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The recent 80-year remembrance of the World War II Holocaust was met with Holocaust deniers. And, only days before the anniversary-remembrance of the holocaust, Elon Musk, Trump鈥檚 prot茅g茅, advised a German right-wing audience that Germany had no responsibility for remembering its past. Incomprehensible to me!

Here鈥檚 my message to the deniers who claim that a Trump dictatorship either cannot happen here, or, worse 鈥� that it cannot resemble the Third Reich鈥檚 assault on targeted groups of people considered 鈥渓esser humans鈥�: Take a trip to Oswiecim, Poland, and either you will be 鈥渕oved鈥� to the core of your being with resolve to keep dictators out of power or you will be numbered among those who are the 鈥渆nablers鈥�.

I鈥檓 still haunted by the two days I spent at the Auschwitz site 62 years ago. It was wave after wave of shock, awe, disgust, and utter sadness. The sheer barbarity and inhumanity of it all was quite literally unbearable.

Near the end of my second day at Auschwitz I collapsed and had to be hospitalized. I woke up in the only available hospital space 鈥� the children鈥檚 ward of a hospital in Cracow, Poland in 1963.

It was the middle of the Cold War, and I was living with a Polish host at that time. Kennedy was in the White House, and Khrushchev was in the Kremlin. In America, the Civil Rights movement was in full sway. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union鈥檚 repression was omnipresent.

Andrzej and I took a train from Cracow to Oswiecim, and at that time the easiest way to get to the main camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was on foot. The dirt road that Sunday morning was filled with Polish visitors and an eerie silence. What little talking I heard was in muffled whisper-like tones. The day was quite warm, but punctuated by the occasional zephyr that made the trek dusty but didn鈥檛 qualify as a cooling breeze. The uncommonly warm day, the dust swirling up around my ankles, the dirt road, the silence, the slumped shoulders of trekkers鈥攁ll filled me with a sense of dread, but I was drawn to the site nevertheless because I had no tools to process what I was about to confront. The experience was profound and life-altering.

Who knows how accurate a memory might be from more than sixty years ago, but I remember that the trekkers鈥� heads were mainly lowered on slumped shoulders as if in contemplation or prayer. We were greeted by Soviet guards and the guides who displayed their credentials鈥攖attooed numbers on outstretched arms. The guides were all survivors of the death camps.

Before we were permitted to enter any of the barracks-like structures or view the remaining gas chambers and ovens, for an entire half-day we were compelled to listen to Soviet propaganda about the so-called Soviet liberation of the death camps, and the so-called Soviet rescue of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto and the liberation of Warsaw.

We were also compelled to watch hours and hours of captured German film footage of unspeakable crimes against humanity and war crimes. I could never understand why the Nazi fascists were so keen on documenting their atrocities. Pride in their grotesque pathological performances no doubt.

Firing-squad slaughter of naked starving stick-figures standing helpless atop trenches dug for their burial. Firing squad locations in front of brick walls partially disintegrated by the enormous volume of bullets striking the walls behind the slaughter. Walls of thousands of photos of the earliest inmates, heads shaved depriving them of their human visage differences, photos that ceased when the sheer volume of victims to be slaughtered overwhelmed the camp administrators鈥� ability to keep track of the victims. Behind glass or plexiglass corridor barriers in many of the barracks, there were sorted-out mountains of children鈥檚 shoes, suitcases, eyeglasses, human hair (used to help make soap), human teeth, women鈥檚 dresses, adult clothing and belongings of various kinds. It was then, and remains still, incomprehensible to imagine the suffering, the tragedies 鈥� the hollow faces forever unconnected to the human remnants and remains.

Are we capable of any of these kinds of horrors, as we meekly transition to a Trump autocracy and mega-rich monopolistic oligopoly? The whole-scale meat-ax approach to removal of immigrants, many of them asylum-seekers whose only offense is civil in nature (only having undocumented status) is eerily redolent of Hitler鈥檚 removal of Jews, their defenders, and the so-called 鈥渄efectives鈥� as the disabled and the religious minorities such as Jehovah鈥檚 Witnesses were labeled.

My host Andrzej was hardened to these horrors, having spent the war as a street waif in Gda艅sk, Poland. With a veneer of apparent stoicism, he seemed to handle Auschwitz. I did not. I hope it speaks to my own humanity as a young man that I couldn鈥檛 handle the horror. I collapsed and had to be hospitalized.

Enablers vaulted Hitler to power. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, and many others were in denial in the 1930s, and they ended up in the camps and the ovens. Allied Power deniers dithered鈥攁ppeasement鈥攗ntil it was too late. They didn鈥檛 mobilize for war until it was too late. America had to rescue Europe from Hitler.

Years later, I returned multiple times to the killing fields of France to mourn and to honor the American ultimate sacrifices for Europe in both of the twentieth-century numbered wars.

Every time I looked out over the seas of white crosses in the peaceful carefully tended garden-like cemeteries of Normandy, I acknowledged their inextricable connection to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other Nazi death camps. The crosses, in perfectly scripted symmetrical rows, in harmony and unity, in sun-dazzled purity, represent the American humanity response to the inhumanity of Auschwitz. The enormity of the sacrifice was necessary to respond to the enormity of Hitler鈥檚 horrors. Each cross is a metaphor for the persistence of our 鈥渂etter angels鈥�. When I contemplate the crosses, I find the peace that the dead expect to have given me.

My message to my descendants and others is this: You must first face and admit the horror first-hand and then contemplate, first-hand, the sanitizing purity offered by the crosses. You will find calm, and then a measure of peace. To discover who you are, make a pilgrimage to Auschwitz and then to Normandy.