Observations: Auschwitz on my mind

Last weekend, I drove down to Cincinnati to go to the Auschwitz exhibit at Cincinnati Union Terminal. I had been to Auschwitz itself about 20 years ago, and that had been a powerful experience. Still, I heard about this exhibit in Cincinnati and wanted to see it for myself.

While nothing can match seeing for oneself the gas chambers or the crematorium ovens, this exhibit was overwhelming, as it traced the rise of Nazi Germany, the building of the death camp and the horrors that ensued.

And it made me think, even more than I had before, about antisemitism and the attacks on synagogues and Jews, both around the world and in the United States.

In my own life, I have only encountered antisemitism a few times. As a first-year student in high school, as I was changing for gym class, another student in the locker next to mine suddenly came out with a poem, which included a line invoking Nazi imagery and calling for the killing of Jews.

I have no idea where that came from. It took me by surprise. But I never forgot it.

I attended Harvard in the 1960s and knew about the Jewish quota and the discrimination that was prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s. But it was gone by the time I was there and that was a blessing.

My father taught European history at Rutgers University, and long before there was any serious literature about the Holocaust, he gave a lecture to his Western civilization class that became a legend. The class normally had about 700 students. For that lecture, he often had as many as 1,500 people who came to hear him talk about the Nazi atrocities. And I was lucky enough to hear it once.

The same year my wife Sara and I visited Auschwitz, we also traveled to Austria with other friends with whom we frequently ventured overseas. I remember visiting a number of synagogues in Vienna and looking at the plaques in each place listing the names of people killed in the Holocaust. And there were a lot of Winklers, no relations that I knew of, but haunting nonetheless to read.

As I went through the Auschwitz exhibit at the Cincinnati Union Terminal, I was struck by a frightening parallel to our own day. In 1933, following a fire at the Reichstag in Germany, which was almost certainly arson, Adolf Hitler used the event to play on national fears and seize power. And I was struck by President Donald Trump’s efforts to turn unfortunate episodes to his own advantage for his own political ends.

As I read about Hitler’s reckless and ill-fated decision to invade the Soviet Union, I couldn’t help but think about the current invasion of Iran, which may very well have awful consequences. As I watched a film of Hitler speaking to the monumental crowds at Nuremberg and elsewhere, I couldn’t help thinking about Trump’s shrill and long-winded addresses to his followers, which sow the same kind of hate. And it’s impossible not to think about our current immigration policy, which favors a similar white, Christian society, not unlike the Nazi quest for racial purity, without the atrocities.

I hope I’m wrong. I don’t want to think about facing the worst. But as I left Cincinnati Union Terminal last weekend, I was more scared than I’ve ever been before.

Allan M. Winkler is a University Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Miami University, where he taught for three decades. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press.