The Last of the Just

By every indication of her Facebook profile, a person who I loved very much in college and who was one of the most decent and principled people I have ever known is these days doing well for herself. She is still utterly beautiful. And I am also pleased to see that her parents are still healthy, together, and apparently very happy.

I will only mention briefly that while I was seeing this person, her mother was doing some local press and talks, discussing her experience having been a child in Europe at a certain time, having had a twin sister at that time, having felt compelled to hid with her sister under her mother’s dress as they assigned people from off the train, and she, having been so “fortunate” to have been a twin, she would spend her time through the Holocaust being studied by a mad doctor whose name you might know and might if you know it well associate it with dreadful evil, and that if you knew the stories, if you had heard her tell them as I have, you would understand the unlimited depth of the evil of the infamous Josef Mengele.

When I was in school, they would teach Holocaust every coupla years. Blah blah blah, the Jews and pictures of emaciated people and that breathtaking number, six million, 12 million, they thought they were finally going to get showers but instead they got Zyklon B. But hear someone’s Mom who you know tell the story, how when her sister succumbed and she fought back and how Mengele took to her phalanges with a hammer, hear that and know that person survived it and created a family that produced someone as astonishing and wonderful as the person I knew back in the day, and you can no longer experience the Holocaust as a brief read in your world history text from ninth grade. I read Last of the Just, I read Night, I was lectured to by Saul Friedman, I have heard Robert Clary tell his story. I still cannot comprehend this era as someone who lived through it, but I have heard the story from people who did. It is a story that reaches the core of this planet. And it is relevant and right under your nose.

And it is ridiculous that I have to write about Marjorie Taylor Greene. She is an ignorant psychopath with redneck in her pocket. There is no empathy under her hair or anywhere within her. None. Yet, he is a member of the United States Congress. This person went in front of a camera and equated House rules that continue to require masking with a Nazi policy forcing the Juden to wear a little gold star.

Oh, yes she did.

“This woman is mentally ill,” Greene said of Pelosi, D-Calif. “You know, we can look back in a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens — so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”

This is a person who is in Congress.

This country is so fucked.

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