By the time the Jews of Vilna grasped the danger of their situation, it was too late.
In October 1941 a 14-year-old Jewish boy named Yitzhak Rudashevski sat in a crowded hiding place in Vilna Poland, hastily writing in his diary. His previously peaceful world had been shattered when Vilna was occupied by the German army three months before and soon the Germans began to persecute and arrest Jews.
In his diary the he wrote “we are like animals surrounded by the hunter. The hunter on all sides… they pound, tear, break….How dreadful is the dawn! The ghetto is full of lamentation. Sobbing dejected people. One has lost a father, another a mother, a third a child. Families have been torn apart.”
First, the Jews were forced to wear armbands, then to walk in the gutter. Soon roving bands of local armed paramilitary men began to grab Jews off the street where they were taken to detention and then disappeared.
Initially, no one knew what happened to those loved ones and family members who were taken, rumors abounded but the authorities were reassuring, these people were being sent to humane work camps. Then the Jews were herded into the ghetto and confined like trapped animals.
Soon, the Germans and their local collaborators entered the ghetto to snatch victims by the thousands. Eventually, a few survivors of these deportation efforts came back with terrifying news, that all those who were abducted from their homes and streets were taken to the nearby Ponary Forest and shot and buried in mass graves. Initially, their neighbors did not believe their stories.
Storm troopers roamed the streets of the ghetto, arresting the “Illegals” who didn’t have “the proper work papers.” Anyone who resisted or ran was shot on the spot. By the end of the three-year Nazi occupation of Vilna, out of 100,000 Jewish residents only 2,000 were left alive.
Throughout these harrowing days, Yitzhak poured his heart into his diary, describing the confusion, the terror, the streets filled with armed soldiers hunting for victims. Yitzhak’s diary abruptly came to an end when he and his family were discovered in their hiding place in October of 1943 and killed.
My parents were both Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Vilna. When I grew up listening to the dark tales from their childhood, I felt detached from their terrifying testimonies. Their stories were from the distant past, in a faraway place, the murderous Nazis were defeated and gone. But overriding all I felt confident that these scenes could never happen in America. America was the multicultural sanctuary that took in refugees like my parents by the tens of thousands and welcomed them into our land.
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My confidence that America was not like Poland in 1941, that the ancient hatreds had no place here, was first cracked during the Charlottesville white supremacist marches in 2017, where angry white men carrying torches to emulate the Nazi Brownshirt marches of the 1930s shouted “Jews will not replace us.”
Most surprising was President Trump’s assertion at the time that these neo-Nazi marchers were decent people.
Now nine years later Trump is sending armies of armed, masked men into the streets of American cities hunting for immigrants, especially those whose skin is dark under the pretense that their papers are not in order.
We see scenes of people being snatched off the street and dragged out of cars. Young children are being used as bait to lure their parents out of hiding. Doors are being smashed and old men dragged out of bed. Children as young as 2 years of age are being arrested and sent into detention.
Suddenly my parents’ tales from 80 years ago are no longer remote and alien.
This week we have seen American citizens whose only crime is that they are protesting on behalf of their immigrant neighbors being shot to death in the streets by ICE agents.
Suddenly to my horror I am realizing that this burst of government violence in Minneapolis will not stop with the deportation of some allegedly “lawbreaking” Somali immigrants.
Trump has emboldened masked gunmen to carry out brutal ethnic cleansing without restraint, and then move on to trample on our constitution and the rule of law by attacking anyone who opposes him.
Will Americans in 2026 fall into the same trap of disbelief as the doomed Jews of Vilna in 1941? The time to act is now. Raise your voices. Take to the streets to demand justice for Renee Good and Alex Pretti and to defend a constitution that is in danger of being trampled by a new set of jackboots.
Michael Good is a retired family physician living in Durham