The N-Word

I grew up believing Nazis were ancient history, and it warped my perspective. Now that they’re “back,” I’m finally ready to see them with clear eyes (and go on living my life anyway).

The recent fracas here at Substack touched something in me. To recap, very briefly: Because Substack had—until a couple of days ago—refused to moderate or shut down hosted publications that share far-right or fascist viewpoints, a vocal subset of writers moved their offerings elsewhere.

It’s hard to fault the moral stance of those who’ve chosen to bail, though I’m not choosing to join them. Substack’s protracted punt on its responsibility is frankly pathetic, but also unsurprising given Facebook’s / Twitter’s / most everyone else’s example.

More to the point, I believe in not living with my head in the sand. Here’s why.

I grew up in a house made of books. Nearly every wall contained built-in shelves, each of them stuffed to the gills. When I was lonely, which was often, I’d go to them to look for something interesting. That’s how I found the beautiful 1965 boxed edition of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which stared its silent challenge at me until I worked up the courage to actually start reading it. And it’s how I found the war books: The War Against the Jews; Exodus; Eichmann in Jerusalem. Hundreds of volumes on trauma, war, dislocation, and Jewish grief.

It was an American Heritage pictorial on the Second World War that did it. Hoping to find images of airplanes and tanks, I stumbled instead upon a photo entitled “Last Jew in Vinnitsa.” It’s a famous image; maybe you’ve seen it yourself. I won’t include it here; suffice to say that when the photo was taken, there were about to be no Jews left in Vinnitsa.

Welcome to the Lorinczi Family Holocaust Library. 

It wasn’t so much that a young boy was largely left alone in a house filled with images of trauma and death. Actually, scratch that: WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING, LEAVING ME ALONE WITH THOSE BOOKS?!?

But I digress.

The issue—besides all those images of concentration camps, pogroms, and violent death searing themselves into the backs of my eyeballs—was that no one ever gave me any context. No one in my family of Survivors ever explained how our own story slotted into all the ones entombed in the walls. The most I could wheedle out of my father was that some people called “Nazis” had done some awful stuff a long time ago, but that it was all over now. The Allies (actually, America) had won the war, and Adolf Hitler and all he stood for had been vanquished.

Sure, some simplification is necessary and appropriate when explaining the Holocaust to a little kid. But children have a fairly well-developed sense of right and wrong, and in my imagination, my parents’ aversion to naming the darkness only intensified it.

It also implanted a childlike kind of absolutism in me. If Nazis were really extinct, they could no more exist than could dinosaurs.

So when I finally encountered them, or their spiritual offspring—can we agree to call them neo-Nazis, or fascists, or something other than Nazis, which they’re not?—I was dumbfounded. It was as if I’d run into a velociraptor strolling down a city street. How can this be possible?

This mental short-circuit didn’t make me want to engage with them, or question them, or challenge them. It made me want to hide. And so I did. It was the perfect excuse not to engage with the things I found distressing or illogical. 

But the time to pretend that the people I disagree with (or outright fear) simply don’t exist is over. I’d prefer to think that I live in a nice neighborhood, free of fascists and Proud Boys and whatever other stripe of asshole is out there, but whether it’s the shopping mall or post office or Substack, we all live in the same neighborhood. I wish fascists didn’t exist, but they do (available right here on Substack and everywhere else pseudo-political ideologies are sold!).

I see now, belatedly, that the well-intentioned ways my family shielded me from the truth hurt them as much as it hurt me. Their refusal to name what they’d survived—and their inability to face their grief—cost them dearly, keeping them locked in tiny boxes long after it was safe to come out.

I’m scared to face the things that scare me, but as a husband, a father, and a writer, I believe it’s my job. Maybe the most important one of all.

Which brings me back to why I’m on Substack, and why I intend to stay. My aversion to engaging with the things I find challenging has kept me out of the larger conversation. As a result, I’ve spent much of my life in a kind of bunker, when what I really wanted was interaction and connection. That’s one story I’m working hard to rewrite.