekend, when I saw the photo (above) of Americans flying the Nazi flag to signal how some people see this presidential election.

A bridge too far, I can no longer remain silent.

Seeing swastikas in American, given all we went through more than 80 years ago to eradicate that symbol and everything it heinously stands for, I was reminded of a story I wrote 53 years ago with a dateline just outside Munich, Germany.

It was printed in an American magazine, then reprinted in other magazines and several newspapers, under the headline, “No News From Dachau.”

Half a century later, it suddenly seems all the more than relevant.

Here it is:

*****

The city was still asleep as I left Munich and quietly enjoyed the empty autobahn that spread before me to Augsburg, to Stuttgart and on to Karlsruhe. I was enjoying Germany, having decided that what had happened here, happened a long time ago. That what had taken place here only existed for me in old newsreels. Hitler and Goering and Goebbels, were names and faces in an old copy of Life Magazine — as distant to many in my generation as Amelia Earheart, Herbert Hoover and Honus Wagner.

History, my history, is TV dinners and Howdy Doody. And Mickey and Willie and Duke. And a bullet smashing into John Kennedy's skull. The fires of Southeast Asia. Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and John Lennon. Watts, Chicago and Kent State.

Born at the end of World War II, what happened in Germany just didn’t seem as real to me as, say, the War in Vietnam. I wore a uniform for four years in the 1960s. That made it real. My father wore a uniform in the 1940s, and again in the early 1950s for the Korean conflict. But that was his reality. Mine was what I’d lived through and what I was living through, like that Sunday morning. That was as real, as the fresh crisp winter air poured through my open window and the road signs flashed by.

I took little notice of them, my destination being hours away. Yet there was one, smaller than the others, that came up and sped by and that one I saw. I’d always known there was such a place but, for me, it was a torn page with a picture and a caption in a book on a dusty library shelf.

Still, when the exit came, I slowed and made the turn.

For the six kilometers that led to the village, the countryside is rolling fields and an occasional dirt road leading to a farm. In the center of town there is a railway station. The building is one room, one story, covered with a dark slanting roof. Next to it is a small platform. There are only two sets of tracks in front of it. And this might well have been any small station in New England except for a wooden sign hanging above the dirty windows of the waiting rooms that announces to all who have ever come here, DACHAU.

There had been a problem in the town recently. The people who live here, many of whom drive to work in Munich every day, are upset that tourists only come to see what remains of an era that ended when the American Army arrived 26 years ago, in April 1945. They feel their town is just another small town, a quiet place to live and a good place to raise children.

They want history to go away.

The Olympic Games are coming to Munich next summer and residents here fear an onslaught of tourists. Sightseers who will come by the thousands, dressed in shorts with cameras hanging from their necks, looking, talking, posing for pictures, whispering, "It's terrible. Isn't this awful. It's so hard to believe. Stand over there and wave. Where can we buy souvenirs?"

Some of the more influential people in town have tried to get the name of the village changed. "It was a long time ago," they argued. But the answers came back, "That's right. It was a long time ago." And the name remains.

Down the block and around the corner, a small detachment of US Army troops occupies what had been a training base for SS officers. The two-story houses that line the street had been lived in by men whose names were spoken first in Berlin, then later at the war crime trials in Nuremburg. A wire fence leads around to the back and then there is a sign with an arrow that announces, “Gadenkstatte KZ.”

That’s the designation of the concentration camp.

From there, the road goes through a small residential area, across a large intersection, past a church, past a bakery, past a dry goods store and finally, on the other side of an open field, there is a parking lot. At the end of the parking lot is a high wall and a large gate swinging under a dark brown weathered guard tower. There's barbed wire and a second wall inside and a long ditch, like a moat, with a nearby sign that says no children are allowed here without their parents, no bicycles, no running, no shouting and no picnicking will be permitted.

A concentration camp is not pretty.

In fact, it looks exactly like what it is. A somber and drab arena of unthinkable inhumanity and death.

Two one-story barracks are off to the side with cement pads lined up behind them where the other 28 had been. To the left is a one-story U-shaped building. It was once the camp’s headquarters. It is now the museum. In between is an open stretch of cement with a striking sculpture of distorted Stars of David. And near that, deliberately much too large to be ignored, is a stone and bronzed plaque with the words, "Never Again."

The museum starts with a wall covered in names of people who had been brought here. People from Germany, from Czechoslovakia, from Poland, from Russia, from the Netherlands, from Denmark, from France. Some of the names are Goldberg, Cohen and Schwartz, Leib, Kaplan and Levy.

Then there are huge pictures of newspapers and journals and photos, many of them once used in the trials, an indelible reminder of what happened here.

Those pictures tell the story of a place that began as an internment camp for political threats to a new German dream. They talk not about the murders or Jews, but about Adolph Hitler and the world he tried to create. This is the early 1930s and they paint a portrait of a man, in a foreboding yet bizarrely human way. There are photos of him making speeches, photos of him smiling with people who believed in his Germany First politics, photos of him at banquets and at parties, laughing, shaking hands, looking forward to the future.

Only then comes a slight mention of Jews being arrested. But it is a minor point and the history continues.

There is more smiling, more laughing, more handshaking, more rallies.

Then comes another mention of Jews. Then there is a third. And then there is a fourth. Then there are pictures of him with men carrying Nazi flags.

Shockingly, the effect is that standing in that building, walking where these men walked, breathing the air they breathed, picturing in your mind where in the large room there might have been a desk and where there might have been a file cabinet, it dawns on me that a mere two-dozen or so years separate certain people walking through this building from being a tourist or being a prisoner.

What a strange definition of freedom that is. To know you can walk out at any time, only because you are here one second in some time-space continuum, after the fact.

Almost no one in the museum spoke. The story is painted too starkly, too well, too real. It’s the story of how men and women and children were brought here. How they were lined up and interviewed. How the men who could work, stayed. How the others were taken away, routinely and summarily, put to death.

Now there are display cases. One has a prison uniform, with a number on the front of it and a Star of David on the sleeve. There is a pile of teeth. There is a pile of eyeglasses. And now there are more graphic, more upsetting photos. Lots of them. Pictures of frail human beings herded awake by young, severely serious and intense men carrying large guns, and batons and whips. The frail men, in prison uniforms that are too large for their emaciated frames, are being marched to work at 5:30 am, marched to a meal, marched back to work, marched to another meal and marched to bed, only to be herded awake the next morning, and every morning, and marched everywhere like cattle.

And when these starved and beaten men – whose faces you can clearly see, and into whose eyes you can clearly stare – when they could work no more they’re set aside for medical experiments.

And there are pictures of those experiments.

The human beings in these photos had been right here. They are standing against a wall in front of a firing squad. A man is lying bloodied and dead in the mud. Two men hanging by their necks. Three men are tied to a stake being beaten by guards with clubs. Two men are standing in front of an oven. An open ditch is half-filled with human remains.

These over-sized black and white photos are sickening.

A small newspaper clipping says that 30,000 were murdered here.

The original barracks had been destroyed by the Americans when they came to liberate this place, but two barracks have been rebuilt and renovated to look as they once did. Inside, slats of wood form bunks piled five high and crammed right next to each other. One open toilet serves the whole building. The Nazi regulations posted prohibit just about everything. None of the punishments had to be listed.

A walkway stretching down from where the barracks had been, lined fifteen to a side, to the far end of the camp, today, there are three chapels. Catholic. Protestant. Jewish. A sign in front says, "We must never forget."

I stood there, near that sign and looked around. I counted the 28 vacant cement pads. Then I counted them again. Whether or not I thought of this as part of my history, no longer mattered. This was very real. This was not just a feature story from a magazine. Or a black and white newsreel. Or merely a way to remind us of our duties to all human beings. Or to tell ourselves what we owe our fellow man. These walls. These buildings. The eyes of the men in those pictures showed depravity that cannot be defined simply as, inhuman.

It happened here.

Thirty thousand men and women and children were murdered right here.

Thirty thousand innocent souls were stripped of their clothes, had their heads shaven bald so their hair could fill mattresses, had their teeth extracted for their gold fillings and had then been driven, like cattle, to the slaughter pens.

Atrocious seems too gentle a word.

Thirty thousand human beings were murdered here in cold blood.

And I felt very lost.

Except for a car horn in the distance and the birds that live in the trees across the fence, the camp is quiet.

Once an hour a church bell is tolled, but aside from that there is silence.

I wanted to talk with someone. To say something. I had a driving compulsion to tell another human being what I felt and to reassure myself that someone else felt it too. But there was a stronger obsession, not to produce a single sound. To be absolutely silent. To be completely alone. To selfishly make this a private and personal experience.

I assured myself it would be wrong to burst into someone else's world. And everyone else there that morning seemed to understand.

I stood in front of the three chapels and looked at what was left of the camp, and especially at the barbed wire fences and the wall and the ditch and the guard towers. And maybe that could have been enough. A museum. Two barracks. Three chapels. All those photos.

And maybe all of that could have been brought Gadenkstatte KZ to life for me.

Maybe the whole experience could have been complete with just that and nothing more.

But a thin cobblestone road leads to another fence, another gate, a small bridge over the ditch and an opening in the trees.

Two buildings stand there, as they did then.

The sign in German says, "Krematorium."

The wooden rafters are still there. The shower rooms off to the side of the larger building are still there. The ovens, silent and hugely grotesque, are still there.

Thirty thousand are gone.

Here the silence is deafening.

Here the stale air crawls on your skin. Here the heat that had come from those ovens and the voices that had pleaded in tears and the people praying their last breaths, and the clanking of the heavy steel doors and the shouting of the guards and the blasts from their guns and even the faint stretching sound that a rope makes when a man is hanging from it... it all remains.

Only one spot is immune, a small grave site out back, marked with a single Star of David and the explanation that hundreds of men and women and children, terrified little boys and terrified little girls being held by their parents, or torn away from their parents and being held by strangers, their names and faces known only to God, lie beneath.

That Sunday morning there were footprints in the mud leading from the walkway behind the ovens to that lone marker, where many people had followed the tradition of leaving a stone.

History is a strange phenomenon. It comes in varying shades of reality. It is as vivid or as vague as our own lives make it. But sometimes, once in a while, like here in front of those ovens and looking at that mass grave, it becomes more vivid than we can bear.

I was not the only person there that morning who stood with his head bowed, weeping.

Some twelve or thirteen years before my visit here, the then managing editor of The New York Times, A. M. Rosenthal, earned a Pulitzer Prize for writing this about his visit to Auschwitz in Poland. "And so there is no news to report from Auschwitz. There is merely a compulsion to write about it, a compulsion that grows out of a restless feeling that to have visited Auschwitz and then turned away without having written or said anything would have been a most grievous act of discourtesy to those who died there.”

When I got back into my car, back on the empty autobahn that spread before me to Augsburg, to Stuttgart and on to Karlsruhe, I wanted only to add, there is no news to report from Dachau.

*****

But there is.

Fifty three years ago, before I left that village, I stopped at the little bakery to buy something for the road. The woman who ran it – probably then as old as I am today – seemed friendly enough that I could ask, in my faltering German, “Are you from here?”

She said she’d lived there all her life.

I pointed back towards the camp. “Did you know what went on there?”

Right away she said, “No.”

I didn’t believe her. “How could you not know?”

She told me, “We knew that we didn’t want to know.”

Hers were the words I recalled when I saw the photo of those Nazi flags last weekend.

How can anyone rationalize what is happening right now in the United States of America? How can anyone somehow vindicate their own compliance with men carrying swastikas? How can so many hide their heads in the sand and claim that they don’t want to know?

Dachau was opened in 1933. It was Hitler’s first concentration camp. That’s where he housed, and began to murder, his political opponents. He rationalized it, along with the opening of other camps, using the word, Vergeltung.

It means, retribution.

Before long Hitler was rallying his followers by referring to “enemies of the people.” And, “the enemy from within.” And calling those who opposed him, “vermin.”

Sound familiar?

What happened in that small German town didn’t begin with the ovens. It started miles away with politicians dividing their own people, calling them vermin, creating a politic of us versus them. It began with hate speech and intolerance and threats to arrest political enemies. And it continued because people stopped caring, because they became desensitized, because they could dredge up their own hatreds, because they willingly turned a blind eye, because they knew they didn’t want to know.

That’s what the photos of the Nazi flags are all about.

And that’s why I can no longer remain silent.

Once upon a time in America, a certain man, seeing those flags in our streets, proclaimed – while others cheered his cause – “There are good people on both sides.”

No there aren’t.

This same man, calling on his supporters for violence whenever it suits his malignant narcissism, openly preaching hate, racism and xenophobia, deliberately creating chaos while openly threatening to use the military to arrest Americans who oppose him, is demonstrating a level of psychosis that is fundamentally, outrageously and unimaginably hazardous to the future of our Republic.

Who will speak out? Not his Supreme Court. They have already obliterated the guard rails. Not his party. They buy in, deeper and deeper every day, to his dangerous cult, hook, line and sinker. Not the old guard. They hide in the shadows, hoping no one will remember how they exhibit unadulterated cowardice. And least of all, the man he has chosen to join him on the ticket and would be next in line should this nightmare materialize. He is an all-too-slick, amoral misogynist who once called his boss “America’s Hitler.” But given the power on offer, he is now on his knees, unashamedly fellating him in public, while constantly lying about anything and everything, even obvious and easily disproven lies. He has even admitted to making up some of those lies himself.

Forty of this man’s 44 most senior cabinet officers have refused to endorse him and proclaim they will not vote for him, all of them noting that he is unfit. Two hundred of the most senior government officials in his administration have warned that he is unfit and are openly supporting his opponent. His former Vice President will not vote for him. And another former Vice President, one the most conservative players in the nation, has publicly endorsed and will vote for the current Vice President as the Democratic Party candidate.

Now consider the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's highest-ranking military officer. A retired four star general, he saw this man up close for years and says, out loud for the world to hear, that his former boss is, “A total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”

It all adds up.

But it is those Nazi flags on our streets that is the curdled whipped cream on this inedible cake. Those flags is the clarion call which prompts me to speak out. That drives me to say, the battle for our democracy is being played out on the field of good versus evil.

Oh, but there are good people on both sides.

No. There are not!

*****