To visit Poland is to walk among ghosts. The thriving Jewish civilization that once filled its towns and marketplaces was almost completely erased. Three million Jews were targeted for extermination — a number too vast to grasp by walking through silent cemeteries. The absence alone cannot speak the full horror.
To stand where synagogues were razed, where schools once taught Torah and arithmetic, where playgrounds once rang with Yiddish laughter, is to feel the emptiness press against your chest. It forces the imagination to repopulate the void — to summon the Jewish ghosts who linger, waiting for conscience to remember them.
It is easier to look at the living. Many Poles today are the grandchildren of those who watched as their Jewish neighbors were rounded up — and sometimes finished the work themselves when survivors returned seeking their homes. They became stand-ins for the killers of yesteryear, heirs to silence, envy, and complicity.
Now another people walks amid ruins. In Gaza, millions return to their shattered neighborhoods under a ceasefire, and we are told they have survived a “genocide” at the hands of Jews. Yet the number of Palestinian Arabs has grown, not diminished — a population larger than before the war they themselves began. They tread among the skeletons of broken buildings built atop their army’s tunnels, while ghosts — Israeli civilians burned alive in their kibbutzim and those taken hostage and murdered in Gaza — cry out from the ashes.
I ponder the ghosts of genocide: the murdered and the murderers; the societies that spawned the slaughter; the peaceful towns that became infernos.
Infrastructure shelters ghosts. Societies are haunted by the ones they create, both killer and killed. The unseen dead can no longer showcase their dancing on the one hand, or lust to murder, on the other.
There are scarcely any Jews left in Poland; their ghosts appear only to those who seek them. In Gaza, the ghosts are not gone. They walk the streets, armed and unrepentant — not spirits of victims, but kinsmen of murderers, now turning on one another.
Poland’s haunting is one of silence — an absence so total it chills the air. The ghosts there do not cry out; they wait to be remembered. Gaza’s haunting is the opposite: a cacophony of rage that refuses reflection. Its ghosts are not silent but screaming — not victims unburied, but hatreds unrepented.
Poland’s soil holds the murdered; Gaza’s streets still host the spirit of the murderers. One ghost asks to be mourned; the other demands to be judged.
The haunting does not end with time. It lingers wherever truth is buried, and it deepens each time the living deny the past that shaped them.
Only when a people can face its ghosts — naming both the murdered and the murderers — can it begin to live freely again.
Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah, is when Jews around the world remember how Nazi Germany systematically slaughtered its own defenseless Jewish citizens. In 2024, the day shared focus with recent events, coming in the shadow of the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7 by Palestinian Arab sadists from Gaza.
To help mark the day, local jihadists in the United States wanted Jews to focus on more than their 6 million Holocaust and newly dead; they sought to have Jews become overwhelmed by anarchy and antisemitic chants.
Pro-Hamas groups assembled at Columbia and Hunter Colleges in a “Day of Rage”
Students chanted in the streets of New York City to “Globalize the Intifada”, to kill Jews everywhere
Columbia University canceled its main graduation ceremony
Hunter College canceled classes and moved online
Police descended onto the streets to protect the Met Gala, even as universities admitted that they couldn’t guarantee safety so capitulated to the mobsters
The Jewish population in Palestine in 1936 was 400,000, and Arabs rioted to stop Jewish immigration and to halt the creation of a Jewish State. The Arabs effectively got the British who were administering the mandate to cap Jewish migration to only 75,000 Jews over the following five years, sealing the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Europe.
The inheritors of that same strain of antisemitism are now rioting in New York City’s streets, this time to destroy the Jewish State.
Telegram from Nazi Heinrich Himmler to Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem about the common enemy of the Jews
The United States in 2024 is not Nazi Germany of the 1930s, but the radical mobs on college campuses are echoes of the Arab riots of the 1930s, seeking to terrorize Jews and alter the government’s position on the Jewish State. Consequently, Jews on this Holocaust Remembrance Day will not just remember the atrocities of the Nazis but of Palestinian Arabs who helped facilitate the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
‘The Zone Of Interest‘ is an unusual Holocaust movie. It shows the daily life of the head of the Auschwitz concentration camp inside his home abutting the vast killing factory. Living a peaceful life with his wife and children, the viewer is struck by the carefree life of the Nazi officer and his family, treating the annihilation of European Jewry as simply a normal 9-to-5 job which supports the family in the way they always desired.
Part of the funding for the movie was from the government of Poland, and its influence can be seen in directing the audience to see that the true evil actors were the German Nazis and not Poles, who were portrayed as trying to help Jews in some way, dropping apples around the camp for Jews who managed to escape. Modern Poles are shown at the end of the film, keeping today’s Holocaust museum at the site tidy for tourists who can view the Jewish possessions which were not seized by the Nazis and their families. The actual rampant Polish Jew hatred is invisible in the film.
Vile Jew-hatred continues today, as do new movies, shows and museums focused on the global scourge. Many contrast past antisemitism to modern Jew-hatred such as the remarkable play ‘Prayer for the French Republic‘ as well as ‘Leopolstadt’. Others are devoted just to the Holocaust like the new museum in Amsterdam. Some try to tie antisemitism into the Arab-Israeli conflict like the opera ‘Death of Klinghoffer.‘
Tragically, many of the works of art about noxious Jew hatred have become awash in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It would appear that Jews being cast as victims – whether with posters of kidnapped Israeli Jewish civilians, or a Holocaust museum – is too much for Palestinian Arab supporters who want to see the Jewish State crushed.
At the March 2024 opening of the new Holocaust museum in Amsterdam, hundreds of protestors gathered outside to shout “Free, free Palestine” and “Viva, viva Intifada,” screaming for the destruction of the Jewish State and murder of Jews.
Anti-Israel demonstrators at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam. Pic: AP
In the U.S., The New York Times published a grotesque opinion that compared Israel’s activities in trying to save its hostages and root out the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre to the Nazi family in ‘The Zone of Interest.’ Over-and-again it wrote of the “military siege of Gaza” and “Israel’s assault on Gaza” in a movie review about a Holocaust film.
NY Times lead opinion piece on March 9, 2024
The author, David Klein, could have stated his opinion about the War From Gaza without attaching his comments to a film about the systematic killing of 6 million Jews but he, and many like him, don’t want to. They want to strip Jews of any protection – offensive or defensive. The end of the article makes clear that he is against supplying Israel with weaponry to prosecute the Palestinian terrorist army of Hamas; appending his opinion to a Holocaust film is designed to also remove America’s shield for Israel at the United Nations and with resupplying the Iron Dome missile defense.
To make his refuse stink a bit less, Klein peppered the “AsAJew” line to protect himself from accusations of antisemitism.
Eli Lake penned an article in Commentary Magazine in March 2024 called “A Brief History of the ‘AsAJew’“. Lake sees this as a phenomenon of far-left diaspora Jews, as even progressives in Israel know that Hamas must be destroyed after the heinous barbarous attack which the terrorist group has threatened to repeat.
Lake described a long history of AsAJews during moments of Jewish suffering appealing to the antisemitic attackers to continue to persecute. He wrote that centuries ago, “the AsAJews of their day lobbied their hosts in the Diaspora to banish or convert the Jewish people to Christianity and to confiscate and burn the Talmud.” He details the story of a man in the 15th century named Johannes Pfefferkorn who converted from Judaism and helped fuel a mini crusade against his former co-religionists.
Times have changed some of the nouns in the anti-Semitic Mad Lib, but the story reads familiar.
Lake wrote, “In the Middle Ages, AsAJew converts were pawns the Church used to spread lies about the Talmud. In 2024, the AsAJews are not converts to Christianity. They are instead converts to the false prophecy of left-wing social-justice activism…. The anti-Semites of the Middle Ages needed AsAJews to provide credentials for the lies that justified their pogroms and expulsions. Today, Hamas and its allies in Iran need the AsAJews to persuade the Hague, European governments, and the White House to delegitimize Israel’s right to self-defense.”
I will add some observations on top of Lake’s. For centuries, antisemites including AsAJews, came for the Jews by attacking the religion itself. They concocted stories about Passover matzah in blood libels and the Talmud teaches black magic. Today’s cohort attack Jews and Jewish history, not the religion. They mock the Holocaust. They claim Jews have no history in the land of Israel and are “colonizers” who stole land from Arabs, and that Jews never had holy temples in Jerusalem so should be banned from prayer in a site that is solely holy to Muslims.
By ignoring religion, the modern day antisemites refuse to carry the antisemitic mantle because they are not attacking the religion, just bad actors who happen to be Jewish. The AsAJew allies provide a wide fig leaf for the charade, much as they’ve done for centuries.
Museums and films devoted to the heinous slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust, which would normally demonstrate the profound need for Jews to have self-determination, are being used by the alt-left and Islamic radicals to argue that Jews should be left to the wolves of Hamas. Some are not as shrill, and offer a tepid “both sides” support, blind to their echoing former President Donald Trump’s Charlottesville remarks.
‘The Zone of Interest’ Winning Best International Film on March 10, 2024, with callout to Israeli and Palestinian victims of terror
As antisemitism scales to terrifying levels around the world, the alt-left and Islamic radicals are turning works of art and remembrances of the deliberate mass butchering of Jews on October 7 and during the Holocaust into calls to attack Jews and the one Jewish State. Many progressive Jews are appalled and are abandoning their former partners-in-crime as now-revealed naked antisemites. But the AsAJews have remained steadfast and will share names and addresses of the Zionists, marking Jews as zealots who need to be punished for the good of mankind once again.
As Israel celebrates its 75th birthday, it is appalling to watch Palestinian Arabs and their supporters turn the remarkable and historic reestablishment of the Jewish state into some sort of offense against Arabs. The inversion of facts turning the Arabs into the victims is a modern day blood libel, attempting to whitewash the historic crimes committed by Palestinians.
Consider the leading anti-Israel voices in the U.S. Congress, Ms. Tlaib (D-MI), Ms. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ms. Omar (D-MN), Ms. McCollum (D-MN), Ms. Newman (D-IL), Mr. Bowman (D-NY), and Ms. Bush (D-MO) who put forward a resolution in congress to commemorate the “Nakba”, which called for 7 million descendants of refugees to be pushed into Israel, ending the two state solution. The anti-Zionist Congresspeople noted that “on November 29, 1947, [the United Nations voted] to partition Palestine into two states against the wishes of Palestine’s majority indigenous inhabitants,” but they simultaneously ignored that the majority of Israelis today are against allowing 7 million Arabs who never lived in Israel a so-called “right of return.” These same Congresspeople claim that the Nakba continues today, with the “ongoing process of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land.”
The Palestinian Arabs committed massacres against the Jews in Palestine in the 1930s, and effectively got the British to stop Jewish immigration just as the European Holocaust was starting. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem met with leading Nazi Heinrich Himmler to encourage his genocide of the Jews. Himmler sent a telegram to the mufti on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, noting that both the Nazis and Palestinian Arabs were partners in a fight to eradicate the Jews.
After the slaughter of 6 million Jews, the Arabs in Palestine did not let up on the local Jews nor Holocaust survivors who had lost everything. The Arabs continued to reject a Jewish presence in the Jewish historic homeland. They voted against partitioning the land and giving a slice of the Jewish holy land for a new Jewish state. They opted to wage a war to annihilate the persecuted Jews. Thousands of Arabs left the field of battle as they encouraged five Arab armies to converge on the nascent Jewish state to annihilate the Jews completely.
This is the vile truth of the Arab war against Jews before, during, and in the shadow of the Holocaust. No amount of NakbaWashing will remove the indelible stain of Palestinian Jew hatred. The current pathetic attempts at Nakbawashing are a latest form of antisemitism, disgustingly turning the Jews into aggressors and Palestinian Arabs as peace-loving victims.
In November 2005, the United Nations decided to mark the anniversary of the liberation of the few surviving Jews from the Auschwitz Death Camp in Poland on January 27, 1945, as an International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On that day, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that the Holocaust is “a unique evil which cannot simply be consigned to the past and forgotten.”
The reality is that the lust for Jewish blood is very much a part of the present.
In December 2022, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) published its latest poll. It showed a dramatic spike in the number of West Bank Arabs in favor of killing Israeli Jews. The gap in Jewish blood lust between Gazans and West Bank Arabs was at the narrowest level since the Second Intifada / Two Percent War.
The results of the PCPSR poll were depressing, showing Palestinian support for terrorism against Israeli Jews and a rejection of a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict. In particular, Arabs showed vigorous support for new terrorist groups emerging in Jenin which had committed a number of deadly attacks inside of Israel.
On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance, when the world pretends in understands #NeverAgain, the Israeli Defense Forces launched a raid to capture several terrorists in Jenin who had committed, and were planning to launch, terrorist attacks. The IDF was successful in eliminating several terrorists when the Arabs opened fire on the soldiers, and left Jenin without the loss of any IDF troops. Two West Bank civilians were killed according to reports from Arab media.
About twelve hours earlier, U.S. forces killed a top leader of the Islamic State and ten other fighters in a raid in Somalia, without the loss of any American troops. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the terrorist “was responsible for fostering the growing presence of ISIS in Africa and for funding the group’s operations worldwide, including in Afghanistan.”
And just a few hours before the U.S. raid, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said “terrorism remains a global scourge — an affront to humanity on every level. It affects people of all ages, cultures, religions and nationalities.” Indeed, as the U.S. and Israeli raids against terrorism highlighted.
But there’s an important difference.
Gutteres pointed out that terrorism “is a global scourge” which impacts all religions and nationalities. Lloyd Austin mentioned that the Islamic State was building a base “in Africa… worldwide, including in Afghanistan.”
But Palestinian terrorist groups are only coming for the Jews, and the majority of Palestinian society supports them. These terrorists are not a fringe radical group but represent a mainstream sentiment. That desire elected a Holocaust denier to the presidency in the last Palestinian election and will likely vote a terrorist as president in the next.
Many actively deny this reality. We pretend that targeting Jews was “consigned to the past” and the occasional terrorist attack in Israel is part of a “global scourge” which “finds its home in vacuums” as Gutteres opined.
It’s not. It’s grounded in a perverse anti-Semitism.
As we remember the 6 million Jews murdered by Nazis and their collaborators, let us not forget the “unique evil” was that Jews were systematically targeted for annihilation. So it was in Europe in the 1940’s, and remains so among Palestinian Arabs in the holy land today.
The United Nations will lead its Holocaust Commemoration with portraying Jews as refugees, rather than as slaughtered defenseless victims.
On January 27, 2023, the United Nations will mark the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust under the theme “Home and Belonging”. It will include several exhibitions, the major one called “After the End of the World: Displaced Persons and Displaced Persons Camps.”
In describing the event, the U.N. wrote “Victims of the Holocaust had their homes, their nationalities, and sense of belonging ripped from them by the Nazis and their racist collaborators.” While true, the world doesn’t mark the event because of a civil war in which Jews and others became homeless.
It is not why the U.N. created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, which said “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.”
It is not why societies created Holocaust memorials to mark the targeted torture and slaughter of the most persecuted people in the world.
Sculpture in Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Austria (photo: First One Through)
It is not why Germany and other Nazi collaborators pay reparations to Holocaust survivors for their slave labor, imprisonment, cold-blooded murder of family members and theft of all their possessions.
It is not why many countries made Holocaust denial and the selling of Nazi paraphernalia a crime.
No, the world has seen many wars, countless refugees and significant homeless. The U.N. could run an event for these people under the banner “Home and Belonging” and bemoan those who had “their homes, their nationalities, and sense of belonging ripped from them,” with exhibitions about displaced persons camps.
But it is vulgar for a Holocaust commemoration.
This is the global body whitewashing the barbarous crimes inflicted on Jews to make it more universally appealing to anti-Semites, and it undermines the education it should be imparting, specifically to these people. It is a new insidious form of Holocaust denial, put on the world stage with Jews and elderly survivors acting as dupes.
Yes, homelessness and the existence of millions of refugees are sad issues that should be addressed. It is true, that anti-Semitism and racism are deep flaws in wide swathes of society.
But that’s not the essence of the Holocaust. It was an evil government systematically torturing and annihilating a segment of its own defenseless citizenry, often with the endorsement and participation of other citizens.
Marcher over Brooklyn Bridge during March Against Hate on January 5, 2020, protesting the ongoing physical attacks against Jews. (photo: FirstOneThrough)
If one wants to commemorate the Holocaust for the tastes of modern audiences, focus on stopping violence, especially against Jews. The United Nations’ approach of sanitizing the targeted genocide of Jews by making an appeal for refugees is seemingly a sinister attempt to mark the Jewish State as modern day Nazis who forced Palestinians into statelessness, and paint the U.N. into saviors of Jews in the 1940’s and of Arabs today.
It’s an outrageous lie at its foundation, and deeply anti-Semitic to promote during a Holocaust event.
To spend time in Berlin, Germany is to be surrounded by echoes of the Holocaust. The silhouettes of Jewish victims can be seen in the memorials of concrete coffins emerging from the ground, brass plaques cemented into the sidewalks, sculptures of men, women and children atop pedestals, and the anti-Semitic edicts drawn on placards hoisted on street poles.
Berlin monument for German non-Jewish women seeking to save their Jewish husbandsBerlin monument for Jewish women and children in front of destroyed Jewish cemeteryStatues in Berlin, Germany commemorating the Holocaust
The small community of Israeli Jews who moved to the epicenter of the Jewish genocide since World War II have made a peculiar peace with this past. Some came when the city was divided in two and settled in West Berlin, and others are recent arrivals, former Ukrainians and Russians who prefer Eastern Europe to the Middle East.
They all know the city’s history and they know the oddity that they represent.
Speaking to these Israeli Jews about their relationships with German neighbors is a course of curiosity and incredulity. They offer that perhaps as many as 20% of Germans today are Nazi sympathizers much like their grandparents, and a similar percentage probably don’t think about the past at all. The Israeli-German residents estimate that most non-Jewish Germans are embarrassed about their legacy but don’t want to hate their own flesh-and-blood. Such Germans are left in an awkward situation when they talk with Jews: the unsympathetic descendants of murderers are engaged with the much more sympathetic descendants of their victims, creating an unbalanced state.
The Jewish Berliners dislike the dynamic, and argue that today’s generation of Germans cannot be held responsible for the sins of the past. They argue that today’s Germans have atoned as best they could through memorials and compensation to survivors. These Jews offer that they bemoan the preferred position they have in society as children of victims; they do not want such inherited status. Instead, they seek their righteous rank earned from sympathizing with the challenging constellation that places today’s Germans alongside Jews. The Jews and Germans are equally inheritors of the past, no more, no less.
Today in Berlin, I heard Jews talk about two different Children of the Holocaust. While I have long been familiar with children of Survivors like myself, it was shocking to hear some Jews relate to the grandchildren of Nazis as victims as well, albeit of familial reputational stain rather than of genocide. Perhaps that is how these new German Jews live surrounded by Jewish and Nazi ghosts: imagining that today’s Germans live with those same ghosts as well.
Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, continues below ground with stories of Jewish families destroyed by the Nazis. It sits one block from the Brandenburg Gate, a monument used by Germans to celebrate their power and freedom.
Blinken never mentioned Israel in his speech, yet it was featured prominently on the US embassy in Israel’s website, including a link to the video and the full text. One could not find a link to the speech on the websites of embassies to other countries (also not mentioned in the speech), except for Italy.
One must assume that the US government opted to post a speech about the genocide of the Rohingya on Israel’s website because the Holocaust was about the annihilation of Jews, and Israel is the only Jewish State. It is unclear why Italy was also selected.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken at US Holocaust Memorial Museum, March 21, 2022
In his remarks, Blinken mentioned the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya from regions of Burma but has never discussed the Jordanians ethnically cleansing the Jews from Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem in 1948-9.
Blinken talked about the Burmese military’s so-called “Clean and Beautiful Nation” activities which led to atrocities, but neglected to mention the popular Palestinian political-terrorist group Hamas’s 1988 charter (article 3) which urges everyone to “raise the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors, so that they would rid the land and the people of their [Jews] uncleanliness, vileness and evil.“
Blinken also discussed “Burma’s 1982 citizenship law, which effectively excluded Rohingya from citizenship and denied them full political rights, echoing the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of their German citizenship,” but has thus far refused to similarly call out the 1954 Jordanian citizenship law which specifically excluded Jews.
Blinken noted the Burmese “dehumanizing hate speech,” in which “Rohingya were compared to fleas, to thorns, to an invasive species,” but hasn’t called out Palestinian Authority officials who call Israel “the greatest cancer,” and the leader of Iran who similarly called Israel “a cancerous tumor.“
Blinken knows the warning signs and said “Understanding the contours of this [genocidal] path is a core part of the Holocaust Museum’s mission. It’s crucial to all of us who are committed to living up to the maxim of “Never again.” By learning to spot the signs of the worst atrocities, we’re empowered to prevent them.“
The current United States government clearly understands that the Holocaust relates to Jews and the importance of the subject to the Jewish State. So one must wonder why it deliberately ignores the genocidal behavior of Israel’s Arab and Muslim neighbors.
Regrettably, it may be because the current administration is adopting the Palestinian Arabs’ false narrative that Israel was created because of the Holocaust, blinding US officials to the deeply-instilled anti-Semitism in many parts of Arab society.
The Holocaust decimated the Jewish population in Europe from 1939 to 1945. After the war, the vast majority of the remnant of European Jewry moved to either France, the United States or the Mandate of Palestine. Just three years after the end of the genocide of the Jews, the modern state of Israel was born.
Many people believe that the world endorsed the notion of a Jewish State because of the terrible tragedy which befell the Jews. While some countries may have indeed voted at the United Nations in favor of recognizing Israel because of the Holocaust, its reestablishment was sponsored by the global community years before World War II.
First by the British in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, then by the League of Nations in the 1920 San Remo Agreement and the 1922 Mandate of Palestine, the leading countries of the world supported Jews reestablishing their homeland. In the late 1930’s the British specifically called for creating a distinct Jewish State in Palestine. All of these actions were taken before the genocide of European Jewry.
Similarly, God’s promises of the land of Canaan to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob predated the Children of Israel becoming slaves in Egypt. The divine promises for a particular family to have a particular plot of land are found throughout the Book of Genesis and include:
“The Lord appeared to Abram and said ‘To your descendants I will give this land.’” (Genesis 12:7)
“For all the land which you see, I will give it to you and your descendants forever.” (Genesis 13:15)
“To your descendants I have given this land.” (Genesis 15:18)
“And I will give to you and your descendants after you, the land of your sojourning, the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” (Genesis 17:8)
“To your offspring I will give this land” (Genesis 24:7)
The Promised Land is an integral part of Judaism. It is a unique dynamic among world religions that a particular people is tied to a specific parcel of land. The history of Jews in their holy land goes back thousands of years.
Yet people confuse the nature of the Jewish State and how it came to be reestablished in 1948. The global community did not create Israel as a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust; it voted to reestablish the Jewish homeland years before the Holocaust. Further, Zionists do not aspire for a Greater Israel from “the Nile to the Euphrates” the way anti-Semites at the United Nations claim; they want to live, pray and have autonomy in their small patch of the world promised to them by God.
The relevance of the Holocaust to Israel today is about underscoring the absolute imperative of Israel’s security, which means ensuring that the country’s neighbors cannot threaten it. Critical features include: Israel having full control of its borders and airspace; no military for a possible future Palestinian State; no ability for terrorist groups like HAMAS in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon to attack Israel; and most significantly, no nuclear weapons for Iran, the leading state sponsor of terrorism which has threatened to wipe Israel off of the map.
The anti-Zionist false narrative connecting the Holocaust and the Promised Land spins a web of lies that European countries created a safe haven – a metaphorical “Promised Land” – for Jews as a gift to allay its guilt in permitting and participating in the Holocaust, an act of charity taken on the backs of Palestinian Arabs. The slander of original sin of the theft of “Arab Land” to create a Jewish State leads to noxious claims that Jews will continue to try to steal more land as “colonialists” as well as demands that the British apologize for the Balfour Declaration. It falsely inverts the indigenous Jews to invaders; those needing protection to aggressors who must be held in check.
The Promised Land of Israel is an eternal gift from God to the Jewish forefathers thousands of years ago and to their descendants in the present day, not from European nations in response to the Holocaust. The critical lesson of the Holocaust is to protect the Jews in Israel from neighbors who wish to do them harm, politically, economically, militarily and most definitely, journalistically.
Israeli soldiers prepare to enter Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Israel (photo: First One Through)
I came with my parents to Vienna on a heritage trip to see where my grandparents lived and my mother was born before they fled the city in December 1938, just after Kristallnacht.
My grandmother passed away twenty years before the trip when I was a young adult. I remember her telling me about her beautiful apartment just off of Ringstrasse, the famous street that looped through the center of town. She spoke of her governess, her walks in the mountains with her classmates at the edge of the city and the wonderful life the family had.
She had also spoken fondly of Kaiser Franz Josef, of whom I knew nothing. Only years after she died in preparing for the trip did I look him up to see that he was the emperor in Austria when she moved to Vienna as a young child. I audibly gasped when I saw that my grandmother had the same name as one of the emperor’s daughters, and was further shocked to see that my Grandma named my mother after the Archduchess’s daughter.
I was both excited and curious to see her city.
My parents, sisters and I stayed at a hotel on Taborstrasse where my grandmother’s eldest sister had a shoe store before the war. That side of the canal had wide buildings but narrow streets which made it feel more residential than the more regal side of the canal which had the Ringstrasse, the opera house and famous hotels. This neighborhood continues to house most of the city’s Jews – about 8,000 today – and kosher restaurants. It was also around the corner from my grandmother’s first apartment where she lived until her marriage.
We walked to the building, entered the open front door and climbed the stairs of the very wide and somewhat worn large building. In the 1910’s and 1920’s, this building housed many of my grandmother’s relatives, as she was the youngest of thirteen and many siblings married and got apartments right next to the family.
We knocked on the apartment door and explained to the older couple living there why we had come to visit. They were very welcoming and showed us around the small apartment and balcony which had views of the surrounding buildings.
We then continued across the canal to the more affluent side of central Vienna where my grandparents moved after they were married. The stories I heard in my youth led me to believe that my grandparents lived along the Danube River, but the address made clear that their home was actually along a canal which weaved through the city center. At first we walked on the grand Ringstrasse to get to the apartment but it was clear from a map that walking along the canal would be more direct and switched course.
We were all very excited to find the apartment. It was a large corner building with floors which must have been at least twenty feet tall. The first floor of the building on the canal front had a restaurant and retail stores, while the side street was completely residential.
We located the buzzer to her apartment and saw that it was now a law firm. The receptionist seemed nonplussed by our request to come up and buzzed us in.
It was at that moment when we saw the etching in the large wooden double-doors: Jew.
Our excitement melted. The fabricated images of my grandmother’s happy years living in Vienna were washed away by the reason she left.
I rubbed my fingers along each letter to consider whether the vandalism was recent or historic. The engraving was deeper than the surface but not deep through the wood. There was no sawdust or sharp edge to the ‘J’ which was carved the deepest.
Did my grandparents see this? Did my grandmother come home one day after pushing my mother in a stroller along the canal in mid-1938, just after the Nazis were welcomed into Austria in the Anschluss to see that someone was watching her? This fancy apartment was only a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies from her first apartment in the Jewish section of town: was it the local Viennese people who didn’t want her in the neighborhood?
We pushed the thoughts away, entered the building and rode the ornate elevator to the third floor.
The receptionist let us into the apartment and allowed us to roam. The apartment took up most of the floor including the whole front of the building overlooking the canal. We checked out each room, now reconfigured from a very large apartment for four people to a law firm to handle twenty, almost none of whom were present. While many of the walls were original, I could not imagine where or how my grandparents, mother and uncle lived in the space. Only the dining room which served as a large board room provided a seamless setting for the ghosts of my grandparents.
We thanked the receptionist and left.
I stopped at the front door of the building again and took a picture. And then a few more.
Was antisemitism still breathing in Vienna? Was it embedded into the fabric of the city, to emerge as pogroms now and again? In the 1420’s the city’s residents confiscated the Jews’ possessions, burned 200 Jewish adults at the stake and converted the children to Christianity. Under the guide of the cross or orders of the Fuhrer, the city seemed ripe for a match to incinerate its Jews.
My grandparents survived the Holocaust by fleeing Europe a few weeks after the Nazis burned their city’s synagogues and Jewish stores in November 1938. While some of my grandmother’s siblings did not leave and died in the Holocaust, I had never considered my mother or grandparents “Survivors” as they did not go into the concentration camps or have numbers tattooed on their arms like some of my friend’s parents. My grandmother spoke with such love of Vienna, not of pain and torture.
But indeed there was a tattoo. Not on her body, but on the place that she loved.
While the Nazis stole the humanity from Jews tattooing their bodies with numbers, they also marked her home and city. She was not Viennese at all. She was a Jew.
That is the heritage of the Jews of Europe.
More than the government-placed plaque marking the place where the city burned its Jews 600 years ago and the commissioned sculpture of a Jew on his knees scrubbing the streets 80 years ago, the markings on the walls by the people of Vienna reveal the hatred that enabled the slaughters to take place.
I came to Vienna excited to see my grandmother’s city, only to discover it was never hers at all.
First One Through 