Roughly six million Jews. Six million Jews were exterminated by Nazi Germany.
Ever since I learned this as a young girl; ever since I can remember, one question persists: How did no one stop it sooner? How was this even possible? How did so many people simply obey?
It felt implausible that a human being could go home at night and fall into a peaceful sleep after inflicting so much suffering. Inconceivable that an entire army could agree to carry out one egotistical, despicable, small man’s wish. How did so many people just… agree? How did cruelty become routine? How did obedience outweigh conscience?
And yet, for a long time, I found comfort in not knowing because…
Thank god that chapter of history was sealed shut. Thank god it was too dark, too monstrous for the modern mind to go back. Surely humanity had learned, I thought. Surely such evil could never unfold again — not now, not in our time, not in plain sight.
That belief gave me relief. It also made me sound so naïve.
Because now, though I wish I could still claim disbelief, I can see it. I see the loud and quiet capitulations, offered piece by piece. I see greed dressed as ambition, corruption disguised as necessity, retribution mistaken for justice. I see how willingly people trade morality for proximity to power, how easily they justify violence for a seat at what they imagine to be the summit.
History did not repeat itself all at once, though. It returned slowly — through silence, through obedience, and through the dangerous comfort of believing “this time is different.”
And still, history teaches us something else, if we are willing to listen: nothing of this magnitude lasts forever because the power of the people is stronger than the people in power. Every regime built on cruelty collapses under its own weight. Every lie exhausts itself. Every chapter, no matter how long, comes to an end.
Sometimes endings are not passive events. They are shaped by awareness, by refusal, by the questioning of orders. We the people will resist the normalization of cruelty by ICE and others. We will speak up before silence hardens into consent.
This, too, will end because enough people have recognized the patterns and chose to break it.