An column in the New Yorker magazine today by George Packer tells a moving and very pertinent story of a conversation between Angela Merkel, Henry Kissinger and Ruth Westheimer at a dinner for Merkel in 2015.
It was the fall of 2015, the height of the migrant crisis in Europe. Germany had announced that it would admit a million refugees, most of them fleeing the civil war in Syria. Merkel had come under heavy criticism for the decision, and, during the soup course, Kissinger—ninety-two years old, eight decades removed from his own experience as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany—let the Chancellor have it. Of course, he said, he could admire the humanitarian impulse to save one person, but a million? That would change “German civilization.” It would be, Kissinger said, like the Romans allowing the barbarians inside the city gates. Merkel listened, in her focused way, and didn’t argue, except to say, “What choice do we have?”
“What choice do we have?” I admire Merkel all the more now.
When Kissinger, on the Chancellor’s right, finished, Merkel turned to Dr. Ruth, on her left. Did she have anything to add? Dr. Ruth is five years younger than Kissinger and so tiny that her feet didn’t reach the floor. (She asked me to push her chair closer to the table so that she could eat her soup.) It turned out that she did have something to add. Her high, cheerful Frankfurt accent is as familiar in its way as Kissinger’s sombre Bavarian gutturals, but she began quietly, almost apologetically, as if she didn’t want to claim too much authority on a subject that had nothing to do with the orgasm. She told us the story of the Evian Conference, held on Lake Geneva, in July, 1938, where countries from around the world gathered to debate the plight of Germany’s Jews. In the end, only one country—the Dominican Republic—agreed to take in a substantial number of Jewish refugees. All the others, including the United States, made excuses.
Westheimer went on to tell the story how she escaped the holocaust by the Kindertransport, a train to Switzerland. Both of her parents died in the camps.
There wasn’t a trace of accusation in her voice—the whole time she’d been telling the story in the same half-apologetic tone—but no one, least of all Kissinger, could have missed her point: You and I were the same as each other, the same as the Syrians. I have not forgotten. Have you?
Of course, Trump doesn’t know, or care, about history. Nor does he have a scintilla of empathy. When the group at the dinner talked about the upcoming election, they were sure Trump couldn’t win.
The experts’ long experience in politics and foreign policy had given them no reason to believe that, in a couple of years, President Trump’s government would separate thousands of refugee children from their parents. Not in order to rescue them, as the Kindertransport had done, but to show such unashamed cruelty that other parents would no longer try to save their children from danger by crossing America’s borders.