Letter to the editor: stop mislabeling US border facilities as “concentration camps”

Dear Editor,

As Americans, we should be able to debate issues without using Nazi or Holocaust references, misquoting and misconstruing facts and history.

Comparing President Trump to Hitler, a genocidal maniac who systematically murdered 12 million people – six million of whom were Jewish, or stating that Republicans are Nazis – Socialist fascist murderers that sought to annihilate the Jewish people, is false and unconscionable.

As a Holocaust refugee, I waited in displaced persons camps for four years with affidavits of support from family members to come to the United States legally. I was not given free health care, education, and housing by the U.S. government. The U.S. provided me with what I wanted most – freedom.

Those who support open borders should not compare or call U.S. border facilities “concentration camps.” Let me tell you about concentration camps. In 1944, my family was forcibly removed from our homes and taken to the Munkács Ghetto for three months with nothing but the little fruit and bread my mother packed us, sleeping next to dying fellow Jews in the streets. We were then shoved like sardines into hot, crowded cattle cars, standing for days without food, water, and only a pot for a “bathroom.” In Auschwitz, I was forever separated from my father, mother, two married sisters (each with two children), younger brothers and one sister who were all murdered in the gas chambers; their bodies burned in the crematoria.

My sister and I with shaved heads, prison clothes, and numbers, were slave laborers in Geislingen, and finally near death in Dachau until 1945 when we were liberated by the American Army. Throughout this genocide, there were no warm showers, healthy meals, sanitary restrooms or mattress bedding provided by U.S. authorities. On a daily basis, people were tortured, starved to death, shot and systematically murdered.

THAT is a concentration camp, and those in the media and Democrat party who fuel hate by false comparisons denigrate all of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust.

I am a proud Jewish American, a 91-year old Holocaust Survivor.

I support President Donald Trump, whose deeds on behalf of all U.S. citizens, its Jewish people, and the State of Israel, are the reason I will support him again in 2020.

Sincerely,
Piri Katz
Los Alamitos, California