Jewish Group

A Time for Choosing

Pure ice-cold antisemitism is guiding a lot of what you're reading and seeing in the last week. It's a crude hatred of Jews for being Jews, and it is as old as the hills.

Tom Watson
Oct 14, 2023

When I was a young reporter in the Bronx, I often interviewed survivors of The Shoah - the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany, an ordered and relentless human extermination program that shipped Jews of all ages to vast death camps, where they were gassed or otherwise murdered. The men and women I interviewed had been mostly children or young adults at the time (this was the late 80s and early 90s) and the camp survivors among them bore Nazi tattoos on their wrists. Numbers, like tags on livestock.

These people emigrated to the United States and made their way to the northwest Bronx. Some were observant Jews of one denomination or another; many were not. I interviewed them in either late middle age or their dotages, and they’d all mostly had full lives - teachers, business people, professionals, involved community members. I was amazed at how soft-spoken and matter of fact these interviews were. The Kristallnacht happened, and then my neighbors turned me in, and then my entire family died, and then I came to America and went to school and got married. And so on. There was an underlying intensity like a large rubber band whose vibration you could sometimes feel when you asked a difficult question but always sensed was there. Today, they’d call that emotional trauma. But at that time, I sensed both a willingness to discuss the past tangled tightly with the human desire to move forward. Which I could understand: the people I was interviewing had (by luck or intervention) received a second chance that six million did not.

And of course, the overall abiding theme of all of these interviews (indeed the special annual Holocaust Remembrance issue of The Riverdale Press in those days) was Never Again.

Well, we have arrived at Again...