An incomparable parallel

Prejudice is present in every society, even though time may gradually diminish its most

Image from Nazi concentration camps - "Victim's Shoes" by photographer Michael Keena extreme manifestations by groups that believe a different "race" should be eradicated.

The year 1933 marked the lives of Jewish people forever. The absolute dictatorship imposed by Adolf Hitler took away their normal and stable lives and replaced it with a genocidal plan to exterminate the entire Jewish population; a plan fed by the ideology that only one "pure race" existed - the Aryan race.

All Jews were ordered to sew a yellow badge on their outer garments in order to mark them as Jews in public. Racial laws were established and businesses were taken from them. Doctors could no longer practice their profession. Jews were not allowed to be in public service, and even their German citizenship was removed from them. The Jewish women were used by German "doctors" and researchers as scapegoats for sterilization experiments and other cruel and unethical "studies." And thousands died in the ghettos from hunger and illnesses.

The humiliation and suffering did not stop there. In 1941, Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jewish race. Jews were captured and taken to concentration camps on convoys normally used to transport cattle. Upon arrival, they were separated into lines - one for women, another one for men and the children. Eventually, they all led to the gas chamber.

There is no way for the rest of us to fully comprehend such atrocities. Only those who survived know the pain.

It is impudent to compare such anguish as that suffered by the Jews to the prejudice against immigrants in the United States today. I do not deny or ignore the existence of such prejudice, but I also know that it is practically impossible to see the history of the Jews repeating itself here and now. And for that reason, I feel proud and privileged to live in this country, where I see immigrants having the opportunity to work hard, open their businesses, provide a dignified life for their families, send their children to school and receive medical assistance, regardless of their immigration status.

If we go back in time, to the mid- 1800s and the great influx of Irish arriving on U.S. shores, we would witness the prejudice they faced for being not only "foreigners," but also Catholics. It got to the point of business owners hanging signs in their shop windows that read "Irish not allowed." Today, this group is an integral and active part of American society.

A little more than a century later, a great influx of Latino immigrants began to arrive in this area. Fortunately, they did not face the same challenges the Irish did. That in no way means that prejudice had simply been wiped out. Indeed, sentiments toward the foreign born had gradually changed, and a divergence of opinions informs our attitudes today.

Some show tolerance for the presence of immigrants in their community; others believe that immigrants are here to take away jobs from U.S.-born Americans; and thankfully, there are those who accept and recognize that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants and that immigrants contribute to building our country and growing our economy.

Last week, a local Brazilian tabloid referred to Tribuna's endorsement for incumbent mayoral candidate Mark Boughton in the recent election as "if a Jew was supporting a Nazi Party," a comparison that is just beyond belief.

It is insensitive and lacking in common sense to compare the action, behavior or opinion of an individual in the contemporary United States to the atrocities practiced by the Nazis. To compare the challenges immigrants suffer today with the Holocaust minimizes the indescribable and horrific pain the Jews suffered under Hitler's regime.

Each one of us shall do his or her part in this fight for equality among all human beings, because any form of prejudice, against any group, based on race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation, reflects a prejudice against humanity as a whole.

Pr. Martin Niemöller, a prominent German, anti-Nazi theologian, made an analogy in the poem "First they came…" about the inactivity of the German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group:

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me."

It is in this spirit that we should all work together toward the same goal of freedom for immigrants in the United States.