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One of Dachau’s last living liberators still has somewhere to be
ATLANTA — Hilbert “Hibby” Margol wears two watches.
It is the kind of detail that seems small until you can’t stop noticing it. One watch is ordinary. It has hands, numbers, the plain mechanics of telling time. The other is a Life Alert, the sort of device sold to people who live alone, or to the people who love them and can’t stand the thought of them living alone.
Together the two watches say something about a man before he’s said a word himself: that he has outlived the need for almost everything, except the people determined to make sure he’s still here.
He is 102. He lives by himself in the same two-story house in suburban Atlanta he shared with his wife of 77 years, Betty Ann, who died at 96 last September. The house still carries the warmth of her memory. Family photographs cover every surface that will hold them: the mantel, the end tables, the walls, climbing toward the ceiling like something that grew there on its own.
There will soon be one more: Hibby’s fourth great-granddaughter, Callie Rose, was born two weeks ago.
A framed photograph of French President Emmanuel Macron pinning the Legion d’Honneur to Margol’s chest — taken in 2024, when Margol was one of dozens of American veterans Delta Airlines chartered to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day — leans against the fireplace, not yet hung, as if the house has simply run out of room to keep up with the life still happening inside it.
The coffee table has disappeared beneath medals and ephemera and the accumulated evidence of a hundred years, and it occurs to you, sitting across from him, that you are not in the home of a man winding down. You are in the home of a man still arriving.
His iPhone buzzed. Then again. He glanced at it and rolled his eyes.
“That’s my daughter,” he said. “Checking on me.”
His daughter is, herself, a senior citizen. The phone had no case — hadn’t needed one, he doesn’t drop things — which felt like its own kind of answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked: What does it look like to move through a century without ever quite losing your grip?
On the day I visited this June, he had just returned from yet another trip to Normandy, marking another anniversary of a war he’d fought in as a young man and had spent most of the rest of his life not talking about. A week before that, the Atlanta Braves had honored him on the field on Memorial Day for the second year in a row.
For six decades, Margol said almost nothing about what he had seen at the end of that war — not to his wife, not to his three children, not to anyone. And then, in his 80s, he started to talk about it, and he has not really stopped since.
Margol is sharing his experience as one of a dwindling number of U.S. Army veterans alive today who helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp.
Inside the camp
He and his identical twin brother, Howard — younger by ten minutes — served together in the war. That alone took some doing: the military generally kept siblings apart, a policy hardened after five Sullivan brothers died together when their ship sank in 1942. (It’s loosely the premise behind Saving Private Ryan.) It took a letter from the Margols’ mother to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to get an exception made.
On the morning of April 29, 1945, the brothers were on the outskirts of Munich when they caught a strange, powerful smell drifting out of the woods.
Howard was the one who placed it. It reminded him of an unpleasant odor he would sometimes catch a whiff of in their mother’s kosher kitchen back home in Jacksonville, Florida — the way she would hold a freshly killed chicken over the gas flame of the stove to singe off the last of its pin feathers. Only this stench was much, much stronger.
The brothers went to find the source. What they came to first was a line of boxcars. The first one they reached had its sliding door open. A dead man’s leg was dangling out of it. They opened the cars and found them packed with dead bodies in striped prisoner uniforms “like sardines,” Hibby would say.
They had a small camera, liberated from a dead German officer a few weeks earlier, and they used it to take a photograph of one of the cars — a copy of which hangs in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
They pressed further into the woods and came out at another clearing. Above the entrance was a sign: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work will set you free.
They had found Dachau.
Beyond the gate was a wide-open yard ringed by low barracks buildings — and, in several places, bodies stacked the way you’d stack cordwood. The arrangement of them is the part that refused to make sense. Somebody had piled them, neatly, as routine.
Neither brother had ever seen anything like it. “We didn’t understand what we were looking at,” Margol said. “It sort of reminded us of a movie set.”
They learned only later that the camp’s ovens had run out of coal months earlier, and without coal, there was no way to cremate the bodies. So the corpses had simply been left where they lay.
It took a moment to register that not everyone in the yard was dead. Off to one side, against a barracks wall, were four or five prisoners — some squatting, some just standing, none of them well. But alive.
The camp’s roughly 32,000 prisoners walked free later that same day, once a Swiss Red Cross negotiator talked the SS commander into a peaceful surrender rather than a last stand.
Years later, at a visit to mark the liberation’s 70th anniversary, an elderly survivor found Margol after a memorial service. She told him she’d been too sick with typhus that morning to understand what was happening around her. Then she leaned over and kissed him on both cheeks. “If you guys were two or three days later,” she told him, “I wouldn’t have made it.”
One family, two branches
I’ve spent much of the past year following a different story: a family of cattle farmers in rural Illinois, building a synagogue in a two-acre cornfield out of the remains of closing synagogues — a Torah rescued from one congregation, an ark from another, stained-glass windows carried out of buildings that no longer exist. The building will also include a museum of tolerance, sharing the stories of the family’s ancestors — some who died in concentration camps, others who survived by being hidden in the homes of Christian families.
The family is named Jakobs. You’ve met the 41-year-old farmer, Nik, in stories I’ve written about the Pennsylvania synagogue he dismantled, piece by piece, to save it; the groundbreaking of the new one rising in a field; and the family’s roots in the Netherlands, where his grandmother, Edith, spent nearly three years hidden in a farmhouse. This spring, I flew with the family to Stadskanaal, the small Dutch town that was her family’s refuge, to watch a local theater troupe stage a play about her survival.
It was in the Netherlands, reporting Jakobs’ story, that he first mentioned a name: Hibby. Jakob’s brother Bryce who left the farm for a career of his own, is married to one of Margol’s granddaughters. Margol’s great-granddaughters carry both halves of this history. On one side: relatives murdered in the Holocaust, and ancestors who survived it in hiding. On the other: a soldier who helped liberate one of the camps.
I asked Margol what he made of it. He didn’t reach for anything grand. “Well,” he said, “it’s quite a story.”
The silence
For decades, Margol said almost nothing about Dachau to his family. “We had written letters,” he said of the war years. “We figured that was sufficient.”
Life moved on. Margol built a business selling furniture and appliances. He raised a family. The war became something that had happened to a younger man.
Then came an invitation.
In 2012, at 88, Margol joined about a dozen other American liberators on the International March of the Living, traveling to Poland with Holocaust survivors and thousands of Jewish teenagers. For the first time since the war, he wasn’t simply remembering what he’d witnessed. He was walking beside people whose lives had continued because soldiers like him had arrived when they did.
“It was such an emotional experience,” he later recalled of walking from Auschwitz to Birkenau, “that when I got home I said, now I have to start talking about it.”
His first talk was at the public library near his home. More than 90 people showed up, on word of mouth alone. Then came another invitation. And another. Synagogues. Churches. High schools. A World War II roundtable. Adult education classes at Emory University. He stopped counting after 200 presentations. Today, he estimates he’s given close to 300.
But talking about Dachau and reliving it are not the same thing. Years ago, touring the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., with a small group, he had to walk through a boxcar on exhibit to continue the tour — cleaner and newer-looking than the one he remembered, but a boxcar all the same. “Emotionally,” he said, “I broke down.”
For most of his life, Margol had carried the story alone. Now he worried what would happen if no one carried it after him.
In September, Margol is returning to Germany with his son Jerry, 74 — this trip courtesy of the Best Defense Foundation, the veterans organization that has taken the two of them to battlefields around Europe, and which is now making a documentary about Margol and another veteran. The itinerary is still coming together, but it includes a stop that father and son have made together twice before: Dachau.
The next generation
Long before Margol began speaking publicly about the Holocaust, he had already spent years building Jewish life closer to home.
Rabbi Mark Zimmerman saw it firsthand. Zimmerman retired this summer after leading Congregation Beth Shalom in Atlanta for 38 years. He met Margol in 1988, when the rabbi arrived and Margol was, as he put it, “a young man of sixty-something.”
“He still comes to synagogue,” Zimmerman said. “He’s still sharp as a tack.”
But what Zimmerman remembers most isn’t Margol’s longevity. It’s what he built.
In the late 1990s, Beth Shalom needed an educational wing. Before the congregation had raised a dollar toward the project, Margol quietly wrote a $100,000 check so the synagogue could hire a professional fundraiser and launch the campaign. He and fellow congregant Stephen Klein later donated roughly $350,000 each to complete the building.
Today the Klein-Margol Educational Wing houses the congregation’s preschool, administrative offices, chapel, library and youth lounge.
“In many ways,” Zimmerman said, “I owe my staying at Beth Shalom to Hibby and his vision. We still have a tremendous preschool because of that original vision.”
Only years later did Zimmerman learn another part of Margol’s legacy, about liberating Dachau. Margol recently gave Zimmerman a copy of the memoir he and his son self-published, becoming one of the congregation’s living links to the Holocaust.
“His firsthand account is such a rare commodity,” Zimmerman said, “in a world where primary witnesses, for the most part, are dying out.”
Nearly 800 miles away, in Sterling, Illinois, the other side of Margol’s family is at work on a version of the same project. Jakobs is building a synagogue, with a museum inside so his grandmother’s story outlives her. Margol has already seen how it turns out — his wing has held preschoolers for a quarter century. Jakobs broke ground this spring.
A hat, a promise
I asked Margol if I could take his picture before I left. “Let me get my baseball hat,” he said, and disappeared into another part of the house.
It’s the one with the patch of the 42nd Infantry Division — the Rainbow Division, one of the liberating forces at Dachau. The nickname dates to 1917, coined by a young Col. Douglas MacArthur because the division’s ranks were drawn from National Guard units in 27 different states.
Room by room, the 102-year-old wandered through his home looking for the hat. He checked the kitchen. He looked at the hook by the door, where another cap was hanging, then shook his head and kept going.
There was something almost unbearably ordinary about it, set against everything he’d just spent hours telling me. The boxcars. The smell. The gate. And now: Where did I put that hat?
He found it, and came back into the room wearing it — the same hat, more or less, that has sat on his head in front of hundreds of audiences by now. He still says yes to the invitations. He still boards planes to Europe. When I asked what all of it was for, he didn’t hesitate.
“I hope and pray,” he said, “that the offspring of all the Holocaust survivors outlive the offspring of the deniers.”
The Holy Ground reporting project is made possible with support from the Henry Luce Foundation.
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Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar, these threats are unconscionable
The Trump administration is reportedly planning to build a case to strip Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of her citizenship and eventually deport her.
It is my hope that American Jews — even those who do not like Omar and can recite every questionable comment she has made over the past 15 years to illustrate why — will understand this as offensive and outrageous not only because they are Americans, but because they are Jews.
The Trump administration may claim that it is building a case against Omar due to paperwork (reports suggest that they are interested in whether her father listed her age as 17 on her citizenship application when she was really 18). It is similarly filing dozens of lawsuits attempting to denaturalize citizens by trying to prove they lied in the process of gaining citizenship. However, that this is happening now, ahead of the midterm elections against a sitting member of Congress, a high-profile progressive whom the president has said should “go back” to her country of origin, suggests that it is, to put it mildly, politically motivated.
Evidently, the Trump administration sees citizenship not as a right or a responsibility but as a reward, one that can be taken away if that is seen as useful to the president and his adherents. That use could be silencing political opposition or something as simple (and callous) as an opportunity to brag about the sheer number of attempted denaturalizations.
Jews, too, have found themselves on the wrong end of political denaturalization. I do not mean to compare the Trump administration to the Nazis, but the stubborn fact is that Jews were indeed stripped of their citizenship as part of a political project in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. And in the early 20th century in the United States, it was Jews who politicians claimed were incapable of assimilating, of ever really being a part of the United States. These arguments culminated in legislation that kept out Jews who could have found refuge here. The threat of denaturalization and the experience of perpetual otherness is a grievous part of modern Jewish history; we should be offended by its presence in our political present.
Jewish tradition as well as history encourages us to stand up to authority when that authority is wrong. Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman; Nathan yells at King David for sleeping with Bathsheba and having her husband killed; Moses famously urges Pharoah to change his oppressive ways. Even God is on the receiving end of pushback when Abraham pleads and negotiates to spare Sodom.
I do not think one needs to be Jewish to be outraged by the attempt to denaturalize Ilhan Omar. I think it is also bone-chilling as an American who believes we, including our elected officials, have the right to openly oppose our president, and I am worried as a person who thinks it would be good to continue to live in a democratic republic. And I am sure that there are Jews who will say that Omar deserves to lose her citizenship because she has said things about Israel they do not like.
But the Jewish lens through which I see this is that it is right to challenge power when it is abused, and it is wrong for the powerful to make a show of trying to cast their opponents out of the country.
The point is not whether Trump can make good on the threat to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her, but that it is obscene to use denaturalization as punishment for being a high-profile political opponent in the first place. If he is trying to make it more dangerous to speak out while being from the “wrong” country, then the rest of us need to say that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be an American citizen.
We should do this because we are Americans and we should do this because we are Jews. We should do this because of the ways in which our American and Jewish identities bleed into one another. And, we should do this because we may not know exactly whether it is as Americans or as Jews that we know we have to protect the right to speak truth to power, but we know we need to do it all the same.
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Germany couldn’t stop Hitler’s election tactics; can America stop Trump’s?
Herding political opponents into prisons and concentration camps, suspending civil liberties, and sending SA thugs to destroy newsrooms and beat up journalists were among the means used by Adolf Hitler to game Germany’s parliamentary election of March 5, 1933, won by the Nazis.
As much as Donald Trump might fantasize about deploying such brutal tactics to subvert our midterm elections, he hasn’t done so — yet. But his objective is the same: Detonate constitutional barriers standing in the way of his lust for power. “Cheat like hell,” Trump told the GOP’s midterm convention last month.
Historian Timothy Ryback has just published a book about the last gasps of the Weimar Republic, titled 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled A Democracy. The 53 days begin when Hitler becomes chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, and end with the Reichstag’s March 23 passage of the Enabling Act, which gave him absolute power.
For our own perilous time, there is another number to take note of: 652 — the number of days between Trump’s second inauguration and our Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Hitler’s long march to despotic power occurred over 3,422 days — from his failed Beer Hall Putsch on Nov. 8-9, 1923, up until passage of the Enabling Act.
After spending less than a year of a five-year sentence for the failed 1923 coup, Hitler returned to a Nazi party that was in utter disarray. But the Great Depression turned the Nazis’ fortunes around, as jobless and disaffected Germans flocked to Hitler with his promises to make Germany great again. In parliamentary elections in 1930, the number of Reichstag seats held by the Nazis rose dramatically from 12 to 107, and more than doubled that in elections in 1932, making them the largest party. After some backroom political wheeling and dealing, President Paul von Hindenburg offered the chancellorship to Hitler, which he accepted on Jan. 30, 1933.
Even though Hitler was chancellor, his coalition wasn’t dominated by Nazis. When the Reichstag went up in flames on Feb. 27, 1933, der Führer had the pretext he needed to begin dismantling the last remnants of democracy. The Nazis’ first targets were Communists. More than 4,000 were arrested in the initial hours after the fire. It didn’t take long for Social Democrats, trade unionists and Jews to also face raids, arrests, beatings and terror, as Hindenburg — at Hitler’s urging — issued a decree that suspended Germans’ civil liberties.
There was still a barrier standing in Hitler’s way: the Reichstag. But Hitler had a scheme for getting rid of it: calling for a new election and ultimately engineering a vote by the Reichstag to abolish itself.
In the days and nights before the national election, set for March 5, Nazis carried out a campaign of repression and menace across the country. Brandishing firearms, storm troopers ruled the streets. Homes of Hitler critics were raided. His campaign speeches were blasted from loudspeakers. Voters were offered rides to the polls in transports organized by the Nazis, an unsubtle hint at which party they should vote for.
In the election, the Nazis and their Nationalist allies won a majority of seats in the Reichstag but fell short of the two-thirds needed to amend the constitution. But Hitler had a workaround: Convene the Reichstag to vote on a measure that would allow him to declare laws without the approval of the federal legislative body. With Communist delegates of the Reichstag either in hiding or in custody, Hitler already had a structural advantage; they wouldn’t be there to vote. With the Reichstag building destroyed, the delegates convened on March 23 inside the Kroll Opera House, which swarmed with armed storm troopers and members of the SS who harassed and threatened delegates who were either on the fence about giving Hitler absolute power or were known to oppose it.
In the end, weeks and months of trying to tilt elections through terror and intimidation gave Hitler his ultimate prize: of 538 delegates in the Kroll Opera House, only 94 — all Social Democrats — voted against the Enabling Act. In effect, German democracy was steered by Hitler into committing suicide.
In an essay for Literary Hub, Timothy Ryback noted parallels between Hitler’s election victory on March 5, 1933 and our midterm elections and cataloged them.
They include Trump’s “brazen attempt to quash negative press coverage” and Hitler’s and Trump’s virtually identical pre-election low approval ratings. Both the Nazi leader and the American president had gone to court to try to have earlier election results overturned, and the German election, like our fast-approaching midterms, was seen as a referendum on the nation’s leader.
“Amidst all the turmoil, everyone understood that the March 5 election was a make-or-break moment not only for the Hitler chancellorship but for democracy itself,” Ryback wrote.
With the midterms just around the corner, this can be said about America as well.
Since Trump’s second inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, he has thrown more effort into trying to rig the midterms for the Republicans than into virtually any other endeavor — other than perhaps misusing his powers to enrich himself and his family, and dreaming up monuments to himself.
Trump’s pardon of 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the capitol on Jan. 6 was an early signal that the defeated president had no intention of playing fair during the 2026 midterms. What followed was a barrage of assaults on the election system. Here’s just a partial list: lawsuits demanding sensitive voter data, the gutting of oversight bodies, intimidation of election officials and orders for key GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts — all designed to both undermine Americans’ trust in the election system and manufacture pretexts for contesting any midterm outcomes that displease him.
Amid these relentless attempts to subvert the midterms, the Democrats have had success at blocking some of Trump’s poisoned salvos, such as holding the line against the so-called SAVE America Act and fending off Trump’s attempts to seize voter information. But none of this deters Trump, who just comes back with more schemes. The latest revelations come from documents obtained by Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy organization.
Those documents show that “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collected tens of millions of voter records, explored undercover investigations against voter registration groups and considered feeding state election data into a system used to locate people for deportation as part of a sweeping federal effort to find alleged voter fraud ahead of the 2026 midterms,” according to Democracy Docket, which reviewed the documents.
“This is an absolute smoking gun,” said Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias.
Trump has openly suggested a federal takeover of election administration, and during the past several months it seems like he’s been laying the groundwork for that to happen if he doesn’t get the results he wants on Nov. 3. It’s all too easy to imagine horror scenarios: Trump claims massive voter fraud, his supporters storm county election offices in protest, the FBI seizes ballots and voting machines, unrest erupts across the country, Trump declares martial law.
If Trump’s schemes trigger the kind of disorder he appears to be preparing for, the question will be whether our courts, our press, our civil servants and our voters stand firm. Germany’s institutions bent until they broke. Ours have bent, but they have not yet snapped. What happens next will reveal whether they still possess the steel that Germany’s lacked.
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Sally Rooney’s publisher stops selling her books in Britain, citing ban on pro-Palestinian group she backs
(JTA) — Sally Rooney’s publisher says it will stop supplying her books in the United Kingdom because current legislation prevents it from passing her earnings on to her.
The best-selling Irish writer, whose work includes the novel “Normal People,” which was adapted into a hit BBC drama, has long been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause.
Faber said it would no longer supply her books in the United Kingdom because of her backing for Palestine Action, a group that the British government last year proscribed as a terrorist organization, saying it had “orchestrated a nationwide campaign of direct criminal action against businesses and institutions.”
“Current legislation in the UK has led to circumstances where Faber cannot pass on UK earnings to Sally Rooney for her work,” the publisher said.
“To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” it said. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format. We remain the proud publisher of her remarkable body of work, which we will continue to sell in other territories.”
Faber had no further comment, the statement said.
Yvette Cooper, then the Home Secretary, banned Palestine Action last year following an attack by the group on the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton which caused millions of pounds of damage. It had previously targeted businesses and premises which it said were linked to Israeli defence companies.
Soon after the announcement, Rooney wrote an opinion piece in the Irish Times in which she doubled down on her support for Palestine Action, adding that she would give the proceeds of her books to back the group. “If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under British law, so be it,” she wrote.
In a statement following the action announced by Faber, Rooney cited her Irish Times opinion piece as she explained that the publication of her books “could now constitute a serious criminal offence.”
The ban of Palestine Action has proven to be highly contentious in Britain. Back in February, the group’s co-founder Huda Ammori challenged the move in the High Court, with Rooney providing a supportive witness statement. She said at the time that she was “almost certain” her work would be dropped in Britain if the ban persisted.
The court ruled in Ammori’s favor, but that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal in June. The Supreme Court is due to hear an appeal next month.
Rooney said on Wednesday: “After a process of consultation and deliberation, and with my full agreement, my publisher Faber has therefore determined that it can no longer supply my work within the UK.
“I have made every effort to be honest with the public about my beliefs and intentions, and I am wholly prepared to accept the consequences.”
Rooney’s support for the Palestinian cause predates the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza. In 2021 she declined to sell Hebrew translation rights for her novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” to the Israeli publisher that had previously released her books in Hebrew.
At the time, she said she supported the BDS movement and would not work with an Israeli publisher unless it is willing to “publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the U.N.-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
That move prompted backlash in Israel and beyond, including calls to boycott Rooney’s work. Israeli bookstore chains reportedly removed some of her books from shelves.
However, earlier this year she agreed to have her latest novel, “Intermezzo,” published by an Israeli publisher approved by boycott activists.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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