“Tell me again these aren’t concentration camps. Say it to my face.”

There is a reason I had no idea of my Jewish heritage until only a few years ago, and reasons I did not previously identify myself as a Jew. Many years back, on my mother’s side of the family, young immigrants arrived on the shores of the United States seeking asylum from the warning signs and implications of the downfall of the Weimar Republic. The Vonarxes fled to America when they saw — not to be overly flip — the writing on the wall. The Holocaust did not happen overnight, and the warning signs were abundantly clear.

My ancestors fled the threat of tyranny to seek refuge in the United States; a place that was not necessarily a safe or overly welcoming place for Jews. They concealed themselves as best they could, and for a people who have outlasted tyrant after tyrant who sought their destruction they did exceedingly well. So well, that only a few generations down the line the secret of our heritage became something else entirely. It was forgotten. It had very nearly died.

I don’t want my children, or my children’s children to have to learn about who they are years after I am dead. I don’t want to be forced to lie for so long that the lie comes perilously close to becoming truth. I don’t want to stand by and watch the prelude to a second Shoah because I have been wrapped in a cocoon of privilege, safety, and apathy.

However, I also feel as though this is a shout into the void. Today, a photograph surfaced of a father and his daughter, both asylum seekers, drowned side-by-side in the Rio Grande. The response to the photograph wasn’t an outpouring of justified rage. No. The response of many was, “take this picture down out of respect of the family.” “Take this picture down it makes me too sad.”

It is good that it makes you sad. It is good that it makes you angry. Don’t turn away. Stare into the depths of what that photo means, and how it makes you feel. Don’t you dare try to silence your response. Don’t you dare let them die in vain.

Here are a few more choice views of the people who have decided to weigh in on this.

The ghetto in Warsaw was not built overnight. The Pogrom wasn’t the first klaxon screaming about what was coming for my People. If you chose to ignore the crimes against humanity plaguing our southern border; if you choose to stay silent or attempt to justify them; if you use your privilege as a pair of blinders to evade the sight of this atrocity, you are complicit.

Finally — and I say this with a confidence I did not before possess as I feared I had no place in the Jewish Community for having learned of my heritage so late in life — that has ended. To those conservative, Zionist Jews who justify and support what is currently happening in the United States; to those Jews who argue that children are not held in “concentration camps.” To those who say even discussing such a thing is a bad faith argument: if you have ever considered what you might do if you lived in Nazi Germany — what acts of heroism you might have performed, I have your answer. You would have done nothing to stand up to the Nazis. I believe you would have turned me into the Gestapo — and you would have done the same to your mother, father and brothers, and sisters.