Editor’s note: This commentary is by Brenda Siegel, who is the executive and artistic director of the Southern Vermont Dance Festival, vice chair of the Newfane Democratic Committee and delegate to the Windham County Democratic Committee. She was a candidate in the Democratic primary for governor in 2018 and is an anti-poverty activist and single mom from Newfane.
[I] have heard that some people are upset with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for naming what is happening at the southern border as concentration camps. She is not the first, but she has a spotlight and people have chosen to go after her as such.
I also understand that many don’t know that death camps and concentration camps in Nazi Germany were different things, though it is fair to say that the two were often combined.
I also understand that many of us are not aware of how the Holocaust started. It did not start with death camps. There were a lot of steps before that. We are further along in similar steps than we ever should find ourselves. Prior to concentration camps, it was small things. It was the type of small things that we are turning away from and accepting. Children, like my grandmother, were called “dirty Jew” in school. Jews were demonized, treated as less. Families like my grandmother’s were fleeing from country to country to try to get away from what Hitler was doing. Division and stigma were allowed to swell about Jewish people as well as others. Just as here and now, there were many years of increasing xenophobia, sexism and racism.
Many of us don’t know the stories of people like my grandmother who came to the United States after the German quota was filled. She was born in Germany, but she was lucky that she had a Lithuanian passport. She, alone, would have been turned away. The family came on a visitors visa and had to go to Canada before eventually becoming U.S. citizens. I exist because my family made it to the United States. My grandmother talked about the fear she had during that time in her life every time that she came near a border.
I tell you this story because I highly recommend that we all learn the history that is screaming at us in warning. I recommend that we all find the courage to do everything to stop this atrocity. Children are in cages. People are in cages. They are being left to be ill, underfed and treated horrifically. We are holding people fleeing danger, we are holding them under armed guards. People are stuck in clothing that they had soiled because they lack any access to facilities. Children have died in custody. Parents don’t know where their children are. We have not kept records.
We want to look away because if we look away, we don’t have to see what we are all allowing to happen. We want to argue that we aren’t that bad. The thing is, we are. The disregard for human beings as human beings has been allowed to grow like a flesh-eating bacteria in this country and we are seeing the manifestation of this in our society today. No this is not new, not at all. This is who we are.
I have heard many people say “This is how it starts.” No, this is not how it starts, this is several steps beyond the beginning and far closer to moving from concentration camps to the death camps than we all wish to recognize. I saw that a border guard called the characterization of the camps as concentration camps “hurtful,” that they are doing the “best they can” with the resources they have. I found myself immediately commenting on a CNN post saying: “So sorry you find it offensive. By definition it is a concentration camp and this isn’t about your ego.”
The Merriam-Webster’s dictionary definition of concentration camp is “A place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”
I wonder if it won’t be until the end of this, that border guards, ICE agents and all of us realize that those participating in these atrocities, those not doing anything right now, those permitting this horror will all be seen as monsters. The rest of us? They will ask why we didn’t do anything when we knew it was happening? Why didn’t we stop it? This is why. How we look at the Holocaust is exactly as history will see us if we never choose to act.
You may not like that it is happening and want to call it something else, but this is what is happening. The argument cannot be about what this is, it must be about how we stop it.
