Grandpa came to America alone at the age of eight. When I was eight I asked why he left his family in Russia to come to America. “Allergies,” he said. “Allergies?” I asked. “I was allergic to Cossacks.” It was years before I got the joke.
The reason an eight year-old was travelling thousands of miles by himself across the ocean to a foreign country was because Cossacks were busy burning his village and killing his family. Like most jokes, it’s not that funny when you have to explain the punchline. In this case, the punchline is a Russian word — pogrom. Pogroms are the Russian version of the Holocaust.
Whenever I hear the word “pogrom” I think about “Fiddler on the Roof.” The musical has special meaning for Jews. It’s more than a story about a guy with a fiddle trying to marry off his daughter. What makes “Fiddler on the Roof” important to Jews is it’s a story about the pogroms. Grandpa loved that musical. It never occurred to me until now, but I wonder if it reminded him of his childhood.
You can go a long time before you learn about pogroms, even if you are Jewish. But every Jewish kid learns about the Holocaust. I was six or seven when I first learned about it. The Viet Nam War was ramping up at the time. I knew war was bad. But I had no idea there was something worse than merely killing people. It would be years before I learned about napalm, Dow Chemical and the legacy of IG Farben. Back then we could still protest the war and declare “we’re not Nazis.” Those were simpler times.
The mass graves in the pictures of concentration camps didn’t bug me as much as you might think.
They weren’t real to me. What kept me awake at night were the pictures of doomed kids. Some of them looked like me. The thought of kids being starved to death led me to wonder if things got worse, if things really got out of hand and the war spread, maybe they would come for us. After all, they had come for the Japanese, why wouldn’t they come for Jews, too? Then I remembered “The Sound of Music” and how the von Trapp family escaped over the mountains to Switzerland. That gave me hope, albeit misplaced. To be honest, I confused the Adirondacks with the Alps. That’s why I figured Switzerland was on the other side of the mountains north of New York.
This mistake was not apparent to me until I got out the Atlas and looked for Switzerland. I knew it was small, but I couldn’t believe it was so hard to find. When I finally found it, my heart sank. It wasn’t near New York at all. It was on the other side of the Atlantic. A long way from New York. There was no way we could get there. But there was a place we could get to -- Canada. It was HUGE.
That’s how I put away the fear. “If we have to run like the von Trapp family, we can get to Canada in a few hours.” When I learned the end point of the Underground Railroad was in Canada, I wasn’t surprised. That just confirmed the wisdom of my plan. When people started going to Canada to avoid the draft, I wasn’t surprised. That just validated my belief that Canada was a safe place.
I did wonder about one thing, though. Why didn’t the Japanese run to Canada when they were being sent to camps? All the Japanese people I knew then were much older than me. When I asked them, they just said stuff like “when you’re a kid, you go with your parents.” Then they would reassure me those days were over. I pretended to believe them. Adults get upset when kids start worrying about stuff like that.
As I grew older and traveled, I realized as bad as things were in the US they were often much worse in many other places. Freedom had a tangible feeling to it. For many years I never had a passport. That didn’t stop me from traveling. You’d be amazed how far an American used to be able to travel with just a drivers license and a voter’s registration card. One proved you were a resident and had your picture on it, the other proved you were a citizen. Of course, I always got pulled out of line at customs, but that just meant the line was shorter. I noticed how uniformly angry the Customs officials were when they had to deal with me this way. I commented on this once, and it was pointed out to me how much they resented me. They knew they could never enter my country with such flimsy documentation. American citizenship had its privileges.
Over the years I’ve known many immigrants who risked everything to come to America. I’ve known Kenyans who spent months hiding in the bush working their way to a safe port. I’ve known Holocaust survivors who fled East Germany before the wall went up. I’ve known Jews who fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fled Spain. After joining the Foreign Legion, one wound up in America because he could never return to the family he left behind as long as Franco was alive. I’ve known boat people who had to bury their parents at sea and hope they wouldn’t follow them overboard. I’ve known Cubans who made it to Florida after losing siblings in the mine field that surrounded Guantanamo Bay. I’ve known Salvadorans who risked everything to get to El Norte. Their stories were all different, but they all had a common thread. “Once I got to America, I could breathe free...”
In the 1980s a loose coalition of faith-based communities came together to work on what became known as the Sanctuary Movement. The goal was to help refugees from death squads find safe haven in the US or elsewhere. One case really stuck with me. A Guatemalan girl, about 16 years old and pregnant, had been caught at the border and returned to her country. She had walked across Mexico, alone and pregnant. She was trying to get to El Norte so her baby would be born here. She risked her life for a chance that her baby would be born free. She came bearing gifts and we sent her back.
I joined after Archbishop Romero was assassinated. US guns were killing US nuns and the government was turning its back on them. It seemed to me that living in the “land of the free” we had an obligation to those seeking refuge. Back then, technology was much more primitive. Personal computers were barely a thing. The Internet wasn’t more than a few nodes. I’m not going to tell you how I helped people disappear into American society. All I’m going to say is it was not very difficult if you knew a few tricks.
Things calmed down and people started to focus elsewhere. The truth is the slaughter still continued, the refugees still came, but Americans lost interest and the government got better at hiding the details from a disinterested populace. But even then we had the illusion of our special role as safe haven for the oppressed and downtrodden. Our government may do terrible things in our name, but we would object to them. We could fight them. We could undermine the injustice. If someone was foolish enough to attack us as a people, even the most cynical elements in our government had to pay lip service to the popular will. When Japan’s Prime Minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, derided American’s as an “inferior, mongrel, race” we responded with defiance celebrating our diversity, embracing our motto, declaring “E Pluribus Unum” meant something important and enviable.
But times have changed. I realize now the old demons are back. This time they are not the product of an overwrought child’s imagination. This time they are walking among us. They are working in plain sight. They saturate our airwaves and news feeds. They are not coy about their agenda. They are not sugar coating things. They are clear as a winter day and twice as cold. This time is different and it’s different in a very specific and disturbing way. The difference between what I see now and what I imagined as a child is this: I’m not scared. I’m ashamed.
The stories of refugees risking their lives to flee the US for freedom in Canada makes it painfully clear. We are no longer claiming the mantle of “land of the free” or “the shining city on the hill” for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I hate to say it, but I’m glad Grandpa didn’t live to see this. It would have broken his heart.