My Holocaust survivor parents would be appalled by what became of their American dream

My parents always saw Victory in Europe Day — May 8, 1945 — as a kind of shared birthday: the moment of their rebirth, as they were freed from Nazi terror.

My father had survived five ghettos and concentration camps. His parents and two of his siblings were murdered. My mother had been a slave in forced labor, until the chaos that followed the bombing of Dresden allowed her to take off her yellow star and to search for a hiding place, instead of showing up for her planned deportation to a concentration camp.

Although both of them were liberated by the Soviet Army, they both placed their hope for the future with the United States — although they never moved here. For them, it was the idea of the U.S. that counted: a safe place for democracy, and a safe place for Jews. Now, 80 years after their liberation, I think they would be devastated to see what has become of their American dream.

That dream sustained them through the painful months and years after VE Day, as their Soviet liberators turned into their new oppressors. My father ran from communist Poland after experiencing anti-Jewish pogroms after the war’s end, and my mother escaped from Stalinist East Germany following a fresh wave of antisemitism. They found what they believed to be a temporary refuge in the American Zone, which would soon become West Germany.

Even though they were in Europe, the U.S. became the protector of their freedom.

I’m not sure I ever fully understood why my family stayed in Germany, rather than, say, following my father’s two surviving sisters to California. I suspected that my father was simply not able to move again after the trauma and loss he had experienced. He stayed his whole life in the small Bavarian town, right across the border from Czechoslovakia, where a U.S. Army Jeep dumped him and a few other Holocaust survivors in the summer of 1945.

It always felt like we ended up there by accident. The only other Jew in my school in this Catholic town was the one staring from the crucifix nailed to the wall. Many Nazis in the town still held positions of power, and had simply changed their party affiliation. It was more than a coincidence that the house I grew up in was located across the street from the U.S. army base. It gave my parents a feeling of safety.

When Germany reunified in 1990, they were skeptical. After all they had gone through, they were never able to fully trust the notion of a powerful, united Germany. Thus, they approved when I moved to the U.S. for my graduate studies, and eventually made a life here as a professor of Jewish history.

But for themselves, they could never decide where to go. There was Israel, the new Jewish state, and there was the U.S., which my parents called by its common Yiddish name: the “goldene medine” — the “golden country,” the dream of many generations of European Jews. How could they choose?

I don’t think they ever imagined that the goldene medine might stop being a beacon of democracy and a safe home for Jews.

If they were alive today, they would be shocked to see a country whose leaders support extreme right-wing parties in Germany, and in the rest of Europe. A country where Jews and Israel are under increasing attack on university campuses, and elsewhere. A country whose president has rehabilitated and celebrated those who attacked Congress, the very symbol of American democracy, on Jan. 6, 2021.

A country whose government is striving to defund institutions of higher learning, using antisemitism as a pretext. A country that now refuses to provide safety to those fearing political and religious persecution. A country that deports migrants to notorious foreign mega-prions without regard to the due process protections in its own charter. A country that is swiftly dismantling the foundations of its own democracy.

I can almost hear my parents asking me: Is it possible that what happened to German and European Jews in the 1930s and ’40s could happen to the Jews and other minorities of the goldene medine in our time?

As a historian of 20th-century Germany, I know that the U.S. in the 2020s is not Germany in the 1930s. But, nevertheless, I am reminded of the sentiment that the famous German-Jewish painter Max Liebermann shared with the mayor of Tel Aviv, Meir Dizengoff, shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. “Like a horrible nightmare the abrogation of equal rights weighs upon us all, but especially upon those Jews who, like me, had surrendered themselves to the dream of assimilation,” he wrote. “As difficult as it has been for me, I have awakened from the dream that I dreamed my whole life long.”

To many American Jews today, who perhaps formerly took democracy for granted and believed that this country would be immune to violent antisemitism, Liebermann’s words might now strike uncomfortably close to home.

As the 80th anniversary of my parents’ liberation, and the onset of their American dream, approaches, I wonder if their dream of a stable American democracy really is dying. The U.S. they idolized fought and beat fascism. It was a beacon of liberty. Now, I fear we are becoming more and more alike to those authoritarian countries we once fought.

But I see hope in the resilience of my parents and many other Holocaust survivors. I think I know what they would tell us today: Don’t be complacent. It is not too late to fight to preserve the democratic values we hold dear.

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