"I had flashbacks," said the 90-year-old man about turning on his television and seeing stories about migrant children being snatched from their parents and imprisoned in cages inside warehouses and box stores along the border. He, too, was separated from his parents — first his mother and little brother, both sent to a place called Majdanek, then his father, taken by boxcar to a slave labor camp.

The 90-year-old man, Holocaust survivor Max Glauben, would never again see his family. They died in the camps — his mother and brother gassed, his father shot. This is what Max Glauben thinks about when he turns on the television and sees stories about children separated from their parent — about being left an orphan.

"If you go through horror, even 70 years later, you get flashbacks," he said Monday from his North Dallas home.

Not even a year ago, Glauben and I sat in his den watching news footage of swastika-waving, Tiki-torch-toting white supremacists marching in Virginia streets, shouting about how "Jews will not replace us." A year before that, in the days before the presidential election — as "fear, fragmentation, and rising strongmen," in the words of The Atlantic, were racing out of the shadows into the spotlight and voting booths — Glauben told me that "the darkest period in our history started the same way."

The co-founder of the Dallas Holocaust Museum has warned us. Again and again and again. And today, he is haunted by yet another echo of his childhood in Poland — one that sounds like a child's yowl.

"Have you ever seen a lost child in a shopping center?" he said Monday. "The screaming? This is the most horrible feeling . When you separate a child from the parent, the child is upset. But so is the parent, who wants to know: Is he going to get shelter, food? What if he gets sick? What will happen? It's a traumatic ..."

BREAKING: Border Patrol releases video of the detention facility in McAllen, Texas.



This is US government video. pic.twitter.com/kOdp5XzuEx — Antonio Arellano (@AntonioArellano) June 18, 2018

He paused. "It's an indescribable feeling. Pain cannot be duplicated. But feelings and emotions can be."

Glauben said he was having trouble articulating what he meant, that words cannot adequately convey what it means to witness this horror duplicated — even in some faint iteration — in the country he has called home since he moved here in 1947, two years after he was liberated from the camps by the U.S. Army.

"The most sincere feeling you can express without opening your mouth," he said, "are the teardrops falling out of your eyes."

In the op-ed heard 'round the world, Laura Bush wrote last weekend that separating children from parents — most seeking jobs or asylum — is "cruel" and "immoral" and "eerily reminiscent of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history." But the Holocaust references are too copious to count.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden tweeted a photo of Auschwitz-Birkenau with a caption that read, "Other governments have separated mothers and children." Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele likened the detention facilities along the border to concentration camps. Holocaust survivor Yoka Verdoner wrote Monday in The Guardian that "what is happening in our own backyard today is as evil and criminal as what happened to me and my siblings as children in Nazi Europe."

There has been blowback, from supporters of this administration and detractors, too, who claim that's a damnation too far. They tell the outraged to calm down, because, after all, these are not death camps, and that the children are not being paraded into showers and gassed.

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard liberal-turned-Trump advocate, beseeched the president to end this policy in a column published Monday on Fox News' website. But in doing so, he wrote that comparing converted Walmarts to Auschwitz "is a form of Holocaust denial, because it makes it seem that the Jews suffered no fate worse than those currently suffered by the children being temporarily removed from their parents."

"But you cannot be a little bit pregnant," Glauben told me Monday. "There may be no loss of life, no starvation, no beatings. But the act of separation is the same. The traumatization is the same."

Even Rupert Murdoch's New York Post noted in an editorial published Sunday night that the comparisons are inevitable. That is especially true, said the editorial, as ICE begins looking at construction of tent cities along the Texas border to detain children for whom there is no room left in the converted box stores.

"You can bet that critics will start calling these Trump's concentration camps, and the term will catch on if they're full of kids," the editorial read.

The Post called for returning to the administration's policy of detaining whole families. Which looks horrible, too, especially since many of them are "fleeing truly horrific situations back home," said the editorial.

"But at least switching back avoids having the U.S. government earning comparisons to the Nazis."

Too late.

The 90-year-old man separated from his parents when he was a young boy told me that when it happens, you become "an island of yourself." And it is a feeling that never, ever goes away.

"It's the most horrible feeling when you lose your parents — the people who cared for you, who provided for you," he said. "It's the feeling you've been thrown into the ocean and asked to swim to shore, all by yourself."