Facing the next Holocaust

How many of us still are in wishful thinking mode? Time for an attitude adjustment.

On the occasion of another Holocaust memorial Day, it is a question worth asking: are we facing another one? More than a year and a half since the slaughter of October 7, and the immediate coalescing of Jew-hatred around the world, including the targeting of Israel's Prime Minister by the International Court of Justice, it's time to stop referring to "the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust" and look forward candidly to what is ahead.

When namby pambies mealy-mouth that "Trump is using the Nazi playbook," a look back at Mein Kampf, the actual script Hitler wrote one hundred years ago for the Holocaust and world conflagration, is in order. How far are we down the same path? From the hounding of Jewish students and the exclusion of pro-Israel (read pro-Jewish) voices from Academia, to the firebombing of Jewish homes and the mobs targeting Jews on the streets of our Western "democracies," to the placating of Iran, whose priority in nuclear armament no one doubts is the destruction of the largest concentration of Jews in the world in Israel, how many more parallels does one need?

Trump, by quashing Netanyahu, is actually in appeasement mode as Chamberlain was at Munich in 1938. A year later, the world was at war. Today, our intelligentsia chant "From the River to the Sea" meaning wiping out the Jewish inhabitants from their ancestral homeland, and they parade with blood on their hands, referring to the lynching and dismemberment of a Jew in Judaea, as a crude and unmistakable symbol of their liberal bloodlust.

"Why didn't they get out?" was always the question about the Jews pre-World War 2. The answer is, they did when they could. Anti-semitism can be traced back to the army of Amalek attacking the Jews fleeing Egyption slavery 3, 500 years ago.

So it is time to disentangle the story of anti-semitism from Nazism, and to see it as a continuum of human conflict. It is also time to recognize that far more non-Jews suffer from it. Not only as bystanders, fellow travelers and predators ("What did you do in the War, Daddy?") but as victims. As many non-Jews as Jews died in the Nazi concentration camps.

How much dissent and diversity is alive in Iran, since its pre-1948 Jewish population was ethnically cleansed? Is it not likely that women, gays, and people of other faiths would be left unmolested within their borders, if the dozen Moslem countries over vast expanses surrounding Israel still welcomed Jews.... but the expulsion of nearly a million Jews from all the Moslem countries of Africa and the Middle East after 1948 is not considered in the discussion of population removal.

These perspectives were brought into focus in the 30 years I worked on I Am André, German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy. André's father got visas for his family to relocate from Germany in 1924, a year after Hitler first tried to overthrow the democratic government of Germany in "the beer hall putsch." He got his daughter to safety in the US a month before war was declared in 1939. And yet he and his wife were rounded up by the French police with tens of thousands of others and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz in 1942. The US Department of State would not process their visa applications.

André's father had fought in World War I for the same country that massacred him. His uncles had been top officers in the Polish Army and fought on the side of Germany in the same war. André was a soldier for France, until it capitulated within a month of being invaded in the spring of 1940. Let's now realize Jewish soldiers are welcomed when they fight for the countries in which they live, but in their fight for their own country, now that they have regained the lands of the Bible, they are reviled.

Let's realize that all the concentration camps in Germany ("on Reich territory") were ordered to be "cleansed of Jews" by SS edict from their Oranienberg headquarters on October 5, 1942. This document is also in I Am André. These camps included Dachau, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck, and others including KL Natzweiler, where André survived as a secret Jew, along with many other political prisoners including those in his category of Nacht und Nebel/ Night and Fog, under the decree of the same name. The UN has since declared this kind of "enforced disappearance" a crime against humanity, but neglects the Jewish civilians kidnapped on October 7th by Hamas who also fall into that category.

How did André survive and help others to survive? As he never failed to acknowledge: by luck, but also and mostly by realism. He did not have Anne Frank's sentiment that all people at heart are good. Instead, he instantly and staunchly accepted the dire realities of the Nazi mindset and warned his fellow prisoners of the fate that awaited them if they held onto their cherished liberal faith - assuming that their oppressors held to values they thought they ought to hold.

How many of us still are in wishful thinking mode? Time for an attitude adjustment, I'd say.

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