The Lesson of Niemöller, Rewritten on the Streets of Minneapolis (Guest Editorial)

Last Sunday was the 40th anniversary of Red Wedge, a collective of artists opposed to the government of Margaret Thatcher who campaigned with the UK Labour Party in the mid-1980s. Looking for some images to accompany a social media post commemorating our first show at the Manchester Apollo, I found some photos in my archive of myself with Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke of The Smiths. They were taken during the soundcheck that day by Steve Rapport, a friend of mine who subsequently moved to the US. Searching online for some way to contact him to ask permission to use the images, I came across his Instagram page and an emotionally charged to-camera clip that he’d posted that morning.

Like many of us, Steve had been shocked to see videos of Alex Pretti being pushed to the ground by six armed men who summarily executed him on the snowy streets of Minneapolis just the day before. For Steve though, that footage stirred deeply troubling memories. His mother, Mina Zelkowicz, was a Holocaust survivor. She was a teenager when the Nazis came to round up the Jews in the Lodz ghetto in Poland on a snowy night in February 1940. When a pregnant neighbour was shoved to the ground by the SS men, Mina’s father rushed to help her and was set upon by the jack-booted fascists who kicked him until the snow ran red with his blood. They dragged his lifeless body away and she never saw him again.

For Steve, the footage of Alex Pretti’s murder on the snow-bound streets of Minneapolis was an horrific echo of his grandfather’s fate, and it triggered an outpouring of righteous anger as he took to Instagram to relate his mother’s experience. His powerful testament stayed with me all day, the scenes from Lodz and Minneapolis overlaid in my mind.

And yet there was a telling difference between these two terrible events. Unlike Mina and her family, Alex Pretti was not the target of the act of inhumanity that was unfolding in Minnesota. ICE had not come to drag him away. They came for his neighbours, for fellow members of his community. Like Renee Nicole Good before him, Alex Pretti was a resistor, someone who placed his body between the perpetrators and the victims, seeking to prevent them from being disappeared by a tyrannical state.

In seeking to explain how the people of Nazi occupied Europe remained mostly passive as the Holocaust unfolded before them, historians have identified five categories of behaviour that manifest in the face of fascism. The list begins with the perpetrators, those who instigate or participate in acts of violence, persecution or genocide. Then come the bystanders, who see what is happening and say nothing. It is estimated that 90% of German people fell into this category during the Third Reich.

Next are the upstanders, those who do speak out, from the public protest of writing letters to the newspapers and legislators demanding that justice be done, to small acts of defiance such as expressing their disquiet to friends and neighbours. Then come the resistors, those who undertake acts aimed at preventing the machinery of oppression from operating. Lastly come the rescuers, those who hide the targets of the regime or help them to escape capture.

That Sunday evening after I had watched Steve’s powerful testimony, I found myself wondering why there had been so few resistors in Nazi Germany. Where were the good people with their whistles and placards, resisting the fascists when they came to round up Jews for deportation? Were those who stood by afraid or apathetic? Or did they simply not understand the gravity of the situation they found themselves in, incapable of perceiving where this brutality would end? We in the 21st century have no such excuse.

That is due in part to the witness of Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor who had voted for Hitler in the German election of 1933. However, as the Nazi regime revealed its true horrors, he felt unable to remain silent and spoke out in opposition to injustice, a stance that resulted in his imprisonment in Dachau concentration camp. In 1946, he composed a confessional, fifteen lines of prose which warn of the dangers of being bystander in a time of state-sponsored terror:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Social Democrats
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Social Democrat

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

Niemöller’s words came to me that evening as I reflected on Mina’s story. Unlike the pastor, we don’t have to rely on hindsight to understand what is happening in the Twin Cities. We are all horribly familiar with the darkest passage of 20th century history, to the extent that I would wager that some of what drove Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti and thousands of others to become active resistors is an awareness of what happened to millions like Mina and her family.