I was just 4 years old, a little girl in Amsterdam, when I tried to run over to pick up a doll for a little girl my age who had dropped it on the sidewalk as she and her parents were being dragged out of their apartment by men with guns.
My dad pulled me back, afraid that I would be loaded into the truck bound for a death camp with that little girl and her family, who were deemed “other.”
I was not quite seven when men with guns broke into our apartment and held my mother at gunpoint while they dragged away the foster sister we were hiding.
I learned not to talk about those experiences of terror until I had established an adult life in the United States, where I could raise my children and grandchildren in the democratic freedom of a shared humanity that recognized the rights and value of all people, of all the children.
I did not imagine that some 80 years later, I would be reliving my childhood of armed thugs terrorizing human beings they deem inferior and shooting those who protest and resist.
Will a little girl growing up today recall scenes from the streets of an American city that echo my childhood memories of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam? Is this really the culture of terror in which Republicans want to have their children form their memories?
Hendrika deVries
Santa Barbara, California
Author of “When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew,” a memoir of survival and resistance in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
Originally published as a Letter to the Editor in the New York Times, 02/09/2026
Re: “State Terror Has Arrived,” by M. Gessen (column, Jan. 27) and “Grief, Whistles and Bad Dreams” (news article, Jan. 31). The memories we give our children by Hendrika deVries.