There are few people with more moral authority than Holocaust survivors, and at a press conference at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie Thursday, they used that authority to speak out against President Donald Trump’s immigration ban—which, they noted, had, in a supreme irony, been enacted on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Eighteen survivors came to the museum to show their solidarity for the refugees and nationals of seven primarily-Muslim countries who have been forbidden entry into the U.S. for 90 or 120 days.
Ralph Rehbock, a museum vice president, was able to escape Germany with his family in 1938, but said they would not have been able to manage without the kindness of strangers in both America and Germany: the relatives in Chicago who let his mother stay with them and helped her fill out the immigration papers; the Marine guard at the U.S. consulate in Berlin who called the Consul General who issued the family’s visas on November 11—even though it was an American holiday—because it was two days after Kristallnacht; the neighbor who tracked them down in Berlin by telephone to warn his father not to return home to Gotha because the Nazis had come to arrest him; and the anonymous passenger at the train station on the Dutch-German border who guided Rehbock and his mother to the train that would take them into Holland.
“I served in Korea in the American army—I was not even a citizen,” he said. “We all pay our taxes. We all do what we have to do to make this country great.”
