WILL YOU BE ON THE NEXT TRAIN?
For anyone who wants to understand how it happened.
The evil of Nazism did not fall out of the sky.
It was built, and it was built by people who believed in something.
The core idea was that Jews were not a faith or a people but a biological threat. An infection in the body of the nation.
That is the thing to understand, because it is what makes genocide possible. As long as you see a human being as a human being, you can hate him. See him as a disease, and you acquire a duty to remove him.
Where did it come from?
Nazism did not grow out of conservatism, and it did not grow out of Christianity. It grew out of a revolt against both.
The foundation was race biology and social Darwinism. The idea that Darwin’s struggle for survival applied not only to animals but to peoples, and that the strong people had a right to displace the weak.
Add to that a blood and soil mysticism that made the nation holy, and a view of man where your worth was measured by how useful you were to the race.
That requires tearing down one thing first.
The Christian principle that every single human being is made in the image of God and therefore carries a worth nobody can take away.
The Nazis knew this perfectly well. They worked actively to push the church aside and replace it with the state and the leader.
You cannot sort human beings like cattle as long as people believe they have a soul.
And then the part many people get wrong. The party was called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. That was not an accident. They ran a command economy, they nationalised, they replaced trade unions with the state’s own organisation, and they promised the people everything if the people would just give them everything.
At the same time, communists and social democrats were among the first sent to the camps, because they were competing for the same voters.
The axis that matters is this.
How much power does the state take over the individual person? For Nazism, for communism and for every other totalitarian movement, the answer is all of it. Your property, your work, your children, your faith, your body and your conscience belong to the movement.
That is what you watch for.
And then there is the conspiracy…
On top of the ideology sat the lie. That Jews secretly ran the banks, the press, the governments and communism all at once. That they were behind everything going wrong.
That story is ancient, it has been recycled in every single century, and it is being recycled right now.
Then there was the ground it grew in. A lost war. Humiliation. Hyperinflation that turned people’s savings into nothing. Mass unemployment.
People who could not understand why their lives were falling apart were told who was responsible.
But notice the order. The words came first. Years of language turning Jews into vermin, parasites, a plague. By the time the trains started running, the great majority had already been trained to accept the idea.
Nobody wakes up one morning and goes from normal to murderer.
You are walked there, one step at a time, and every step looks small.
So who helped them?
This is the part nobody talks about. Germany could not have done it alone.
The Netherlands. 107,000 Jews deported. Around 5,200 came back. Dutch administrators built the registries, Dutch police made the arrests, and Dutch railway workers ran the trains and invoiced the Germans for it.
France. On 16 and 17 July 1942, French police arrested 13,152 Jews in Paris. 4,115 of them were children. Not a single German soldier took part. It took France fifty years to admit it.
Hungary. 437,000 Jews deported in 56 days in the summer of 1944, mostly to Auschwitz. Eichmann arrived with a handful of German staff. The rest was the Hungarian gendarmerie.
Slovakia. The government deported around 58,000 of its own citizens in 1942 and paid Germany a fee per head to take them. A few hundred survived.
Romania. Antonescu’s regime did its own killing. Around 270,000 died in Transnistria from starvation, disease and massacre.
Norway. Around 770 deported by Norwegian police. About 35 came home.
Croatia. The Ustaše ran their own camps and murdered Jews, Serbs and Roma without the Germans lifting a finger.
And then there are the places where no government was left to collaborate with. In Poland, around 3 million Jews were murdered, more than anywhere else. There was no Polish state left to hand them over, the Germans did it themselves, and the occupation was the harshest in Europe.
In Poland the penalty for hiding a Jew was death, not only for you but for your whole family.
In the Soviet territories they did not even bother with trains. The Einsatzgruppen shot around 1.5 million people at the edge of dug pits, family after family, village after village.
And then the exceptions. Bulgaria refused to hand over the roughly 48,000 Jews inside the country itself, but deported 11,343 from the territories it had occupied.
Denmark saved around 7,200. That is what makes October 1943 so rare. Not because Danes were better people, but because they chose differently while everyone else was busy obeying.
That is the lesson. Every single country had a choice. Most of them chose wrong.
What did America mean?
Without the United States, Europe would not have been liberated. It is that simple.
As early as March 1941, long before the Americans were in the war themselves, Lend-Lease began. Weapons, aircraft, trucks, food and fuel to Britain and later the Soviet Union.
American industry built around 300,000 aircraft and 88,000 tanks while Europe lay in ruins. It was not only soldiers. It was a production machine nobody could match.
On 6 June 1944, around 156,000 Allied soldiers landed in Normandy. Young Americans, British and Canadians, most of them under 25, who had never seen Europe and went ashore to free a continent they did not live on.
Around 418,000 Americans never came home.
I cry when I read about them. Every single time.
Boys of eighteen and nineteen who left a farm in Ohio or a street in Chicago and died on a beach or in a town in a country they had never seen, for people they had never met and never would.
And when the war ended, they did not stay. They rebuilt. The Marshall Plan poured around 13 billion dollars into a wrecked Europe, Germany included. The victor lifted the enemy back onto its feet.
Today half of Europe looks down on them. We stand on what they paid for, and we turn up our noses at the bill.
I have nothing but contempt for that attitude in any person who enjoys a freedom he did not pay for and has never lifted a finger to defend.
Go to Normandy and walk between the white crosses. Then try saying it again.
And no, we have not become better people!
Some say we have moved past it. That we are more developed now, more enlightened, that this cannot happen again because we have grown wiser.
It is not true. It is the most dangerous lie of them all.
The men who built the camps were not primitive. They were educated. They were engineers, doctors, lawyers and civil servants. They read Goethe and listened to Bach. None of them lacked culture. They lacked something else entirely.
Nothing has happened to the human heart in eighty years. We got better phones. That is all.
The same capacity to follow the herd, the same capacity to look away, the same capacity to convince yourself that what you are doing is just, sits in us exactly as it sat in them.
And you do not have to take my word for it. There are people walking among us today with precisely the same attitude toward Jews as the ones who slaughtered them back then.
They do not even hide it. They shout it in our streets and in the comment sections on this platform.
We have not become more developed. We just have not been put in that situation yet.
Why am I writing this?
Because the pattern never changes. First the words. Then the acceptance. Then the neighbours turn their backs. Then the authorities act.
We are (still) in the language stage right now. That is still a place where it can be stopped.
But it hangs by a thread. Otherwise the trains run again. And maybe you are on one of them. Or your children are.
Because it never stops with the Jews. It never has. It never will.
Send the text on to the young. Share it with everyone who needs their memory refreshed. History only repeats for those who forgot it.
* Written by Krisztina Maria
