The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

by Jeremy Dronfield

President Roosevelt—who wanted to increase the number of refugees taken in—could do nothing against Congress and the press. The United States had a theoretical quota of sixty thousand refugees a year, but chose not to use it. Instead, Washington employed every bureaucratic trick it could dream up to obstruct and delay applications. In June 1940, an internal State Department memo advised its consuls in Europe: “We can delay and effectively stop . . . immigrants into the United States . . . by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way . . . which would postpone the granting of the visas.”

The USA Democrat politicians even today disavow any anti semitism then and now but the fact is, anti semitism is alive and well. Discrimination based on the color of your skin or your religious beliefs or any other ethic or gender bias is unacceptable. Their prejudice caused untold millions of deaths then and now!

Conservatives—who were not necessarily politically conservative—were somewhere in between; they believed in preserving ancient Jewish traditions, rituals, and laws, but departed from the Orthodox in recognizing that human hands had written the Torah and that Judaic law had evolved to meet human needs.

This refers to religious Conservatives not political Conservatives. Do not take this out of context.

In the Nazi mind, Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same—Jews, they claimed, had created and spread communism, and now ran it alongside the global capitalist conspiracy that they were also, contradictorily, alleged to be running.26

Part of Hitler’s Big Lie propaganda. If you tell a incredible or impossible lie often enough it becomes a “fact” in the gullible human mind. Sounds a lot like today’s politics doesn’t it!

Beyond the Blockführers and kapos, the electrified wire and watchtowers, the SS commandants and guard dogs, beyond the roads and railways, the camp system and the hierarchy of the SS, stood a whole nation, a government and society of human beings whose base, animal emotions—fear, spite, lust for gain or some imagined former greatness—empowered the system.

Very similar to the current political philosophy of today wherein politicians believe you should never let a crisis go to waste. Twist, spin, and distort the truth to secure tour advantage. Greed and jealousy!

The prisoners’ incarceration was meant to be the clean, simple solution to the society’s complex, muddy problems. The removal of human toxins—criminals, left-wing activists, Jews, homosexuals—was supposed to bring back the nation’s glory days. In fact it was not a cure but a poison, slowly but surely bringing the nation to the ground. The inefficient labor of starved slaves, the cost of the system that enslaved them, the weakening of science and industry by the removal of geniuses tainted by race: all these things hamstrung the nation’s economy. Becoming a pariah among nations had cost trade. Germany tried to solve these further problems by wars of conquest, more enslavement, more murder of the people believed to be the root cause, the stone crusher rattling on, day and night, grinding and destroying and slowly wearing itself out.

History is repeating itself today.

Solidarity and cooperation, the keys to survival, rarely come naturally to men in extreme circumstances.

And nothing has changed much. Human nature seems content to pit us vs. them.