Tolkkinen: After childhood under dictatorship, 97-year-old Detroit Lakes woman has a warning for America

DETROIT LAKES, Minn. - In Detroit Lakes, there’s a 97-year-old woman who has found herself turning off television news lately.

The scenes of ICE-related brutality in Minneapolis have become too searing.

For Elisabeth “Betty” Johnston, they conjure up painful memories of a childhood spent under Nazi rule in Austria. The fear of saying the wrong thing, of getting arrested or killed. The group of young people she witnessed being grabbed and dragged off as she and friends ate at a Vienna restaurant.

She has been warning her neighbors that we in America could be entering a similar era.

“As an American, I see the similarities in the U.S. now, as immigrants are grabbed from their jobs, restaurants, schools, homes and taken to detention centers, like they are criminals,” Johnston wrote in a letter published last fall in the Detroit Lakes Tribune.

That was before federal agents flooded into Minnesota. Before they killed Renee Good. Before Alberto Castaneda Mondragon ended up with brain trauma while in ICE custody. Before they shot and killed Alex Pretti.

Johnston was 9 when Nazis goose-stepped into Austria in 1938, Hitler’s first incursion into foreign territory.

“Trump has created an authoritarian U.S., and has turned our representative democracy into a fascist country,” she wrote. “I love living in the USA. Please heed my warnings. I understand what it means to be occupied and the ramifications of all of the changes happening in the United States.”

After the war, Johnston told me last week, she worked for the Americans, who were viewed not just as liberators but as genuinely good guys.

She met a young corporal named Lyle Johnston from Minnesota and ended up moving here and marrying him at age 19. For years, they ran a plumbing and heating business in Detroit Lakes. She said she has voted for Republicans as well as Democrats over the years and that she decided from the start that she was going to be the best American she could be.

At church, Johnston often speaks her native language with Roy Hammerling, professor emeritus of religion at Concordia College in Moorhead. She and Hammerling have much in common. His parents also grew up in Nazi-occupied Europe. His mother, 90, grew up in Poland and is also alarmed by what is happening in America.

As Germans living in Poland, Hammerling’s mother’s family enjoyed German protection and didn’t realize the horrors inflicted by the Nazis until the war ended, he said. His mother lives in California now and belongs to the conservative Missouri Synod branch of Lutheranism.

We shouldn’t compare our government to Nazi Germany lightly. And certainly nothing that has happened can compare to the millions of Jews and others who died in the Holocaust. But we also shouldn’t look away from the similarities to the regime’s early days and the tactics of many other dictators in history.

The anti-trans messaging during Trump’s campaign. His repeated attacks on the “radical left.” His attacks on universities. How he has turned undocumented immigrants into scapegoats for the country’s ills.

Trump has sent masked thugs into our streets. That has escalated since his first term, when unknown agents took people off the streets in Portland, Ore., and whisked them away in unmarked vehicles.

And straight from any dictator’s playbook, the Trump administration has attempted to squash independent journalism, with some success.

Even our ability to criticize the federal government began to erode last year with the detention of residents who expressed pro-Palestinian views. Now the U.S. Department of Justice has launched investigations into Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey following their criticism of ICE.