Ordinary moments in the midst of terror
/As a young teenager in the early 1990s, I was deeply shaken and transformed by the movie Au revoir les enfants ("Goodbye, Children"), a 1987 French film, about the friendship between two boys, Julien and Jean, at a Catholic boarding school during World War II. In the film, Jean is Jewish, and he is abducted along with other children and the school headmaster by Nazi authorities at the end of the movie. It was based on the real experiences of the director, Louis Malle, who attended just such a school where Jewish children were hidden and then taken away during the war.
The film was one of the least graphic or horrific Holocaust stories I was exposed to as a teenager. So, why did it affect me so deeply?
There are images from that film that have circulated in my thoughts regularly for decades now—the boys playing practical jokes, playing outside, sitting in class, complaining about school lunches, and getting into minor trouble. The vast majority of the film is regular life, and that was completely intentional, not poor pacing on Malle’s part. His whole point was how normal life was.
Yes, he was aware of tensions and wild stuff going on during that time, but mostly it felt distant. There’s one scene in a restaurant where a Jewish man is recognized and harassed. That’s one of the few times anything comes up, but even that isn’t the point. The point of the scene and what gets most of the camera’s attention is how quickly everyone in the restaurant went back to eating and talking normally.
A peaceful creek and a small stack of stones for meditation - image by Arie Farnam
About a year after I first saw that movie I went to Germany as an exchange student and I couldn’t get it out of my head. My German host family was often pretty harsh. They weren’t told ahead of time that I’m legally blind, and they were upset. We were sitting at dinner and my host father snapped, “That’s unacceptable!” My host mother explained in a somewhat more moderate tone, “But we hoped you would be friends with our daughter,” as if that was now impossible, which proved to be true.
One of the biggest problems was that I couldn’t go to school with their daughter who was a year younger than me, because German schools did not allow students with disabilities to attend mainstream public schools at the time (in 1992). My host mother, who I believe did try to be kind despite my prickly teenage exterior, arranged for me to attend an all-girls private Catholic school.
And the only reason I could attend was because I had buckled to my mother’s protective pressure and marked my religion as “Protestant” on my official exchange agency forms. I was about as Protestant as the Dalai Lama. The problem was that the form only had Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Buddhist options. There wasn’t even an option for Muslims, let alone Pagans. There was no “other” category, which I would have happily chosen. I wanted to check Buddhist, just to mess with them, even though my family wasn’t remotely Buddhist either. Mama said I should choose Protestant because at least she was raised Protestant, though she wasn’t really anymore, and I had been raised on Greek, Norse and Native American myths.
Well, I didn’t know until I’d been at the school a week or so, but you could only attend that school if you were a card carrying Catholic or Protestant. Fortunately, some friendly classmates realized the problem before any of the adults. They also knew that the alternative would be that I would be sent away to an institutional school for the blind.
So, they protected me and taught me to fake being a Protestant, how to cross myself in the correct direction (the opposite of the Catholic students) and how to pretend some knowledge in our special Protestant religion classes held in the school basement. I was almost caught when the Protestant religion teacher asked me what people in America say about Martin Luther, and I thought he meant MLK because I had never heard of the original. Sensing that I was about to screw things up royally, one of my friends stomped hard on my foot under the desk, and I got the message and shut my mouth and refused to say another word.
I couldn’t help feeling a romantic thrill at the age of 16, that I—like Jean in the movie that had awakened me to the seriousness of political realities beyond teenage lives—was hiding in a Catholic school because I was from the wrong religion. At the same time, I knew that comparing my situation to a story from the Holocaust was both stupid and offensive. So, I never mentioned it to anybody. But I never forgot.
And when the grandfather of my host family took me under his wing and provided the only truly loving and warm welcome I got in that family, I listened to him with deep attention. Opa, as we called him, had been drafted into the Nazi army as a young man.
Being a romantic young girl, I wanted desperately to see him as good, so I never grilled him on exactly how it had happened, whether he had known how bad the Nazis were when he was drafted or whether he had tried to evade or escape. But he was very clear on the morality as an old man. He impressed upon me vehemently and repeatedly that ordinary Germans were responsible for what happened, and that he should have done more to stop the war and the Holocaust. He was sent to the Eastern Front, where he was among 90,000 German soldiers captured at Stalingrad. And he was among the mere 5,000 of those who survived the gulags.
He was one of the first people I had ever met who had a truly earth-shaking life story. He may well have been responsible for a large part of my switch from wanting to be a lawyer, who could take on injustice in the courts, to wanting to be a journalist. The idea that I could interview people, the way I talked to Opa, and hear first hand the really important stories in the world and tell the world about them, became all consuming to me within a year after hearing his tales of the war and his survival.
But the thing that stayed the clearest in my mind was one gray Saturday, sitting at the kitchen table with him, mugs of tea in front of us, when he was telling me and a friend about the rise of the Nazis and how ordinary people had been roped into the whole system, he turned to me specifically and said, “You have to understand this. It can happen anywhere. It could happen in your country.”
I had protested the first Gulf War in early 1991 at the age of fourteen, which was another part of my political awakening. I had started hearing about US-backed dictatorships and death squads that had ravaged Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, things that had happened in my much shorter lifetime. I believed him.
And I have basically been doing what that German grandpa urged me to do ever since—paying attention, documenting whatever I can, standing up and loudly saying “no” when I have to, being ready to run or hide or fight back if necessary. Today, I am amazed that old man saw the U.S. in that context all those years ago. I was a rebellious teenager after all. Of course, I thought the government and mainstream society was likely to be evil.
But Opa saw warning signs—a belligerence and propensity to go to war first and use diplomacy later, a willingness to support dictators, torture and violence in our allies, widespread, vocal racism and lack of real redress of past injustices, the concept of “America first,” runaway corporate capitalism, income inequality spiraling out of control compared to the rest of the world, and worst of all, the flimsy and outmoded American electoral system that had turned the U.S. into a de facto two-party state, where most people felt that they had no real representation. Even in 1992, that was clear to an old man in Germany who had seen where such things can lead.
Today, my heart breaks. Opa, I failed. I tried. I really did try—as a journalist and as a citizen. I cried out against each increasing wave of war, tolerance for torture, surveillance, violence against peaceful protesters, repression of free media, electoral manipulation, legalized bribery, propaganda, racialized policies and rhetoric, etc. In the early 2000s, people used to mock me for it, not just Americans but also Europeans. My European friends have most definitely stopped laughing about my propensity for political protest.
I’m glad Opa didn’t live to see 2026. It would break his heart.
I’m working as hard as I can still, but I’m exhausted. We all are. I spend an inordinate amount of time juggling healthcare bureaucracy for my son and me. My son’s cheekbone and eye socket were shattered in a baseball accident a few weeks ago, and it’s been a nightmare ensuring that he has adequate medical care. And maintaining what remains of our health insurance is a constant running battle.
But on a Sunday, Mama and I finally manage to bundle my 96-year-old grandma into the car and drive to a nearby wading pool at a local creek for a few moments of relief. In the back seat, on the way there, I scroll through my phone and come across a video sent by friends from the other side of the state. A woman holds the phone and you can hear in her voice that she’s crying. She points the camera toward an imposing razor wire fence, several fences, in fact, in layers around an industrial-scale compound.
At first, I don’t understand. And then it hits me with force just as I hear the voices, distant cries, many many voices, dozens at least. They sound like women. There are shadows against the distant wire fences, many hands raised, splayed fingers, grasping.
“We are trying! We are trying to get you out!” the woman with the phone yells, her voice breaking into sobs.
I read the note that came with it. An ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington. My limbs feel impossibly heavy. I clench my throat to keep back any sound. My mother and grandma in the front seat don’t need to know this. My grandma with dementia wouldn’t understand. And Mama knows full well. She often crumples under the weight of it. I’ll tell her about it later, when she’s not driving.
My friend writes that the people in the concentration camp—and yes, these fit the international definition of concentration camps, with massive numbers of detainees rounded up based primarily on ethnicity and held indefinitely until their legal status can be ascertained, including many U.S. citizens—are women, at least on this side of the complex. The landscape around it is bleak and isolated.
We arrive at the creek and my cell phone has no signal. We sit on folding chairs with our feet in the water, eating a picnic lunch and watching children splash and families lounge on the grass. My mind returns again to Au revoir les enfants after all these years. There were scenes like this in the movie. People relaxing, playing, swimming, eating picnic lunches. These things are not incompatible with concentration camps in the same country.
I hear the little boys yelling, “Soldier! Soldier, come on! This way!" as they slide down the brisk stream. At first, I think they’re playing at soldiers, but as I listen it becomes clear. It’s one boy they call Soldier, with the intonation of a name. The mothers call out to him by that name. In this country, some people name their child “Soldier.” In this red county, I know most of the people here wouldn’t know about the concentration camps and if they were told they would argue that “Those are only for criminals,” or “Well, they shouldn’t have broken the law coming here,” and so on. The discomfort of having read a fair amount of history is that I know that’s how the Nazi concentration camps started too. They claimed the people rounded up in camps and deported were criminals.
When we head back to the car, Mama takes my grandma to the bathroom and I go to the car with my dog Conway and load our chairs and coolers. I hear a family talking as they get out of their vehicle next to us. Pleasant chatter. Then, my mind snaps to the fact that it’s in Spanish. With the way things are, I straighten up and scan the gravel parking lot, checking that there is no one suspicious around. It’s reflex. After that video, I can’t help but worry.
Local friends often say, “We would like to help people, but there aren’t any immigrants here.”
But there are. I listen in the grocery store and at out of the way places like this. There are plenty of Spanish speakers in our local area, if you’re paying attention, but they don’t go anywhere much, not if they can help it. Just food, work, and recreation in the most out of the way spots—like this.
I hear a woman sharp whisper and a second latter pattering little feet. I turn and there’s a tiny girl with black pigtails toddling up to my dog, an older woman a few steps behind, trying to catch her.
"¡Sí, sí, puedes!" I squat down next to Conway, who is delighted, wagging his tail furiously and exercising admirable self control by not lunging forward. He loves attention from little kids.
The little girl reaches out a hand tentatively toward his soft ears. The woman has stopped just short of grabbing her up.
"Es muy amable,” I try, scrambling for something from my Duolingo lessons. That probably isn’t the right word for a nice dog, but it’s the best I can do on short notice.
"¿Español?" The woman sounds surprised. The little girl smiles, pats Conway and then darts away toward the car next to ours.
I glance up at the woman and smile. I want to ask, “Are you okay? Do you need any help? Be careful out there. Do you know who to call if you run into trouble?” I don’t have any “red cards” with me, but I have my doubt about how useful those really are anyway. I also don’t want to add fear or suspicion to a pleasant interaction, so we just smile awkwardly and then the woman chases after the toddler, to keep her from veering out into the parking lot.
A few minutes later, I’m getting into the back seat. Grandma is in the front and Mama is on her way back from the bathroom. The car is running and the AC is on, so I reach over and buzz the window up. Two teenage girls—dark-skin and black hair—are just outside, heading for the car next to ours, and they react to the sound of the window, leaping back and pressing themselves against their car. Their faces are momentarily stretched, mouths and eyes wide.
I smile and wave. They shrug and hurry to the other side of the car. I consider rolling the window back down and saying something helpful or reassuring. But what? And would that really be reassuring? Being noticed, having someone clearly track your reactions? Insecure and lacking confidence, I remain silent but ready.
What must it be like to know that people who just look or speak like you are being tracked and stopped, arrested, and imprisoned, forced to spend weeks proving their citizenship or legal status while being moved around between concentration camps with inadequate food and brutal conditions? It isn’t just happening to recent immigrants or to people without legal status. There are plenty of U.S. citizens who have been swept up in it. And what exactly is the moral justification for treating people that way, regardless of their citizenship?
And how helpful is it that some of us are allies? How do we show who we are without raising fears and suspicions? What exactly can we do, except be ready, be aware, pay attention, and take videos if the worst does happen?
I wish I could do better. I am seeing more and more scenes from Au revoir les enfants behind my eyes these days.
