Straws in the wind are picked up one or two st a time

Asia somewhere over the Swiss.

A number of my family took refuge in China and what-is-now Singapore.

My son's family maintains a residence near Singapore, a bank account, and owns a small rental building with some shops and restaurants held in a local corporation.

He's visited repeatedly over the decades and could easily get permanent residency.

His family were all East European Jews from that part of Europe, and almost all of them had gotten out by the early 1920s, most a couple of decades earlier.

We went to Krakow, and when we would walk around, Jews would somehow materialize and start talking to him. In English. I was invisible to them. Probably for good reason since my grandparents all came from Ireland and I clearly was not, as husband would say, a member of the tribe. He was always unnerved by these encounters, as in the U.S. even fellow Jews never recognized him as one of them. He'd learned early on how to let them know.

As unnerving as it was, it was also gratifying, to be acknowledged as one of them. We both knew enough about the Holocaust to understand what had been lost, and the fact that he couldn't be on the street for more than 15 minutes without a fellow Jew approaching him was touching.

But even then we had a sense that there was still a lurking anti-Semitism under the surface, and I find it both distressing and horrifying to see its resurgence.

In the USA, most people just consider me another white (albeit swarthy) guy until they hear my accent.

In Europe, I've always been identified as Jewish from a distance, even with a baseball cap over my kippah.

Jews in 1940 in Germany and Poland
Muslims in 2018 in the US.

Thank you Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin for fanning the flames of prejudice and hatred.

that "a Jew always has a suitcase packed".

I was born in the late fifties, and am a student of history. The horror of the holocaust is something that I grew up believing could never happen again.

Yet it has. Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe. Piles of skulls. Whole families killed. 'Ethnic cleansing.' War crimes.

I visited the Holocaust museum in DC several decades ago, and I still remember the huge box of shoes. I stayed in that room for a long time looking at those shoes, thinking of the people who wore them. Their stories. Their hopes. Their lives cut short in overcrowded cattle cars moving along dark tracks across the steppe.

This can never happen again.

We have to stop it. This Charlottesville thing - nazis with swastikas and faces twisted in hatred and rage marched through OUR streets chanting, "Blood and soil."

We are walking on a razor edge, just like Abram walked between Bethel and Ai. On the one side is the utter shame and destruction of the Republican party as we know it, followed by the rebirth of our republic. On the other, the imposition of a fascist government here, followed by other fascist government throughout Europe and another holocaust.

My dad hated the army. He never talked about his service. I only have two small stories because that generation didn't really talk much about stuff that bothered them. But Dad would be spinning in his grave had we not cremated his body and scattered his ashes on the shore of the mountain lake he loved.

We've got to find a way to show up at the polls and flip both houses. Trump and the rest of the fascist traitors need to be removed from office and put in cages where they can do no further harm to humankind and we need to pick up the pieces of our republic and put them back together. It will take decades to clean up the Republican mess, but we've got to try.