History, rhyming. From Forward:
About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, including many Holocaust survivors. Recently, some of them asked if they could hide the building’s Haitian staff in their apartments. “That reminds me of Anne Frank,” Rachel Blumberg, president and CEO of the center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There’s a kindred bond between our residents being Jewish and seeing the place that the Haitians have gone through.”
The seniors were aware of something that is only beginning to dawn on the rest of the country: that in addition to the aggressive immigration enforcement operations underway in Minnesota and elsewhere, the Trump administration has moved to cancel Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from a handful of countries once deemed too unsafe to return to.
My father died in the small hours of the morning after a prolonged battle with Alzheimer’s. I had taken to sleeping in a chair next to his bed for the previous week. While I waited for the funeral-home workers to pick up his body, one by one, or in small groups, the attendants at the facility stopped by to pay respects. Many of them were Haitians, saying prayers for my father in a kind of musical Creole. These people contributed more to American society on the average workday than has been contributed by the entire worthless Trump family has since it washed up on these shores like the red tide decades ago.
But there are deeper political echoes than my personal ones in play here. Between 1938 and the early 1940s, while the United States was pretending it didn’t know what was going on in Europe, Haiti took in several hundred Jewish refugees, ultimately saving their lives.
Seniors in long-term care facilities develop deep bonds with their staff. Blumberg’s residents, she said, “can relate to not being wanted, to being kicked out and coming to to America for salvage and freedom and safety and shelter. And they want to be able to protect the Haitians.”
Which, sadly, puts them a few miles ahead of even a number of Democrats in the Congress.
