Stephen B. Jacobs was incarcerated in Buchenwald when he was five years old. He’s now 79 and he states, just days ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday, “It feels like 1929 or 1930 Berlin.” Newsweek:
“Things that couldn’t be said five years ago, four years ago, three years ago—couldn’t be said in public—are now normal discourse. It’s totally unacceptable.
“We thought our country had changed. In fact, it didn’t. We were operating on a misconception. ‘My god, we elected a black president in the United States! Look how far we’ve come!’ We haven’t.”
In Trump, Jacobs says, the far-right sees an “enabler.”
“I’m involved with New York real estate, I know this man personally,” says Jacobs, whose eponymous architecture firm celebrated its 50th birthday in 2017. “Trump is an enabler. Trump has no ideas. Trump is out for himself.
“He’s a sick, very disturbed individual. I couldn’t say that Trump is a fascist because you’ve got to know what fascism is. And I don’t think he has the mental power to even understand it.”
Jacobs says he’s told that is the only Holocaust survivor to design a memorial. He designed the Buchenwald Holocaust memorial in the late 1990’s for the U.S. Commission For The Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad.