"Why I did not leave Nazi Germany in time" - an
adaptation
06 December 2006
by Timbre' Wolf, Contributing writer for AnaiRhoads.org
AnaiRhoads.org - This is a paraphrase of Jewish Professor Werner
Weinberg's "Why I did not leave Nazi Germany in time."
Pursuant to copyright law I have created an entirely
new and, hopefully, poignant work from Mr. Weinberg's
original piece. Note to reader: This portrays the
similarities in what we now face as a nation and what
Mr. Weinberg faced in Nazi Germany. While the
variations are minimal they alter the point from
history to current events. Dr. Weinberg was professor
of Hebrew language and literature at Hebrew Union
College, Cincinnati, Ohio. This article originally
appeared in the Christian Century March 21, 1982 p.
478. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation.
A complete directory of substitutions follows the
article.
As I encountered Weinberg's article, some sixty years
(plus) after the experiences which he describes, it is
my hope, beyond hope, that someone will not be reading
the following article sixty years from now on an
Internet threatened by governmental censorship.
"Why I did not leave the United States in time"
1. I was young when the administration came to power,
and I was beginning my education toward a professional
career.
2. During the first year of the administration's rule
most of us thought that Bush would disappear from the
stage in a few short years - especially now that he
had been given real responsibilities. We had no doubt
that he would fail, he was so much more incompetent
than those who preceded him, and even they had largely
failed to make the planet a better and safer place to
live. And, with elections occurring again in four
years, that would surely be the end of him and his
swaggering Orwellian utterances.
3. After 9/11 and even for the next few years we
thought we would be able to endure the discrimination,
the spying on our peaceful meetings, the photograph
taking, the name gathering, the wiretaps, the
profiling, even the threat to life and limb to some of
us, just as previous generations had endured - like
the hippies of the '60's for example. For together
with the blows that fell on us there grew an inner
regeneration, an awakening of consciousness, a pride
in our idealism, a readiness to suffer for it and
eventually to triumph through it. Far too little is
known, as yet, about this short-lived inner
renaissance under outside pressure. But just count the
articles and Internet publications, the organizations
(MoveOn, CodePink, DemocracyNow, WorldCan'tWait, et.
al.) of the resistance during that brief period. And
let us not forget that along with this newly found
wellspring of strength we were still proud of and
still practicing our national heritage - especially
freedom of speech and freedom of assembly - and often
we felt that we were the only true responsible
citizens of our great nation.
After the failed war in Iraq, and with less than a
third of the United States population approving of the
president, the administration's opposition party took
over both houses of Congress. We were certain that
things would be put right. We were wrong even in this.
4. How many people have ever given thought to what it
means to tear oneself up by the roots and leave an
environment that has been one's physical, cultural and
emotional home perhaps for generations? Even Chuck
Berry's rock-n-roll song from a generation or two
previous echoed in our hearts, "I'm so glad that I'm
livin' in the USA." The uprooting I mean is totally
different from the "Get thee out of thy country"
imperative that went out to Abraham, which carried
with it God's promise about "a land I will show thee"
(Gen. 12:1). An uprooting that is totally involuntary
causes great pain. Even in the jails and prisons
(newly completed by Halliburton subsidiary KBR),
moving to a different prison or having to leave a cell
with which you had become familiar and go to a
different one was a misfortune. Strangely, in the
flight of refugees we seldom consider the initial
stage: that of being uprooted. We begin to develop a
degree of empathy only after they have become "boat
people," so to speak.
5. I readily admit that many of us feared the shock of
being uprooted and tried to avoid it if at all
possible. But to understand this reaction, you will
have to believe me when I say that nobody could
possibly have foreseen the "final solution," or the
impending results of laws like the Patriot Act or the
Military Commissions Act. I am quite sure that this
even applies to the administration's leadership during
the earlier years. Consider that Collin Powell said,
of the Pentagon's spying program on PeaceFolk, "This
should not be happening in America." To me, everyone
who says that he or she foresaw the incarceration,
torture, and slaughter of the people, and that it was
all ascertainable from the Biblical inerrancy
fundamentalism and religious/zealous nature of our
leader, is a liar, or has forgotten the limits of the
human mind before the horror. When the first evacuees
from Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and secret prisons in
foreign countries told us about the torture and
resulting deaths, we did not know whether to believe
them or not - they were terrorists after all.
6. There was even a moral objection against leaving
the United States. I remember that as a child I
sometimes caught the phrase: "So-and-so had to leave
the country." This was only said of someone who,
perhaps a generation ago, emigrated to Canada to avoid
army service in Vietnam, to evade the police, to
escape creditors, or someone who just could not make a
living at home. In short, the association with
emigration was negative; a person "in good standing"
simply did not leave. We even had a slogan: America.
Love it or leave it. We loved America and we had been
brought up on the protestant work ethic: "Stay in the
land and make an honest living." Ironically, most of
us had no idea that this proverb was nothing but
Luther's translation of a verse from the Hebrew Psalms
(37:3). In some families this prejudice against
emigration in any form went back to emigrants after
the political upheavals several centuries old, to the
very scions of "our crowd" in this country. America
was the greatest country in the world and everyone
knew it.
7. On summer vacations we would visit other countries.
One of the students stayed there illegally; a second
would have liked to stay, but his father forbade it
sternly. All others returned and assumed new positions
in corporations, mom and pop operations, or even
county and state agencies.
8. Many of the leaders we chose (Sheehan, Zinn, Moore,
Rhoads, Wolf, et. al.) felt they had to stay as
shepherds of their flock. But most of them advised
other's to remain here "to help straighten things
out." This feeling of duty-to-stay was ubiquitous; I
felt it strongly as a new teacher in a grade school
with children full of life and potential, and also as
a son. For if an opportunity had offered itself to me
as a young man, it was certain that I would have had
to leave my mother in the midst of the very danger I
sought to escape. Many cases of able-bodied young
persons who were given the chance and left, of leaders
who made use of their special standing outside the
immigration quota, filled us with sadness and
indignation. The situation was not yet one of
"everyone for himself," and for some it never came to
that. We were all in this thing together - "united we
stand..." and all of that.
Beginning perhaps with the events of 9/11, and from
then on - increasingly - through the administrations
reign, the terror grew and the belief of afFree and
democratic future in America faded away. Only then did
many of us, who had not done so before, begin to
contemplate emigrating to another country.
9. Before the open panic started, reaching the
decision to emigrate was still an individual process;
some arrived at it earlier, others later. People who
were still employed or in business probably tarried
longer than those without means. Driving your new SUV,
finding your news on Cable T.V., and your
entertainment from Hollywood has a narcotic effect.
But aside from these factors, individuals have
different thresholds, even with regard to acting and
reacting in the face of grave danger. Once the
decision had been made, the urgency grew quickly, and
the feeling was: the sooner the better. But at that
time there was, connected to the willingness to
emigrate, still the consideration of where to go and
how to build a new future there.
10. Now there was this true tragedy: in the measure
that the need to emigrate became evident, in the same
measure the opportunities for emigrating decreased
rapidly and radically. The emigration quota of other
desirable countries was overdrawn, and their
consulates handed out waiting numbers that stretched
ahead years into the future. The passports for Mexico
and Canada, now required, sharply decreased because
the mandatory power did not want to alienate a
neighbor. As far as other countries were concerned,
the demand for those specifically skilled in, say,
medicine -- one of the few ways of being admitted
elsewhere -- was saturated. Those countries that sold
entry visas asked ever-higher sums, and there were
ever fewer of us who could raise the money.
All in all, long before the exit door was slammed
shut, emigration countries barricaded themselves
effectively against us. The causes were economic and
social, combined with the fear of displeasing the
Bush/Cheney administration or even outright sympathy
with their goals and methods, among them anti-gay,
anti-Muslim, and anti-tolerant sentiment. By that
time, every one of us spoke his own "Get thee out,"
but God did not show us a land.
11. I wonder whether those who ask such a question as
"Why did you not leave the United States while there
was still time?" realize that not everyone could have
emigrated. There were definite qualifications and
conditions, and those who did not meet them could not
leave. Our conversations were governed by such things
as affidavits, sponsors, passports, quotas and visas,
requirements of age, skills and health, relatives
abroad, rumored loopholes in emigration laws from the
world over. Thousands, tens of thousands of us simply
could not emigrate if their life depended on it --
which it did. And if I, a healthy young man with a
certain sense of adventure, could not emigrate, what
about young children and old people, the sick and the
handicapped?
12. The greatest irony, something that to us could
only appear as a cruel hoax, was the international
conference on the refugee problem held at Amsterdam,
Netherlands, in July 2008. If Queen Beatrix had
deliberately convened it as a political measure to
demonstrate to her constituency in the Netherlands
that the state of the economy, especially the
unemployment situation, did not permit the immigration
of any more peacenik Americans, she could not have
chosen a more effective means. Strange that she should
not have realized what the outcome would be; we
peacefolk of the US knew that the conference would
lead to precisely nothing, for each of us had heard
the regrets and refusals of the different countries
privately, before at that conference delegate after
delegate from country after country stated them
publicly. There were gloating headlines in the "free
press" day after day during the conference: how right
Bush had proven to be, how the world was beginning to
see things his way, how nobody wanted us: the
intelligentsia, the compassionate and the peace
lovers.
There were tiny sparks of hope -- and I want to single
out Western Samoa, Venezuela, Cuba, and Costa Rica for
a blessing -- but they only emphasized the total
darkness on the face of the earth. We read the
newspapers with a growing dread; we were glued to the
radio in horror. Right there in Amsterdam our fate was
sealed. We did not have to wait another two months for
Wu's journey to Washington D.C. to know that the world
was buckling under to Bush/Cheney. As directly as Wu's
visit led to the invasion of Canada and Mexico, as
surely Beatrix's Amsterdam made possible the Silent
Night. The message was loud and clear: do what you
want with your resistance -- it's an internal affair.
And we, the rest of the world, won't lift a finger.
13. It is commonplace to say that the Silent Night was
the dress rehearsal for what was to come. It is seldom
realized that it was also a last chance. The world was
being tested once more for its moral fiber, and once
more the world failed. For a few days after the event,
border police in neighboring countries -- Canada,
Mexico -- were less strict about repelling peacefolk
who dared the desperate nighttime dash over a frontier
in the woods or across the river. Then this loophole
was closed too, by a fifteen billion dollar fence, and
the trap shut on us.
As for the peacefolk left in post-Silent Night US
there was nobody anymore who had any hesitation about
leaving. Never mind tearing up old roots or striking
new ones; it was a mad scramble. But emigration was
available for only a few; the rest were caught. Quiet
despair settled over us. We continued our different
tasks under ever-worsening conditions; I went on
teaching at the grade school. Many of us were very
pessimistic, depressed and gloomy; many anticipated
still worse to come, even though nobody imagined -- or
could have imagined -- Deputycommandos and silencing
chambers.
One more thing I did not anticipate: that 40 years
later a well-meaning student of a brand-new academic
subject called "The Silencing Studies" would ask me:
"Why didn't you leave the United States while there
was still time?"
The reader will note that the following substitutions
were made:
Nazi Germany with United States.
Hitler/Nazis with Bush/Cheney/administration.
Jewish people with PeaceFolk.
Schocken-Verlag with various internet news/peace
groups
Mein Kampf with Biblical inerrancy/zealotry
Auschwitz with Halliburton/KBR prisons
Nuremberg Laws of 1935 with Patriot and Military
Commissions Acts
FDR/Evian, France with Queen Beatrix/Amsterdam
Holland, Belgium, France with Mexico & Canada
Chamberlain's journey to Munich with Wu's visit to
D.C.
Crystal Night with Silent Night
Einsatzkommandos with Deputycommandos
Gas Chambers with Silencing Chambers
Holocaust Studies with Silencing Studies
copyright 2006 Timbre' Wolf
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