There is a document in the Swedish archives dated June 28, 1945. It records an interrogation of my husband’s grandfather, Alois Simonič, conducted only weeks after his liberation from the Nazi concentration camp system. He was thirty-one years old.

Alois had been born in 1914 in Ihan, in a part of Europe whose borders, governments, citizenship regimes, and occupying powers would change repeatedly during his lifetime. He made his living as a chauffeur and was married. During the occupation of Yugoslavia, he continued driving. He also used that work to help the Partisans with transportation.

The Swedish State Police recorded what followed with admirable economy. Alois said that he had assisted the Partisans with transports and that, because of this, the Germans arrested him on August 1, 1944. He was sent into the Nazi concentration camp system, first to Dachau and then to Neuengamme.

The form contains a separate entry for political orientation. Here the archive becomes wonderfully inconvenient.

“He is a communist and was one even before the war broke out in 1939.”

That is what the Swedish police recorded Alois telling them in June 1945.

No modern historian inferred his communism from fragmentary evidence. No political opponent applied the label to discredit him. No descendant reconstructed it from family gossip. Alois identified himself as a communist when the concentration camp system he had survived was still being dismantled.

The Nazi records independently establish his imprisonment within the political-prisoner system. Dachau documentation identifies him as a Schutzhäftling, records prisoner number 111385, his transfer from Trieste to Dachau in September 1944, and his subsequent transfer to Neuengamme. The surviving documentary trail continues through liberation and Red Cross evacuation to Sweden.

He survived, and so did the politics.

Communists belong to the history of Nazi persecution whether modern political movements enjoy remembering them or not. Political repression was foundational to the concentration camp system. Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other political opponents were among the earliest prisoners after the Nazi seizure of power. Dachau itself opened in March 1933 primarily as a camp for political prisoners.

None of this is obscure history. The discomfort begins when the prisoner is somebody’s grandfather.

Family memory has a remarkable ability to improve the politics of the dead. Political convictions become youthful indiscretions. Resistance becomes bad luck. Arrest becomes an inexplicable wartime tragedy. A person who made choices inside an occupied society is gradually converted into a harmless ancestor whom history simply happened to strike.

Several familiar logical fallacies make that conversion possible.

Presentism appears when current political loyalties become the test by which an historical victim is judged. If communism is morally repellent to me now, a communist persecuted by the Nazis becomes difficult to accommodate. His politics begin to shrink in the retelling until eventually they disappear.

Historical victimhood is not a character reference.

The Nazis did not persecute only people whose political opinions would be comfortable in contemporary America. Their concentration camps confined people whom the regime defined as political, ideological, racial, and social enemies. Political prisoners included Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, liberals, resistance members, and others considered dangerous to National Socialism. The red triangle marked political prisoners inside the camp system. Schutzhaft, or “protective custody,” supplied the bureaucratic language through which political detention could be administered.

The historical obligation is to describe why a person was persecuted, even when the answer produces someone we would not have invited to join our political party.

False equivalence arrives almost immediately after the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)