Experience hope over fear as Democrats plan about how to repair Trumpzism's incompetent leadership

Echo opinion letter to the editor of The New York Times: I am a first-generation American. My parents were Holocaust survivors.

My mother was born in Vilna (now Vilnius) in 1930. Her deportation* to Siberia at age 10, saved her life, and the lives of her parents.

Reading Tolstoy and other great works of literature, and never losing hope, were among the beacons that helped her to survive during the five years she spent in Siberia. 

Similarly, many of the (all too few) survivors of the Vilna Ghetto found ways to cope by retreating into reading and writing fiction, making art, composing and performing music.

Meanwhile, my father, a pianist studying at the Vienna Academy, escaped at age 16 in 1938, on a music scholarship to Palestine. Music saved his life.

I firmly believe that the arts can help us survive the Donald Trump era. It has been proven to help people to survive and flourish in the face of war, cruelty, racism, sexism, fascism and all other threats to human dignity.

From Deborah Hautzig,  New York
The writer is the author of dozens of children’s books and two novels.

A group of Lithuanian deportees in Ziminsky District, Irkutsk Oblast in Russia.

*Soviet deportations from Lithuania were a series of 35 mass deportations carried out in Lithuania, a country that was occupied as a constituent socialist republic of the Soviet Union, in 1941, and 1945–1952. At least 130,000 people, 70% of them women and children, were forcibly transported to labor camps and other forced settlements in remote parts of the Soviet Union.  Among the deportees were about 4,500 Poles.