I felt lucky when they gave me back my coat at the end.

Two hours earlier, I’d traded it for a numbered tag at the cloakroom of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.

Then I walked into the lives and deaths of my people.

I walked by choice into what we call history but is really just yesterday: my own parents were born during the Holocaust. Born to Jewish fathers who were each in their way fighting the hatred that sought to turn their beloved babies’ chubby dimples to ashes. Born to Jewish mothers whose pregnancies must have felt, at least in part, like political protest. Like a literally gut-level, bone-deep refusal to be exterminated.

I walked into a history which, at eighty years old, is also newborn again today. And which is about all of us.

This history is not just about the Jewish families whose pre-war wedding photos and happy snapshots fill a tall shaft in the heart of the museum; I couldn’t decide if the warmth I felt there was a sense of being at home among them, or an imagined ghost of the fires that roared up other industrial-sized chimneys to swallow these generations forever.

No, this history is about *all* of us whose humanity has ever been hated, then denied, then murdered under guise of law while our bodies, living and dead, are plundered for power and for money.

And it’s about today. It’s about our president’s words and the administration’s rollback of our rights and the actions of our armed forces on our streets and on the high seas.

So, on the other hand, it’s also not just about the Nazis and their collaborators, then and now.

It’s about all of us who still have power and privilege on loan to us from the past. We who are not — yet — directly harmed by the renewed rising of what we must call white supremacy. And it’s about what we choose to do, while we still can.

As for me… I had to catch my plane home that afternoon, so I hurried through. Tried to, anyway. But some things were too haunted to be hurried.

The panoramic photo of a warehouse filled with bales upon bales upon bales of hair; I could not stop my hand from reaching up to feel the texture of my own salt-and-pepper curls, the ones that strangers smile at, the ones that would have been shaved from my skull before or after my murder.

A rectangular lake of shoes, cracked and dusty leather filling the floor from wall to wall. Except where the museum’s metal walkway cut a path for me. Step by step, my sneakers passed by thousands of their fellows forlorn, unpaired, empty, but still carrying the imprint of the feet that had walked into the undressing rooms that came before the poison showers, the rooms where everything deemed to have any remaining value was stripped from people who were deemed to have none.

The light-filled circular space that opened up at the end, where a flame burns for memory and tribute and vigilance. That space is clearly there as an airlock, to hold us in our transitions back from the Holocaust to whatever may await each of us in the here and now.

It helped; in that space I lit a small candle that echoed the larger flame and I wiped away a few tears. For those from whom everything was stolen in that not-long-ago outpouring of hatred, fear, and the lust for power and money. For those who gave their lives at that time to protect the future. For us, living in their future and facing the need to fight again, still, always, against all the hatreds and all those who would use them for gain.

I think that’s why I bought a mezuzah in the gift shop on my way out. It’s a tradition I grew up with but hadn’t felt moved to honor before: a decorative container for a tiny fragment of Torah scripture, to be placed on the doorframe of a Jewish home. Like mine, now.

I have never felt particularly Jewish; I’m an atheist with a taste for chopped liver. I came home and put my new mezuzah on the front doorway anyway. Because the horrors that were done to us in living memory have not been done *only* to us.

Hitler explicitly modeled his antisemitic Nuremberg Laws on the Jim Crow “black codes” of the United States. I stood and watched a long, long, long scrolling list of how the legal noose tightened around Europe’s Jews over the years from 1933 to 1945, and it was all too familiar.

I put my hand on the slatted wooden siding of a claustrophobically small railway cattle-car, where a hundred people would have been packed in at gunpoint for a journey that only dozens would survive to even reach the camps where they were then enslaved, raped, and murdered. The planks of the ships’ holds taking kidnapped Africans to our country via the Middle Passage must have felt something like that, too.

The Nazis, obsessive chroniclers of their own brutality, filmed the death marches they forced upon their starving, freezing, stumbling columns of prisoners. I imagine that Indigenous and Black museum visitors must recognize their ancestors in those images, too.

It was a relief to turn in my number — 213, on a disc rather than tattooed on my arm — and be given back my warm coat. To walk out into the cold sunshine of our nation’s capital and feel that I am still free.

I am, as I have always been so far, one of the lucky ones. That’s by happenstance, and I’m grateful for it… even as I acknowledge that it may not always be so. I’m writing this on the day of the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia; closer to home, despite its protestations, the US government has no love for liberal Jews like me.

This, though, is by choice:

Today, in one small way, I marked my home and myself in solidarity with everyone in our nation who has been hated and harmed, demonized and dehumanized.

None of us is free until all of us are free.

Onwards, my dears. ❤️