Why do we have to remember the Holocaust? How do we know it was six million?
“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” — Heinrich Heine
Ask anyone from the current generation (and when I say current generation, I mean anyone under the age of twenty-one) about the Holocaust or “Shoah” in Hebrew meaning catastrophe and what do you think they can tell you?
Do you think young people today with all the information at their disposal such as the internet, Wikipedia, all the social media and everything else available to them can give you an answer about the Holocaust? Do you think they actually understand the scope, the scale, the planning that it took to murder over one million children and a total of at least 6 Million Jews in Europe? Do you think they know what the “Final Solution” was? That it took planning by architects, medical professionals, engineers, scientists, people from all aspects of politics, lawyers and people who were previously friendly with Jews to plan an annihilation. Do you think they know that companies such as IBM, Coca-Cola, Mercedes Benz, Volks Wagon and countless others profited from the “Final Solution”.
Do you think in our modern, democratic, technologically advanced, diversified and activist society our current generation can comprehend why the world chose to turn it’s back on the Jewish people? Or do they even know the Jews have always been the scapegoat for all the world’s problems? Because supposedly Jews control everything, media, finance, politics if you so choose to believe. Consider this; our current pandemic started in China, not many Jews there. Oh I’m not blaming the Chinese people for the pandemic, I’m just pointing out the fact it had nothing to do with the Jews, a logical fact.
I don’t think so. I think they hear about Palestine and Israel in the news and they jump on the bandwagon with the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) without knowing anything about the struggle of the Jewish people. Yet we’re not boycotting China though their human rights policies are certainly no secret of being one hundred percent anti-human.
They don’t read history or if they do read anything they read a narrative of the so called poor and disenfranchised Palestinians (who’s leaders live like kings while their people struggle). This generation knows nothing of the fact that we were the indigenous people of Judea and Samaria who were expelled from our land and the original translation of Palestinians literally meant “invaders”.
Do you think young people today know anything about the fact that the Palestinians actually had their own Nazi units or that the Mufti of Jerusalem collaborated with Hitler and his regime to keep Jews from coming back to their beloved Israel? It was the large number of Jews coming back to the land that scared the Palestinians so much. A Jewish state was exactly what they didn’t want. They didn’t want a democracy living next to them or to be more precise they didn’t want Jews living next to them. Why give back land you don’t actually own? Why not just get rid of the problem like a bug that keeps coming back, say a roach or worse a rat.
No, I’ll bet they don’t know that there were cartoons in the papers and in the streets characterizing the Jew as a roach or a rat that must be stomped out.
No they listen to rap and they hear very often the word “ghetto” knowing nothing about the true Ghetto or the origins of that word. And if you know nothing about the origin of the word ghetto I’ll give you a short history lesson. It was originated in Italy specifically in Venice (which was its own republic by the way). It was a wall that was built back in the medieval days to separate the Jews from the rest of society. That’s why the word was used to describe black neighborhoods in America. Because they built a wall to separate the black people from the rest of the city. What you know as a ghetto today is a luxury complex compared to the Jewish ghettos of Nazi Germany in Europe.
That was step one, to gather all the Jews from every corner of Europe and put them in a ghetto where they weren’t allowed to leave. They took away their citizenship, their jobs, their homes, their belongings, but most of all what they tried to take away was their souls. Part of step one was to start starving the Jews since they had no jobs now, they had no means to buy food. The other part was to herd them into the worst of the city’s neighborhoods like cattle.
Oh at first they just started shooting people in the street, no records were kept of random shootings. But the Germans were so proud of what they were doing they actually used census reports (cards provided by IBM by the way) to gather information on the number of European Jews.
But random shootings and later gassing Jews in trucks wasn’t fast enough. They weren’t dying fast enough so the Germans had a dinner at a mansion on a lake that was previously owned by a Jewish family and planned a annihilation of an entire people while dinning and drinking wine. And the “Final Solution” was born. Oh but this solution was centuries in the making.
Finally, the gas chambers, and concentration camps and the trains were a solution. Children torn from their mother’s arms, sent to crematoriums to make sure future generations didn’t survive and rise up against the machine that killed their families. Unfathomable atrocities for our current generation to comprehend.
To answer my own questions, why do we have to remember the Holocaust? How do we know it was 6 Million? Because it is happening around the world right now and because not that long ago after Pearl Harbor it happened here in our democratic, technologically advanced, activist society to Japanese Americans. No it wasn’t as grand a scale as the Holocaust, but Japanese Americans were rounded up and sent to concentration camps simply for being of Japanese descent. People who were peaceful, decent Americans, accused of crimes against their own county, herded into camps like cattle. Because it could happen tomorrow to any of us.
I am the product of survivors of the Holocaust. My family members in Russia were killed by the Nazis and don’t get me wrong I love America, the country that took me in. But if we don’t educate the youth about what happened just eighty years ago (a sneeze in the frame of time on our planet) it is bound to happen again and again. It doesn’t matter where or to whom it happens whether it is in Africa, the middle East, Europe, China, ignorance is something we cannot afford.
