By Samantha Wilson
This January 27th we are nearing the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – nearly 77 years have passed – and although there are still survivors to provide their first-hand testimonies we are seeing more and more stories of people denying or distorting the Holocaust. As this final generation of survivors is waning it’s vital to take the time to learn from them and hear their stories.
There is a famous saying from George Santayana, stating “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” There is no doubt about the importance of this statement in relation to the Holocaust – a time when six million Jews were murdered. Of these six million, one and a half million were children. Throughout the Holocaust, Jews were rounded up and put in cattle cars – then they were sent to concentration camps. Others were forced to live in ghettos with little food or medicine, and would slowly starve to death and die of diseases. Still, others went into hiding, living day-by-day, wondering when they would be discovered and sent to a concentration camp. The Nazis kept meticulous records both photographic and written yet we are seeing a resurgence of people such as Ye denying their history and worse we are seeing people continue to blindly follow him rather than listen and respect those who lost virtually everything but their own lives. Why? My own conclusion is that for some it’s easier to be a follower and to hate who you don’t know than admit that humankind is capable of committing these atrocities.
There were over 40,000 camps and ghettos during the Holocaust in which the Nazis carried out their systematic killing. Still, the Holocaust did not start with deportations, concentration camps, or ghettos – it started with words… words of hate, loathing, and antisemitism about people many did not know but felt were easy to victimize. Knowing this was how the seeds of the Holocaust started – how can our generation so easily turn to hate? Again, my own answer is that following these hate-filled sites and influencers is easy – the internet has made it easy to spew hate.
What we need to do is make standing up to hate easier. Years upon years of antisemitism and hate speech across Europe normalized hate against the Jews. The Holocaust showed us it becomes easier to denigrate and and later kill those you hate – that words lead to hate, and hate leads to actions, and actions can lead to murder. An organization known as the Conference On Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) has conducted several Holocaust knowledge and awareness studies over the past few years. According to a recent Claims Conference study on Millennials and Gen Z in the United States: 63 percent of respondents do not know that six million Jews were murdered and 36 percent thought that “two million or fewer Jews” were killed during the Holocaust.
What makes this worse is that one of the details we do learn in school – or should learn – is the number of those murdered so either people aren’t learning or don’t believe the number. What is even scarier is a 58 percent believe “something like the Holocaust could happen again.” This should concern us all. The Holocaust wasn’t that long ago… in fact, it is recent enough for their still to be over 200,000 survivors around the world so with so many who can provide their history – how can we possibly be ignoring it?
A few years ago I interviewed two Holocaust survivors. One in particular always stuck with me. Sidney Zoltak and his family escaped their ghetto in the darkness of night, wandered into the forest and eventually were helped by virtual strangers who hid him and his parents for nearly 18 months. The last 7 months he didn’t see sunlight and they were unable to fully stand.
Sidney told me: “After the Holocaust we thought there wouldn’t be any more genocides in the world, but after many more have happened in Darfur and the Balkans and other places where groups were just murdered because the ones who had the power didn’t like them. One of the factors that contributed was for good people and the free world to do absolutely nothing about it. One of the things is to be bystander, or complacent or be indifferent is to be a contributor to genocide. Even in the schools when you have bullying – if you have bystanders and you see bad things happening and they don’t react in a positive way they are contributing to the situation. The world has to understand the Holocaust was a genocide – a very unique genocide that didn’t happen in a couple of years. It started with the emergence of Hitler in 1933 until 1945 and not many wanted to help Jews and those who were complacent and indifferent contributed to those who died – so the world should not be complacent.”
Simply put, we can all do better. Hate speech and the continued advancement for years ahead of the Holocaust led to acts our generation can’t even begin to fathom, yet many are ignoring or denying it. We must do more than simply ignore voices such as Ye…we must stand up and spread the word of survivors who are with us, those who have died and those murdered. Otherwise one day our past can become our future.
