A Polish-American Looks at American Nazis
I was born in 1954, about ten years after WWII had ended. The trauma of that experience was still fresh in people’s minds. My father was in training as a bombardier, although he never saw action since the war ended before his training was complete. His two older brothers fought in Europe, though and saw some pretty hard action.
I saw a lot of mangled men throughout my childhood, mostly without legs. They got around in wheelchairs, although one — a newspaper vendor — used blocks and pushed himself along with his hands.
When I was 10 we moved to what was then a middle-class Jewish neighborhood. Our street had large houses, while other parts of the neighborhood were a bit more modest with two-families lining tree-shaded streets. We moved for two reasons. First, we were moving up in the world and second, my father’s mother lived nearby, in one of the two-family areas. My grandmother lived on the second floor. One of my father’s sisters and her husband lived below, on the ground floor. We were a tight-knit family on both sides.
We’re a Polish family, descended from a country with a very large and long-standing Jewish population — at least until that recently ended war. Perhaps because of that, our closest and most comfortable friends were Jewish. My mother’s best girlfriends were Jewish and my father made a point of letting me know that the top names of honor roll students were either Jewish or Polish. I suppose they might have been, but I take that story with a wink and a grain of salt.
Our neighbors, Eva and Harry Benatovitz, took us in for a few days when we had a small fire in our house. We played with the Zimmerman kids at the end of the block. I had non-Jewish friends too, of course, but the easy-going chemistry was never really there. When I moved to Boston my pack of pals were, for the most part, Jewish. This was so, despite the fact that I played Irish traditional music for over 10 years and rubbed shoulders with other Catholics all that time. I couldn’t figure out why. I supposed it had something to do with the fact that I was Polish and that the two cultures had lived together for centuries. I’m now married — to a very nice Jewish fellow, of course — and have the best in-laws ever.
Maybe because of this, the sight of American Nazis marching in Charlottsville confused and enraged me. “The Jews Will Not Replace Us!” they were chanting. Huh? Replace who? Why? I had no idea what they were talking about, but the hate came shining through. I thought about Jews. I thought about Poland. I thought about the stories my parents told me. I had always wanted to visit Poland, to meet the rest of my family there. Mr. and Mrs. Benatovitz — our neighbors and friends for decades — were also Polish, I learned. Polish-Jewish. Did they want visit Poland, too? No, my mother explained. The Benatovitzes lost every single member of their family to the Nazis. They never wanted to see Poland again. It was not a rebuke, just a clarification, but the reality of it was like a slap in the face. Eva and Harry Benatovitz were not statistics, not random Jews out to replace anybody. They were people and they had lost their family. My parents had protected me from this and it still hurts to remember it.
Hitler’s invasion of Poland started WWII. I heard other stories, of my mother and grandmother crying and praying for someone, some country, to come to its aid. My grandmother still had brothers living there. She had no idea if they were alive or dead. My grandparents were immigrants who barely spoke English. My grandfather got his American citizenship by serving in WWI. Now his home country was being overrun and destroyed.
European Nazis had a racial hierarchy. The Jews were at the bottom, but go up one step from there and you had the Slavs, like the Polish. Most of the concentration camps were located in Poland, for a few reasons. First, there were a lot of Jews in Poland. A third of the population there was Jewish. The Nazis set about slaughtering them as fast as they could. But there was another reason that’s not talked about as much, one which particularly resonates with me: after the Jews, it’s been said, the Poles were next. It’s all about race, which seemed to transcend skin color in this case. Poles are a pretty light skinned people as a whole.
Then there were the death camps. No one in my family knew about them until the end of the war. It turns out those camps offered equal opportunity murder: Jews, gypsies, Slavs (Poles especially), Communists, prisoners of war, anyone they decided to hate at that moment.
I’m sure American Nazis have a hierarchy, too, that includes black and brown people. They still hate Jews — how original of them. And they’ve hooked up with the Klan and the white supremacists, along with the people who want to re-fight the Civil War (do they think they’ll win this time?). The Charlottsville “Unite the Right” march was one, big happy family full of rage and murder, hate and racism. The air was full of pepper spray, invective, and Confederate and Nazi flags. And, like before, we have an unhinged Commander in Chief egging them on.
I think our only hope lies in the democratic traditions that are ingrained into the people of this country, north and south. Simply put, it is my hope that we not put up with this. Crack open a history book — and not too long ago — to see the consequences of inaction. March. Call. Sign Petitions and, for God’s sake, vote. There’s some great work being done to field candidates who are more representative of the peoples’ needs. Democracy is not a spectator sport.
And, if you want to burn a confederate flag, you have my permission.
