“I am fearful when I watch the slow chiseling away of civil rights, tolerance, compassion and acceptance. I am saddened when I see this country’s pride in being a nation built on the belief, trust and hard work of immigrants challenged by the rhetoric of racism … After all, I have personal experience with the rise of the most shameful event of the 20th century.”
These words from Bernard Marks,
published in The Sacramento Bee in 2017, resonated with me as I grappled with how to respond to the Trump administration’s increasingly vicious attacks on Latinos.
The latest outrages:
▪ Imprisoned children
deprived of toothbrushes and beds, left to linger in their own waste
▪ Threats of
mass raids and deportations
▪ A shocking
photograph of the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his baby daughter, Valeria, clinging together after they drowned in the Rio Grande
Marks, a Sacramento man who survived the Holocaust, died in December at 89. He spent his final years
speaking out with fierce moral clarity against a resurgence of the same hate and authoritarian tactics that preceded his imprisonment in Auschwitz and Dachau.
As debate raged over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the term “
concentration camp,” I remembered Marks’ words.
Nothing in modern times compares to the Holocaust, but the term concentration camp predates it by decades. One Cambridge Dictionary definition for the term is “a place where large numbers of people are kept as prisoners in extremely bad conditions, especially for political reasons.”
This describes what’s happening in a Texas camp where “a chaotic scene of sickness and filth” was unfolding, according to The New York Times.