If She Were Your Child

Jewish kids learn about the Holocaust really early. Not in school, Hebrew or otherwise, but at first by eavesdropping on whispers of elderly relatives at Passover seders. In shul, during Kaddish. We are brought up to know both the horror of what happened to others like us, and the appreciation that we were born in a time and in a country where we were free from fear that we would be targeted, even killed, over our religion. Still, I don’t know of any Jewish kids who didn’t play the “what if” game, who didn’t imagine themselves in 1930s Berlin.

I learned about the St. Louis late enough that I can still feel the tingle of horror that went down my spine when I read that the USA—my country! The good guys!—sent a shipload of Jews back to Europe to die. And that we had quotas forbidding them to emigrate here. That Otto Frank was denied safe passage to the U.S. for his family. That the U.S. government was infested—I use this word deliberately—with anti-Semites; that heroic FDR himself disdained Jews. That we knew about the concentrate camps and still decided not to bomb the railroad tracks leading to them. Knowing this, it became easier and easier to imagine myself as a girl, trapped on that ship, no way out, sent to die.

Today, there are many countries in turmoil. Their people are poor, their governments can’t meet their needs, and some of their citizens have turned to heinous crimes to support themselves or because growing up in such cruelty breeds cruelty. Others are doing everything they can to escape these countries; to give themselves and their children a chance of a better life in the U.S. This has been going on for years, and it’s getting worse.

Yes, parents have sent their children unaccompanied to the U.S., hoping they would reach the country safely. Jewish parents in Europe in the 1930s did this as well. These kids have been detained at the border. It’s a horrible mess, but what waited for those kids in their home countries was even worse.

What would you do if she were your child? What would you do if your country was burning down around you, and you only had enough money to get your child to the relative safety of the neighboring country up north, the land of the free and the home of the brave? Would you be brave enough to send her alone?

Or maybe you’re “lucky” enough to have enough money, enough resources, that you can make the trip together. You know if you can just make it to the border, you can tell the border guard that in your home town, your brother was killed by gang members, and they said they would kill you and your daughter if you didn’t sell drugs for them. You made it this far, barely surviving, so you can claim asylum and try to start over in a country where you have nothing, know no one and barely know the language. (Yes, I know that some folks claiming asylum are members of these same gangs. We are supposed to have a process to sort them out.)

Sadly, while you were on your perilous journey, you didn’t get the memo that the Justice Department had declared “zero tolerance” for asylum seekers; that you would be assumed to be a criminal, jailed, and your daughter would be taken away from you to live in a “tender ages” shelter, where there is no system for insuring you’d ever be reunited again. Oh, and the Justice Department has unilaterally decided that gang persecution and domestic violence are no longer reasons to be granted asylum, so you’ll probably be sent back home to die. And maybe you’re even at peace with that, because you did what you came here to do, got your daughter to safety, and maybe she’ll be adopted by an American family. In any case, you’ll never know what happened to her. You won’t know that the months she waited in a place that some have described as a “summer camp,” where adults were forbidden to comfort her cries and teenagers taught themselves how to change her diaper, have damaged her forever. She’ll never be able to trust anyone again, never be able to form a healthy attachment, because in her young mind, her mother abandoned her.

There are two types of people in this world: There are the people who see that mom from Honduras and say, there, but for the grace of God, go I. I don’t know if it’s because I’m Jewish and was raised on the stories of Anne Frank and others, or because God made me a writer with the unquenchable thirst to know and feel the stories of every person I came in contact with. But I read about these people and I wonder if I could be strong enough to make this journey.

There are also people in this world who don’t see themselves in other people; who see them as literally “other.” The worst of them call them “cockroaches;” say that they “infest” America, that laugh at the cries of these children. The better of them argue logically that these kids were jailed during the Obama Administration, that there is enough going on in our country that we need to take care of our own first, that there just isn’t enough money to help, that their countries are hopeless and we need to keep their crime from our borders.

I’m not going to pretend I have any answers. There are no easy ones, and I’m not informed enough to make policy proposals. All I’m left with are feelings—that our country is broken, owned completely by those who value their own bottom line above everything else. That our world is broken, as too many live in poverty and violence and too few want to spend the time and money to help them. That our souls are broken, as too many see what’s happening and say it’s not their problem because it’s not their children.

I’m so ashamed of what our country has become. I’m so terrified that the worst is yet to come.