Emily Cunningham

I would actually love to go back to where my ancestors came from, but they're not there anymore. They disappeared in an attempt to Make Eastern Europe Great Again.

When I was growing up, I was absolutely inundated with the Holocaust as part of my Jewish education. I resented it; we were Americans, in America. What did this have to do with us? I'm more grateful for it now.

One of the things we learned (and I would welcome any knowledgable historian to correct me) is that Hitler did not start out planning to kill all the Jews in Europe. He hated and resented us, blamed us for all Germany's ills, but at the start, merely wanted to expel us

The first programs he put in place, broadly known as the Nuremberg laws, were designed to isolate and segregate German Jews from the general population and civil life, as well as expropriating their wealth... forcing them to emigrate.

As as we might say today, "self-deport."

And many German Jews did, in fact, do so. This is why one of the ironies of the Holocaust is that a minority of the victims of this German genocide were German Jews.

It wasn't until the Nazis invaded Poland, and then western Russia, with its vast Jewish populations, that the "Jewish problem" became so acute that the Nazis came up with the "final solution." I mean, there were too many! Where were they supposed to go?

It's a commonplace that a genocide starts slowly with a program of dehumanization, segregation, alienation. But it's not part of some conscious secret plot. Many good Germans, who later on manned the chambers, would have been horrified at the thought of mass murder in, say, 1936.