I was walking through Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel and one of the most haunting places in the world, when I stopped to listen to a video from an elderly female survivor.
She was talking about the questions she got after the war, including “Why did Jews (like her) willingly board the Nazi trains if they knew those trains were going to concentration camps?”
She explained that they didn’t know. That the Nazis often forced other Jewish people, under the threat of death, to stand on the train platforms and lie, assuring the passengers being herded into boxcars that they were going to new jobs and new homes. The Nazis even gave them phony receipts after taking all their money, claiming they could exchange them for foreign currency once they arrived in their new “resettlement.”
Of course, there was no resettlement. When the boxcar doors opened, the Jews were greeted with snarling dogs and pointed guns. They were shoved into lines, and those deemed too old, too young or too feeble were murdered the same day. Many were led to gas chambers disguised as showers. They were told to strip, crowd inside, and wait by the faucets.
No water came out. Instead, poison gas soon left a chamber full of corpses, which were lugged to a nearby crematorium and burned. A survivor once recounted, when she asked where the rest of her family was, how a Nazi pointed to the plumes of smoke rising from the crematorium chimneys and said, “There.”
This is not a maybe. This is not up for debate. This is fact — stark, horrible, evil fact — told again and again by the people who were forced to endure it.
Yet this weekend, on the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day, recent surveys show that one in five young Americans believe the Holocaust was a myth.
A myth?
How a lie systematically becomes the truth
The story I recalled from my Yad Vashem visit became the inspiration for a novel I wrote last November called “The Little Liar.” In two years of research for that book, I came to understand something critical. The Nazis weren’t able to do what they did because they had bigger guns. They did it because they had bigger lies.
Beginning with Adolph Hitler’s great lie to his people that Jews were the cause of their troubles, he stacked one falsehood atop another and sizzled them in hate. He manipulated the government. He manipulated the language. He called the law that gave him sweeping powers to discriminate, silence, arrest or destroy the “Law To Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich.”
Remedy the stress? Who wouldn’t want a law like that? But it was a sham, a cover, as were all the Nazi lies about Hitler’s territorial ambitions, or his “resettlement” plans for undesirables, like Jews, Catholics, Romani and others.
The Nazis’ penchant for lying was so vast, they once even covered up a concentration camp. When the Danish Red Cross, in 1944, demanded to visit one of these so-called Nazi “labor camps” because they were hearing about terrible things happening there, the Nazis permitted a visit to a Czechoslovakian camp named Theresienstadt — but only after they did a complete whitewash of the place.
First, they shipped some 7,500 prisoners to Auschwitz, to make Theresienstadt seem less crowded. Then they planted flowers and grass. They cleaned up the prisoners, gave them new clothes, and warned that if they said anything about what really went on there they would be punished. They even staged fake games for the children and a put on a concert at night, carefully guiding every step of where the Red Cross visitors went.
Not surprisingly, the Red Cross was satisfied, they went away quietly, and the Nazis quickly resumed their usual operations at the camp.
That’s worse than lying. That’s a whole new kind of evil.
But this was rule No. 1 in the Nazi playbook. Keep insisting on the deception, no matter how great. As Joseph Goebbels said, “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”
How can some believe this never happened?
Which brings us to those who wish to deny the Holocaust. It is stunning to learn that, according to that poll conducted late last year, 20% of Americans between 18-29 believe the Holocaust is a myth, and another 30% neither agree or disagree with that sentiment. That’s half of all young Americans who can’t declare the Holocaust was a fact.
That is terrifying. Because if Hitler could have had one wish before he died in ignoble defeat, it would be that one day nobody believed he’d tried what he did; that way, someone could try it again.
What is the motivation of people who make claims like this? Is it blatant antisemitism? Deny the past suffering of Jews so you can justify your hate for them today? Or is it simply a lack of education? A 2020 poll revealed that, amongst adults under 40, one in 10 did not recall ever hearing the word “Holocaust,” and 63% were unaware that 6 million Jews were murdered during that time.
Well, if you are in that group you need to make yourself aware. You need to know that two out of every three Jews in Europe were murdered. You need to know that the world’s Jewish population today is STILL smaller than it was prior to the war, thanks to the Nazis’ massive slaughter.
You need to know millions of other people were slaughtered during the Holocaust as well, that homosexuals and disabled people were shot in cold blood, that Romani and Sinti were considered an inferior race and were raped, tortured and killed whenever they were discovered.
You need to know that Catholics were outcasts, and that the Dachau concentration camp had an entire wing for Christian pastors, and that the Nazis’ future plans for the church included replacing all Bibles with copies of “Mein Kampf” and replacing all crosses with swastikas.
You need to know the continued cost of that horrific period of history, because it is not ancient, it was just 80 years ago. The world is still feeling its effects.
I was speaking with a man last week whose father escaped the Nazis in Greece, although most of his family was wiped out, and whose mother was pulled from a line at the last minute, a line being taken off to their certain deaths. After the war, the couple met, married and had a son.
The boy’s name was Albert Bourla. He is now the CEO of Pfizer. Under his guidance, his company developed the first approved vaccine for COVID-19, which helped save millions of lives.
Yet for every Albert Bourla who is in the world today, this are millions of scientists, lawyers, authors, singers, woodworkers, plumbers, loving mothers and doting fathers who are not and never will be, because a madman and his mad nation engineered the systematic murder of their would-have-been ancestors.
This is not arguable. This is not a debate. This is cold, hard history. It’s worth noting while 20% of young people in that survey labeled the Holocaust a myth, not a single person over 65 did. This means the old know better. And it means those who remember must teach those who do not.
If they don’t, those young people may, one day, sadly, learn it from personal experience.
Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him @mitchalbom.
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