By Mikaela STONE

Representative Laura Friedman awarded local advocate David Meyerhof a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition to celebrate his “unwavering commitment to Holocaust education and remembrance,” as well as his contributions to America as a speaker, educator and poet. Meyerhof is known for advocating for the voices of Holocaust survivors and for the past 10 years has worked as Holocaust Speaker Coordinator for the Los Angeles, Glendale and Burbank unified school districts. He took over this role from Sylvia Sutton who started the Holocaust Speakers Program 30 years ago. Meyerhof draws from his background of 35 years with the LAUSD to connect fifth through 12th graders with Holocaust survivors’ stories. In his 10 years as coordinator, the number of survivors working with the program has shrunk from 18 to 7. 

“It’s a constant battle to reach as many schools as possible, to reach as many students as possible, because we know [the living survivors’] time is limited,” Meyerhof said. Overall the program has reached an estimated 70,000 students. One little girl, who had immigrated from El Salvador, expressed in a thank you note that she had felt defeated by the difficulty of learning English while handling the challenges of elementary school. After hearing the survivors’ stories, she felt inspired to throw herself into her studies and succeed as the survivors had. She wrote: “You have changed my life.” 

Holocaust education is especially dear to Friedman as she lost members of her grandfather’s family in the Warsaw ghetto. Friedman felt Meyerhof embodies the ideal “Justice, justice, you shall pursue” – a command from the Torah and Old Testament that hangs framed in her office. 

“I wish we had one of you in every congressional district,” Friedman told Meyerhof. Meyerhof hugged the Congresswoman admitting he was “trying to hold back the tears … [this] is one of the highlights of my life.” 

Meyerof’s own family shaped his legacy of advocacy: His grandfather, Otto Meyerhof, and his father, Dr. Walter E. Meyerhof, were rescued by Varian Fry, who helped 2,000 refugees escape the Nazis. Fry’s rescuees included artist Marc Chagall and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who went on to write Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Otto Meyerhof would go on to win the Nobel Prize for his studies on oxygen in the muscles. David Meyerhof’s mother, Miriam Meyerhof, escaped via the Kindertransport, a series of rescue efforts for children whose parents were in concentration camps, homeless children and orphans. Miriam Meyerhof had been living in Berlin studying to be a nursery school teacher – a passion she would make reality in Anna Freud’s nursery for children affected by the war. 

“The words [Holocaust survivors] have to say [are] the most important words to say today,” David Meyerhof said. “There are parallels between now and Germany then. It started with deportation then became the Holocaust … we can never normalize deportation or concentration camps.” 

In his poetry, Meyerhof asks, “Are we facing reality in front of our faces or/Are we running from what will catch us in the end?” For Meyerhof, current events are more than politics. “I am not talking out of the side of my mouth, I am talking about history.” 

One of the survivors Meyerhof works with, whom he chose to keep anonymous, escaped Nazi-occupied France at age 8 and is now a retired USC professor. This survivor expressed fears that he or she would be deported back to France. 

According to Meyerhof, “The ICE attacks on immigrants bring up the horrors of what happened to Germany and to other countries that Germany took over.” 

Can such an atrocity happen here? 

“The question has come up, ‘How could Germany, which had the highest education level, the highest scientific level, the highest cultural level, bring forth the Nazis and turn them into murderers?’” David Meyerhof recounted. 

Germany had produced such great minds, and pacifists, as Albert Einstein. 

“The Nazis were able to capitalize on the dissatisfaction of millions of Germans who had gone through World War I and the Great Depression. They were able to find a scapegoat, which were the Jews, saying the Jews were taking all the jobs, that the Jews had all the money.” These untruths still circulate in modern day America as seen by popular rapper Kanye “Ye” West claiming during his 2022 rants that Jewish people control the media. 

When asked about the parallels Meyerhof saw, he said, “Some of the first people rounded up were the handicapped. [In] America, we have a situation where people are being rounded up because they are immigrants and people are being targeted because of their sexual orientation, and a national registry [of autistic people] is being set up.” 

During the Holocaust, Polish immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and disabled people were among those persecuted. Currently, little is known about the registry announced by Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health, but the Autism Self Advocacy Network confirmed HHS walked back its statement after public backlash. 

Meyerhof’s fears surrounding those “rounded up” in ICE detention centers are not assuaged by reports of center conditions. Following a Canadian tourist’s arrest and custody in multiple ICE centers, she told The Guardian (a British daily newspaper) she had been taken to a “tiny, freezing cement cell” and became sick after eating the food. The American Immigration Lawyers Association reports an increasing number of deaths under ICE custody, largely due to lack of medical care. 

Meyerhof further worries for those taken without due process to El Salvador. 

“The prison in El Salvador is a concentration camp. There is no difference to how they are set up. To me, this is the beginning of what happened in Germany,” he said. He references the questioning of “habeas corpus” and the militarization of the police as further parallels to 1930s Germany. 

“To the millions who are speaking out, what happens when they continue their protests and [the protests] get larger? … Will Trump call out the military? Will [the military] aim their guns at the American people? Will they shoot the American people? That is a fear I have because it happened in Germany. [Today is] following a pattern.”

Meyerhof believes that “everything counts” when it comes to making one’s voice heard. 

“I tell students who can’t vote because they are under 18 years old they can still write a letter, they can still speak up, they can talk to their friends and family, and they can march. For people over 18 there is voting … fascism is occurring right now in America.” 

Meyerhof’s poetry can be found in his book Look Beyond, and on allpoetry.com.