The Most Dangerous Words May Be: “It’s Not That Bad Yet”

History is easy to understand after it has happened. We know which warnings mattered, which reassurances proved false and which decisions came too late. Looking back at Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, the progression toward catastrophe can appear painfully obvious.

It was not obvious to the people living through it. That distinction is at the heart of my new book, When Is It Too Late? Holocaust Lessons on Risk, Decision Making, and the Failure to Act. 

I am the son of a Holocaust survivor. My mother, Mary Katz Claman, was a Hungarian Jew who was forced into the Kisvárda Ghetto, deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, selected for forced labour and eventually liberated after surviving circumstances that would have been almost unimaginable only a few years earlier.

My first book was about preserving her story. When I finished it, I thought that work was largely complete. October 7 made me realize there was another question I needed to explore.

What troubled me was not only the horror of the attack itself, but what followed. Jewish communities strengthened security, schools reviewed emergency procedures, Jewish students reported hostility and intimidation, and many Jews began questioning assumptions about their safety in democratic societies that they had rarely questioned before. 

I began looking at my mother’s experience differently. Instead of asking only what happened to her, I began asking what happened before what happened to her.

If we begin at Auschwitz, we begin too late

When we teach the Holocaust, understandably, we focus on its horrific endpoint: ghettos, deportation trains, concentration camps and mass murder. But if we begin at Auschwitz, we begin too late.

The more difficult lessons are found earlier, when people still lived in their homes, went to work, sent their children to school and planned for the future. Institutions still functioned, streets remained familiar and ordinary life continued, even as the protections beneath that life were weakening.

Danger did not arrive all at once. It accumulated through discrimination, exclusion, increasingly acceptable hatred, institutional failure and the gradual narrowing of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)