Day 2: Nosh, Jews; hitler, 'rump

Leaving the wall to return for the tale-end of the Jewish nosh gathering, my thoughts return to ‘him’ as I pass the Nogales repub ‘headquarters’, a small building overwhelmed in red, white, and blue with ‘his’ signs and other republican campaign signs.

I remember my grandmother’s panicked call to me, after Bush stole the election, after the planes crashed into those other mammoth tyrants of u.s. hegemony, after people reacting more like robotic killing machines than real humans, urging me to leave the country, to grab my daughter, my lover, my friends and flee.

One of the few stories my grandmother told me about her time in germany during hitler’s rise to power was the one about how very early on she tried to convince her husband to take her and the children and the rest of the family and leave the country. He refused.

She would have gathered the family and escaped by herself, she announces, but she agreed to stay with him ONLY if he brought money out of the country, which, being a salesperson with permission to travel abroad, he did. I think this stash is what they were able to forfeit to buy the way out of Germany for four of them in 1939.

Her frantic voice, usually the bright, confident tenor of wise age – she was 99 years old at the time – was thin and breathless with strident instruction: leave, leave, leave – leave everything, take nothing but your lives and run away.

I know ‘he’ has been compared with hitler but more menacing than ‘him’ is the people and their hatred and inhumanity he is releasing and elevating from the sewers and cesspools of the u.s.ofa.’s very foundation.

As I walk down the sunny sidewalk, marveling at the bluest skies with small contrasting fluffy white clouds, I wonder if groups of Jews met together before the ‘election’ of hitler, if they worked hard to combat the hate and bigotry, and I know the gas chambers were later filled with such sheras and heroes – as these border crossings and these ‘boundaries’ on either side are the graveyards of such sheras and heroes as well.