Never Again is Becoming Again
Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day — a day that, for many, means reading names, honoring lives extinguished, and remembering the unspeakable brutalities of fascism. But for me, it always lands somewhere deeper, more personal: the echo of my father’s stories, his survival as a thirteen year old from Vienna, Austria, the death of his nuclear family and the unruly ache that comes with being second-generation with the resounding echo of “never again.”
And yet it is, in fact, sliding rapidly towards again in the USA. We are witnessing brutal violence unfold now. Not on the far side of history but now, in real time. Not that it is the first time but in it’s systematic formation, new in it’s vast organization, sanctioned fully by an evil and corrupt regime. It is now. The deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti have hopefully shaken the conscience of our nation. Along with the people disappearing into detention camps, children being taken and orphaned and all the rest you know about as well as what you don’t know. Yet.
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I cannot mourn Holocaust Memorial Day without feeling the ragged tension of now. I feel an old quake in my chest when I see footage of federal officers in the streets, when I hear political leaders defend violence in the name of “order,” and when families and children feel terror in their own communities.
When I hear the name ICE, I cannot help but hear a grim historical echo — the SS guards of my father’s nightmares, checkpoints that once terrorized Europe, now mirrored in the rhetoric of “enforcement” and “compliance.” It is no simple metaphor. When state power is wielded without empathy or restraint, when citizens are shot during protests and the mechanisms of justice seem absent, it feels like history’s worst lessons are not behind us but bleeding, no hemoraging, into our present.
And so I carry both griefs together — the historical trauma of the Holocaust and the contemporary trauma of a nation that cannot quell its rapid slide toward authoritarianism. I think of survivors like my father, who taught me that healing is never linear and that “never again” is a vow, not a slogan. Healing from the past is already difficult. Healing in a moment when old horrors seem to circle back is achingly harder.
Holocaust Memorial Day was yesterday; but the work of vigilance, remembrance, and moral resistance is every day. And if the past has taught us anything, it is that silence is complicity. So we remember the victims of history and the victims of today. We name them. We grieve them. And we keep pressing for a society where justice and humanity come first.
