Shortly after the attrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 in Israel became widely known and an immediate uptick in antisemitism was reported, Wilton resident Peter Wrampe reached out to me. It wasn’t unusual for Wrampe to contact GOOD Morning Wilton, as it was plumb in the middle of election season, and Wrampe chairs the Wilton Republican Town Committee. But it wasn’t politics he wanted to discuss.
Wrampe was born in Germany in 1943 — two years before the end of World War II when the Nazis were in power. He came to the United States at the age of 15. His experience growing up in Germany and then as an immigrant has shaped his very strong feelings about standing up against antisemitism and speaking out about religious and racial intolerance. “I need to speak out,” he told me. He knows I am Jewish, and he asked me, “Heather, what can I do to help?”
When I asked if he would tell his story through GOOD Morning Wilton, he immediately accepted, but he wanted to wait until after the election so that no one would accuse him of any political motivation. He wanted to be heard for his message alone: “If you don’t want bad things to happen, you’ve got to stand up and speak up.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
GOOD Morning Wilton: Can you explain why, given where you were born and what your experience has been, why is it so important for you to speak up?
Peter Wrampe: Have you ever heard the saying about the seventh generation? Ever heard that one?
GMW: I have not.
Wrampe: Somewhere in the Old or New Testament, I forget which one, but it says, “The sins of the father shall be” — and I’m paraphrasing — that basically, “you’re going to be held responsible for that for seven generations.”
That’s just something that I carry and that has to do with what happened in Germany… in Europe at the … at the bad time. The Holocaust. I read as a child when I was 10 years old, 12 years, what went on and it never left me.
The thing that I really asked myself, number one, is, our parents, we never asked the questions — “What did you do [during those years]?” That was a taboo subject that didn’t come up in society in Germany until 1968, and we had already left [Germany by then]. That was kind of a taboo subject.
Then I asked myself, [What] if the people had stood up to the brown shirts, to the Nazis? The answer to that, it never would have happened.
A couple of other factors that I’ve got is, evidence points that — I think I talked to you about Berlin in 1943-44, where the [non-Jewish] wives of Jewish husbands. When their husbands were getting rounded up and getting ready to be shipped east, the wives actually went and demonstrated in front of the police stations, that the government was forced to let [the Jewish husbands] all out.
It basically shows you that when people speak up and not look the other way out of convenience. When they look away out of convenience, bad things happen. If you don’t want bad things to happen, you’ve got to stand up and speak up. End of story.
The atrocities that happened on Oct. 7 — unspeakable. Unspeakable in the sense of, my God, more savagery than I would ever expect. That troubles me. And then when people go, “Well, you know what happened before, that there has been conflict before [between Israelis and Palestinians]. But, how can I say it — one perceived injustice does not justify reaction of any kind, let alone what happened [on Oct. 7].
And the second thing is, when do you stop going back and saying you’ve been wronged? Where do you stop? Do you stop with the Romans? Do you stop with the Babylonians? I mean, somebody who says, “The Romans threw us out [of the land],” you can’t go back and back in history and find a point where you can actually blame somebody — that’s like justification stupidity!
The other thing that I’m really angry about, is — the universities. You saw the other day, the three presidents of the of the Ivy League schools, in front of Congress. They ought to be run out of the country. If they can’t condemn [calling for genocide of Jews] and they say, “It has to be discussed within its context.” Are you really nuts?
I think there’s something really wrong with the education system, that they absolutely have gone to the point where you can get away with anything because you can excuse it. You can come up with lame excuses, that really floors me.
GOOD Morning Wilton: And you work in the university system, [as a professor] at NYU.
Wrampe: I don’t think I’m the only one that thinks this was pre-planned. Not only was the attack on Oct. 7 pre-planned, we know that. But the instantaneous response of the Palestinian support across the campuses, they were not knee-jerk reactions. They were planned. You can’t get that many people together [and that organized on so many campuses] within maybe one or two days.
And that [the universities] even let that happen, that beats the heck out of me. That they let it even happen! The discipline has disappeared at the university level in favor of free speech. Free speech only goes so far. Last time I heard somebody say, “I want to kill the president,” he got arrested. You can’t say that, there is a limit to free speech, there’s a limit to what you can do.
The movie theater, you know what it is, you can’t scream, “Fire!” You can’t threaten this. And we all know that. So why can people run around and take that position that they’re taking? That to me is just irrational. It is just hurtful — no, worse than that. Hurtful doesn’t compare to what it actually is — inciting, fostering, glorifying, incentivizing genocide.
When somebody says, “Kill all the Jews,” end of story. Nobody would go and say, “Kill all the Black [people] and get away with it, no people will say, “Oh, that’s just fine.” All the Japanese, or all the Chinese, or whatever ethnic group you want to think about. You can’t do that.
GMW: Why do you think that when it comes to Jewish people, it gets rationalized — “Oh, we’ve got to think about the context.” Why is that okay when it comes to things said about Jewish people?
Wrampe: I’m speechless because they have not really understood history as to what happens.
Luckily, [I was 2 years old], I did not have to go, but my mother had to go to the [concentration] camps and see the bodies. But [for me], just reading about it and seeing the pictures and listening to the stories and listening to what happened. When the evidence is there, you can’t deny the Holocaust, period.
People don’t understand that they were individuals, individual human beings. It wasn’t a group of people, it was individuals that were killed.
So why do I think about [people accepting things said about Jews]? I think they’ve been brainwashed on one hand or they let themselves be brainwashed, that they have a lack of mental capabilities. And I think for us as society, we just have to put a stop to this, to say this is going too far. By anybody’s imagination, it’s just going too far. You’ve got to get them educated somehow. But I think it’s very difficult to get people to see something that they don’t want to see.
GMW: When you were growing up, what you were taught? What did you learn when you came to this country?
Wrampe: When I came to the country [in 1958 at age 15], people said oh, yeah, yeah [things about Germany during the war]. So yeah, I was 2 years old [then], and I was really involved in World War II as a machine gunner. What do you want from me? I had nothing to do with that, [I was age 2]!
But then on the other hand, I’ve always regretted that during those 12 years? 20 years? That they had, they had… [not spoken out]. The total number of people that died. It was 50 million in World War II, roughly. I’m really pissed off at them (excuse the expression) because they’ve now given Germans a bad name, in the sense of, you’re always obviously associated with that [history]. That they’ve soiled the reputation of some of the world’s best thinkers and philosophers. I’m talking about Goethe, Schiller, Kant, all of these folks. Just wiped out all of that good stuff, at least for a good amount of time.
I always wondered, why people went along? Was it because they agreed? Was it because they were intimidated? Or was it because they just didn’t care? Or was it because the antisemitism was very strong in Europe, in particular in Austria, and in that region, before 1900. It was really heavily, heavy, heavy then.
So when that Austrian corporal [Hitler] got ahold of the National Socialist Party, he just perpetuated that. There was a whole slew of sick antisemitism, from 1850 until about 1950, in rough numbers. for some for whatever reason. My own justification is [I think] it was envy, envy.
When the Jewish people were in Europe, they were not allowed to be in the trade business. So they went into money lending, etc, etc. and of course, they made money — they were smarter. That’s what usually happens. People who feel discriminated against, they educate their children! So a portion of it was envy, but the envy was unjustified. If you limit me to what I can do for a living, I’ve got to do that which was left over, and be good at it! That is the major reason I saw that people had antisemitic feelings. But it was also that people capitalized on it for political purposes.
I’ve always asked myself that question, as to why people didn’t speak up — basically saying, I wish they would have, they should have. I wish they would have [spoken up] and the world would have turned out a different place.
GMW: In school, in that post-war period, in Germany, how were people educated, what was taught?
Wrampe: They pretty much did not talk about anything that went on. I went through my eight years of schooling in Germany and they didn’t talk anything about World War II, period. There was nothing, nobody said anything about that, not that I recall.
What was in Germany, for me, was basically the emphasis on STEM, on science, on math.. that was the major emphasis, that they would teach you good skills so that you could get a good job or go to school. There was very little philosophy, in the sense about history.
GMW: So how did you how come to know and understand about what happened in World War II?
Wrampe: I was always inquisitive. I would read anything that I would pick up. During the summer times, I would read one book a day, 800, 900 pages, I could go through no problem. I was constantly in the library. I also liked reading about history, and I always wanted to know what went on. And what happened. So that was kind of a good amount of self-education, a good amount.
And then coming here [to America], I took the math route, I took the engineering route, which was just fine.
Then when I started working at Union Carbide, one day we were working on a project and we had like, 20 people in the room. I looked around, and said, Holy Moses! There’s only two native-born Americans here. The rest of us are all off the boat. Which kind of said to me, melting pot, etc., etc., that it’s a good place to be.
And by the way, I always wanted to research it, but I don’t think I can find the real numbers, how many people come here and return home? Very few. So that to me, says that if you want to be someplace, [the U.S.] is the place to be, compared to other places. Everybody wants to leave wherever they live, and they all want to come here.
GMW: You started this conversation talking about “the sins of the father.” Growing up, whether it was in Germany or once you came here, where did that sense of taking on that responsibility come from?
Wrampe: You always look over your shoulder because you know, you’ve got the mark of Cain on you. You always know that, in people’s minds, maybe it’s reading too much into it, but to a large degree you kind of have a feeling that, even though everybody knew that you had nothing to do with it as a kid, they still assign you into a category.
GMW: How young were you, and what did it take for you to realize that? How did you learn that and come to understand that?
Wrampe: In Germany? Obviously not, there was nobody putting you on a guilt trip. I think it was mostly when I was a teenager in the U.S. Yeah, there was a little bit of that. Not only personally, but I was also kind of seeing it as what happens to a nationality, to the Germans [as a whole] because of that.
If the Germans had foreseen that they were going to get that type of reputation for a while, it would have made an impact as well. Obviously nobody looks forward, but I wish they would have.
The thing that always really killed me, did you know that the planners of the Holocaust, half of them were PhDs? The guys who perpetrated what was done were not stupid people. They were not the savages of the country — they were the intellectuals, they had law degrees! Would you believe that! I was aghast! One of the realizations that came with time was, the guys who actually orchestrated this thing, I had always thought they were a bunch of savages running the camps. They actually had really educated people doing this stuff! I thought, this just can’t be! And when you find out, it was terrible!
I hope that helps you, or maybe it just tells you that I’m confused.
GMW: No, it tells me that you synthesize the past and you’re not confused. You’re seeing what’s right to do and trying to inspire other people. It takes one person to stand up and inspire someone else to do the right thing alongside you. It’s not confused, it’s courageous.
Wrampe: [My wife] Kathleen and I look at each other and say we don’t understand how you can have a teach-in in Oakland — this either just happened or is planned to be happening — it’s impossible to understand, unless there is a larger plan out there by somebody. And clearly, I think the people who are supporting the universities, financially, ought to reconsider what they’re doing. I wouldn’t put a penny into them.
I’ll tell you this, if that stupidity had come from the new president of NYU, she’d get a message from me: “I resign. I don’t want to be associated with you, end of story.” I’d say, “No, no, no, no. I’m doing this [teaching] for fun, I don’t need the money, to hell with you!” Even if I needed the money, I’d find another place.
I would not be associated with an organization such as the University of Pennsylvania. I hate to say it, I had always wished I would have gone to MIT but we just didn’t have the money. But now…
I’m glad we had this discussion.
GMW: I really appreciate it too.
Wrampe: If you have follow up questions, follow up comments, let me know. But I will say: We are with you. Period. We don’t deviate from that in this house.
And by the way, I do believe that we have the same religious background — at least I do believe the Old Testament, that goes across both [our] religions. And [I believe] the New Testament — it’s not that new [laughs]. You know, we’ve got the same Judeo-Christian principles, we live by them. There is not much difference to me. You can quote me on that one. I’m standing up for my own people! Or my cousins [laughs].
GMW: Thank you, Peter.
Wrampe: Anyhow, you got my support, and if you need anything, if I can be of any help to the community, let me know.
GMW: Thank you, Peter, very much. This is a huge help and very comforting.
Wrampe: We may not always agree on politics, but we agree on humanity and that’s all I worry about.
The expression of support here is nice, but the potshots at universities are disappointing, joining in a disingenuous conservative pile-on led by one of the House’s leading anti-Semites. (I myself went to one of the universities in question and will be continuing my modest annual donation because I support their ideals and mission and believe their intentions are good, even if I regret some aspects of their immediate response to Gaza)
And “unless there is a larger plan out there by somebody” is getting into outright conspiracy theory territory, some of that, regrettably, also tied up in anti-Semitism. The “Judeo-Christian principles” business is also deeply problematic, for a whole host of reasons. I’m willing to believe he’s coming at this from a place of good intentions, but I think he needs to step outside of the conservative media bubble more often; more than a few of the media personalities attacking Palestinians now were advocating Great Replacement Theory just a few months ago and will probably go back to doing so again after the war ends.
(It’s also worth noting that some of the organizers of that Oakland ‘teach-in’ were, themselves, Jewish, as are many of the organizers of pro-ceasefire protests; many American Jews are deeply conflicted about the war in Gaza and heartbroken by the plight of Palestinian civilians even as they want Israel to remain safe)
Michael Love: You write, “It’s also worth noting that some of the organizers of that Oakland ‘teach-in’ were, themselves, Jewish, as are many of the organizers of pro-ceasefire protests; many American Jews are deeply conflicted about the war in Gaza and heartbroken by the plight of Palestinian civilians even as they want Israel to remain safe.” You are correct that many Jews are heartbroken by the deaths of Palestinian civilians during the current conflict. However, that doesn’t mean that most Jews are supportive of ceasefire protests, which have largely failed to advocate for the return of Israeli (and other) civilian hostages and place no responsibility for the current crisis on Hamas, a terrorist organization who hides among civilians and engages in acts of rape, terror and war. These protests often move beyond criticism of Israel into blatant antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Jewish Voice for Peace is an explicitly anti Zionist organization that released a statement calling October 7 “a historic win for Palestinian resistance.” They have been banned on multiple campuses for extreme rhetoric, intimidation and violence. They hardly represent the Jewish community. It is important to call out antisemitism wherever it exists, whether on the left or the right.
I said that “many of the organizers of pro-ceasefire protests are Jewish,” which I believe is accurate; there are in fact a great many Jewish-led ones. I did not intend to take a public position on the merits of ceasefire protests themselves, or the nature of their support.
His comment about “a larger plan out there by somebody” concerned me greatly, for reasons I don’t imagine I need to explain; I think a lot of people who genuinely support the Jewish cause can end up getting manipulated into taking positions that are actively harmful to it, and that this is a particularly big risk for conservatives because there are far fewer people in conservative media sensitive to that.
Also, I believe the “historic win for Palestinian resistance” comment was from Students for Justice in Palestine, not Jewish Voice for Peace.
Thank you Peter for standing up and speaking out.
Thank you Peter Wrampe for standing up! Your message is timely and so important. We have the opportunity and the responsibility to join together and change the course of history.
Very appreciative of Peter Wrampe’s assessment of the words and inaction of the university presidents.
Dear Peter Wrampe, thank you so much for speaking out. I am distraught and terrified at what our universities are teaching the next generation, and about sending my own Jewish children away to college in a few years. We cannot raise a generation that thinks that Hamas, an organization that murders Israeli civilians, that puts Palestinian civilians in harm’s way on a daily basis by using them as human shields, is an organization that is not wholeheartedly condemned. These “pro-Palestinian, anti-Jew” rallies do not even understand what they are saying. Hamas has been brainwashing innocent Palestinians for years, and then either using them in their battle for jihad, or discarding them after they steal all the humanitarian aid that they are garnering, taking it for themselves.
For those who aren’t Jewish, nor affiliated with Israel, I ask you to imagine. Imagine the crimes against humanity that were played out on October 7th, the raping, the beheadings, the murder of parents in front of children and vice versa. Burning houses, burning people. Please imagine that. Imagine the horror, the terror. Human beings don’t do that to each other. And then afterwards, Hamas proudly broadcasts these videos, in an attempt at psychological warfare against the citizens of Israel, or in an attempt to garner a greater reaction, or perhaps more fear; I’m not really clear on what the intent is, other than cruelty. Israeli people are still immersed in the October 7th massacre and kidnappings; every life is precious, we (I am switching to my Israeli alliance now) simply won’t stand to be victims here, we will fight for ourselves and for our right to exist without fear.
And now imagine living in America, a proud U.S. citizen, and suddenly not knowing who your friends are. Not knowing if it was your next door neighbor that stole the Israeli flag lawn sign from your driveway. Needing a police presence at every event or holiday gathering with your friends. And with a drumbeat going in the back of your head, a sense of doom, of hopelessness to fight against it, of going back to a time that seems very, very reminiscent of the pre-holocaust era. We are all getting generational flashbacks. Even here in Wilton, it’s terrifying.
I am actually scared to voice my concerns right now, in this forum. This is not easy for me. I worry that someone will take it out on myself and my family. But I agree even more with Peter Wrampe, that we must stand up for ourselves. And so, at the same time that I – a VEHEMENTLY anti-gun Democrat – debate letting my husband go out and purchase a gun for self protection, at the same time that I – and all my friends – are discussing an escape plan to Canada should things turn south, I also must stand up for myself because it seems to me that only a Jew will stand up for another Jew. It is very rare we get support elsewhere (but very heartwarming when we do). I have never in my life felt this way, until recently. Until October 7th. Please know that we Jews need more than silence right now. We need hugs, we need comfort. Thank you so much to those that have given me that support, it means the world to me.
This article is about fighting for empathy, about fighting against racism and bigotry, and about fighting to educate our younger generation to value seeking truth, seek humility, and above all humanity. I pray that we are raising a generation of truth-seekers, and I thank you again Peter for being one of the voices against the darkness and injustice that we feel simply for being Jewish.
Dear Sharon, you are not alone! There are tens of millions of us in this country who reject any ideology that finds justification for such unspeakable horrors.
Peter, thank you for speaking out.
It takes a lot of courage to grapple with the legacies left by long history and intergenerational trauma, and to sift through our collective responsibilities to one another in the face of complex conflicts. Even more courage, to do such grappling publicly.
It means a lot to your fellow Wiltonians, particularly those of us who are Jewish, for you to make the effort. Thank you for doing so, and also to GMW to providing the space.