Dear Sir,
My name is Jon Panofsky. I’m a law student, a Jew, a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I have my M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and lest you think I am one of the godless heathens who are so perniciously targeting your client, let me inform you I am a religious school teacher, and have been for most of the past decade.
I saw your recent comments regarding your client being treated like a Jew in Nazi Germany. I want to say that not only are you dead wrong, your comment is beyond offensive.
See, my grandmother, Lotte Panofsky, WAS a Jew in Nazi Germany, and I can promise you, if she were still with us, she would tell you that she wishes she was treated as well as your client has been. I have a few questions to ask you;
Firstly, was your client pulled to the front of her workplace by her government and verbally assaulted by a governmental employee because of her beliefs? No? I didn’t think so. My Grandmother was, she was sitting in school one day in the suburbs of Dortmund Germany when a member of the SS came into her school, pulled her by her pigtails to the front of the classroom, and spent a half hour screaming at the class that my 12 year old grandmother was “what a dirty, evil, Jewish pig looks like.”
Next, did your client have to hide while her place of worship was destroyed in front of her eyes? Did she see the government destroy the businesses of her church members? No? Well, in 1938, my 14 year old grandmother was sent into Dortmund to collect bills from clients of her family dry goods shop when she inadvertently stumbled into a little thing known as Kristallnacht. She watched, alone, from inside a phone booth while the Gestapo destroyed Jewish businesses, and sat helpless and scared as she watched her synagogue set aflame and destroyed.
Finally, was your forced to choose leaving all her worldly goods behind, or face possible death because of her religion? No? Well my grandmother was. See the Nazis instituted a penalty of 90% of one’s income on any Jew who wished to leave Germany. That’s one reason many stayed behind. My grandmother and her mother got lucky. They got out of Germany in 1941, and came to America shortly before the borders were closed. Had they not left when they did, I would not be here to write this letter to you. My great-grandmother, so I’m told, spoke of the experience by saying: “I once had maids, now I am one.”
So yes, I take offense at your remarks about your client’s treatment. She is imprisoned due to her own actions. She had many alternatives, but she refused to take them. To stoop to the level of calling her treatment such as the Jews in Nazi Germany faced is offensive to me. Even going past offensive, it cheapens the memory of the millions of people, Jewish and non-Jewish, who perished at the hands of true evil.
You owe me an apology. No, scratch that, you owe every living survivor and every child, grandchild, and other family member of those who perished, and those lucky ones who survived the Nazi terror an apology for your careless, ignorant, and deeply problematic language. I’ll be waiting for my apology, but until then, I must say that you have some deep thinking to do about how you portray yourself and your client to the media.
Sincerely,
Jonathan W. Panofsky, M.A.
