Memory and freedom
Editorial

Memory and freedom

This week, many of us have been thinking about memory. About remembering. About our ties to the past, and to the future.

It’s particularly natural to think about memories this week, which began with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, that hell on earth where two-legged creatures who resembled human beings without being human indiscriminately slaughtered about 1.1 million people, about 1 million of them Jews.

(Apparently the gas chambers were devised not only for the convenience — it allowed the Nazis to kill more people more quickly — but because it spared their own good little soldiers from the often unavoidable trauma of having to look at women and children as they shot them in the face.)

This week we think also about the resilience of the survivors, all of them by definition at least 80 years old, many of them over 100. They are an extraordinarily hardy bunch. It’s as if once the German failed to kill them, what mere bug or fall or accident or malfunctioning body part possibly could?

We also have been reminded of terror victims like Alisa Flatow, whose vibrance — whose smile, whose dimples, whose joy — did not overcome death but keeps her memory alive. We are heartened by talking to her father, who exudes warmth and still can feel joy.

We think of the hostages who were released from captivity this week, of the hostages still held, of the hostages who died in the tunnels; we think of the brutality of their captors and also of the strength of their will to live. We all desperately hope that the hostages who still are alive will be able to overcome their many months of darkness and cruelty and return to sanity.

Politics in this country exploded into extreme chaos this week. We will not discuss it here — those of us on either side of the divide look at everyone on the other side with the kind of pained disbelief that an editorial could not possibly help. But we do feel the need to say something about an issue that’s top of mind right now:

Immigration.

Almost all of us in the country, and certainly just about all of us Jews, are the descendants of immigrants. I was lucky — my grandparents and great-grandparents all got here before 1924, when immigration became restricted. All my family had to deal with was the perils of the trip and of making a new life, in a new language, in a strange land. The immigrants who came later had a far harder time.

I keep thinking about the MS St. Louis, the ship that crossed the Atlantic in 1939 carrying more than 900 Jews who were trying to escape the Nazis. They were turned away from Cuba. They steamed up the east coast of the United States, at times within sight of its lights, and then were turned away again. The ship went back to Europe, some of the Jews were able to disembark in other countries, but many of them ended up in Germany, and most of them were slaughtered in the Shoa.

America is a nation of immigrants. The country was built with immigrant brawn and flourished with immigrant brains. We were the world’s hope, we were the world’s magnet, and we attracted everyone with a hope and a dream.

I understand that immigration is different now, and that the rules that have governed it have broken down. Certainly we need rules.

But I hope that we will never allow immigration to turn into a dirty word, and immigrants to be seen as somehow less than the rest of us. We have all come from immigrants; we all are lucky that those immigrants made it here.

I’m grateful that my family found their way to the harbor lit by the Mother of Exiles, and they were able to enter through the golden door by the glow of her lamp. I hope that the door does not close on others trying to enter it.

—JP

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