As the Trump administration disappears immigrants into foreign prisons and sees this as a source of American strength, I think back to when my dad was disappeared, why he came to America and, indeed, why I exist.
My dad’s journey through war and concentration camps teaches me that authoritarianism does not strengthen a nation and that, notwithstanding Elon Musk’s warning that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” it has been one of our national strengths — and that because of our president, it is now in peril.
My father’s family was Armenian. During World War II, my family members were living throughout Eastern Europe and were secretly involved in a network that was spying on the Nazis and transmitting information to the West. The Gestapo uncovered the network, and my dad’s heroic cousin Izabela was arrested in Poland in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, along with her daughter, Teresa. Izabela died in Auschwitz, and Teresa was subjected to medical experiments by the Nazis.
My father and other immediate family members were arrested as well for being part of the spy network. But they were detained in Romania, where officials and the police — the “deep state” — shielded them from the Gestapo, so they were imprisoned for a time but survived and were eventually released. (Bribery helped.)
Izabela’s son-in-law, Boguslaw Horodynski, a Pole, oversaw the spy network and survived the war. But the Soviets, seeing a freedom fighter as a potential threat to the emerging Communist bloc, arrested him and dispatched him to a labor camp in the Siberian gulag. We believe Boguslaw was enslaved in a mine in Kolyma — which the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described as the “pole of cold and cruelty.”
Romania’s prime minister personally asked Stalin to show mercy. But Stalin wouldn’t budge.
Perhaps this is the prism through which Stalin saw Boguslaw: He’s an immigrant in Romania, he’s potentially a risk to national security, and due process is a silly concept that would slow us down, so we’re sending him to a prison in another country.
Sound familiar?
By one account, Boguslaw died in 1952 in Kolyma. Another version is that he was released in 1956 after Khrushchev took power and died while trying to walk home to Poland.
By this period, my dad had seen multiple relatives like Boguslaw disappeared or murdered by Nazis or Communists. He was determined to escape to the West. So in 1948 he swam across the Danube River to Yugoslavia as a first step to the West — and then was disappeared himself into a concentration camp, then an asbestos mine and finally a remote timber camp. But a young French diplomat, Robert Morisset, stationed in Belgrade, found out about my dad and wrote a letter to the Yugoslav authorities on his behalf. That saved his life, for my dad was released: Thank God for Western diplomats willing to speak up about human rights.
Even in Communist labor camps, America shone as a beacon of liberty. So although my dad spoke no English, he dreamed of finding a path to get there. He made his way to France, and in 1952 the Cameron family in Portland, Ore., working through Church World Service and the First Presbyterian Church in Portland, sponsored my dad to come to America. He arrived by ship in New York, and his first purchase was a Sunday New York Times to teach himself English.
My dad was dazzled by America. He made his way to Oregon, where his first job was at a logging camp — where the loggers ate steak! He was thrilled to hear Americans speak freely, to learn about due process of law, to see how universities were cherished. He reveled in a land where people weren’t randomly tarred as enemies of the people, where the government didn’t disappear people off the streets.
To my dad, fleeing genocide and repression, America seemed extraordinarily accepting of diversity. Immigrants were accepted, and so were competing opinions. His landlady returned his rent. “I’m not going to charge a refugee,” she said. “You need the money more than I do.”
My dad recognized America’s imperfections, of course, for those ideals are more lofty than our sometimes grubby reality. Yet I’ve seen how they inspired my relatives imprisoned in Eastern Europe and people just like them in places like Venezuela and El Salvador.
Yet now American values are threatened by an American president. The Trump administration deported — it said by mistake — Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the husband and father of American citizens, to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Despite an apparently unanimous ruling from the Supreme Court ordering the facilitation of his return, White House officials have shrugged.
Another immigrant, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan, simply vanished into the system — until my Times colleague Miriam Jordan wrote about his case, after which the Trump administration acknowledged grumpily that it had shipped him to El Salvador. That raises questions about whether there are others who have been disappeared.
I watch all this, and I think about what is threatened today, including those values that, like a lighthouse in a raging storm, drew Ladis Kristof to these shores and made him a (heavily accented) American patriot until his death in 2010.
It can take many generations to build a great edifice admired around the world — and just days to destroy it. And President Trump is a wrecking ball. So, Mr. President, a plea: If you want to make America great again, let’s start by respecting the rule of law and ending the practice of disappearing people into distant dungeons.
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Nicholas Kristof became a columnist for The Times Opinion desk in 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His new memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” @NickKristof
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