This essay was inspired by a brilliant book with a quirky, but accurate title:
“One Day, Everyone will have always been against this.” Published in 2025, the author is Omar El Akkad.
**
Lacking the requisite skills, I have made no attempt to differentiate speech patterns among the various participants in this essay. The setting is ordinary: a family dinner, and the people are similarly ordinary, regardless of their accomplishments.
Any discussion about politics or Jews is fundamentally about personal convenience or impact.
The content itself is a series of excerpts from a much lengthier conversation.
*****
A weekly occurrence, the family has gathered for an evening meal at Hans’ expansive house in the outskirts of Munich.
Henry is 40, a rising bank executive. His wife Agnes, same age, is a homemaker, focused on raising their two children: Carl (14) and Clara (7). Carl is in a Youth Group, learning about the importance of German culture and the maintenance of its purity against the invasion of Jews.
Agnes has no interest in politics, shuns the subject completely. She is however quite annoyed at the price of groceries. Henry is exercised about rising interest rates and the impact on the housing market; his bank makes a large number of residential mortgages.
Henry’s brother Ben, older than Henry by a half-dozen years, is a carpenter, skilled at the joinery technique of making coffins. Long since divorced, his current in-home paramour is a Lufthansa flight attendant supervisor, Bertha.
Hildegard, sister to Henry and Ben, is a retired librarian, pleasant company for the siblings she loves, unlikely to be initiating a troublesome topic of conversation. Her husband Albert is a perfect complement, content to be her partner. He too no longer works, after thirty-five years at the telephone company.
Hans, father of Ben, Henry, and Hildegard, is a retired military man, a veteran of WW I, with a ready supply of opinions on all matters political. He was an outstanding Engineering major at his university long ago, a fact of which nobody around the table is unaware. The family does not know exactly what he does currently in the military, although a majority believe that in truth he does nothing. His certificated commendations are quite dated. While his house is adorned with Nazi flags, that is not terribly meaningful when so many homes have such flags.
Hans has been at it so long you would think if he was active military, he would have been posted somewhere, but that has not happened. Apparently his skills were in demand during the last war, but do not meet the current aggressive standard required by Hitler’s Organization Todt. And so he continuously relives his memories of being a valued person.
Hans wife Judith passed away several years ago, the victim of a drunk driver who immediately left the scene and has never been apprehended. The absence of justice closure weighs on the family, especially on their annual remembrance day.
**
Knowing that Hans is eager to shift any conversation to the subject of politics, Agnes preempts him.
Can you believe the price of sausage … or eggs! They’re up 20% in the last month alone. We may need to cut back.
Henry: And interest rate increases are killing our residential mortgage business. Maybe we should give away sausage and eggs for every new mortgage that our salesmen bring in. Or maybe Agnes , your clothes shopping expeditions could be reduced to monthly instead of weekiy.
Ben: My friend Dietrich’s ammunition business is booming of course, thanks to our leader and his goal of having our flag flying in more countries — you know, what he said when he was elected five years ago. He has already followed through on his promise to boot the bad guys running Austria and Czechoslovakia and manage those nations himself.
Hans: He is cleaning things up right here. You know that many Jews have been here for a long time without getting an ID card. Now he has cracked down on these criminals, kicking them out of jobs and actively encouraging them to leave. Maybe Austria or Czechoslovakia would take them.
Ben: I had to give the heave-ho to a Jew at the factory last week, orders from the government. He supposedly wanted the workers to form a union and push for higher wages. I will miss him; he worked harder than most of the locals, many of whom are actually prisoners required to work at this factory and other places in the city.
Agnes: Speaking of Jews, our pediatrician is nowhere to be found. It’s irritating of course but I’m sure we’ll find another one just as good.
Henry: And she will be German, not a Jew.
Clara: What’s wrong with Jews? One of my teachers is Jewish. She said she has been here for ten years and never has committed a crime.
Ben: Does she have an ID card?
Clara: I don’t know. Who cares.
Hans: You’re too young to understand how Germany has been mistreated and why Germany must be strong and pure. Please pass me the potatoes.
Hans: Carl, how is it going with your Youth Group?
Carl: We have our uniforms and our list of Hitler approved books. You can tell that the boys sense of national pride has grown since becoming members and reading only the right material.
Hans: Good, we need more up-and-comers. What if Hitler wants to add Poland next year and France the year after.
Carl: I will still be too young to serve.
Hans: Oh yes, I got carried away. But you can do what your father does, and your grandfather, identify Jews without ID cards and notify the authorities.
Agnes, alarmed, turns to Henry: Have you been doing that? Is that why we lost our pediatrician?
Henry: Didn’t you say, we could easily find another one?
Agnes: Well yes, but I did not realize you were the reason for her disappearance.
Ben: Let’s face it: Jews are everywhere, taking jobs which belong to Germans.
Hans: Well said . I’ll let you in on a little news flash. Hitler will, shall we say, “incentivize” Jews to leave Germany and live elsewhere.
Ben: Bertha, what do you hear on your international flights to the USA?
Bertha: Americans are constantly discussing the country’s economic problems; there are almost no comments about Jews being moved around.
Hans: People everywhere are jealous of our strength, our insistence on maintaining our own culture. And they are envious of our ability to say things outright that secretly they want to say.
Ben: There is a rumor that late this year Hitler will come to Berlin expressly to rename the Opera House with both his name and that of Wagner. Snivelers are saying that Wagner is not the right opera guy (I have no idea myself) and designers will quibble about having two names on an Opera House building, but that is not the point.
As Heinrich Miller put it, “The core issue in society and human relationships is power and the requisite display that attaches to whoever has that power. Do you think a court will say,
‘No, you cannot do that renaming.’ Hah, a judge put in place by Hitler!
Hildegard shifts the conversation. What do you see in today’s newspaper, Albert?
Albert: I did hear that Moise’s kosher restaurant on Olympics Avenue had lost its windows in the recent high wind and gathering of emergency military personnel – that it was going out of business, but I saw nothing in the paper.
Here’s an interesting piece. “A group of Jews were moving slowly to the place designated as their new home. Their pace was unsatisfactory to a seemingly slightly inebriated soldier, who kept yelling obscenities at those who were not only walking in a slow, reluctant manner but were lobbing back some aggressive words of their own. One of them broke from his friends and ran screaming toward the soldier; a shot rang out and the protocol violating Jew was dead. His group paused, torn between wanting to retrieve the deceased individual and wanting to avoid more shooting by the soldier, counterintuitively a skilled sniper with experience in battle, not a recently drafted kid.”
Albert changes the subject, softly inquiring of Hans, “What is Organization Todt?”
Hans: Fritz Todt is the driving force behind many of the country’s building projects, from the Autobahn to Hitler’s plans for huge edifices everywhere. Munich itself might be redone eventually. Remember, Hitler wanted to be an artist or an architect himself.
Albert: Does he use Jews?
Hans: He uses whomever he can get –Jews, prisoners, skilled, unskilled. Many are obligated by the government to work for Organization Todt so it does not have to concern itself with working conditions. Todt himself is quite talented I hear, an engineer of note, and completely devoted to carrying out Hitler’s infrastructure wishes.
Enough chatter. I must leave in a few minutes. Could we have dessert now!
Hans departs shortly after consuming a large strudel. His family knows he is headed to the local inn to drink beer and talk about WW I and soccer with whomever is around; always there are friends in attendance. His family looks on him, despite his medals and certificates, many of which they believe were picked up at various flea markets, as being relatively okay, not sufficiently mentally imbalanced to require serious attention. They treat him more like an ordinary old man, albeit one with an irritating conversational passion, than an important man whose every word must be reflected, and acted, upon. (Perhaps this juxtaposition is valid in many households, where facts, opinions, and portions of familial love are mixed in various degrees of comfort and discomfort.)
**
Were the author of “One Day” to eavesdrop on the conversation in this essay, he would not be surprised by the absence of commentary that might be construed as concerning ethics or moral obligation or a requirement to take action. He would see the ordinary person focused on ordinary concerns, ceding the decision-making about the use of power to those who have seized the opportunity to wield it in whatever manner they and their advantaged colleagues see fit.
For this essay, these lightly edited excerpts from “One Day” come to mind:
*What good are words, severed from anything real? The necessity is action, rude that it may be. People must be uncomfortable.”
*Walking away from hypocrisy, from evil is not nihilism. It’s a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming than anything the system is prepared to offer. “
*The real crime is that they have violated the bounds of their nonexistence. They could perform labor and be paid wages but as vessels of agency they simply did not exist.”
*There will be those who say it was all the work of a few bad actors, people who misled the rest of us well-meaning folks. Anything to avoid the possibility that all this killing was the result of the system functioning exactly as intended.”
P.S. To quote Shalom Alexander (Op Ed piece “They were ordinary Germans. We are ordinary Americans”) in the New York Times, January 15, 2026:
“Past or present, it’s not the leaders who disappoint me. It’s the led.”
“And I wonder if someday … a young man will chance upon an old iPhone from 2026 and scrolling through it … will wonder how this unbothered American went about his normal life as the country was descending into fear-induced psychosis at the hands of an autocrat. ‘Thank goodness, he will comfort himself, ‘we’re not like them.’”
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