When I was a child, my mother and I watched the film Playing For Time, starring Vanessa Redgrave, based on the autobiographical book by Fania Fenelon The Musicians of Auschwitz.
I was 11 at the time and did not fully comprehend the film, although my mother and I wept as we watched it.
Fenelon survived Auschwitz by joining the women’s orchestra. The women’s orchestra was one of the cruel jokes the guards in the camps played on the prisoners, a way to survive but also a process of compromising the prisoners’ gifts and humanity to the sick purpose of the camp.
I was genuinely sickened when I read the account of a US government agent joking “We have an orchestra here” while standing a children’s concentration camp.
Hannah Arendt may have been right that evil is banal; but that does not in any way minimize the horror of it. History may not repeat itself but it is rhyming and those rhymes horrify me.
We have crossed the line to evil, to fascism.
We must drag our nation back to sanity.