Another eyewitness is dead. His witness was an effective if crude one. His solution to anyone who argued the Holocaust did not happen was simple and violent. “Shoot the sumbitch.”
His response to those who strut around in Nazi uniforms? The same.
To some of life?s questions, the only right answer is violence, he believed. Give war a chance, he said. It worked in World War II in Europe where he fought and saw what the Nazis had wrought.
When Baltimore-area residents of all faiths gather Sunday for “Bearing Witness: Passing the Legacy” as part of this year?s Yom Hashoah, they and we should include this lesson among our efforts to ensure memory of this horror does not die along with those who endured it.
The lesson is simple: we must never become the evil we have successfully fought.
My father-in-law fought that evil on foot and from Jeeps and deuce and a halves roaring across France and Germany under the command of his hero of heroes, Gen. George S. Patton.
He was among the tough, blue collar, working-man bedrock of our nation. His life since the War-He-Would-Not-Talk-About was defined in many ways by the initials VFW, NRA and UAW.
Not exactly a liberal, he rarely used that word without “damned” in front of it.
Years of grumbling about Holocaust revisionists peaked three decades ago when images of Americans in Nazi uniforms strutting around Skokie, Ill., slapped him in the face from television news.
I found him loading bright, shiny brass and copper 9mm ammunition into four magazines of two Lugers, complete with holsters, he brought home from the war. He?d also chosen his Golden Spike .30-30 and about 200 soft-point deer rounds as appropriate for leaving exit counter protests the size of a fist in unarmed marching Nazis.
I told him he couldn?t do it. This is America where even ideas most vile are protected along with those who spew them. If we start shooting, we?ll be no better than they are.
It was the only time he ever laid a hand on me, grabbing me by the collar and pulling my face down to within inches of his. “We?ll never be like them,” he said softly but with a lethal intensity. “Ever.”
Yet, that is the question, isn?t it? We have been like them sometimes in our history.
We so easily could be again. Righteous violence dances along a precipice of mindless hate.
That time, one eyewitness decided not to resemble those he hated most. He unloaded his weapons. He died last year without any more blood on his hands.
But every year about this time he would remember, for remembrance is not just a memorial to victims of Holocausts past. Remembrance is a guard against Holocausts future.
Frank J. Keegan is editor of The Baltimore Examiner.
