This year on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Twitter account shared pictures of Holocaust victims who had been turned away by the United States. The thing you notice when you look at pictures like this is how normal everyone looks. These are not people about to be victims of a horrible genocide, these are people hanging out at the beach, people on a date, kids at school.

These are people living normal, everyday lives, different only from ours in that they are better dressed than us and they don’t have cell phones. There was normal life … and then there wasn’t.

As a parent I wonder, what is the thing to do if normal life is ending? Do you prepare your children for what’s coming? Do you try and toughen them up as quickly as possible or do you try and give them as many memories as possible of “normal life”?

On Saturday we learned that the President’s executive order on immigration was ruining the lives of people already legally in the United States. We learned that Steve Bannon is now on the Security Council and that the Attorney General in Illinois has filed a lawsuit that could mean my husband, a state employee, will stop getting paid in March.

I took my daughter out to a nice dinner and a live show.

Her bat mitzvah is in six weeks and there are days when I think “Oh, we don’t really need centerpieces, we should cancel them and save some money” and there are days when I think, “This may be the last nice party we ever have, let’s throw some champagne in to the mix.” If by May we will no longer have a home, if by June her best friend will be living in a camp for Muslims, if by next year we’ll all be dead, let’s live it up while we can. Perhaps the memory of when everything was normal, of living in a nice home in a normal country, perhaps that will be enough.