In the fall of 2015, Dr. Ruth told the story of the Evian Conference, in 1938, where countries from around the world debated the plight of Germany’s Jews.Photograph by Gian Marco Castelberg / 13 Photo / Redux
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?”