In 1938, Orson Welles broadcast his adaptation of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. Radio listeners panicked, believing that aliens had landed in New Jersey the night before Halloween. After consuming all that candy, kids brushed their teeth with bristles made from newfangled nylon instead of bristles from boars. Earlier that year, organized labor won the battle to establish a minimum wage, set at a whopping 25 cents per hour. At Gettysburg, Union and Confederate veterans gathered for the 75th anniversary of that bloody and momentous Civil War battle. Television was still a decade away from being a source of entertainment for American families, so President Franklin Roosevelt communicated via Fireside Chats on the radio. His view of the conflict unfolding in Europe was that the US would not join a “stop-Hitler bloc” under any circumstances.

My parents were settled in Brussels by then, having fled the tightening noose of restrictions on Jews in their homeland. From their relatively safe perch in neutral Belgium, they heard the terrifying news: a wave of anti-Jewish violence had erupted in Germany and other nations occupied by the Nazis. Synagogues were burned to the ground, over 7000 Jewish-owned businesses plundered, cemeteries desecrated, Jewish homes destroyed. In the streets, littered with the broken glass of shattered windows, wives and mothers watched helplessly as 30,000 of their husbands and sons were snatched up by the SS and the Gestapo, sent to brutal concentration camps for the crime of being Jewish. The pogrom, which began the night of November 9 and continued through November 10, has come to be known as Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass. Jews were made to pick up the bill for the cleanup. That was 85 years ago. One would hope that would be ancient history.

But here we are today in the midst of a complex conflict between the state of Israel, born of the dislocation of Jews escaping for their lives and finding few safe havens in the world, and Hamas, a terrorist group whose goal is to exterminate Jews and whose gruesome attack on October 7 set these horrors into motion but whose people, the Palestinians, are also searching for a homeland. In the vacuum left by U.S. disengagement, the people of Gaza and Israel alike suffer the consequences. My heart breaks for them all. The war may radicalize people on both sides, while fueling more hate against both Muslims and Jews. And Jewish Americans like me, a next-generation Holocaust survivor, and Jews throughout the world are left fearful and wondering where it will end. After all, the lesson of the Holocaust is that the unthinkable can happen.

Over the last several years, I have worked on a book about my family’s escape from the Nazis. Aided by a treasure trove of letters and documents saved by my parents, I have been able to recreate their nail-biting story, uncovering some chilling parallels to our own time: the popularity of right-wing politicians, the rise of hatred against others, be they Mexicans, Chinese, LBGTQ, Muslims or Jews, the cumulative impact of propaganda, and the effects of immigration and diaspora on families everywhere. It took a dozen years or so for Hitler to fully persuade his nation that Jews were such a danger to the world that they had to be eliminated. In a world where civic discourse has been replaced by rapid-fire social media commentary intended to incite, where “news” on the internet or even mainstream media like Fox cannot be trusted, where people too often “take sides” instead of recognizing complexity and nuance, it may not take a dozen years. Who would have believed that insurgents in these United States would storm our Capitol or try to overturn an election?

Soon, I will be out in our community promoting In the Wake of Madness. It’s a good read – and an important one, and I have been looking forward to spreading the word. But, I confess, I am now a bit anxious. For years, I thought I had escaped generational trauma, but I am no longer so confident. Do I really want to put myself out there with all but a Jewish star on my forehead? What kind of world will my grandchildren inherit? Will the madness ever end?

I have spent most of my life wondering what I would have do if my homeland turned on me, or, conversely, what courage I might muster to fight atrocities done to others. Let’s hope I never have to find out.

In the Wake of Madness: My Family’s Escape from the Nazis will be released on February 5, 2024. Pre-order begins December 26, 2023.