I am writing in response to recent comparisons made in many media outlets between the immigration crisis and the Holocaust. I sympathize with the separation of the children from their mothers and agree that measures should be taken by both parties to ensure a resolution as quickly as possible.
However, what these media outlets are doing is ethically and morally wrong. They are comparing the current immigration crisis to the Holocaust. As the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust victims and survivors from Buchenwald and Auschwitz I am outraged. The illegal immigrants and their families were not forcibly thrown out of their homes by the United States, placed in cramped cattle cars without food and water and sent to fake showers, real gas chambers and ovens to be cremated. Many during the Holocaust were separated from their parents to be exterminated. While the conditions in the detention centers are not ideal, I am sure they are far better than those offered to the children in the concentration camps in Europe during WWII when six million Jews were murdered/exterminated for no reason other than being Jewish. The Jews did not voluntarily run to these concentration camps. There were no classes, movies or doctors, and not enough food or water for those who were kept alive in the concentration camps. What about all the photos taken by the liberating armies of the survivors and how they looked in the concentration camps? What about the piles of dead corpses stacked on top of each other? How could anyone compare the atrocities committed to the Jews then, with the current events? By doing so not only are these media outlets minimizing and belittling the Nazi atrocities, they are sending a message to the world that our country is guilty of annihilating innocent men, women and children for no reason, as the Nazis did. If only the men, women and children of the Holocaust would have received the same treatment as current illegal immigrants and children.
My parents are alive and fully aware of the immigration issues. My father just turned 90 and my mother is 84. Both are very independent and very active members in their community in Queens, New York. They are also outraged. They have to live with the horrible memories of the atrocities from 1939 through 1945 when they were liberated. Their parents were murdered in front of their eyes. Their brothers, sisters, cousins sent to gas chambers. The majority of our family in Poland was wiped off the face of the earth by the Nazi atrocities. They were not buried. They were cremated. How do you think they feel? The journalists and those guilty of making these comparisons owe an apology to every Holocaust survivor as well as to every mother, father and child brutally murdered by the Nazis. Shame on them for comparing the atrocities committed by the Nazis with the current political situation of the illegal immigrants and children.
If you don’t agree with the policies find some other way to protest and stop making this irrational analogy.
Dr. Renee Reifer Fishweicher
Fair Lawn
