ABOUTFebruary morning Seventeen-year-old Maria Brik kissed her mother goodbye and went to school. She never saw her home—or her homeland, Ukraine—again.
She recalled: “We were herded between two rows of armed soldiers and ordered to be put into open-back trucks. We were taken to a camp full of other children and their teachers, surrounded by barbed wire.”
Maria Brik was my mother, and it was 1943. When her parents learned that their daughter had been captured by one of Adolf Hitler's armed forces, they rushed to the detention camp in a futile attempt to save her. Later, my grandfather would write: “I always have before my eyes a vision of how you ended up behind barbed wire with a piece of black bread and sobbed bitterly.”
The next day, armed forces put my mother and other dirty and frightened detainees in cattle cars and sent them to Germany to work as slaves.
My mother never talked much about those days. I learned the details of her ordeal only after her death, when I found a stack of letters that she had kept for eighty years. Through these letters and through researching and writing her story, I realized the deep and lasting impact of pain caused by people who are taken from their families, stripped of their dignity, and sent to foreign countries.
My mother was one of the millions of men, women and children from all over Europe who became unwitting victims of Hitler's strategy of finding free labor for German factories and farms. Hitler denigrated and dehumanized his targets. “Untermensch”—subhuman—that’s how he treated my mother and people like her from Eastern Europe.
In Hitler's opinion, they may have been subhuman, but they were also young, healthy, and still able to work.
In Germany, my mother and the others were sent to a processing camp. They were ordered to strip and were poked and prodded by medical staff and then disinfected. And all this in front of other abductees, men and women, as well as Nazi guards.
After she was found “clean,” she was sent to Würzburg, a historic city in the Bavarian region of Germany. For several months she worked as a maid for Dr. Horst Schröter and his wife.
Housework was an easy way for my mother to fall into slavery, but that soon changed. Before the end of 1943, she was sent to Schweinfurt, just over forty kilometers from Würzburg, where she worked twelve hours a day making ball bearings for German tanks, trucks, airplanes and ships. The Nazis systematically starved, abused and humiliated my mother and others. The Allies bombed them repeatedly. She ate watery soup made from potato peelings and dug holes in the ground with her bare hands to protect herself from bombs.
In April 1945, she and other surviving forced laborers crawled out of the ruins of the city to find American soldiers, members of the legendary 42nd Rainbow Infantry Division, marching toward them.
The Rainbow Division was created from twenty-seven National Guard units during the mobilization campaign before World War I. According to Colonel and later General Douglas MacArthur, the 42nd Division stretches like a rainbow from one end of America to the other. A symbol of a nation united to fight so that foreigners could live without tyranny.
I couldn't help but think about these young American soldiers as I watched United States President Donald Trump order his successors to take up arms and march back into combat zones. But his battle zones were American cities – Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, Portland and Washington, DC. He takes aim at what he calls the enemy within: aliens, rapists, murderers, drug lords, parasites, left-wing radical lunatics and democratic politicians.
Trump has ordered the National Guard into US cities to contain protests over harsh actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Trump has stepped up ICE raids, implementing his “Mass Deportation Now” slogan during his election campaign.
But when ICE agents stormed a Chicago apartment building with guns drawn and detained dozens of residents, four of whom were U.S.-born children, protesters took to the streets.
There were also protests when a 44-year-old father living in Alabama was deported by ICE to Laos, despite a judge ruling he could remain in America because he had presented what the judge called a “substantial claim” for American citizenship.
When we humiliate and belittle people, calling them subhuman, as in the case of my mother, or aliens and vermin, as in the case of Trump, when we abuse them with our words and deeds, when we deny them due process of law, we sow the seeds of pain and grief that will gnaw at them and their descendants for years to come.
My mother survived those brutal years of war in Germany. She immigrated to Canada, but carried the emotional wounds with her for the rest of her life. Her relationship collapsed. Her friendship has turned sour. She was never happy.
For some, the pain is so deep that it is passed down from generation to generation. I had not heard about intergenerational trauma until I started writing a book about my mother. Golden daughter. I'm currently recovering from this.
In 1944, when Rainbow Division soldiers were sent to Europe, they likely received a message from then-US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He wished them luck in their “struggle to end conquest, struggle for liberation.”
Today we could argue that it is America that needs liberation. It was Roosevelt who warned that democracy is unsafe if people tolerate the growth of individual or group power beyond the power of the democratic state itself.
“Fascism,” he said, “is the ownership of the state by an individual, group, or any other controlling private force.” He has no place in a democratic country.
