A Dark and Deadly Valley

When the roundups start, who will speak up? What makes ordinary people take a stand? And what do they possess that’s somehow different from those who go along?

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1.

In the summer of 1942 in Paris, a young French police officer made a choice. Knowing that the round-up of Jews ordered by the German authorities was to be carried out by the Parisian Surete, Theophile Larue, an ordinary French police officer who walked the beat in Paris, warned his Jewish neighbors. Eight families escaped the mass arrests of the Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup, in which thousands of Jews were put into a sports stadium in inhumane conditions before most were eventually sent to the death camp at Auschwitz. Larue and his wife Madeleine lived with their children Monique and Alain in an apartment building in the 6th Arrondissement, and had previously sheltered a Jewish friend wanted by the Gestapo. When the horror came, they did what so many did not - they acted with bravery, resolve, and opposition.

Undoubtedly, Larue was ashamed of his police colleagues’ complicity in a vast crime against humanity, but I wonder what made him act? What makes ordinary people take a stand? And what do they possess that’s somehow different from those who go along?

These are questions that, a week into the overt malignity of the second Trump Administration, we should all be asking ourselves. Too many came into this year believing that Trump and his gang were merely making promises to an ill-informed mob, and they’d hesitate to carry them out. Others have made peace with stepping back from public affairs, perhaps over-confident that this building storm won’t touch their own families, their own friends, or their own communities. And perhaps they (and most of us) will enjoy a peaceful pass through these next four years, but I fear not.

Trump’s early moves, that wave of ego-stoked executive orders, have a common theme of cruelty and revenge, and many are based on pure bigotry. Declaring an end to Federal efforts to increase diversity and inclusion. Banning transgender people. Launching migrant roundups. Leaving the World Health Organization. Dropping out of the Paris Climate Accords. Pardoning the January 6th rioters and cop killers. Attempting to strip U.S. citizenship from people born in this country.

The question it’s hard to get past is this one: when the roundups start, who will speak up? And will there be Americans like Theophile Larue?

2.

By tolerating and enabling hate speech, Counselor to the President Elon Musk undermines trust in democratic norms that prioritize equality, democratic process and inclusion. Musk’s base mocking of the Holocaust over the last week defiles the West Wing of the White House (where he has an office), every contract and tax break he has with the U.S. government, and indeed, everyone who drives a Tesla motor car. He also encourages an increase in the current wave of anti-Semitic crimes, here in the U.S. and abroad.

Infamously, Musk last week twice threw out what appeared (to every honest human who’s ever seen one) to be a Nazi salute to the crowd at a post-inauguration Trump rally. Apologists claimed a range of excuses for Musk - he’s on the spectrum, it was an awkward way of expressing true love, it was a “Roman salute” from the movies and video games.

Of course, neo-Nazis themselves saw the truth - and celebrated the world’s richest man echoing their hate movement’s classic symbol. “Incredible things are happening already lmao,” posted Andrew Torba, the founder of the far-right Christian Nationalist social media platform Gab, while a chapter of the white nationalist group White Lives Matter posted a note on Telegram saying: “Thanks for (sometimes) hearing us, Elon. The White Flame will rise again.”

Civil rights leaders and Holocaust experts saw the same thing.

“The salute itself should be enough to warrant condemnation and attention,” Amy Spitalnick, head of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, told The Guardian, adding that so should “the ways extremists see an action like this and take it as license for their own violent extremism.”

Efraim Zuroff, the retired head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office and formerly the organization’s top Nazi hunter, said he also saw it as Nazi salute, and that it happened at the U.S. presidential inauguration celebration made it especially shocking to see. “This is America, the leader of the free world, the people who sacrificed 200,000 soldiers who died to defend Europe. He has to explain himself.”

Musk reacted to the furor with jokes on Twitter, and then by appearing at a gathering of Germany’s extremist far-right political party AfD. He told the crowd that Germany needs to “move on” from the “past guilt” of the Holocaust.

“It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk told the brown shirts, whose current iteration centers - here’s a shocker - on demonizing migrants.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters that the tech billionaire’s support of the far-right “endangers” European democracy. Musk has recently thrown his support behind multiple far-right European leaders, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Reform U.K. Party leader Nigel Farage (though he subsequently turned on Farage, saying he “doesn’t have what it takes”).

Musk’s open bigotry is vile. And the broader danger lies in allowing a global oligarch with immense wealth and control over influential technologies to wield unchecked power, including shaping public discourse or policy indirectly. Such concentrated influence in private hands risks eroding the principles of liberal democracy, where power should be distributed, accountable, and rooted in public interest—not dominated by individual agendas or interests.

And its focus on the stateless - on those perceived as outsiders, from someplace else, not fully German or American or South African - is an echo of a bell that was rung more than 90 years ago.

3.

Today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, recognized by the United Nations General Assembly as Holocaust Remembrance Day. As a young reporter in the Bronx, working for The Riverdale Press covering politics and helping to run the editing desk, I met and interviewed many Holocaust survivors in the 80s and 90s, women and men with tattooed numbers on their forearms. People who had witnessed the cruel annihilation of their entire families - not in war, but in systematic and ruthlessly administered death camps.

It’s easy to recoil from Musk’s anti-Semitism and his mockery of the state-organized murder of six million people. But it’s also important to realize he is probably the de facto second ranking public official in the United States government. His coarse views straddle both banal xenophobia and a dangerous call to action among those who both hate and are predisposed to taking action.

Opposition is vital - personal opposition. As civil rights lawyer Marc Elias wrote a month ago, we are indeed on our own: “​​Our institutions are not going to save us. Only we can do that. We may be on our own, but together we can fight, and we must believe that when we fight, we will win.”

Back in the summer of 1942, when the young Parisian cop Theophile Larue chose bravery over cowardice and saved his neighbors, the orders from the Nazi occupiers to round up the Jews came with what they (rightly) perceived as a sweetener to the French police: only the Jews from elsewhere, the refugees, the stateless were to be targeted in the sweep. There’s a direct connection from that order to the precipice this country stands on the edge. Auschwitz only truly looks like Auschwitz in the rearview mirror of history - the designation of a national scapegoat, a vast series of roundups, a network of internment camps, and neighbors informing on neighbors all preceded the gas chambers and ovens. Sound familiar?

In the coming days, some of the greatest heroes of our time may well be law enforcement officers Theo Larue who refuse to take part in mass round-ups, who warn families and communities about coming raids, and who quietly use the administrative powers in their departments to stymie the creation of internment camps or a network of informants. Let’s hope so.

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