Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Dr. Ruth, Dr.
Kissinger, and Trump’s Cruelty to Families
June
13, 2018
George
Packer
June
12, 2018
The
New Yorker
Jose, a
five-year-old Honduran boy, was taken away from his father by immigration
officials last month, after the two of them had crossed the border at El Paso.
The father was transferred to a detention camp. Jose, all alone, was put on a
plane to Michigan and placed under the care of a family of kind but anguished
strangers. In his bedroom at night, he clings to pictures that he’s drawn of his
family—his mother and siblings in Honduras, with its epidemic of gang violence,
and his father in a U.S. prison. He won’t stop asking, “When will I see my
papa?”
Jose’s torment—the
increasingly routine consequence of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy
to separate children from parents who enter the United States without
papers—reminded me of a conversation I heard a few years ago, between Henry
Kissinger and Ruth K. Westheimer. We were guests at a dinner in New York for
Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, whom I had profiled.
Around the
table were American and German foreign-policy types, and I could imagine why
Dr. K. was there, but Dr. Ruth was a mystery—I only knew her as the diminutive
TV sex therapist.
It was the fall of
2015, the height of the migrant crisis in Europe. Germany had
announced that it would admit a million refugees, most of them fleeing the
civil war in Syria. Merkel had come under heavy criticism for the decision,
and, during the soup course, Kissinger—ninety-two years old, eight decades
removed from his own experience as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany—let the
Chancellor have it. Of course, he said, he could admire the humanitarian
impulse to save one person, but a million? That would change “German
civilization.” It would be, Kissinger said, like the Romans allowing the
barbarians inside the city gates. Merkel listened, in her focussed way, and
didn’t argue, except to say, “What choice do we have?”
When Kissinger, on
the Chancellor’s right, finished, Merkel turned to Dr. Ruth, on her left. Did
she have anything to add? Dr. Ruth is five years younger than Kissinger and so
tiny that her feet didn’t reach the floor. (She asked me to push her chair
closer to the table so that she could eat her soup.) It turned out that she did
have something to add. Her high, cheerful Frankfurt accent is as familiar in
its way as Kissinger’s sombre Bavarian gutturals, but she began quietly, almost
apologetically, as if she didn’t want to claim too much authority on a subject
that had nothing to do with the orgasm.
She told us the
story of the Evian Conference, held on Lake Geneva, in July, 1938, where
countries from around the world gathered to debate the plight of Germany’s
Jews. In the end, only one country—the Dominican Republic—agreed to take in a
substantial number of Jewish refugees. All the others, including the United
States, made excuses.
Four months after
the failure of Evian, in November, came Kristallnacht. At the time, Karola Ruth
Siegel was a ten-year-old Jewish girl living with her parents in Frankfurt.
Nazis showed up at their apartment to arrest her father, a salesman. As they
marched him off into a covered truck, he turned around and looked at Ruth, who
was watching from the window. She waved, and he waved back. Then he smiled, so
that she wouldn’t cry. She never saw him again.
Two months later,
in January, 1939, Ruth’s mother placed her on a train with other German Jewish
children bound for Switzerland—part of the Kindertransport. Her mother hugged
her on the platform,
Dr. Ruth told Merkel and the rest of us, and, to keep
herself from crying, she began to sing songs during the train ride that would
bring her back to the happy time when their family was together. Dr. Ruth
survived the war and the Holocaust in Switzerland. Her parents perished in the
Nazi death camps.
“The Evian
Conference gave us no help,” Dr. Ruth said. “If not for the Kindertransport, I
would not be here today. I hope something more comes from this conversation
about the Syrian refugees than came from Evian.” At this point she was looking
directly at Kissinger. Now I understood why Merkel had wanted her at the
dinner. There wasn’t a trace of accusation in her voice—the whole time she’d
been telling the story in the same half-apologetic tone—but no one, least of all
Kissinger, could have missed her point: You and I were the same as each other,
the same as the Syrians. I have not forgotten. Have you?
The room fell
silent. Then the conversation moved on to American politics. The Presidential
primaries were a few months away, and, though Trump had become a media
sensation, he wasn’t an obvious front-runner. Merkel wanted to know whether he
could win. The American experts around the table were in agreement—not a
chance. Trump would fade quickly, and the Republican Party would consolidate
around a mainstream candidate—Jeb Bush, maybe Ted Cruz. The experts’ long
experience in politics and foreign policy had given them no reason to believe
that, in a couple of years, President Trump’s government would separate
thousands of refugee children from their parents. Not in order to rescue them,
as the Kindertransport had done, but to show such unashamed cruelty that other
parents would no longer try to save their children from danger by
crossing America’s borders.
Dr. Ruth said
nothing for the rest of the evening. She had told us what she wanted us to
hear.
George Packer
became a staff writer in 2003. For the magazine, he has covered the Iraq War,
and has also written about the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, civil
unrest in the Ivory Coast, the megacity of Lagos, and the global
counterinsurgency.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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