My two genocides

Palestinians bury the bodies of 48 Palestinians, handed over by the Israeli army through the Kerem Shalom border crossing, in a mass grave in the city of Rafah, on March 7, 2024. (Photo: © Mohammed Talatene/dpa via ZUMA Press APA Images)

“‘Where Was the World …"

"The original Yiddish publication of Elie Wiesel’s Night was
And the World Remained Silent.

'Where was the world?’
reiterated Wiesel in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

The Germans did their utmost to keep the truth at bay.

“A glorious page of history that’ll never be written.”

SS chief Heinrich Himmler

Enmeshed in two genocides I am: the first, the Holocaust, took place in Europe during World War II; the second, in occupied Gaza, set off by Hamas’ onslaught on Israel on October 7, 2023. I came into the world on November 1, 1943. Place of Birth: Camp Westerbork, a transit camp in the northeastern Holland. By then, some 100,000 Dutch Jews and several hundred Sinti and Roma had been deported to the death camps in Poland. I am a victim of that genocide, neither perpetrator nor bystander. As for Gaza, there I am complicit, if only because the slaughter of 6,000,000 European Jews, including 1.5 million children, serves as a cover for the ongoing genocide in West Asia. Put differently: “Gaza” is the first genocide carried out in my name.

George Santayana’s oft-quoted dictum that those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it assumes that we can learn from history, provided we make the effort. “History teaches but has no pupils,” Ingeborg Bachmann’s terse formulation is rather more apposite. And yet, “memory” made me a historian, a historian of the Holocaust, in duty bound to record and record and record. Between 1996 and 1998, I directed the Oregon Holocaust Research Center when it was located at Pacific University in Forest Grove. I had no illusions about the human capacity to do their worst, but nonetheless persevered in what I knew to be a quixotic enterprise in the belief that writings and teaching might do some good after all.

Now I feel used. The very scholarship that’s been my life has been appropriated by the genociders.

But now I feel used. The very scholarship that’s been my life has been appropriated by the genociders. I am appalled at the silence of Holocaust Centers and Holocaust museums everywhere, the weaponizing of antisemitism and other forms of brutalizing intimidation. Horrified by the moral bankruptcy of the US, Israel’s chief supplier of arms and genocidal co-sponsor, backed up by European vassals like Germany, Holland, and France, countries that like their feudal overlord have genocidal and colonial blood on their hands. Deep-rooted exterminatory propensities die hard. Not so very long ago, the Dutch and the French did their part in helping the Nazis carry out the routines of destruction. At his trial in Jerusalem, deportation czar Adolf Eichmann reported that the task of making the Netherlands Judenrein – “Jew-free” – was never a problem. “Too many functionaries carried out the occupier’s dictates,” acknowledged then Netherlands’ Prime Minister Mark Rutte in 2020 at the nation’s Holocaust commemoration. In France, the mass deportation of Jews to the gas chambers was a collaborative effort on the part of the French police, ministry officials, and railway managers.

What’s more, Holocaust survivors like me are being actively recruited to come out in support of Israel.

The original Yiddish publication of Elie Wiesel’s Night was And the World Remained Silent. “Where was the world?” reiterated Wiesel in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

The Germans did their utmost to keep the truth at bay. “A glorious page of history that’ll never be written,” SS chief Heinrich Himmler declared. Deception was integral to the destructive process. My family had been designated for deportation to Theresienstadt, the so-called Musterlager (Model Camp) in the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. (We never left Holland, however). In 1944, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), allowing itself to be hoodwinked, reported that conditions in the camp were favorable. The Germans needn’t have worried, it turns out. Today’s genocide in Gaza is being livestreamed. Within the parameters of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, the verdict, an open and shut case, should have been in long ago. But so far, the outcry has been blunted at every turn by the US and genocidal stakeholders abroad.

“I see in the streets that the gentiles are happy and gay and that nothing touches them,” writes sixteen-year-old Moshe Flinker, a Dutch-Jewish refugee hiding in Brussels under an assumed identity, in his diary in January 1943:

               It is like being in a great hall where many people are joyful and dancing, and also where there are a few people who are not happy and who are not dancing. And from time to time, a few people of this latter kind are taken away, led to another room, and strangled. The happy, dancing people in the hall do not feel this at all. Rather, it seems as if this adds to their joy and doubles their happiness.

While it is true that Israel’s genocide has not gone unnoticed, including arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, it is also true that to date the slaughter has continued unabated, as has the frontal attack on those committed to stand with Gaza. We can’t wait to let history judge.