Monday, May 6, 2024, marked the beginning of Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom Hashoah in Hebrew, which runs from the Sunday before through the following Sunday.
Yom Hashoah also coincides with the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar and marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 19, 1943.
It is important to remember, however, that the Holocaust didn’t occur overnight. It was a systematic process that resulted in the persecution and ultimate murder of six million Jews.
The first country the Nazis invaded was their own. Long before the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the Nazi party exploited the aftermath of WWI to gain political power while blaming Jews for the economic and societal problems of the country. Jews were also demonized by racist and antisemitic rhetoric.
Overthrowing the democratic Weimar Republic or (2nd Reich), Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933 following electoral victories, and Germany transformed into a dictatorship whereby Hitler began to enact his “Final Solution.” As a result, the rights of Jewish citizens were increasingly stripped away.
Jews were rounded up and forced into ghettos. They would later be sent to concentration camps.
On November 9 &10, the Nazis engaged in violent pogroms (an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group) against Jewish populations in what became known as Kristallnacht or “Night of broken glass.” Jewish property, businesses, and synagogues were destroyed. One hundred Jews were killed, and 30,000 were sent to camps.
Dachau was the first of these camps to open in 1933.
There were 44,000 camps in total serving different purposes.
Among the most notorious were the death camps such as Auschwitz, which the Soviets liberated in January 1945.
2020 marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, where the Allies would discover many of these camps and signs of the atrocities committed.
Despite the countless documented evidence from various sources, there is a troubling trend of holocaust denialism.
Denialism originated with the Nazis themselves, who tried to conceal or destroy evidence of their crimes.
The year is different, but the antisemitic rhetoric is the same.
Regardless of whether it comes from select members of Congress or a foreign country. It’s still present today.
In 2016, Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei posted a holocaust denial video on Remembrance Day. Today, we once again face a rising tide of antisemitism fueled by conflict abroad.
Hamas (officially designated as a terrorist organization in Oct. 1997) has engaged in holocaust denialism. Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, co-founder of Hamas in 2000, said, “The so-called Holocaust is an alleged and invented story with no basis.”
In 2009, Hamas said to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that they would “refuse” to allow Palestinian children to study the Holocaust, which it called “A lie invented by the Zionists,” and referred to Holocaust education as a “war crime.”
Similar rhetoric has also been used by Vladimir Putin in attacking Ukraine, stating that the military invasion’s aim was the denazification of Ukraine — despite President Zelensky himself being Jewish.
Today, Israel finds itself at war with Hamas because of Hamas invading Israel on October 7, 2023. The Palestinian cause has seen support from many quarters in the west, both official and civil, predicated on the treatment of Palestinian civilians by Israeli authorities. It is worth noting that there are Jewish people joining Palestinians in the protest of the casualties in Gaza. Yet, when you see ‘protesters’ at college campuses destroying property and interrupting the daily lives of others, or engaging in violence, your protest loses any moral standing.
It’s been revealed many of these “protesters” are professional agitators who were carrying implements like log chains. Others chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” This is in and of itself antisemitic and has been used by the terrorist group Hamas itself.
Two things can be true at the same time. The casualties in Gaza are disproportionate and are worth acknowledging as excessive. The victimization of Jewish peoples by Hamas, and others around the world, can be just as true as the abuses of Palestinian civilians at the hands of the state of Israel. One should not be permitted to hide behind their own trauma, past and present, as a justification for their abuse of power.
The loss of human life is always a tragedy, especially on such a scale. However, you can’t claim to support the existence of one group while denying the existence of the other. We must remember the past to avoid repeating it’s mistakes.
