Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on June 7, 2024

This year, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah, fell on May 6. It commemorates the Nazis attempt to exterminate the European Jews during World War II.

The 2024 observance occurred amid a deplorable upsurge of antisemitism, in the United States but elsewhere as well. Antisemitism is not, of course, a recent phenomenon. It goes back at least to the Middle Ages and was influenced by, among other things, popular superstition, economic resentment and Christian antipathy toward the Jews.

The intervening centuries witnessed anti-Jewish outbursts by such celebrated figures as Martin Luther, who led the Protestant Reformation, French writer Voltaire and Ford Motor Co. founder Henry Ford. There were periodic pogroms including during the First Crusade of the 11th century, the bubonic plague of the 14th century, and at various times in Russian history into the 20th century in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were massacred.

One element of contemporary antisemitism is Holocaust denial. Since the 1970s, groups and individuals expressing this baseless idea have conducted an ongoing campaign that claims that the Holocaust never happened. Their modus operandi is to challenge the factual basis of the Holocaust and question the veracity of its survivors.

Some who question it have endorsed presenting opposing views of the Holocaust as if there were more than one valid interpretation regarding its authenticity. There is not.

Deniers sometimes try to get the unwary to debate the legitimacy of the Holocaust. That would be the equivalent of having a debate with a member of the Flat Earth Society.

Paradoxically, the deniers methods reinforce both the reality of the Holocaust and the utterly spurious notions of denial itself. Hundreds of published personal testimonies by survivors of manifestly traumatic experiences provide evidence that only close-minded persons or those with a specific antisemitic agenda could question.

Among the earliest first-person accounts of this collective anguish, and perhaps the best known, was the late Elie Wiesels searing memoir Night. This short but intensely powerful book recounts the deportation of Romanian Jews (including Wiesel and his family) first to Auschwitz and then eventually to Buchenwald, together with the appalling conditions of the death camps.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed, Wiesel wrote. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Subsequently, other narratives have appeared, many written years later by survivors who were simply unable to come to grips with their ordeal in the immediate aftermath of World War II. While these accounts broadly share a common theme, each is unique in referencing the different locales and the wide variety of personal stories. This lends further credence to the diverse nature and savage inhumanity of the Holocaust.

Equally compelling are the many surviving documents in which the Nazis themselves discussed both their plans and their murderous policies. These were among the massive numbers of records captured by the Allies as the war concluded incriminating evidence that the Nazis didnt have time to destroy.

An especially significant example is a collection of documents called the Einsatzgruppen reports. The Einsatzgruppen were mobile killing squads composed of Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel) and police who proceeded through the western Soviet Union including Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and the Baltic states in 1941-42 in search of Jews to slaughter.

At each stop, they kept a precise, detailed record of the men, women and children they shot in cold blood. At Babi Yar, outside of Kyiv (the capital of Ukraine), more than 33,000 were murdered in the course of two days.

These reports were then sent back to the appropriate government officials in Berlin, where they were filed away. By the end of 1942, no fewer than 1.5 million killings of mainly Jewish civilians had been recorded.

Less well-known participants communicated regularly with their comrades regarding the extermination of Jews at pure death camps in occupied Poland such as Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka pure because, unlike Auschwitz, which was also a slave labor camp, their sole purpose was to kill people. Most of the documents are chillingly matter-of-fact: The perpetrators simply had a job to do, however unpleasant.

Both survivors accounts and Nazi documents are among the vast number of artifacts on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. This collection also includes victims personal belongings, audio and visual recordings and an enormous quantity of photographs. Many of these photos were taken by the Nazis themselves. They were, after all, proud of what they were doing.

The Holocaust is, in sum, a matter of historical record. It happened. Those who suggest otherwise are playing into the hands of antisemites and deniers. Thats not just fundamentally wrong. Its also a moral travesty.

Gene Miller, a Lancaster County resident, taught history at Penn State Hazleton from 1969 to 2004.

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Holocaust denial is a moral travesty and rejection of fact [column] - LNP | LancasterOnline

Category: Holocaust Denial
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