By some estimates, the thousands of No Kings rallies across the country last weekend may have amounted to one of the largest mass protests in American history. According to data analyst G. Elliott Morris, between four and six million Americans took part in the protests against Trump and his increasingly authoritarian regime — or somewhere between one and two percent of the entire U.S. population.
Along a busy commercial street in downtown White Plains, in suburban Westchester County just north of New York City, one particular protester sat in the cool late spring drizzle and talked about the dangerous parallels with the past. Kurt Goldschmidt is 102 years old. He was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1923. He survived the Nazis and the Holocaust. He minces no words.
“I’m here today because this is something I can do against Trump. I lived during the Nazi time in Germany and they put me in a concentration camp,” he told interviewer Shannon Powell, co-founder of Indivisible Westchester. “Trump is trying to imitate Hitler. That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Mr. Goldschmidt was joined by several dozen of his fellow residents in a nearby assisted living facility for senior citizens. He sat on the bench of his walker and waved a sign that read, “I need to be able to tell my grandchildren I did not stay silent.” As cars passed, many sounded their horns in support of the self-titled “Old Folks Supporting No Kings Day” protest. Some rolled down their windows to offer kind words of endorsement. A few motorists stopped to curse at the elderly protestors and extol their love for Trump, whose military parade to celebrate his own 79th birthday was a colossal flop later that evening.
Completely non-plussed, the elderly retired teacher standing next to me on the line as I held an umbrella for Mr. Goldschmidt (my main task and a distinct honor) did not hesitate to forcefully address two red-faced men in a large matte black SUV who’d stopped to verbally harass her neighbors.
“Fuck you and fuck Trump!” she yelled right back. The SUV pulled away, its cosplay vehicle armor seeming to visibly shrink under the onslaught. Score one for the seniors.
Meanwhile, Mr. Goldschmidt was giving a lesson in direct and effective political communications that every Democratic consultant could learn from:
“The only way is to be with the Democratic Party which is against Trump. And that’s the only way in America you can do anything about it. It’s important because one has to show the people that there are some people in the world here who are against Trump.”
There were larger rallies all across my home region of the Hudson Valley, and indeed around the country, in cities and towns everywhere in the U.S. Millions of people were on the march, and my guess is that the vast numbers included Americans who had never marched before. This was a major organic moment in the growing opposition to Trump and far-right extremism. I believe that this opposition will continue to grow and spread well beyond existing activists and the core Democratic coalition.
That’s because the threat is so grave. U.S. Marines detaining an American citizen in a U.S. city. Masked immigration police conducting vast sweeps of immigrant communities and “disappearing” residents to detainment centers and foreign prison camps without ever bringing them before a judge. A United States Senator assaulted at a press conference. A U.S. Representative charged with felonies for demanding access to inspect a federal facility. Political assassinations by an alleged MAGA-motivated killer in Minnesota. A New York City official and candidate for mayor arrested Tuesday while escorting an immigrant out of court. And continued madness and malignity from the president, whose threats to attack and imprison those who publicly disagree with him seem to metastasize with each news cycle.
In a 1978 commencement speech, pioneering civil rights lawyer and Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall made an impassioned plea for personal involvement in our national struggle to keep and hold democracy:
Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.
His words still echo, because we have arrived at a moment of extreme peril. And as I listened to Kurt Goldschmidt softly recall the dark and distant past the other day by the roadside in White Plains, it was important to realize that he has seen this — and where it can lead — before.
A few years ago, Mr. Goldschmidt was interviewed by researchers at the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York, a center dedicated to creating a rich oral history of the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity. As he told the story of his long life, one part stood out to me. In 1939, at just 16-years-old, he said goodbye to his childhood friends as they were shipped away to concentration camps. 9. Mr. Goldschmidt was temporarily spared only because the Nazi authorities characterized him as half-Jewish.
“I have only two words,” he said. “Never again.”
“I said goodbye to my girlfriend and the others at the Hannoverscher Bahnhof on the railroad stage railroad station that was called after the city of Hannover, where these transports left for Minsk. From eleven hundred persons, eight people came home.”
At the end of the long and riveting interview, Mr. Goldschmidt is asked if he has any words for future generations watching his testimony.
“I have only two words,” he said. “Never again.”
There’s a line in historian Timothy Snyder’s best-selling 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” that resonates with me in the context of testimony like this:
“History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something… History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.”
We should all listen to Kurt Goldschmidt and stand up with him, in public, today and tomorrow.
Tom Watson is a veteran consultant to nonprofits and civil society organizations, and an instructor in the nonprofit management graduate program at Columbia University.