How Could People Let That Happen?
On understanding how historical genocides and fictional dystopias become reality and refusing to let that be us
A few weeks into the first Trump presidency, I spent a weekend in Waco with a group of students from our Christian social action class. One of my colleagues had invited me to be the female chaperone and participate in a poverty simulation hosted by Mission Waco. One of our many requirements for the weekend was turning over all of our electronics to the hosts. While I sneakily kept my Fitbit close to my body, I spent the weekend learning and growing with my students instead of doomscrolling on my social media feeds.
When we got back to the bus and I was once again able to check my Facebook page, I saw the first blow of the new administration.
I got another colleague’s attention. “Uma, he signed a Muslim ban order.”
With a sigh and a shake of the head, all he could say was, “Here we go.”
I was supposed to start teaching Night the next day. I was supposed to start giving my sophomores historical background on the Holocaust and how an entire nation could turn against Jews, the disabled, Gypsies, Poles, and homosexuals. I had to explain the systematic murder of 11 million people, six million of whom were Jews.
I had done this many times before through two other presidential administrations. But for the first time ever, I was scared. Angry and scared. But I also knew I had a duty to my students. When I got home, I started designing a jigsaw analysis looking at refugees, both the Jewish refugees the American government sent back to die and the refugees coming to our borders in the 21st century. I found pieces investigating our Christian Biblical duty to the foreigner. I found articles about the integration of Vietnamese refugees into American society and the explosion of nail salons. I stepped back and let the pieces speak for themselves.
And then I let Elie Weisel take my students through the gates of Auschwitz.1
Every time I have taught Night, students have asked, “How could people let that happen?” Even after going through the historical background and talking about the Versailles Treaty, the global Great Depression, the already present anti-semitism, and the realities of human nature, my students can not wrap their heads around it. For many years I assigned a genocide project, having them select a 20th or 21st century genocide, do an extensive research paper, and then present what they learned to the class. My students learned about the Armenian Genocide, the Holomodor, the Rape of Nanking, Cambodia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Darfur, Rwanda, and more. I learned alongside them, picking up new information with each iteration of the assignment, each new group of students with new research at their disposal.
As a teacher in a Christian high school, I was able to talk about sinful human nature, not as an excuse but as an explanation. I discussed self-preservation and the choices we make. I challenged them when they said they would have protected Anne Frank, pointing out the risk to not just themselves but their parents, siblings, and any other allies they might have had. I honestly told them that I wanted to believe I would do the right thing too, but we cannot know if that is what we would do until we are faced with the choice ourselves.
One of the most haunting experiences of my life was visiting the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp. I was a college junior preparing for an exciting semester abroad in London, but two of my classmates and I decided to spend two weeks backpacking Europe. While we enjoyed gallivanting around Paris, Rome, and Florence, the history lover in me felt the need to visit the very first concentration camp built by the Nazis.
The gates to the camp were a short walk from the train station. It wasn’t built out in the middle of nowhere miles from town. The people in Dachau would have been able to hear and smell everything that was happening behind the barbed wire. When it was built in 1933, the townspeople were told the camp was only for political prisoners. Those who spoke up against the government, broke the law, or were deemed a political nuisance found themselves inside the slowly growing camp. At the beginning, it was not just a camp for Jews; it was a camp for anyone the Nazis determined was dangerous to their political designs.
Eventually, it became home to thousands of prisoners. By the time Hitler started putting his Final Solution into play, most of the prisoners were Jews. There was no plausible deniability to what was happening in the villagers’ backyards. The trains with humans stuffed into cattle cars traveled right past their homes and businesses. People would have heard the gunshots and cries coming from inside the barbed wire. And I cannot see how they would have avoided inhaling the stench of filth and death when the wind was blowing in the right direction.
If the von Trapp family had not escaped Austria in 1938, they most likely would have been imprisoned and died there. In a recent Facebook post, the granddaughter of Captain and Maria von Trapp said that if that had happened, “there would have been no musical career, no Sound of Music, and certainly no me.”
Dachau was not built for Jews, but it was certainly the first step in the attempted annihilation.
It never starts with death squads.
It starts with fear. It starts with name-calling and bullying and lies about minorities who are easy targets.
It starts with discriminating against people, eliminating diversity, and insisting on a kind of purity test for jobs, education, or even housing.
It starts with villainizing teachers and with parents not coming home after a long day at work because they have been arrested or detained because there is the potential that their immigration status can be questioned.
It starts with rewriting curriculum, emphasizing patriotism, spreading propoganda, and isolation from the rest of the world.
But because it initially only hurts the few, most people are willing to turn a blind eye. After all, they are still holding onto the hope that these changes will usher in a new and glorious age that make their lives better. A little moral discomfort is worth the cost if it means they will come out on top eventually.
Unfortunately, as Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller famously said, when “they came for me…there was no one left to speak for me.”
The roots of authoritarianism and/or genocide start with angry, hurting people. They’ve lost positions of power or financial stability or their family structure has been destroyed by disease, war, or cultural upheaval. They are looking for someone to blame and strong authoritarian leaders who make them believe they are the solution. They stop looking at the best interests of the community and instead look inward, not necessarily out of selfishness but instead to focus on their own survival. They forget that there is strength in numbers. They forget that their own survival is dependent on the survival of their neighbors. They forget that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
They forget their own humanity.
Do I believe the country that helped to free the remaining victims of the Third Reich will become the villain in the story of the 21st century? I hope not. I pray that enough of us know better and say no. I pray that enough people see what is happening and speak up before it is too late.
But to do so, we must know our strength.
As I reread 1984, I keep returning to Winston Smith’s belief “if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that.” In Orwell’s seemingly prophetic novel, the proles far outnumber the Party members. With the right leadership, they could lead a revolution. But they are poor, uneducated, and just trying to survive from one day to the next. They do not have the time or energy to concern themselves with revolution. Instead, the Party appeases them with promises of potential lottery wins (which they will never get), violent entertainment, vices such as pornography and alcohol, and anything else that will keep them from realizing they are being oppressed by more than the circumstances of their birth or the imaginary Goldstein. Sound familiar?
Thankfully, we are not proles. We were born into an imperfect democracy with plenty of flaws, but with a system in place with the tools to stop the worst impulses of those in power, even if those with the most power and influence refuse to do their jobs. We have information at our fingertips and the ability to connect with people across the globe. We were raised on a healthy diet of Star Wars and dystopias and Holocaust history units. We know how this story could end. As economist Patrick Chovanec said in a recent Bluesky post, “The future is uncharted…But the past stands as a warning that unthinkable things can happen, slowly and then all at once.”
We just have to decide if we want to persuade those around us to join us in forming a better future in which all of us can flourish, or instead abdicate our future to the decadence of the few.
Note: If you are a teacher and would like access to these resources, please let me know. I am contemplating starting a new website for my teaching materials and breaking away from Teachers Pay Teachers and this might give me the motivation to do so.
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My son has just started reading Night with his 7th-grade class and asked if I had ever read it. I laughed and then responded, “Probably 15 times.” That might be a slight exaggeration, but no, I did not need his teacher to get my a copy of the book so I could read it with him. I have three copies on my bookshelf and both English translations.
It is impossible not to remember "First they came", from Bertolt Brecth. Good article!
Thank you for your voice. I hope many more will hear it.