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A century-old Holocaust survivor's lesson for us
Date: 2026-Oct-08 Author: Barry Shatzman
You're 15 years old. A booming knock on your door comes in the middle of the night. Five minutes later you've been taken away. Those taking you knocked your stepmother unconscious. You'll never see her or your younger brother again.
Three years later you're liberated, with nothing but paper clothes and memories of atrocities that no human ever should have to experience. You come to learn that virtually everyone in your family has been murdered.
Just one photo has survived from your childhood... and by the time it was taken your life already has turned irreparably tragic. Your father has been murdered and you're required to wear an armband with the Star of David. Each day brings another right taken away from you.
That photo now lives in Alter Wiener's book From a Name to a Number. A friend used AI to bring it more to life for what would have been Alter's 100th birthday today. When she texted it to me, I couldn't stop tearing up from how powerful it is.
I didn't have to describe his "arrest" up there for you to see that. But in case it's not obvious why i did, read a newspaper just about any day from the past almost 2 years.
I still remember the times i'd sit on Alter's couch and he would talk about how terrified he was about what Donald Trump was doing. This was no attempt at drama - i was the only other person there. He just clearly saw the parallels to what he experienced growing up in Nazi-occupied Poland.
And that was only Trump's first term. I'll forever miss Alter, but i'm glad he never lived to see Trump's current term.
Not so much because Trump echoes Hitler, who said he would "make Germany great again" while continually casting false blame and oppression on groups of others until people hated those others rather than the original hater with funny hair. Not even because his targeted raids mirror Hitler's.
"If they come for us at night and you do nothing, they will come for you in the morning," Robin Morgan wrote in her book, The Demon Lover. It would be the torture of seeing people going about their lives as if nothing horribly unusual is taking place that i doubt he would be able to survive.
Which brings us to the question of how to honor Alter's life which began a mere 100 years ago today. If you want my guess, i'm pretty sure he'd say the best gift we could give him would be to challenge this evil at every step and emerge from it with us all being more loving.
And to fucking mean it when we say "never again".