Last week I was driving along a two-lane road here in Lavaca County when I passed a car pulled onto the shoulder. One sheriff's vehicle was parked in front of it, another behind it, boxing it in. I couldn't see who was inside. I didn't slow down. But a thought arrived before I'd even passed them: that's probably someone without papers, and by tonight they'll be gone. Taken to a detention facility somewhere, "disappeared" from a family that might not learn for days where they are.
I don't know who was in that car. It may have been an ordinary traffic stop. What unsettled me was not what I saw, but how quickly my mind went there — and how easily I kept driving.
The question I have asked all my life
I come from a big German family, German on every side. The Repschlaegers were the most recent immigrants among us. My great-great-grandfather, Karl Repschlaeger, was a carpenter born in 1828 in Werder, Germany. In 1872 he and his family sailed from Hamburg to New Orleans aboard a ship called the Vandalia, and by 1880 they were farming right here in Lavaca County. They were Lutherans. They were immigrants. They arrived speaking another language, and Texas made room for them.
German was the first language of both of my grandmothers and my maternal grandfather, and being German was at the heart of how our family understood itself. Yet they also learned to soften it. They Americanized their names, did not teach German to their children, and found other quiet ways to blend in. Many German-American families did the same during the years of the two World Wars, when being German could make you suspect.
Every branch of my family left Germany long before Hitler. That accident of timing is the only reason I grew up a Texan instead of a German. And so, for most of my life, I have carried a quiet question: What if they had stayed? What if my family had still been in Germany in the 1930s, when Jewish neighbors were being registered, stripped of their jobs, rounded up, imprisoned, and finally murdered? What would we have done?
I have always wanted to believe the answer is that we would have hidden someone in the attic. That we would have spoken up. That we would have been among the few.
What driving by taught me
That afternoon on the county road gave me a more honest answer than I wanted.
If I had been a German woman walking down a street in 1938 and saw a Jewish man being pulled from his home, I suspect I would have done exactly what I did that day: kept going. Not because I approved. Because I was safe. I was Protestant, a citizen, blue-eyed, with a good German name and the right kind of face. Nothing about that scene was going to touch me unless I chose to step into it.
And I can list the reasons I would have given myself, because I gave them to myself on that road:
• I was afraid. Stopping might bring trouble onto me.
• It would be futile. What could one woman possibly do against officers with badges and the law behind them?
• I didn't know the whole story. Maybe he had done something. Maybe it was none of my business.
Every one of those thoughts felt reasonable in the moment. That is exactly what frightens me about them.
Being careful with the comparison
I want to be careful here. What is happening in our country today is not the Holocaust, and I don't want to cheapen the memory of six million murdered Jews by pretending otherwise.
But the Holocaust did not begin with death camps. It began with ordinary people learning to look away. It began with the idea that some people living among us did not belong, did not have the same claim to due process or dignity, and could be removed while their neighbors went about their errands. The machinery of cruelty depends less on the cruel than on the comfortable.
Most of us know the words “First they came for…” Fewer know they belong to Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor of my own family’s faith. After the war, he spent years confessing that he had stayed silent while others were taken. His confession has been repeated so often it has almost become a slogan. It wasn’t meant to be a slogan. It was meant to be a warning to people exactly like me.
What I might do next time
I won't promise heroics. I am a woman in her seventies on a rural Texas road, and I don't know what I could have done in that moment that would have helped rather than harmed.
But I can stop telling myself that driving by is neutral. And I can do the smaller things that are within reach long before anyone is pulled to the shoulder:
• Learn what rights every person in this country has, regardless of status, and help share that information.
• Get to know the immigrant families and the organizations that serve them in our own counties, so that "them" becomes names and faces.
• Show up when local officials make decisions about how our sheriffs and courts handle immigration, and ask questions in public.
• Be a witness. Pay attention. Notice the time and place. Refuse to let things happen unseen.
My ancestors were welcomed here. Someone, somewhere along the way, decided that a carpenter from Werder and his family were worth making room for. I owe it to them, and to the people in that car, to be at least a little braver than the woman who kept driving.