We Didn’t Know/Last Train to Nuremberg

I was recently exchanging emails with a relative who is a longtime liberal but also a supporter of Israel, and I asked if she was not bothered by the horrors of the Israeli prison camps — the amputations, starvation, torture, and deaths — and she responded that she didn’t know about that…

…which immediately made me think of Tom Paxton‘s song, “We Didn’t Know.” It is an angry, satiric song — and I should add, for folks who want trigger warnings, that the second verse portrays a character who uses the n-word. I’ve known it since I was a kid, when my parents and others were caught up in the struggle to end the Vietnam War and told about the “good Germans”– an ironic cliché, meaning the Germans who didn’t like Hitler, didn’t support the extermination of the Jews, and later insisted they would have been horrified if they had known what was going on… but said they only learned about those horrors after the war… even though all their Jewish neighbors were disappearing and never returning, and the Gestapo was breaking down doors and hauling people away. Like many other people in many other situations, they managed to convince themselves that war is always terrible, and of course a nation at war will do dreadful things, but Germany was still essentially a good nation, even in these dark times, and they were essentially good people… and, in any case, what could they have done?

A lot of Americans felt that way about the Vietnam War. Some actively supported the US invasion; many more believed it was terrible but necessary, and never called it an invasion; many thought it was a mistake, but managed to ignore the brutality and horror the US was inflicting on a small, faraway nation — because, after all, we were the leaders of the free world, defending democracy, as we had when we defeated the Nazis and liberated the concentration camps, just twenty years earlier. The soldiers of WWII were only in their forties and that was their youth; they considered themselves the opposite of the Germans: the people who had fought and died to stop that horror.

Paxton wrote his song in 1965, when both major political parties and the mass of Americans were still backing the invasion, the bombing, the killing and dying to prevent the spread of Communism… and had not yet had their noses rubbed in the senseless, racist, brutality we were inflicting on people we were trained to think were not like us.

By the time Pete Seeger wrote “Last Train to Nuremberg,” it was 1970 and we knew about the My Lai massacre. If you are too young to remember, the short version is that in March, 1968, US troops under the command of the men named in the first verse of Seeger’s song — Lieutenant William Calley, Captain Ernest Medina, and Major General Samuel Koster — entered the small village of My Lai, searching for Viet Cong troops; found no soldiers or men of military age; and burned the village to the ground, while slaughtering some five hundred women, children, and old men, after raping many of the women, including girls as young as ten or twelve. Despite the testimony of a few horrified soldiers who protested and managed to save some people, those facts were suppressed, Medina was given a medal, and the story only became public a year and a half later. The army, which originally reported the massacre as a battle in which “128 Viet Cong and 22 civilians” had been killed, eventually court-martialed and convicted Calley, but not his superiors — and went from denying what had happened in My Lai to claiming it was a unique incident, despite investigations that turned up numerous similar massacres. The song, of course, is referring to the Nuremberg war crimes trials following the Nazi Holocaust.

I grew up with these songs and stories, and the lesson that in many situations, ignorance is chosen and is complicity. When I talk to people who say they don’t know about the horrors of the Israeli prison camps; choose to frame the genocidal bombing, starvation, and destruction in Gaza as defensive, or as normal horrors of war; or accept claims that the IDF is targeting only combatants, these are the songs and stories that come back to me.

We are in a dark time, growing darker. I live in a neighborhood full of immigrants from Asia and Latin America. I have no idea how many of them have green cards or citizenship, or what will happen if the local equivalent of the Gestapo starts breaking down doors on my street — or what I will do, how far I will go, to protect and help them.

I grew up on stories of the Underground Railroad — of people who risked their homes, families, and freedom to aid people escaping slavery. I grew up on stories of people who hid Jews during the Nazi holocaust and helped my mother and her relatives to escape Nazi Vienna. My mother helped a friend’s daughter who was underground in the US, hiding from the FBI. My uncle was with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in Delano and Huey Newton’s link from prison to the outside world. I have marched, gone to meetings, gone briefly to jail, but have done far less — and sometimes felt I was doing less because the situation was less dire, because there was less that an ordinary person could do.

I fear we will soon be facing situations in which many of us “ordinary people” will have only the choice of risking our freedom, homes, and potentially our lives or being remembered as “good Germans,” who looked away and went along.  I just saw a note Pete Seeger wrote, I’m not sure when, or to whom, but it feels like something to share:
Some of the “small things” do not feel small; some can feel dangerous or difficult. Some are, in fact, dangerous — the “good Germans” were facing real pressures, real dangers to themselves and their families if they did what all of us in hindsight agree would have been the right thing. I understand why they felt they were not to blame; I understand why some people may argue they were not to blame. But I was raised on stories of my relatives who were on the cattle cars, shipped east to be exterminated while the “good Germans” pretended not to know what was happening; and the lesson was that there is nothing worse than that.

These songs are not masterpieces; I left out a couple of verses of Seeger’s, because I had forgotten one and another seemed to weaken the message. I’ve never performed them and hadn’t posted them here because they felt like minor artifacts of my distant past… but that exchange with my Israeli relative brought them back into my head, and I can’t get them out. Far from feeling like historical artifacts, they now feel like some of the most timely songs I know.