Alaska Republican Don Young is the longest-serving member of the House, and throughout his 45-year tenure, he’s made himself well-known for his bitter temper and ugly tongue. But despite his already appalling record, he’s now managed to sink to the deepest low humanly possible:
"How many millions of people were shot and killed because they were unarmed? Fifty million in Russia," Young said. "How many Jews were put in the ovens because they were unarmed?"
It’s quite the feat: Young manages to both distort history in furtherance of his obsessive pro-gun agenda, and he blames European Jews for their own slaughter in the Holocaust—instead of Nazi Germany.
My father was an 11-year-old boy when the Germans invaded eastern Poland in 1941. In his memoir, The Lost Childhood, he describes the day the Ukrainian militias that had overrun his hometown of Lwow came to apprehend his father—my grandfather, for whom I’m named—having received the green light from their Nazi overlords:
Worried about my father, I followed Lala to the local precinct. My mind was racing. I was overwhelmed by the rapid flow of events. My father and my uncle arrested, my mother sick and resisting the police, my sister washing toilets for the police—what would come next? As we approached the building, I spotted a column of men, six abreast, marching out of the police yard surrounded by Ukrainians with submachine guns. My father was next to his brother in the row before the last. Our eyes met. He seemed surprised to see me on the street, and didn’t notice Lala.
I followed the column for a little while. Father turned around once and gave me a faint smile, like the one I had seen on his face a week before when we carried out the radio. I waved to him, but failed to catch his eye. One of the policemen noticed, however, and, aiming the submachine gun at me, forbade me to follow the column. I stood in place for several minutes until the prisoners were gone.
I would never see my father again.
Had my father, a mere child, somehow acquired and wielded a weapon, he’d have been murdered on the spot—just as his own father was shortly thereafter—and neither I nor my siblings would be here today. Yet this is the fate that Don Young seems to have preferred for me, my family and the few Jews fortunate enough to survive Hitler.
This is intolerable, and Young needs to be forced from the political scene immediately. Please donate what you can to help his Democratic opponent bring his career to an end this November.