Sixten Robé

I listened yesterday to the Joe Rogan episode with that Cooper guy, and right away, I knew what I had to do. I got in my car and drove straight to my 98-year-old grandmother’s house. You know, my grandmother—the one who lost her first husband, her little children, her parents, and every single one of her siblings in the Holocaust. The one who somehow crawled out of hell, rebuilt a life from nothing, and still wakes up at night with memories she can’t bring herself to talk about. I had to go to her because, for nearly a century, she’s been living a lie. She’s been telling us these horrific, gruesome, gut-wrenching stories—about the Germans, painting them as if they were monsters, as if they were actually villains. But I just listened to someone who really knows his shit, and he made it crystal clear: we’ve all misunderstood them. So, I sat her down. I took a deep breath, looked her in the eyes—those same eyes that have seen things I can’t even begin to comprehend—and I told her the truth. “Grandma, enough. Enough with the fake grieving. Enough with the lies. For almost a hundred years, you’ve been poisoning people’s minds with your one-sided, manipulative sob story. But I just listened to an expert—a guy on a podcast, which, as we all know, is the highest form of truth and reality—and he set the record straight. “Hitler and his people weren’t what you think they were. They weren’t cold-blooded murderers, genocidal maniacs, or ruthless butchers. No, Grandma, they were complicated. They had reasons. They had perspectives that, shockingly, you and your family never bothered to consider. Did you ever stop, in between watching your children being ripped from your arms, to ask yourself what they were going through? Did you ever think, while you were starving in Auschwitz, that maybe, just maybe, they felt misunderstood? “I mean, sure, they rounded you up, packed you into trains like cattle, and sent you to a place designed to erase you from existence—but did you ever take a moment to see things from their point of view? Maybe they were under a lot of stress. Maybe they had economic struggles. Maybe they just needed you to pause for a second and acknowledge their pain. That’s all they asked for, Grandma. A little empathy. A little open-mindedness. And really, was that so much to give?” After I finished, my grandmother—like a typical Jew, and like every Holocaust survivor who just won’t let things go—reacted with horror and anger. But I stopped her right there. I reminded her that, these days, canceling and shutting down uncomfortable ideas only makes it seem like there is some kind of Jewish supremacy. And I wasn’t about to let her cancel me, so I left...