Poor Little Greta Can't Even Look at the Monsters She Supports

I once stood on the haunted soil of Hitler’s first concentration camp: Dachau.

Picture a dozen or so rowdy 15-year-old high school boys on a four-week tour of Germany and Austria. With only our German teacher, Albert "Doc" Kalmar, to supervise, we did everything you’d expect from teenagers. We gawked at the Glockenspiel, ordered beers at lunch, and tried out our awkward language skills on the local girls. 

Then picture us stunned into silence by a place where the evil still lingered like a physical presence, almost 40 years after the war. I don't have any more words to describe it — a bit of a failure for a writer, I admit.

It isn't an experience I'd recommend, but I might require it. 

The Nazis opened Dachau barely a month after Hitler took emergency powers in the wake of the Reichstag fire. Over the next 12 years, more than 200,000 political and religious prisoners were forced through the same gates I would later walk through as a tourist. An estimated 41,500 of them died there, many by methods too cruel to describe. In 1940, the Nazis installed a crematorium — a grim foreshadowing of the greater horrors to come.

Call Dachau a proving ground for what they could get away with, almost in plain sight. 

I'm half-Jewish, and you should have seen the look on my grandfather's face when he saw that my dad had bought a Mercedes. Many Jews simply didn't buy German, not even 35 years after the war. Nobody in the family obsessed over the Holocaust — or even talked about it, as far as I can remember. But just being a half-Jewish postwar kid gave me some small appreciation for what happened, and why the Holocaust must never happen again.

And yet nothing can prepare you for actually standing at its birthplace. 

I can't imagine visiting an extermination camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka, where the Nazis sometimes murdered more Holocaust victims in a single week than they killed at Dachau during its entire 12-year existence.

It’s also unimaginable to me that the day I went to Dachau is now farther in the past than my visit was to the Allied victory over the Nazis. The summer of 1984 was 41 years ago — but that was only 39 years after Dachau’s liberation by the U.S. Army. 

Some people need a history lesson.

Enter, stage left, Greta Thunberg. 

Thunberg, in case you've been lucky enough to forget, is the scolding Swedish schemer who latches herself onto whatever Lefty cause is trending, provided there are cameras nearby. So there was no need to remove my shocked face from cold storage when Greta and her "Selfie Yacht" crew took to the Eastern Med to deliver a meaningless — but photogenic — amount of "relief" to the starving Gazans who might not have eaten since second breakfast.

Thunberg described her brief and lawful detention as a "kidnapping" because of course she did. 

So it was with no small amount of pleasure that I read Thunberg and her minions would be required to watch Hamas's own video of the Oct. 7 terror invasion. "Greta and her flotilla companions were taken into a room upon their arrival for a screening of the horror film of the October 7 massacre,” Israeli Defense Chief Israel Katz announced Monday.

So it is with sadness and anger that I report the rest of what Katz said: "When they saw what it was about, they refused to continue watching."

You coward, Greta — how dare you.

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