On my birthday in January, I found myself at the library, spooked by Trump’s vilification of migrants and acceleration of deportations. I'm adding the post to my new blog now, after Trump’s March 1 executive order attempting to make English the country’s official language, which, fortunately, has to compete with language access laws such as the Civil Rights Act and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, the non-discrimination clause.
January 31, 2025
At the hospital where I am a medical interpreter, I work with immigrants and migrants who are just trying to get healthy, get back to their jobs, and keep their families healthy. We have Haitian, Spanish-speaking, Cape Verdean, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic interpreters, and more, and the patients we work with are valuable members of the community.
Trump is trying to scapegoat migrants with his lies. He’s talking about deporting “the worst illegal criminal immigrants threatening the American people” (See WSJ article of Jan. 29) but he’s deporting our community members who have no criminal background at all, in places like Newark.
I’m not trying to be dramatic, but this scapegoating is really reminding me of another kind of work I do, translating letters from Nazi Germany. When I translate German family letters for clients, there are seemingly endless stories of Jewish families in Europe just a couple of generations back who were also just living their lives when they faced absolutely arbitrary and cruel persecution.
I recently helped Dr. Shulamit Reinharz in some of her research by translating German letters from her father, Max, from the 1930s and 40s. She includes excerpts of her dad’s English writings in her new book, Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir (Amsterdam Publishers, 2024). (It’s a very engrossing book, and, of course, trigger warning, very upsetting in scenes like Buchenwald.)
Let me share some paragraphs with you. Two stories early in the book stick out to me as being eerily banal, things that could happen to any of us.
When he was 17, in March 1938, Max Rothschild wanted to take his final exam (Abitur) in high school English but decided to take a failing grade on his final exam, because… guess what he was asked to translate on his test. He writes:
The [English] exam was given by a miserable Nazi professor. […] [He] grinned triumphantly at me, the only Jew in the room, as he explained the exam rules repeatedly. We were handed sealed questions and had to translate from English into German. The text – an excerpt of the English edition of Mein Kampf! All ideology aside, one should have been able to conceive of a more representative example of “English” literature. In that segment of Mein Kampf, Hitler claims that no Jews fought at the front during his tour of duty during World War I. And so the drivel went on. […] When I reached the point in Mein Kampf where Hitler’s diatribe against the Jews began, I halted. By stopping there, I knew that I would get a D at best, not only ruining my English grade but also my general average and the class average. (p. 12)”
A few hours later, Max sees a trusted professor and tells him about the exam. He writes, “In the corridor where everybody could see us, I told him about my uncle Max who had volunteered to serve at the front for the German army in 1918 and was killed. (p. 13)”
We probably all have lie detection fatigue, but I guess we should keep pointing out the blatant lying and scapegoating from the White House.
Later that year, in September of 1938, Max was visiting his family in Munich, when, he writes, “an overnight razzia and deportation of Polish Jews began in our neighborhood. On October 28, 1938, German police arrested 17,000 (!) Jews of ‘Polish nationality living in Germany.’ These so-called ‘Polish Jews’ were long-time German citizens; many had even been born in Germany, but now they were stripped of their citizenship without having committed any crime. (p. 23)”
He continues:
I did not barricade myself inside my grandmother’s apartment while this round-up was underway. Rather, I ran to the Central Train Station in Munich where I met Ilse’s two cousins, the Gerns. Together we stood in a truck that had been put at our disposal by the owner of one of Munich’s Jewish department stores, and we distributed woolen blankets and other necessities to the deportees. For the first time in my life, I saw Nazi brutalities, mild, of course, in comparison with what happened later. A police inspector…kicked little children who were looking for their parents. Ilse’s cousins and I worked through the night. We did not imagine it would happen to us, just to those poor Polish Jews. (p. 23)
Learn more at https://storymonsters.com/hiding-in-holland