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Immigration And The Winds Of War Saga

 If you recall, The Winds of War was published in 1971, and Herman Wouk wrote the follow-up, War And Remembrance, in 1978. The books became celebrated miniseries in 1983 and 1988, respectively. I saw The Winds Of War by pure luck, when Netflix allowed us here in the US to stream it. It could have been 2013 or 2014; Donald Trump was a weird cameo actor, not a politician.

Anyway, it's one of my obsessions now. It worms its way into your mind and heart before you realize it. One thing you notice is how the shadow of the Nazi evil just hangs over the story. We get to see how low-level distaste for Jews--like Clara Young in the German railway station--will be used by the Nazis for their own purposes. If we do not affirmatively love those in danger--risk ourselves for them--evil will find them.

The professor Aaron Jastrow doesn't perceive the danger in his immigration status until far too late. The diplomat August van Winnaker has a low-level disdain for Jews that he masks in concern for legality and propriety. Aaron dies in Auschwitz eventually, as does his cousin Berel. Natalie Jastrow, Aaron's niece, barely survives the camp. Berel dies protecting Natalie's infant son Louis, as SS guards open fire. 

I don't have any tendentious comparisons to today's events, except to say that human beings retain a dignity no one is allowed to deface. Every good thing we might do can be twisted by evil. We might say, "The US doesn't have to take in everyone," and that is true. Still, your neighbor in the Biblical sense might be looking you right in the face.

The fictional Aaron Jastrow wasn't the celebrated historian and professor who wrote "A Jew's Jesus" and taught at Yale. In the end, he was just a Jew, and some evil people decided Jews had to die. Natalie wasn't the brilliant daughter of a respected merchant; in the end, she was just a Jew, and the evil people decided she should die.

Does diplomat and ex-fiancee of Natalie, Leslie Slote, actually care about the economy, or public health, or is the plight of the Jews in Lisbon simply exposing his selfishness on this occasion? I don't ask so that people bash each other, but to check myself. It could come to pass that Love requires me to protect people others would want to kill, or allow to be killed. I think I would rather have Bunker Thurston's "Quaker conscience" than Slote's.

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