My mother-in-law was born at Miła 18.

In October 1934, the address meant nothing beyond the life unfolding inside it. It was an apartment building in Warsaw, on a street that had not yet been walled into a ghetto. Her mother kept the family’s wedding linens in the basement.

Nine years later, the bunker beneath that address became the command headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization. Mordechai Anielewicz and many of the young people who fought beside him died there.

Today, Edna’s birthplace is a mound of rubble with a memorial stone on top.

I spent years verifying her life, document by document, for a book. That is why I read Sunday’s election results from the German state of Saxony-Anhalt the way I did.

The Alternative für Deutschland won 43.9 percent of the vote and thirty-nine of the eighty-three seats in the state parliament, only three seats short of a majority. The Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, collapsed from 37.1 percent to 17.2 percent.

Turnout reached 77 percent, up from 60 percent.

That last number is the one to sit with. This was not apathy. This was participation.

I know what a woman who writes about the Holocaust is expected to say next, and I am not going to say it.

Germany in 2026 is not Germany in 1933. The Basic Law was written by people who had watched a republic dismantled from within, and it has protections that the Weimar Republic never possessed. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization in 2023. Every other major party currently refuses to govern with it. Merz and the CDU have restated that refusal.

For now, the firewall is holding.

I am not warning that the Reichstag is about to burn. I am telling you what I have learned to watch instead.

In Germany’s federal system, education is largely a state responsibility. State governments shape school curricula. They fund cultural institutions. They help determine the resources available to museums, archives and memorial sites. They also provide funding and security for religious communities.

Saxony-Anhalt’s Jewish community numbers approximately 1,100 people. It depends upon the state for both funding and protection.

Björn Höcke, the AfD leader in neighboring Thuringia, called Berlin’s Memorial........

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