Are We Up to the Moment We Are About to Face?

Our Parents and Grandparents Say Yes We Are.

Pretty much every day for my adult life, I have watched at least one movie. On good days, I’ve watched more than that. It’s an addiction. I have never smoked. I have never done drugs. I don’t drink. But I love movies. All movies. Very old ones. New ones. I watch bad ones. But naturally, I prefer good ones.

I love pretty much all movies except cynical ones and those that do not ring true. My favorites reveal something inspiring or ennobling about people. Yes, I like happy endings or endings in which I can see some happiness. I saw “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” when I was little and managed to persuade myself that they probably got away alive at the end.

I mention this because this evening I watched a movie about the end of World War II. I’ve watched a lot of such films. My Dad, after escaping the Nazis, fought in World War II. The Blue Devils. Eighty-eighth infantry division. He was an artillery officer. I’ve often thought of all he went through in life before he turned 21. It was so alien from my comfortable existence growing up in a New Jersey suburb in which the greatest challenges I faced were the large number of girls who were washing their hair on Saturday nights and persuading my parents to lend me their Ford Pinto. (Which, truth be told, I later totaled. Still have a scar on the bridge of my nose from where my head hit…and bent…the steering wheel.)

He was brought up very poor in Vienna, Austria. His father disappeared on Kristallnacht and my dad, age 13, searched the city for him riding in a horse-drawn cart. My grandpa had been arrested and kept in a soccer stadium and then released after a few days. Most of their relatives were not so lucky. My grandfather’s family, you see grew up just a few miles from Auschwitz. My grandmother’s in Hungary did not fare much better. My father’s synagogue was burned down on that November night and so his bar mitzvah, scheduled for just a few days later, was cancelled.

They were dirt poor. Often my grandma would go without food so her son and her husband could eat. Once, when my father got scarlet fever, he was sent to one of the few hospitals that accepted Jews and he was forced to spend his time their sharing a small bed with another boy. The boy died on a Friday night but no one removed his body from beside my father for two days. When my great uncle who lived in America arranged for their passage to the U.S.—probably by bribing a U.S. official—they paid their exit taxes with most of their possessions.

They left Vienna with their only valuables being a couple of gold rings my grandfather kept in a clothes brush the back to which he had hollowed out. He worked making such brushes. Well, it was not quite that glamorous. He removed the bristles from the hide of animals that were then used in the brushes.

The night late in 1939 they escaped Austria there was an assassination attempt on Hitler and the borders were closed just an hour after they made it across. They made their way to Trieste and there, with money from my great uncle, who had a liquor store in Danbury, Connecticut, they boarded the S.S. Vulcania.

That’s my Dad sitting up on the rail in the middle of this photo, with his shirt jaunitly open (not wearing a cap). You will note he is wearing what were his first pair of long pants. Later on the voyage, the pants would meet a bad fate. They were made of some kind of cellulose rather than proper fabric and he was hit by a wave and the pants just shrank to the point of being unwearable. He had been proud of them and the loss made him feel terrible.

They arrived in the United States 85 years ago this month. He was not yet 14. Settling into a small multi-family house behind the parking lot of a 5 and 10 cent store in Danbury, he went to the local high school, learning English by…going to the movies every Saturday. They cost a nickel for a double feature but the reason it made sense for his economically strapped family was that every week he went, as part of a promotion, the theater gave away a different plate or glass and over time, they put together place settings for the family. My grandfather never learned English well enough to work in the U.S. So my grandma became a seamstress and joined the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. She supported the family that way with her salary augmented by my father’s work as a delivery boy. Apparently, World War I hero Eddie Rickenbacker was on his route and making deliveries to him was a high point for my Dad.

By 1944, he had learned English, graduated high school, joined the Army, went off to Officer’s Candidate School in Oklahoma, persuaded himself he was some kind of Viennese figure from the Old West and was deployed off to Europe where some mystery surrounds what he did although allegedly because of his fluent German and smattering of Hungarian he participated in some missions he never felt comfortable telling us about. He endured war. He was for a while in charge of the administration of a small village on the Italian-Yugoslav border and then, with the war winding down, he went to look for all his missing relatives or records of them in the concentration camps. Almost 40 perished.

All this before he was 21.

I have always immersed myself in movies and books of the period (or of previous wars and periods of horror) to see if they would give me any sense of what he might have endured. It was futile, of course, and naive, and I am sure he would have had it no other way. He seldom spoke of it all until he was quite old. It was eerie listening to him when he lay on his deathbed in the summer of 2012 as he drifted into delirium and would call out and speak in German rather than English much of the time.

In any event, watching these movies, like the one I watched tonight, I thought again of the great test history offers up to succeeding generations and how they both rose to challenges and, just as often, failed to. It also struck me that heroism takes many forms. Sometimes it is an act of conspicuous bravery. But sometimes it is hidden from the world and is just the kind of sacrifice or courage that puts food on the plate of a child or enables a family to withstand great horrors or chooses to resist in the face of overwhelming odds.

It is impossible not to connect such stories to our moment…in part, because every moment in history contains such tests whether they are wars or simply the struggle within a society for social justice or to maintain a focus on what is good in each of us.

Look around you. You can see the storm clouds on the horizon. I suspect, if you are reading this, you have watched them gather for many years. You have watched as inequality in America has grown worse and worse, as tens of millions of Americans have mobilized not to advance the interests of the country or help left up their neighbors but to express their hatreds and fears and prejudices in ways that would reverse centuries of hard won social progress. You have watched as rights we valued—voting rights, the right of woman to control her own body—have been stripped away. And, I suspect, you have done what you could to stop the drift backwards in time, the drift toward a more divided, ugly society.

But because so many have gone along with the depredations of demagogues, we are reaching a point of inflection at which, in a matter of weeks, they will begin to seek to institutionalize more of their worst impulses and tear down many of the governmental and social structures that have been erected here over time to produce a better America.

The question before all of us as citizens is whether we realize that this moment is the test that will define not only how history views us and but how our children and grandchildren do. There are early signs that many in positions of power will put their self-interests and aspirations for greater wealth and power ahead of their sense of responsibility to the rest of us. We’ve seen it from leaders in the tech sector and the media. We’ve seen it from politicians.

Now, frankly, I’m not surprised. If you are a CEO, your job is to serve the interests of your shareholders. Admittedly, I think it is short-sighted to do so in a way that may diminish the special advantages once offered by the American market or that placates those with misguided plans that will someday take a huge toll on those who made the decision to bend the knee.

But, the incoming administration is making a bet. Its leaders and the donors behind them have bet that if they satisfy America’s most powerful people they can use their power to control or provide just enough to placate the vast majority of Americas. And it will be up to us…each of us…small as we may feel at the moment…to ask ourselves whether we have more courage or perspective than do the billionaires who are willing to set fire to the house in which we all live in order to collect on the insurance policies they have each purchased.

It will fall to us to be more courageous than ABC or Meta or Republicans in the US Senate. We each must act in a way that makes sense for us and our families. We each should be wary of the consequences of acts of resistance in an environment like the one we are entering. But courage is not about the absence of fear. It is about having the same fear any rational person would and finding a way to overcome it.

When I watch or read stories of real heroes that is what I see again and again. And then I wonder, is this just the stuff of movies or is it…can it be…real?

And then I remember the story of my father…of our fathers and mothers and grandmothers and grandfathers…of tens of millions, hundreds of millions…and I believe. I truly do. Not in the way I hoped happy endings could be true in films. But in the way I knew what I loved and admired about my own parents and so many others in their generation.