No. of Recommendations: 13
even the literal fascist governments of WWII didn't start off there, either.
Spot on. I was asked this week to resubmit certain family documents that establish my family's Jewish lineage, and the events that led to fleeing from Vienna to avoid persecution.
They will be used at an upcoming event sponsored by the German and Austrian embassies for descendants of families that faced persecution in the 20s and 30s that are interested in reclaiming citizenship.
Included is a packet of letters, all in German, between my great uncle -a pediatrician who immigrated to New York in 1928- my grandfather who perished in Vienna on Krystallnacht, my father newly resettled in New York, and my Catholic Grandmother sitting out the war in Ljubljana.
The letters from my great uncle in Brooklyn to my grandfather in Vienna discussed the increasing radicalization as Austrians bought into the Hitlerian lies and Reich propaganda. Uncle Paul urged his brother in Vienna to 'get visas for the boys'. My grandfather wrote of being fired by the University because he was a Jew, the shunning of the family by Austrian neighbors under the thrall of the fascists, culminating in a letter to Uncle Paul to 'Please watch out for my boys.'
The last letter in the packet, from my Dad in Jamaica, New York to my grandmother in Ljubljana, dated December 6, 1941, had a government sticker on the envelope: "OPENED EXAMINED". It expressed the hope that they might someday be together again.
The similarities of the rise of the Reich in the 20s and 30s to the present are frighteningly clear to those who survived, and to students of history. We simply don't understand Stephen Miller's motivation or the attraction to the evolving fascist movement.
