A prelude to Nazification

"Since the Germans had issued their decrees on the Jewish population, she could go shopping only at certain times; she must not take a taxi, she could sit only in the last carriage of a tram, she could not visit a coffeehouse or cinema, or attend a concert or any other event."W.G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz,” from which those lines are taken, is a prelude in reverse. In it, the nameless narrator describes his friend Jacques Austerlitz’s 30-year quest to discover who he is, and what became of his parents.It turns out that his parents put him on a kindertransport when he was 4 years old, on the eve of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He grew up in Wales, with the name Daffyd Elias, not knowing he was not the natural son of his parents, nor who his birth parents were, nor what became of them.It was only through occasional circumstances, faint, sometimes terrifying glimmerings, déjà vu of he knew not what, that he came to understand the horrible deformations of his time, horrors for which he was in no way responsible but that determined the course of his life.The book, Sebald’s last, won the National Book Award in 2001, after Sebald died.Obviously, Sebald could not have intended it as a reflection upon our world of 2026, yet it is, in the sense that slowly unfolding horrors are too often a prelude, seen too late.Yes, I am saying that we are living through the Nazification of the United States. People are being murdered on the streets and trucked off to die in concentration camps.No one knew in 1933 what lay ahead, how the simple vocabulary of everyday life would be laid, like a thin skin, over acres of blood.European Jews in the 1930s were not being sent to concentration camps; they were being “deported.” They were offered the right to “self-deport,” to sign documents known as Heimeinkaufsverträge — with the compulsory first name “Israel” — by which they were offered “residence in what was described to them as a most salubrious place.”Eswatini, perhaps? The Central African Republic, Iran, or Afghanistan or Uzbekistan? Or any of the 36 nations to which Herr Trűmpf is deporting refugees — always for cash considerations.Under Hitler and his Reichsfűhrer Heinrich Himmler, Jews slated for execution “had their files marked R.n.e. for Rűckkehr nicht erwűnscht, Return not Desired, a purpose for which the SS men responsible, who regarded numerical accuracy as one of their highest principles, had a census taken several times,” Sebald informs us.The Nazis were sticklers for statistics — anal-retentive, we’d call it today — one reason the world eventually was able to nail a few of those genocidal Aryan bastards for what they did.Ahh, but Herr Trűmpf and his Reichsfűhrer Stephen Miller have a better final solution: just erase the numbers.“You can’t catch me, I’m the Kuchenbrot boy!”The present is prelude, my friends. To what? Too early to tell?The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum boasts — bad word choice, I know — a room with more than 100,000 shoes taken from victims of its gas chambers — more than 8,000 of them taken from babies and children who were murdered upon arrival.That sticks in my head. Know why? I rescued some babies from a U.S. concentration camp. I met their mom 40 years ago in an immigration prison in Laredo — the first U.S. immigration prison built specifically to imprison mothers and babies, and run by a private prison company: prison for profit.Now we have more than 220 private prisons, run for profit, to imprison mothers and babies and all sorts of refugees. All those shoes …After the Nazis “deported” Jews, they “confiscated” their apartments and money and jewels and books and tables and dresses and shoes and neckties, and anything else they could get their hands on, and stacked it in boxes in warehouses where the Top Nazis on the Block could take whatever they wanted.Of the hundreds of thousands of peaceful, trustworthy, mostly brown-skinned people our Fűhrer and Reichsfűhrer Miller have chained, abused and continue to deport: What happens to their stuff? Do we at least leave their widows and children something to remember them by?(Courthouse News columnist Robert Kahn wrote the first history of U.S. immigration prisons: “Other People’s Blood: U.S. Immigration Prisons in the Reagan Decade,” Westview Press/HarperCollins, 1996.)Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads