What were YOU doing last night?

Last night was the most distinctly terrifying night of my life, save for only one or two. I would call it all an anxiety attack, a slowly unfolding panic attack, or an existential attack. Whatever it was, I remember the feeling that my whole world had unraveled, and that nothing would be the same. 

 

I stayed up until 2:30 this morning and awoke at 6:41, when I heard the garbage truck outside. I am operating on four hours of sleep, and also the belief that every American should be operating on four hours of sleep. Because we all should have had the night I had—sorry, but dammit, it’s true—for the basest of reasons.

 

I’ve always wanted to know if anyone had ever asked those Germans who piously maintained that they knew nothing, absolutely nothing about the horrors their democratically-elected leader, Adolf Hitler, was inflicting—well, what were they doing on Kristallnacht?

 

If you don’t know what Kristallnacht is, then you never met, as I did, Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky. I was a nursing assistant in my twenties; he was an old man dying of cancer at University of Wisconsin-Hospitals. He was also the first man I saw with the Nazi tattoo on his forearm. He was an extraordinary gentleman, accepting his end with grace and composure. It didn’t matter to him that he was deeply respected in the Christian community, had strong ties to Edgewood College, and was revered by his congregation or disciples. He had great compassion and concern for others, and he had not given in (this is hitting close to home) to bitterness.

 

I bring you this photo, a screen shot that I tell you I took from my Apple laptop operating on macOS Big Sur Version 11.7.10. I show you the photo instead of just hyperlinking to it, as I normally would. A link in a text on a webpage—what is it? It’s a series of 0’s and 1’s that can be immediately erased by a program of 0’s and 1’s that somebody, or indeed some artificial intelligence, can direct. And the motives of the entity directing the removal of every hyperlink to Manfred Swarsensky are not good. Nobody wants to remove any mention of Swarsensky unless they want to hide the truth.

 

Bury the truth.

 

Let’s go back to the question that every German of a certain age (how odd to be using that phrase that usually denotes a woman of, well, “a certain age) has to answer.

 

What were you doing on Kristallnacht? 

 

Swarsensky knew because he was there in Berlin on the night of November 9 / 10 in the year 1938. He was up all night, and he witnessed first-hand the violence of that night. He knew that it was a rampage of broken glass, burning buildings, shouts, bells clanging, fire trucks with alarms blaring, and the smoke of burning bookstores / butcher shops / and synagogues that burned your nostrils. If you were in the country, perhaps, with the nearest house miles away, then you get a pass. But if you were in even a village, you knew exactly what happened that night. If you did not, you were lying to yourself.

 

What were you doing last night?

 

Remember, last night? I was up until 2:30, because I could not stop seeing this image in my mind:

 

I was up looking at this, and having seen it, I cannot unsee it. I cannot unsee it because I met Rabbi Swarsensky, and I saw the tattoo as I walked him to the bathroom in his hospital room. He was pushing the IV pole, courteously refusing my offer to help.  Here’s the screen that I saw this morning as I wrote this, and that you might never see, if I merely “link” it. Indeed I could link, but something has to be there at the other end. So here’s the screenshot:

 

And here we are. I am a 68-year-old guy remembering a man three years older than my father, a rabbi whose synagogue burned down on Kristallnacht. Lousy syntax—it was Swarsensky, not my father, who was the rabbi whose synagogue…

 

Four hours sleep, remember?

 

I am thinking of Swarsensky because I wonder if he knew what was coming, and if he knew how bad it would be. I’m thinking of Swarsensky because I saw the picture of the “top brass” of the United States Military sitting stone-faced and silent in the face of an onslaught of Fascism and hate from the president of the United States and Pete Hegseth, Secretary of his newly-renamed Department of War.

 

Calling these guys the “top brass” or just the “brass” is like calling Hurricane Maria, which I went through, a “Cat 5.” These men and women know war as no one else does—they have seen it, endured it, directed it, defended it, and suffered it, often to the point of alcoholism, PTSD, and suicide. These men and women are serious in a way that I am not. They put their lives at risk, which is OK, and they put their fighters at risk, often knowing that there will be a price. A phone call that has to be made to a wife-now-widow waiting at home, the wrong decision made on too much adrenaline and too little sleep, the derision of civilians for fighting an unjust, unpopular war.

 

They had dropped everything to do what had never been done: gather them all up and pressure them. If they were historically minded, they would have known that   

Hitler had done the same thing, and had made his generals swear this oath, called in English “The Soldier’s Oath:”

 

 

 

He stopped just short, but trust me, to anybody who knew anything about what they were seeing, the Soldier’s Oath was not in the rear-view mirror. But the off-ramp was certainly in the rear-view mirror, and we were speeding directly toward a place where that oath would be impossible to ignore.

 

It was horrible first to see the complete dementia on display. Dudes, this guy told everybody in his first debate with Kamala Harris that immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Ohio, and not only did you look the other way, you bought into it and amplified it. This guy has been up walking on the roof of the White House not once but TWICE! Nobody can say that Trump is following some sly and devious logic that only an Oriental, subtle mind could conceive.

 

Grampa has dementia.

 

So for forty-three minutes, the mind numbed under the onslaught of Trump’s demented mind. We heard about the battleships that used to look like how battleships should look like, according to Trump. We heard his grievance about the Nobel Peace Prize. We heard a lot, but nothing spoke louder than the “joke” about what might happen if the generals didn’t loosen up and relax. You know, have a beer, raise your right hand, and swear some good will to you good bud. Here’s the inevitable screenshot, and note that it goes downhill immediately. Trump has entered a room full of people whose professional lives are now threatened, and who have devoted their lives to upholding the constitution, not catering to the whims of some madman. We are not two minutes in, before Trump makes a threat that everyone in the room must have taken seriously:

 

Trump knows that everybody in the room is thinking about the troops that he has sent to Los Angeles, to Washington, D.C., and to Portland, Oregon. But loosen up, he says, we’re all on the same team, and if you leave the room—"there goes your rank, there goes your future.” This threat is on SECOND 24 of his speech. See above. 

 

It followed an utterly chilling moment in which Hegseth directly addressed the generals, and spoke about the enemy from within, and made it very clear that that enemy wasn’t immigrants. It was me, since I am the radical left. 

 

I am the person to be eliminated.

 

This was Hegseth’s message, and Trump was on board on his SECOND sentence. And then, after all the minds in the room had been subjected to 43 minutes of malignant dementia, Trump finally told the audience what he wanted them to know:

 

 

 

It couldn’t have been clearer or more callous. Let’s train our military to be monsters in foreign countries by being monsters at home.

 

The “brass” should have walked out of this “Cat 5” hurricane. They were morally obligated to do so, as I was morally obligated to pick up the phone and call the White House. They didn’t, but they were silent.

 

They were silent, and so was I. Until now, when I am writing about it. And I am not writing for you, assuming there is any “you” reading this post today. I’m writing it for my nephew’s and my niece’s grandchildren, assuming any of those worthy individuals ever comes along.

 

I’m writing it because I met Swarsensky, and I know what he was doing on Kristallnacht. And I’ll tell you: he was woken in the middle of the night that his synagogue was in flames, and that his Jewish congregation and the local gentile population were watching the firefighter douse the flames…

 

…of all the buildings owned by gentiles surrounding the synagogue.

 

They let the synagogue burn to the ground.

 

And then they sent Swarsensky to the camps, and I ended up meeting him at the end of his life, and in the first years of my adulthood. And I have carried the memory of this man and his burning synagogue down hospital corridors and decades of festering hate and maddening indifference. I have worried who had the greater guilt—Hitler? 

 

The firemen?

 

Or was it the Germans who watched the spectacle and did and said nothing?

 

I think I know what Swarsensky would say. But I also think that he wouldn’t say it, certainly not decades after the event. He was a humble man pushing his IV pole to the bathroom of his hospital room. He had witnessed horrors, and would soon be free of them. He wouldn’t have troubled a nursing assistant with any of that.

 

He held his peace.

 

But I can neither hold his, nor hold my own.

 

What were you doing last night, by the way?