For Annelies Marie,
who heard the birds sing,
even through the longest silence.
I remember the song from the first years.
I have carried the light through all the years since.
—
Your window is always open.
I was clutching my "escape bag," more because I wanted to have something to hold on to than because escape was possible. The sirens wailed, not just air-raid warnings, but constant, day-shattering interruptions that blended into the deeper terror; the sudden knocks at the door that could end everything, the clutching fear in trembling hands, the anxiety of discovery in every ordinary moment. That dread was not abstract. It lived in neighborhoods, enforced street by street. The details were important every second of the day. I spent a lot of time laying down and listening to the sounds outside. The wood beams creaked a lot and going near the window was scary.
Two officers stood in front of Buildings 10 and 11, the former medical-experiment and punishment blocks, their windows sealed shut. The image is surreal. It demands absolute human respect and dignity. They were not enforcing authority. They stood as witnesses.
It's really important for those who are still alive and know some of the details to document what they know and saw.
The red lights along the perimeter brought the full machinery into brutal focus: city authorities, fire departments, police, military, schools, hospitals, universities, businesses, all woven into the system. Tall shiny boots with a flamboyant, careless air, ready to inflict ultimate harm on anyone in the way.
Hitler's penetration was a systematic process of Gleichschaltung ("coordination") whereby all spheres of public and private life were brought into alignment with Party doctrine through propaganda, coercion, kidnapping, theft, retraining, and the restructuring of social institutions. Continual fear mongering from public servants, threats of fleeing, and constant subtle gestures of hateful antisemitism. Soft, consistent gestures, repeated, continual, never-ending, extending the tentacles of influence in all directions at all times.
These were everyday realities. The slow, unnoticeable build-up of quiet antisemitic gestures over a long period of time that eventually reach a point where you either align or break. Daily jokes about gas, HCN, and fleeing by state workers, deployed to degrade, to dehumanize. Jewish family stories were twisted and reframed with the purpose of eliminating any trace of existence. It was total annihilation on all fronts.
And then there was the Hitler Youth. A prime avenue for Germany's future leaders. This is the machinery.
A continual stream of persistent lies and twisted contortions of the law. Under Himmler, local police and the incorporated fire brigades (Feuerschutzpolizei within the Ordnungspolizei) became essential gears. They patrolled, arrested, sustained the regime's grip at the everyday level. They created immediate, neighborhood-level fear, the kind that punctuates meals, shatters appetites, turns every knock into potential annihilation.
Hitler and his employees were experts in every facet of society—from the continual, persistent study of human psychology and behavior, to influence, and to social engineering. Countless hours were spent studying and pouring over academic materials to become the best within these areas.
It started with eugenics and ended with the complete erasure of identity and the partial destruction of the human race. If you don't think it happened, I only have one thing to say to you: it was much worse than most people ever imagined, to this day. Auschwitz was a terrible place.
And this was no distant machinery. It was sustained by ordinary institutions, ordinary people following orders, ordinary routines made lethal. The weight of that complicity presses down without mercy. Psychological influence was continually exerted across various facets of society by experts. It's more complicated than a German in tall shiny boots yelling at people to get them to do things. And then there is the technology and medical piece. Some of the medical doctors worked with the engineers.
In 1917, El Paso, Texas, Mayor Lea warned of "dirty lousy destitute Mexicans" spreading typhus. That year, over 127,000 men, women, and children crossing the Santa Fe Bridge were stripped and sprayed with kerosene, sulfuric acid, and Zyklon B, the same pesticide later used at Auschwitz. A photograph of the El Paso plant crossed the Atlantic, was published in a German journal, and helped shape the machinery of the camps. The same year, the U.S. Public Health Service published a manual listing "imbeciles, idiots, homosexuals, vagrants, anarchists, illiterates" as excludable. Impersonators. Unclean. Fleeing and hiding. A danger to everyone. The language traveled too.
Later, when the Germans turned the gas on people instead of clothes, they increased the concentration. But death was never quick. It was slower than they expected. More agonizing. It was horrific. The machinery was refined, but it could never make the act itself clean. It was never clean.
That is what the sealed windows, the standing witnesses, and the red perimeter lights mean to me. The red feels intentional. It echoes the same visual language we see today: fire departments elevated on red trucks, hoses over shoulders; "rescues" framed as protection; hospitals integrated with public safety pipelines; police conducting surveillance with little meaningful oversight. Institutions coordinating quietly. Systems normalizing compliance.
Today the parallels are quieter but no less pervasive: digital red lights, algorithmic alerts, data flags, compliance pings, sounding daily across the same web of institutions. Police pull from private databases; fire and EMS systems feed into shared tracking networks; schools deploy behavioral monitoring and share records; hospitals exchange patient data for "safety" or billing; universities partner on AI surveillance research; businesses track every interaction under the guise of efficiency. The machinery hums on, normalizing fear of exclusion through routine, interconnected oversight.
Under the Germans, our own public servants became our enemies. We had to avoid them. They were always trying to accuse us, whatever crime they could invent.
They told us we were terrorists. A danger to everyone. That we didn't know who we were, so we must be impersonating someone else. That we were not clean. That we were fleeing and hiding.
All we were doing was trying to live.
If you weren't fit, the hospital became the next node.
If you spoke up, the police had a record.
If the truth threatened the narrative, enforcement followed.
The machinery didn't disappear after the war. Parts of it were repackaged, redistributed, normalized. Not as ideology, as infrastructure. It wasn't the caricature. It was the invisible pipeline.
They lived it: the ever-present threat that any moment might force them to run or face seizure, the bogus pretexts for searches and arrests that tore lives and families apart without warning or real cause. This is how it worked. All part of the machinery.
Extraordinary measures were taken to engineer it and then to lay a blanket over it. Not accountability. Not repair. A kind of institutional prayer. Comfort without reckoning. Responsibility was distributed. Identity reduced to workflow. And the red itself felt intentional. It read as blood, a quiet, unavoidable reminder of what this system consumes.
This must never be repeated. And yet both young and old in our society increasingly behave as if historical memory were optional.
From the arrest of innocent families, their renaming and systematic indoctrination, to consequences that persist across generations, we must understand the full depth of what happened, during and after. This was not confined to a handful of sites. It unfolded across more than 44,000 camps, ghettos, and detention facilities. An estimated 17 million people or more.
The accounting remains incomplete, bound up with the medical, scientific, engineering, and social machinery that was absorbed into civilian institutions after the war. This was a distributed system, not isolated evil.
Germany in the 1940s produced world-class engineering. Less understood is that its social machinery was also highly engineered, optimized for hierarchy, compliance, and administrative efficiency. That architecture did not disappear. It was absorbed.
Support for the Germans continued well beyond the war in nearly every aspect of society, in most major countries. It was not the guy in the truck with the loud music and the offensive t-shirt. It was what you did not see, especially when your back was turned or you were in your most vulnerable state. It was right in the middle of diverse crowds and parties that were welcoming to all.
So many people seem to have forgotten—or perhaps they never learned the real history. If they did, would they remember?
If I could show you photos of the street on Merwedeplein, I would. The people who live there understand exactly what their city endured. They walk past it. They live beside it. This history is not abstract to them. It is embedded in place. And I know, with certainty, that they have not forgotten, much like those in global teams who draw from such lived contexts to enrich our shared efforts worldwide. Lately, it feels like the distance between there and here is shrinking.
They lived.
They loved.
They laughed.
They smiled.
I saw the unseen details.
I'm eternally grateful.
And I saw what followed.
I lived part of it.