The “Holocaust” Is Not The Right Focus!

Written by Jerry Elman, April 19, 2023

Yesterday was Yom Hashoah, the annual remembrance of the Holocaust in Israel and among the 16 million Jews in the world today! Yesterday was just another day for most of the other 3 billion plus people!

Holocaust commemorations have a peculiar repeating uniformity to them. For this reason, I have avoided them for years, even as the son of survivors. I taught a class instead as my way to honor and remember the 6 million who perished, along with the survivors, most of whom are no longer with us.

The events seem to go through the motions of remembering something horrible without wanting to understand and really address the realities of what happened and why. Many of the factors that led to the Holocaust exist today! We just look the other way!

The murder of six million Jews was the result of something much bigger than the Holocaust. We are being too simplistic in recognizing and remembering the Holocaust alone!

My problem with Holocaust remembrances and even much of Holocaust education is that they speak of Nazism in simplistic terms as a warning against intolerance and hate. They recall the six million Jews who perished. They focus on the Holocaust and the genocide of millions as a single period or event in history that had a time bounded start and finish.

And every remembrance ends with everyone repeating the words “Never Again” or “Never Forget!” We don’t say, “Never Let It Happen Again!” That makes it much more complicated, which it is! That means doing more than just going to remembrance events!

What truly led to the Holocaust is avoided. Acknowledging that almost every country in the world was complicit in looking the other way while Hitler exterminated the Jews is not part of accepted history and Holocaust education. And worst of all, acknowledging that WW II was a war over power and control of Europe and not in any way associated with saving Jews from extermination is also avoided in most discussions and education about the Holocaust. The war was about occupied countries getting their countries back.

Nowhere in any war strategy or policy documents of any country is it stated that one goal of WW II was to save Jews. Nowhere is it documented that there were any deliberate military actions to stop or slow down the killing of Jews.

The reality is the war had nothing to do with saving Jews! Saving Jews was off-limits in every aspect of the Allies fighting the war. But we won’t talk about that! We won’t teach that. We won’t call it out! When we do try to talk about it, we always sugarcoat it with acceptable excuses.

The harsh reality is that most of the world, not just Nazi Germany, wanted to get rid of the Jews for generations. Hitler and the Nazi leaders knew that from the start. What made them different is that they decided to act on it.

As Europe fought Nazi Germany to get their countries and land back, they looked the other way when it came to the extermination of Jews. Why? The answers to that question are the most important things we need to know and understand. Yet we avoid them because it’s too complex and too offensive to address the question and come up with the true answers.

Jews were not welcome and wanted throughout the world long before WW II. And when Jews had the opportunity to flee Nazi persecution, they were not allowed to enter other countries. When they did flee, most were sent back to certain death. Why? Jews were universally hated. Jews were not wanted in most countries they lived in. They lived in most of these countries only because they were kicked out of other countries before that. And when Jews were killed, no one really cared. Jews were meant to be killed. History has repeated that over and over again!

Not a single Nazi death camp, gas chamber, crematorium, or transportation system to the death camps was ever bombed by the Allies. Often factories just miles from the death camps were bombed, but never a death camp close by!

Leaders at the time said that the best way to save the Jews was to focus on winning the war. But those that said that also knew most Jews would already be dead by the time the war ended. They just needed to do nothing to let it happen!

At the end of the war, the leaders were not surprised about how many Jews were killed. They were surprised about how many survived! And they did almost nothing to help those who survived. The countries they fled were still focused on killing them, so they could not go back. No other countries wanted them! They were forced to stay in the same concentration camps with a new label, “stateless refugees!”

So what do we make of these harsh truths when we remember the Holocaust each year? What do we tell and teach in Holocaust education? What do we really do to ensure this never happens again? We say “never again” or “never forget” at an event. And then we go on with our daily lives.

Remembering the Holocaust as a killing event, as genocide alone, downplays the long history of Jewish persecution and ignores the Holocaust’s deeper roots in favor of simplistic moral lessons. It focuses on the gas chambers and crematoriums instead of the broader truth and history. A truth that even exists in today’s world!

We refuse to use terminology that people can understand and calls out exactly what happened then and still happens today! Instead, we call it “antisemitism!” What the hell is that? It takes one to two paragraphs to define what antisemitism is.

It’s a term a German “Jew hater” created in 1879 that deliberately avoids saying, “I hate Jews!”

What is a Semite? A Semite is not really a Jew by definition. The whole term is fabricated for a hateful political agenda by a non-Jew! So why do we embrace this ridiculous term? It drives me crazy!

We need to call it what it is, “Jew Hate!” We teach entire courses of study on it many times just because the term antisemitism is not understood! It comes down to one thing and one thing only. There are lots of people who hate Jews! Always have and always will! People don’t want Jews living among them! Always have and always will! And worst of all, people want Jews gone! Always have and always will.

Let’s cut to the chase! If we stop using the term antisemitism, explaining and understanding it becomes plain and simple! Understanding and eradicating the “hated of Jews” needs to be the focus. That is the real lesson and remembrance of the Holocaust. That is what the six million who perished would want us to focus on in remembering and honoring them!

My personal focus on discussing, writing about, and teaching the Holocaust is focused on understanding and addressing “Jew Hate!” Unless we address Jew-hate as the focus, we will never prevent another Holocaust!

The Full Story!

There is a more detailed telling of the Holocaust, one that recognizes that the 20th century was already among the bloodiest periods in Jewish history before the start of the Nazi genocide. This includes the flight of millions of Jews out of Europe and the way those who remained were delivered to the Nazis by Western immigration quotas and collaboration.

It is a story that begins not in 1939 or 1941 but in 1880.

Jews began their mass flight from Europe following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, an event that sparked mass popular pogroms in the Russian Empire and saw new laws enacted against its already oppressed Jewish subjects. These pressures from above and below slowly increased, culminating in the massacres of the Russian Civil War of 1918-21, which claimed the lives of well over 100,000 Jews.

Most Jews who fled westward in the six decades that preceded the Holocaust went to the United States. Their story is often swallowed up in the larger tale of American immigration, of millions of other Europeans seeking a new life and opportunities in America. But the Jews were not like the Poles, Italians, or Germans who arrived with them at Ellis Island.

Polish and German families sent their young men ahead of the family to establish themselves and make the family’s arrival more comfortable. Italians who found the immigrant life too difficult returned to their home country in large numbers.

Jews behaved differently. Once they decided to leave, they sold everything, boarded ships, and arrived on America’s shores as whole families. They knew they would not be returning. They were fleeing Jew-haters and had nowhere to return to.

Most European immigrants returned to their home countries in huge numbers between 1908 and 1925: 57% of Italians, 40% of Poles, 64% of Hungarians, 67% of Romanians, and 55% of Russians.

Among Jews, the figure was just 5%! The Jews stuck it out in America through thick and thin, prosperity and recession. Other immigrants were seeking a better life; the Jews were running away to save their lives!

As the decades passed, Europe continued to become uninhabitable to Jews. Between the antisemitic May Laws passed by the czar in 1882 and the Nuremberg Laws passed by the Nazis in 1935, many more European states implemented an ever-tightening regime of restrictions on Jewish work, citizenship, and education that would keep Jews out of professions, universities, and ultimately entire countries.

In the summer of 1938, before any German occupier forced their hand, Poland passed a law stripping citizenship from any Jew who hadn’t lived in Poland for the previous five years.

The Nazis, fearful the move would leave them saddled with now-stateless Polish Jews, rounded up 17,000 of them living on German soil and drove them to the Polish border, where they lived in a kind of stateless limbo, refused entry to either Germany or Poland, until the start of the war.

During the standoff, Poland turned to Britain, the US, and the League of Nations, demanding they offer new homes to the unwanted deportees. Poland’s deputy ambassador to London, Count Jan Balinski-Jundzill, warned that terrible consequences awaited the Jews if the West refused. Poland would have “only one way of solving the Jewish problem — persecution.”

It was the same story once the war was underway. Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu didn’t need Nazi propagandists to convince him that the Jews were a problem that needed solving. After the Nazi declaration of war on the Soviet Union, he was thrilled by the opportunity offered by the chaos engulfing Europe. “Romania needs to be liberated from this entire colony of bloodsuckers who have drained the life essence from the people,” he declared of the country’s Jews. “The international situation is favorable, and we can’t afford to miss the moment.”

As the pressure on the Jews grew, so did Western fear of them flooding in as refugees.

In 1910, when the US had already absorbed some two million East European Jews, New York Immigration Commissioner William Williams ended his annual report with a warning: “The time has come when it is necessary to put aside false sentimentality in dealing with a question of immigration and to give more consideration to its racial and economic aspects and in deciding what additional immigrants we shall receive, to remember that our first duty is to our country.”

American immigration officials working under Williams began turning back more and more Jews arriving in New York, even as the killings and persecution grew worse in Eastern Europe. Despite these efforts, the Jews kept coming.

In 1921, the US Congress decided to act. It passed the Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 Quota Act, severely reducing Jewish immigration from over 120,000 per year to under 3,000 a decade later.

America, and after it, Britain, Canada, Argentina, and countless other nations, systematically closed their doors to the Jews and kept them closed right through the Holocaust, even when everyone already knew of the extermination underway throughout the European continent.

The Holocaust, in other words, was understood by the Nazi leadership as a German solution to a problem “felt by the entire world.”

No one wanted the Jews; all sought ways to be rid of them. It was only when the West closed its doors — when the Jews became “undeportable” — that Europeans began to contemplate and even embrace the radical Nazi solution to what many saw as everyone’s shared problem. Millions of people could be snuffed out of existence by the German “Final Solution” because they were unwanted everywhere and protected by no one.

This is a contentious point in today’s Europe, but a true one nonetheless. Many nations protested that they did not actively join in the murders. But few can claim they did not restrict Jews’ lives, persecute them, hand them over to their executioners and prevent survivors from returning to their homes after the war. All took part in the larger cleansing, even if only some took the responsibility of direct killing upon themselves.

There were, of course, countless “individual” Europeans who risked life and limb to save Jews, and even some political and religious leaders who did so. But these are almost everywhere exceptions. No major social or political group anywhere in Europe rallied collectively to the Jews’ defense.

The Germans planned and initiated the Holocaust. Germany under the Nazi regime bears the “ultimate culpability” for the genocide. But German efforts could not have succeeded without the massive collaboration — and in fact, in the few places where such help was denied them, they failed.

In Belgium, the Nazis were able to round up nearly two-thirds of the Jews of Flemish Antwerp (65%), where local police collaborated with the occupiers. In French-speaking Belgium, where officials and citizens refused to help, the figure was almost half (37%).

In Hungary, the government enthusiastically deported 437,000 Jews to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 in an operation totally run by Hungarians. These deportees were rural Yiddish-speaking Jews from the Hungarian provinces.

When the Nazis demanded Budapest’s assimilated, middle-class Jews, the Hungarian government balked. Its refusal left the Nazis helpless to implement any large-scale killing in the capital. Most of Budapest’s Jews survived the war.

The same pattern emerges in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and elsewhere. Greek collaboration allowed the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Salonica, while Greek refusal to help meant the same could not be done to the Jews of Athens. The genocide policy was successful only when locals cooperated.

Locals cooperated in most places, resulting in six million Jews being murdered. Imagine how many fewer Jews would have been murdered if locals did not cooperate with the Nazis!

This long, slow, purposeful destruction of European Jewry — the transformation of Europe into a continent literally uninhabitable to Jews — didn’t begin with WW II and didn’t end with its conclusion.

After V-E Day, the now all-but-forgotten story of the Jewish DPs, the “displaced persons” who would languish for years on German soil, imprisoned behind barbed wire by the American and British occupation forces for the simple reason that no one on Earth would take them in. My parents were caught in the middle of this, which I highlight in my book.

It was a postscript to the Holocaust that, for many survivors, the deepest truth was revealed: Auschwitz was not the exception to the European Jewish experience but merely its logical conclusion. Auschwitz was a means to achieve the desired result!

The fall of the 3rd Reich left millions of people displaced on German soil from across the European continent. With the war over, the Allies pivoted from a war footing to occupation and reconstruction. Their first priority was to repatriate anyone who could manage the journey home.

Allied soldiers would collect the wandering millions at checkpoints throughout Germany and deliver them to processing sites established in nearby towns. Millions hitchhiked, stole bicycles or vehicles, or simply walked to their former homes in France, Holland, Italy, Belgium, Poland, and elsewhere.

By October 1, more than 2 million Soviets, 1.5 million French, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch citizens, almost 300,000 Belgians and Luxembourgians, more than 200,000 Yugoslavs, 135,000 Czechs, 94,000 Poles, and tens of thousands of other European displaced persons had been sent home.

Yet as 1945 drew to a close, the Allies came to realize that some of the war’s survivors, the so-called “last million,” could not go home. For one reason or another, they had no home to return to.

Hundreds of thousands of Polish Catholics were afraid of what awaited them in their violence-wracked, Soviet-dominated country. Hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians could not return to countries now under Soviet rule because of their active collaboration in the Nazi war effort and occupation regimes.

And then there were the Jews, the survivors of the slave labor camps within Germany, and over 200,000 survivors flowing in from the East who had tried returning home and been pushed out by violent neighbors and even pogroms carried out by those who’d felt nothing but relief at their disappearance. Instead of welcoming their Jewish neighbors and friends back, they proceeded to “finish the job,” killing tens of thousands of surviving Jews. In my book, I speak in detail about the pogrom my mother and her family survived after returning to Sokoly. Seven of the twenty-one surviving Jews were killed, and the rest fled.

In 1946, the US and Britain established the International Refugee Organization, tasked with resettling the last million in new homelands. The IRO quickly got to work marketing the remaining DPs to Western and Latin American nations with dire shortages of postwar laborers to help rebuild their economies.

Over the course of 1946, over 700,000 DPs would be offered new homes by IRO member nations — a generosity of spirit that came with one immense caveat. The IRO nations then quickly closed shop and left the camps, leaving behind the last 250,000 DPs to spend the next two years imprisoned by their liberators. These were, of course, the Jews.

It was no mere oversight that left the Jews trapped in the land of their murderers and sometimes in the very concentration camps from which they had been “liberated.” It was not ignorance of the problem or the chaos of a frenzied reconstruction that left them ignored by the world as the years passed.

Even as they languished, a frenetic debate was underway in America. Many voices, including Jewish groups and Christian denominations, called to lift the old quotas and let these last survivors into America. But a coalition of midwestern Republicans and southern Democrats in Congress adamantly refused. The Jews, it was said, were closet communists.

Quotas for Eastern Europe, the nations from which the Jewish DPs hailed, remained astonishingly low in the immediate post-war period: 6,524 per year from Poland, 386 from Lithuania, 236 from Latvia, and 116 from Estonia. The 250,000 Jewish survivors would remain “stateless” with nowhere to go. They would remain in the camps, viewed as a burden to the rest of the world. Many believed that if Hitler were allowed more time, this burden would not exist!

The birth of the State of Israel in May 1948 finally provided a place for these Jews to go. They were openly welcomed to Israel. There is only one response when people question the need for a Jewish state. Without a Jewish state, Jews would continue to live in a world where no one wanted them. There would be nowhere to go when facing persecution.

Losing our Jewish state, Judea, to the Romans was the beginning of the long history of Jewish persecution and killing. This history is why there are only 16 million Jews in the entire world today. Compare that to over 3 billion of everyone else living in the world today!

The Holocaust is too large and complex to allow for only a single narrative of what it means. To the West, including many Western Jews, it is usually understood as a cautionary tale about the terrible results of human intolerance. To drive home this point, teenagers are taken to see museums, death camps and to see cattle cars.

But a study of the broader context in which the Holocaust took place — without which it could not have taken place — upends this easy moral narrative. Preventing another Auschwitz won’t prevent another Holocaust! Auschwitz was just a means to something much bigger and longer in time.

One answer begins to take form only when one steps back from these totems of Holocaust commemoration, from the camp incinerators and Ukrainian killing fields, the Nazi rallies, and the partisan fighters’ resistance poems. It emerges from a close reading of what came before the genocide, the suffering, and the marginalization that are now forgotten. It is so much more than just remembering that six million Jews perished. The real question is, how did that happen? Then we start talking about the real answer!

The Nazis were less original than anyone wants to admit. The propaganda machines, the anti-Jewish legislation, the dream of a Jew-free Europe — in all these, the Nazis were copying ideas and policies laid down by others, by forebears and neighbors. Where they did innovate, especially in the technology of the genocide, their success depended on the eager collaboration of many Europeans in almost every nation and province of the continent. The United States was also an eager collaborator.

For all its incomprehensible horror, the focus on the murder itself paradoxically serves as a kind of psychological soothing, a way to forget how dozens of nations, including the free peoples of the West, were willing participants in the vast, generations-long corralling of millions of helpless Jews to their ultimate destruction.

The Nazis were ultimately defeated, but not before they had won their war against the Jews of Europe. It’s a point that might seem monstrous at first glance but becomes unavoidable when one looks at the longer history in which the Holocaust is embedded: To the nations whose Jews were destroyed, that destruction came as a relief.

The politics of Europe had been gripped by the Jewish question for three generations, an anxiety that was only removed when the Jews, too, were removed. In Eastern Europe after the war, many surviving Jews were not allowed back to their homes or treated better than before. In the West, any meaningful exploration of the broader context and culpability of the nations of Europe and the West was quickly set aside in favor of a thin, unthreatening moralism that we accept and recognize each year at events that make us feel better.

Jews are pretty much alone to remember that when their brethren stood before the gas chambers and then furnaces, no other nation or religion, class, or institution reached out a hand in rescue. Seven previous decades of European and Western politics joined in unison to shove them into those gas chambers and furnaces.

This is the world’s harsh reality before, during, and after the Holocaust. This is what we must remember. This is what we must teach.

The focus of events like Yom Hashoah and reciting “never forget” or “never again” must be something much bigger than the Holocaust itself. We must remember the Jewish experience over thousands of years, where history repeats itself over and over again! Our focus must be on breaking this historical cycle and creating a world where Jew hate no longer exists as an acceptable norm. We cannot prevent genocide without eliminating its root causes. And yes, we know the root causes.