STOP FLATTERING YOURSELF
In the eight decades since the Holocaust, just about everyone has wondered: had I been alive during World War II, what would I have done? Would I have I have hid Anne Frank or would I have been a silent bystander or collaborator? Everyone, except the most rabid of Jew-haters, reaches the same conclusion: of course I would have hid the Frank family. I’m not a monster.
The problem is that most people have been playing the wrong game, deliberating on a misguided rhetorical exercise. If it’s between the bad guy and the good guy, well, of course everyone will choose to be the good guy. But in truth, it’s not between the bad guy — and don’t get me wrong, the Nazis were certainly bad — and the good guy. It’s between the antisemite and the Jew.
Look, I get the confusion: for 80 years, whitewashed Holocaust education and media (i.e. books, movies, etc.) has overemphasized the role that non-Jewish Righteous Among the Nations played during the Holocaust. But this is a distortion, a fantasy: the white saviors were few; the bystanders were most. Even those who most ardently opposed the Nazis -- the Allied forces, even the non-Jewish anti-Nazi resistance -- cared little at all to do anything about the plight of the Jews.
Consider this: “Night” is probably the most famous piece of Holocaust literature after the diary of Anne Frank. Elie Wiesel originally wrote his memoir in Yiddish, titled “And the World Remained Silent.” But he had to change the title -- and some of its content, which was deeply critical of the non-Jewish world’s complicity -- in order for it to be published for a western audience. “[The Holocaust] is not an example of man’s inhumanity to man,” Wiesel noted in 2005. “It was man’s inhumanity to Jews.”
Whatever you did when entire Jewish families were set on fire in their homes in southern Israel on October 7 is exactly what you would have done when hundreds of Jews were locked in a barn in Jedwabne, Poland, and set on fire in 1941.
Whatever you did when Hamas kidnapped Jews, ages 9 months-85, to cheering crowds of thousands who jeered and spat at their disfigured corpses on October 7 is exactly what you would have done when the Nazis humiliated starving, destitute Jews by forcing them to hand-scrub the streets in front of laughing crowds.
Whatever you did when Hamas forced our tortured, starved hostages to make degrading, game show-style hostage videos is exactly what you would have done when Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz were forced fight each other to the death in boxing matches for the Nazis’ entertainment.
Whatever you did when Hamas gunned unarmed Jewish civilians down at the Nova Music Festival on October 7 is exactly what you would have done when the Nazis gunned down unarmed Jewish civilians as they carried out the Holocaust by bullets in Eastern Europe.
Whatever you did when Hamas paraded emaciated Jewish hostages on stage and brought Palestinian children to enjoy the spectacle is exactly what you would have done when the Nazis publicly humiliated Jews on the streets of Europe.
Whatever you’ve done over the past 16 months while thousands have chanted for the murder of Jews on your streets is exactly what you would have done as the Hitler Youth marched on the streets of Nazi Germany.
Whatever you’ve done over the past 16 months while Jews have been socially marginalized out of just about every industry and cultural space is exactly what you would have done as the Nazis banned Jews out of every industry and cultural space.
Whatever you’ve done over the past 16 months as the pro-Palestine crowd has demanded that Israeli Jews “go back to Europe” is exactly what you would have done as the Nazis and their collaborators told Jews to “go back to Palestine.”
“What would I have done had I been alive during the Holocaust?” you ask yourself. I am here to tell you definitively: whatever you’ve done for the past 492 days is exactly what you would have done had you been alive during the Holocaust.
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