The Democratic Party is the party of hate. They look at middle- and working-class Americans and see “garbage” and “deplorables,” words that President Biden and Madame Hilary used. On November 4, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough trashed Trump voters, asking, “Who are these people…who raised them?”
Mr. Scarborough, let me tell you who raised me.
My parents came to this country in 1948. They were Polish Jews who survived Hitler’s Holocaust. They did not know each other when they arrived in the United States.
When my father was fourteen, he was imprisoned in a Nazi slave labor camp for the sole crime of being a Jew. By the time the 12-year Reich was destroyed, the Nazis had killed his father, sister, and brother. There are missing pieces of my father’s story since he understandably seldom talked about those harrowing years.
When most people talk about the Holocaust, they sum it up by saying that six million Jews were killed. End of story.
Buchenwald survivors (1945).
When I hear these callous statements, I am filled with rage at the ignorance of such utterances because there is so much more involved. Survivors such as my parents were tortured by guilt for having survived. It meant being afraid to go to sleep at night. It meant being afraid of the movies that played in your head between two and six in the morning when you saw the faces of your dead father, sister, brother, and you screamed in agony.
For those living with survivors, it meant being awoken by your wife from your nightmare because you were thrashing around so violently that you were hurting her. It is a life sentence for a crime you did not commit.
Against great odds, my father came to America with nothing. No money. No education. Just a sick mother who never smiled after the war. By working harder than 99.5% of the population could even imagine, he became very prosperous. For years he labored in obscurity until finally finding success in real estate construction and development.
But according to Democrats, he did have one advantage: His white privilege!
My father’s first job was as a tailor in the New York garment industry. He met my mother after moving to Baltimore, and they then moved to Vineland, New Jersey.
Using his small savings, my father opened a grocery store that was not successful. He struggled to pay off his creditors—something people did in those days for bankruptcy was a stigma. Subsequently, he moved to Philadelphia, where he went into debt to open a new grocery store. The store was about five thousand square feet with two checkout counters.
This time, my father succeeded. He did everything in the store, including being a butcher. It was a dirty job, but he did it as a step towards a better future. The hours were grueling.
His mother worked in the store as did his stepfather and my mother. My grandmother lived in an apartment over the store. One day, I was with her in the apartment, and she started to talk about the son whom the Nazis killed She took out this small suit of clothes that belonged to him and started crying. I was too young to understand at the time what was happening before me.
Ultimately, wanting something better, my father sold the store and pressed forward with his small building business. The business started slowly, so my parents bought a small convenience store. It helped pay the bills until we were forced to close the store after my mother was almost killed in a robbery. We were fortunate that my father’s real estate business started to take off, so that we could do the revenue from that store.
My mother was of critical importance in our family’s business success. She worked tirelessly and supported my father in every way. She was an unsung hero, as were many women of previous generations.
My mother’s family had a different story. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a common man with uncommon insight. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump would have liked him.
According to a story my mother told, my grandfather stood in the village center of their small town and said that the Germans would kill all the Jews. The village elders said he was crazy and not to repeat what he said lest he start a panic.
Rather than bow before this edict, my grandfather took his wife and four children eastward by foot and cattle car, heading to Siberia to live out the war. On the Russian-run train to Siberia, the sick were literally thrown off the train.
One despondent woman who lost a child threatened to tell the Russian guards that one of my mother’s siblings was sick. My five-foot-tall grandmother pulled out a knife and told the woman she would cut her throat if she said anything. My mother’s family arrived in Siberia, fully intact.
Life was incredibly harsh. The family lived in a barn, drew water from a well, and survived almost entirely bread and vegetables culled from the fields after the farmers harvested their crops. But they survived.
After the war they traveled to Europe and spent time in a displaced persons camp until receiving permission to come to America. After finally arriving, my grandfather’s first job was as a junkman.
Ultimately, the family all pitched in and bought a bakery. My mother worked in a factory during the day and then came to the bakery to work the evening hours. My uncle delivered bread on his bicycle in the early morning before going to school.
Of my junkman grandfather’s four children, three of whom became millionaires. The fourth married a dentist who opened multiple offices.
To make a long story short, my parents survived, legally came to America, worked incredibly hard, including taking breathtaking financial risks, and they prospered. Their efforts saw them going from a rented row home in West Philadelphia, sometimes eating only potatoes for dinner, to living in a million-dollar suburban home eating steak about twenty-five years later. This was the American dream and my father never tired of saying America was the greatest country in the world. This picture of them becoming citizens hung in every home in which they ever lived. Even my grandmother was able to smile for this wonderful moment:
American Thinker
Jesus Christ is King
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