Is Any Of This Nazism Making You Nervous?
I’m definitely anxious and worried for my family.
I have been dealing with Antisemitism since I was eight years old. The neighborhood kids wearing hockey masks, holding hockey sticks came to my house one night when my parents were out. My oldest brother cowered in the corner, crying. I picked up the phone and called my grandparents, who lived a short distance away. They arrived quickly, and those neighborhood kids scattered.
I was also eight when I met my first adult Nazi. She ripped me away from a birthday party after watching a Cinderella show. She dug her nails into my skin, not caring if she caused me pain. She said, “You will not be friends with my daughter, and my daughter will not be friends with a Jew.” I left the party shortly afterward.
Almost a decade later, my father and I, now living far away from Long Island, stood outside our country home. Kids from my high school drove by and stopped. They looked at us, rolled down their windows and did a Nazi salute. Laughing hysterically, they drove away, but we would have the last laugh. My father called the principal of the high school, and those kids were called into the principal’s office the next day.
One New Year’s Eve while in college, my friends and I went to a club on Long Island. It was smoky, and the music was pulsing. And it was a lot of fun until I saw men stationed around the club, standing still, watching everyone, including me. They appeared to be Nazis, and I asked my friends if we could leave before anything went down. To this day, I don’t know if anything happened or if I was wrong about them, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
Living in an area filled with Hasidics does not help. I resent being grouped together with these people, especially because I don’t consider myself Jewish. I believe in God but not organized religion, and I don’t need a temple or church to pray to Him.
But no matter how I feel or perceive myself, we are reaching a pivotal Fahrenheit here when it comes to being Jewish. The world doesn’t care. People don’t care. They go on subways and shout for the Jews to show themselves, and then what? Kill them?
It’s been programmed into people for a very, very long time that we are a danger to the human race, but we are far, far from it. But they don’t want to listen. They won’t listen, and I fear under Trump, it will only be much, much worse. I can see camps being created, people rounded up, and history repeating itself again. Except there won’t be an America left to save anyone, unless you fit into the new societal mold, and that society will be very, very narrow and selective. It will be a real dystopian, one I don’t want to see or live in, but how do you stop it?
What really scares me is not just my own survival but my family’s survival. How do I protect them? I heard my parents whispering downstairs when they thought no one was listening that things are getting bad. What are they going to do? Buy a gun? Will that be enough to protect us?
Lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe, I don’t want to see tomorrow. Maybe, tomorrow will be worse than today, and the next day after that and the next day after that. But I remind myself of what I have lived through, and I’m not just talking about Nazis. I’ve survived a lot of other things, and I know how strong I am. I am a survivor, and I will survive what comes next. But what about my family? How do I protect them? I don’t know, and I fear for them. But somehow, we have to wait and see how things go because I know things can change really fast. It takes one thing to change everything else, and we won’t see that change coming until it does. So, I have to wait. It’s the only thing that I can do.
Thank you for reading my writing.
You can find more of my writing here: www.melissamendelson.com
