(RNS) — In the past week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has descended into my hometown of Portland, Maine. In our small village of a city, our neighbors are being hunted. Some aren’t going to work and have stopped sending their children to school. Families are trapped inside for fear of being torn apart. That goes for those who are here legally, with all of their paperwork in order, as well as those who are not.
As I walk the streets of my beloved home with my newborn baby attached to me, I’m confronted by memories of the past. On Tuesday (Jan. 27), we commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a history that I inherited: My grandmother was the only Holocaust survivor in her family. She evaded capture over and over again, saved by strangers — all nameless, faceless individuals who risked their lives to help her in small and big ways.
I’ve spent much of my career studying and retelling her story. Among those like me who work in Holocaust education, there is a healthy conversation about which stories and facts are most important to teach: Do we focus on death and destruction or rescue and resistance? For me, it’s always been the latter. My grandmother’s survival has taught me that there is a ripple effect when you focus a hopeful story — one that illuminates the power of collective good. You learn what to fear and resist, but also receive a blueprint of how to show up for neighbors in times of crisis and need.
Through this work, I’ve participated in a collective goal: Never again. It’s a mantra we say about the Holocaust in every classroom and on every commemorative day. It’s a hope for the world, and I subscribe to it. But “Never again” can feel like an empty drum we keep beating. There has been political violence in every decade since the Holocaust, including subsequent genocides. Rather than “Never again,” I believe we should refocus our mantra to a question: What do we do when?
A portrait of Hana Dubová, the author’s grandmother, taken in the early 1940s while she was a teen refugee in Denmark during the Holocaust. (Photo courtesy of Rachael Cerrotti and the We Share The Same Sky archive)
What do we do when a man with a fragile ego gains power after leading a failed coup? What do we do when democracy is dismantled and tactics of harassment, humiliation and terror become the norm? What do we do when rights are stripped and a plan of genocide is devised?
And what do we do when there’s an opportunity to protect the persecuted? My grandmother’s story helps answer that one.
At the age of 14, my grandmother was sent with a group of Jewish teenagers from her home in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to Denmark, which would be occupied about six months later. As she put it, it was like “receiving a lottery ticket.” In the years that followed, she was repeatedly taken in by Danish farmers who were part of a women’s network. She exchanged her work for room and board and remained safe in the Danish countryside until 1943, when, as Nazi forces sought to round up Danish Jews, she fled to Sweden, stuffed under herring on a fishing boat, part of a grassroots rescue mission that saved 95% of Denmark’s Jews.
On the boat with my grandmother were a prominent rabbi, Marcus Melchior, his pregnant wife and some of their children. Bent Melchior, then 14, would follow in his father’s footsteps to become chief rabbi of Denmark and would spend his life fighting for refugee rights.
I became close to Bent during my years researching my family, as if he were a grandfather. We had many conversations about this shared history. “For the Danes, the Jewish people were normal citizens and good neighbors. This was psychologically an important part of the story,” he told me. “This was not something that was organized by an institute or government. This was grassroots. It was a spontaneous reaction of the men and women in the streets. These were our neighbors. We have legends around what happened during the war, but these are not legends; these are real incidents.”
He would go on to give me instructions: “You cannot help the whole world. But those that are within your reach, you can treat and respect as human beings.”
During the years that Jews found refuge in Sweden, their neighbors at home in Denmark never forgot about them. They didn’t appropriate their belongings, as happened in many other countries. Instead, they watered their houseplants and protected their memory. While some people were able to ferry their threatened neighbors to safer lands, others ensured they felt welcome. No one person could stop the war or the evils of the occupying government, but they could participate in a village of helping hands.
We aren’t stopping fascism anytime soon, and I’m not convinced that any amount of Holocaust education will get us there. But Holocaust and genocide education has the ability to reveal the incredible power of individuals and communities in terrifying times.
As my own state of Maine reckons with how to protect a threatened group of neighbors, I feel a call to action from my own family history. I’m not alone in hearing that call. The neighborhood efforts I’ve witnessed being organized here and across the country are evidence of that.
We Jews are well known to wrestle with ourselves. As we remember the Holocaust, it’s required to ask: What do we do when the learning, remembering and commemorating aren’t enough? What do we do when people in need are within our reach? Do we act? Or do we let our memorials and memories become hollow?
(Rachael Cerrotti, a writer, podcaster and curator of storytelling about inherited memory and grief, is the author of “We Share The Same Sky: A Memoir of Memory and Migration.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
