This past week I have been thinking of my grandparents, who failed to escape Nazi Poland before anecdotally committing murder suicide to escape their fate. I never met them and never heard a verifiable account of why they didn’t leave although I know their four children either left on their own or were sent out. Increasingly, as this country appears to move inexorably towards lawless but theocratic and oligarchic fascism- the conflation of all possible abhorrent systems of “governance”- I think about my grandparents decision and the consequences: stay with hope or stay with despair but either way, the end result is tragic.