"Lock the doors and close the blinds -- we're going for a ride..."

Today is the Jewish holiday of יום השועה וגבורה, or Yom HaShoah U'Gevurah, which loosely translates to Holocaust Remembrance Day. This day was chosen, according to many, as the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

And in typical blog fashion (although not typical for me), here's a song I'm thinking about today:

Untitled
Peter Himmelman

This is a story 'bout a taxi ride I can't forget,
It was autumn in Minnesota, it was rainy, cold, and wet,
So I hopped into the first cab that I saw,
The heater was on but the chill just wouldn't thaw

The driver of the cab he had a pock-marked face,
He didn't seem too unfriendly, he was just starin' off into space,
And he told me that he used to drive a truck,
And that right now he was down on his luck.

We talked a bit about travellin', told him that I'd been to the USSR,
He looked at me in the rear-view mirror and said, "Ain't that where the Jews and commies are?"
And I knew I was in for a hell of a ride,
My face was calm but I was burnin' up inside.

He told me he had a dream to go to a place free from niggers and Jews,
"Austria?," I asked out loud as I stared down at my shoes,
Then he said, "That's exactly right,"
he said, "Hey man ain't you proud to be white?"

I played along with him a bit, then I said, "What do you mean? I'm not quite sure."
That's when he told me how much he admired the Fuhrer.
We drove on through the Minnetonka Pines,
And the rain started freezin' on the highway signs.

Then I said, "Don't you think it was wrong, I mean, gassin' all them Jews?"
Then he told me Hitler's only fault was that he had to go and lose.
A war that should have set the white man free,
To inherit the entire earth as his destiny.

Then he started fishin' for a cassette tape that he'd gotten in a special class,
And on it some teacher was talkin' about destroyin' the Jews at last,
And about how they were all to blame,
for every problem that you could ever name.

I stared out my window, started thinkin' about my life,
Thinkin' about my children, thinkin' about my wife,
And I wondered how much more could I endure,
Of a hatred, so naked and so pure.

When we got to my brother's house, I even tipped him a dollar or two
And I was wonderin' if he'd known all along that his passenger was a Jew.
I just stared at my breath in the freezin' night,
That's when my brother came to the door and put on the light.

Don't tell me children, defile your dreams
Our heads are still pounding from the sound of their screams
And the blood is still flowing down European streams
And it's you who have no right to call yourself a human being,
Here I am,
in a taxi cab with a cut-rate Aryan

I spent the next morning with a man who had death camp numbers on his arm,
And I swore to myself I would do anything to protect him from further harm,
And he told me wherever you may go,
you must refute them if they say it wasn't so.