Preface

When Martin Luther King came to Birmingham I was majoring in German at Birmingham-Southern College. You can see a Birmingham-Southern student in the PBS series "Eyes on the Prize". She is white, and she marches in the front - thin, kind of geeky, wearing dark horn-rimmed glasses. She was probably the only white resident of Birmingham to take part in the demonstrations. While I was driving back and forth to classes, obediently staying away from areas of conflict as instructed by the civil authorities, she walked into the face of cameras, baring witness to the fact that there were young white southerners who recognized that our society was unfair and wanted justice.

Donors called the college dean who was serving as interim president that year, threatening to withdraw funds if she continued to take part in the demonstrations. So he called her in and gave her the choice of withdrawing from the demonstrations or being expelled. I hope she withdrew.

You can't major in German without dealing with the holocaust and after graduation I read extensively about the Germany and Austria that led up to that injustice, thinking my experience as a civil-rights-era southerner might parallel, in some way, the experience of a young German/Austrian of those years. I felt the need to write about it and it seemed easier to deal with someone else's conflict.

Truth is, there would have been precious little to say - a few words about cringing as Annie Mae Abrams left our dining room and the "n" jokes began to pass my father's lips; about the morning she didn’t show up for work and he took me with him to look for her, driving over dirt roads to an unlighted house, where we had to walk around to the back to find anyone. There were four or five black women huddled over a stove in the darkened kitchen. A large pregnant dog wandering in with us... I can still see it, the back yard with only a few clumps of crabgrass, and when I do, I still feel the same sinking feeling that hollowed out my chest that afternoon.

I could say we felt generous, passing along our cast off-clothes to her rather than sending them to the Salvation Army, and that it shames me now to think of it. My best guess about the German peoples in the era leading up to the holocaust is that people in Austria and Germany were doing pretty much what we were doing in the south before the marches, living as normal lives as they could, wanting to trust their leaders, blocking out, as well as they could, Krystalnacht and the raids, hunkering down and feeling that hollow, sinking feeling in their chests when they found they couldn't ignore it any longer.

My book would have dealt with what it meant to stand by, to feel helpless to right the wrongs around one, to feel safe but impotent to do what is right.

Now it is 2006, a new struggle has eclipsed the old and this time, I am not a Southerner with a moral dilemma, feeling helpless to change the social system, I am not the German, I am the Jew, slated for extermination by an enemy with no more regard for me and mine than I would have, spreading borax in the cracks to eliminate cockroaches.