Opinion: When You See Evil, When You See Injustice...

The following opinion editorial is by Alexis Harrison, a Fairfield resident, who is running for state representative in the 132nd District:

“Without a doubt, I am the luckiest man alive,” Abe Baron said in his slight Polish accent to the crowd of high school kids during our weekly youth group meeting at Our Lady of Assumption Church in Fairfield, Conn. It was a bitter cold winter night in 1997 when I first met Abe and his wife, Sari at our weekly youth group meeting.

That night, Abe, then a man in his early 70s, and his wife Sari, came to recount the private hell they endured at the hands of the Nazis during World War II and how they narrowly escaped death.
Because they were Jewish, Abe and Sari saw the evils of humanity and experienced the worst kind of suffering and calamities that was beyond my own teenage mind’s comprehension.

Abe was about 5’7 in stature but had a large personality, and he dressed sharply in a smart dark blazer and a gray sweater. He would begin to cry every few minutes and clutch his hand as he told his deeply personal narrative of pain (both physical and emotional), loss and how he began his life again following the darkness. Every so often, Abe would apologize for getting choked up as all eyes of his young audience were glued on him. Each of us had become mesmerized by their mere presence as if we wanted to memorize their words and faces. A beautiful woman who had light brown hair and a soft smile, Sari was more demure and would quietly tell her husband not to cry as her own eyes wept.

Abe was a natural story-teller, gentle yet an outgoing and personable man who had a ubiquitous twinkle in his hazel eyes. Those very same eyes that saw his apartment building in Warsaw destroyed in 1939 by the German army that killed 100 people including his mother, his sister, his nephew and other family members. Abe himself barely escaped that bombing. After the fire from the bombs had ceased, they returned to the building to try to salvage anything they could:

…Then I noticed a “chain” and was about to call to ask whose it was, until I noticed it was a ladies watch bracelet. I looked at it for a little longer and recognized it was the jewelry my mother kept around her neck. As I dug further in that same spot, I picked up a charred head bone. It could have been anyone’s head bone, but as I picked it up I realized it was my mother’s because I recognized a little piece of her coat collar that wasn’t burned in the fire. I was 15 years old, the youngest one of all my brothers and sisters, and my caring mother went upstairs to prepare food, and like that she was dead. Nobody could imagine how I felt; I cried for 24 hours until I had no tears left. At the end of the day we took many of the bones to a field and left them. The field was covered with bones. (Nevertoforget.org)

The tragicness of Abe’s story is hard to articulate; it is a microcosm of what hate, antisemitism and destruction can do and destroy. His story, which included 5 horrific years in Nazi concentration camps, has been embedded in my memory for years. He would eventually be liberated from Buchenwald.

Decades after World War II, and the creation of a Jewish State in 1948 which served as refuge for those persecuted during the war and those expelled from nearby countries, and after several wars, and numerous attempts to create peace between Israel and her neighbors, the unresolved situation appears to be a pretext for a massive spike in antisemitism worldwide. Another calamitous event took place in Israel by the terrorist group, Hamas on October 7, 2023 when over 1,200 Israelis and others were killed with claims of rape and savagery; over 3,500 were injured, and some 240 people from numerous nations were kidnapped - almost half are still being held hostage. This has renewed an urgent need to confront this deadly form of hatred of the Jewish people.

Across the country, we are watching protests by college students, attacks against Jewish communities and random acts of violence, symbolizing a fundamental uptick in antisemitism. In my hometown of Fairfield (and sadly in other parts of Connecticut), we’ve seen police investigate profanity against the Jewish community, and other groups. Most recently, Fairfield police said they were probing an incident of a swastika found drawn on a locker at a school. We know what history teaches us about hatred against a specific group, how it grows like an unrelentless tumor, affecting masses of people in its wake and threatening the fabric of our society. Even before the October 2023 attack in Israel, we’ve seen a rise in antisemitism. A 2023 report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) showed a 100 percent increase in antisemitic incidents in Connecticut, and there has been a 361 percent increase nationwide since the war began. Some say the uptick is caused by the proliferation of social media, YouTube videos, TikTok which has normalized antisemitism.

While it is certainly legitimate and reasonable to critique the war between Israel and Hamas, including deaths of innocent Gazan civilians, that is not a basis to attack Jewish people here in Connecticut, in the United States, or anywhere in the world. Students at Yale University and Wesleyan have also held anti-Israel protests, and have caused Jewish students to feel bullied, unheard and unsafe on campus, and have blocked access to public spaces on campus from other non-protesting students.

I wonder what Abe Baron would think if he was still alive today (he passed away at 89 in 2014) -- his arm bore the numbers tattooed by Nazis as a tragic marker of hatred allowed to fester and spread. Would he be thinking that we have advanced up to a point, only to be drawn back down into the dark path of intolerance and hatred? I would reconnect with Abe in 2000 when I invited him to speak to my class on Jewish-Christian Understanding at Sacred Heart University. Again, he delivered his very moving story in his warm-hearted and candid ways.

I agree with Governor Lamont’s philosophy, which he stated in a May 7, 2024, Holocaust Remembrance Day speech: “When you see evil, when you see injustice, when you see anti-Semitism, when you see hate speech, when you see wrong: Stand up.”

We are a liberal democracy and that means anyone can speak their mind without fear of punishment. But that also means that we each have a responsibility to act in a civil manner, not trying to silence others by drowning them out, or worse. Ideally we should all try to engage in public debate to hear the other side, learn history, and understand that the truth is more nuanced than often is projected in sound bites and slogans.