Dear Friends,
We didn’t know that Michael Cohen was a descendent of Holocaust survivors. His article helps us understand where we are today. Read it and take action, peace, democracy, and Human life.
Joseph Gerson
“Before The Scream Echoes Again”
From inherited Holocaust trauma to ICE raids and Nazi-echoing slogans, America’s warning sirens are screaming again; and this time the uniforms say “homeland security.”
Michael Cohen
I was raised on stories that never left the room, even when no one was speaking.
That’s the inheritance of trauma. It doesn’t come with a trust fund or a plaque. It arrives in flashes, screams in the night, and faces that suddenly disappear from the present and reappear in hell.
Much has been written about the children of Holocaust survivors; the so-called “second generation.” Psychologists have names for it now: intergenerational trauma, inherited PTSD, emotional hypervigilance. Clinical language meant to explain what my family simply lived. When your parent survives genocide, survival becomes the family business. Fear doesn’t end. It just learns new disguises.
My father is a Polish Holocaust survivor. Strength defines him. Silence protects him. But trauma? Trauma never asked permission.
I remember a December break around 1986, down in Florida at our family home. My grandmother; my papa’s mother, was there. She was in her mid-90s, small, quiet, fragile in a way that came from surviving the unthinkable. At some point, without warning, we heard a scream that didn’t belong in that room; or that decade.
She was reliving the day the Nazis stormed her home.
Her eyes went vacant. Her face contorted into something frozen in terror. She wasn’t in Florida anymore. She was back in Poland, watching family members murdered, dragged away, erased. That look stayed on her face until the moment passed; until she recognized her surroundings again, until safety slowly reintroduced itself.
I never forgot that expression.
Because I see it now, every day, in this country.
I see it on the faces of people approached by ICE agents in unmarked vehicles. On mothers clutching children as men in tactical gear scream orders. On families who don’t know if compliance means survival or disappearance. It’s the same face: pure terror mixed with disbelief that history is repeating itself in a place that promised it never would.
This week in Minneapolis, federal agents deployed teargas, pepper balls, and flash bangs against protesters. Eight people were arrested. Thousands of DHS and ICE officers flooded the city in what the administration proudly called the “largest operation in DHS history.” A mother, Renee Nicole Good, was killed by a federal immigration agent. And the Department of Justice? It declined to even open a civil rights investigation.
Let that sink in.
When allegations of excessive force arise, DOJ is supposed to investigate. That’s the rule of law. That’s the guardrail. But when you decide in advance not to investigate, it stops being justice; it becomes policy.
Gas clouds filled the streets. A man scrubbed his eyes with snow while agents drove away spraying orange irritant. Students walked out of schools. Prosecutors resigned in protest. Cities sued the federal government, calling it what it looked like: a federa invasion.
And hovering over all of it was the language.
Language matters. Every authoritarian understands that. Hitler certainly did.
So when I see posts coming out of the White House and federal agencies that echo Nazi propaganda, I don’t analyze it academically. I feel it viscerally.
“One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.”
That wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t careless phrasing. It was a deliberate invocation of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer.” One people. One nation. One leader.
The Department of Labor posted it. The Department of Homeland Security amplifies white nationalist imagery. Recruitment materials that erase diversity. Social media posts that demonize immigrants while sanctifying “American-born” purity. Bible verses weaponized to bless exclusion. Patriotism redefined as obedience.
This is how fascism creeps in; not in jackboots first, but in slogans. In bureaucratie cruelty. In the normalization of force. In the quiet decision not to investigate when power kills.
As the son of a Holocaust survivor, I take this personally. I don’t have the luxury of pretending this is exaggerated rhetoric or partisan hysteria. My family lived the consequences of that dismissal.
The United States is not Nazi Germany. But history doesn’t repeat itself perfectly; it rhymes. And when a government deploys mass federal force against cities, criminalizes protest, targets immigrants as existential threats, and borrows language straight from genocidal regimes, the rhyme becomes impossible to ignore.
I hear my grandmother’s scream in Minneapolis. I see her face in Brooklyn Park. In Chicago. In every neighborhood where unmarked vehicles pull up and people vanish into the system.
Never Again was not a slogan. It was a warning.
And warnings only work if we’re brave enough to listen; before the scream echoes again.