I’m not a young man any more, in fact, at 42, I was born closer to the end of World War 2 than today. My parents are both baby boomers. Their parents fought the war. When I was born less than 38 years had passed since Japan surrendered and ended the war. I heard the stories. The good and funny, like fishing with grenades or flights with a crazy pilot in a plywood plane over nazi lines and eventually I heard the bad stories too. When I was in 3rd grade a Holocaust survivor came to our class and showed us the tattoo on her arm that the nazis put there. Clearly those of us who knew them will never forget their stories because to be honest there are far more bad stories than good.

I’m thinking specifically of Herky, for those of you who remember him you’ll never forget him, for those who never had the pleasure imagine a tough guy, NYC kid from Five Points, soldier, farmer, who is also the life of the party with a sense of humor akin to Groucho Marx. He was not above wigs or props to get a laugh.

One day while he was cleaning the house he had owned since the end of the war, the money for which he won playing craps on the boat home from Europe, he found a roll of film. I had access to a developer at the time so I got what photos I could off of it. As we looked at pictures of Patton’s army on the moving to relieve the Bulge he meandered a bit. A lieutenant no one liked crashing his jeep, dealing with an enemy messenger in the Netherlands.

But then he told me something that I had never heard and is forever burned in my brain. He was in the artillery and when not actively firing the big guns they sometimes cleaned up after the infantry had moved through quickly. He was among a group of men tasked with examining a prison camp, barracks, barbed wire, but the nazis had run. It was a concentration camp. They opened the gates and walking skeletons appeared from the barracks. Herky saw a barn and went to the door. He opened it.
And that’s when he lost the ability to talk. I don’t know specifically what he saw, but I know it was horrible. Even now, the look on his face and in his eyes haunts me. He saw firsthand what fascism does to innocent people.

Now some on the right are trying to make the Holocaust disappear. Some deny it ever happened. Some deny how bad it was. A right-wing pundit recently suggested we should have sided with them in the war.
Never will I work with a nazi. Never will I excuse nazis. Never will I stop emailing senators and congressmen when they collaborate in any way with the new nazis trying to take over this country. I hope this can be reigned in before it goes where I and many people are afraid it could go. Though the eyes of my grandfather I know what nazis do and that we can never allow that to happen again in any form.