OUR PRESIDENT!: "The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure. SILENCE IS COMPLICITY."

[raging moderate]

53. Oh, SOME Americans DID have to say that, in 1975, in Southern Illinois.

I was a traveling public-school speech/language pathologist, and we lived in Grand Tower, Illinois. A resident and former teacher tried to school us on how Hitler and the Nazis had supposedly been slandered and had been "not really so bad." I had grown up in a mostly-Jewish Chicago neighborhood, and I gasped and nearly said some very bad words. My husband, who had been a US soldier stationed in Germany about ten years earlier, luckily spoke first: "It was a crime against humanity." The man said "Bah!" and walked out before I could say anything.

I do want to say that not all of the Grand Tower inhabitants were like that. I was helping the volunteer ambulance crew in my spare time. These ambulance volunteers were all very shaken and sympathetic to the plight of Black people in Southern Illinois, as some of them described the terror expressed by a Black family injured the night before in an accident nearby, when they saw white ambulance crew people approaching them. These ambulance crew members were not antisemitic, either.