What Really Changed in 1945? Yom HaShoah Speech

This speech was given at the Yom HaShoah service,
Auckland Hebrew Congregation, New Zealand, 27 April 2022

In the fourteen years we have spent interviewing and photographing survivors for the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation we have encountered stories of tragedy and depravity, and all too rarely, courage, compassion and conviction. 

In 2019 we visited Auschwitz in Poland and Le Chambon Sur Lignon in the South of France. Some of you will recall that at last year’s event we played the three minute film we produced as a result of our visit to Le Chambon.

Although it is less than a day’s journey from Auschwitz to Le Chambon, they may as well occupy distant universes.

Auschwitz was a product of Europe’s most culturally, scientifically and educationally advanced society. In contrast, Le Chambon and the surrounding towns were home to mostly simple peasant farmers and villagers. Led by Protestant Pastor Andre Trocme, the people of Le Chambon were characterised by courage, compassion, and a willingness to defy authority in order to live according to conscience. As a consequence the 5000 people in the Le Chambon area were able to rescue up to a similar number of Jews.

If there is tragedy associated with Le Chambon it is that it was not replicated throughout Europe.

In 1945 the world emerged from war. What came to be known as the Holocaust was brought to an end.

But what really changed in 1945? We know the allies prevailed but in regard to what has drawn us together tonight, what really changed?

Did ordinary Europeans repudiate the Jew hatred that for centuries had manifested in economic, social and religious discrimination?

Were the masses of willing accomplices brought to account, or at least filled with remorse?

Did the philosophers who influence society from above abandon their intolerance of Jewish distinction and particularity?

Did theologians reject the toxic and incoherent supersessionism that for centuries had driven Christian persecution of Jews?

Was there a change of heart in the Muslim leaders so keen to see Hitler’s policies implemented in their own lands?

Were the western political and military leaders who knew what was happening to European Jews and yet chose to do little or nothing - were they brought to account?

Of the many nations that chose to close their doors to Jews fleeing certain calamity, how many were willing to acknowledge their moral failure? 

Did the philosemitism and courage of Le Chambon begin to permeate other European cultures?

The answers to these questions are disturbing, confronting and relevant.

The Holocaust was unique and that very uniqueness must be fiercely defended. And yet it stands in a series of historical events that form an essential context. Namely, millennia of persecution, marginalisation and antagonism toward the Jewish people. 

Indeed, antisemitism has come to function as a social constant, as reliable as gravity, as unrelenting as the waves of the sea. 

Enemies have been many and friends have been few. And the character of friends like those of Le Chambon is ultimately only proven in times of peril. The Shoah taught us that those considered friends are worse than irrelevant if they will not act.

Another painful lesson of the Shoah is that when an entity declares its genocidal intentions it must be believed.

In the 1930s, some of Europe’s brightest minds chose not to see what was obvious - that European Jewry was destined for disaster. The act of seeing the obvious, bore just too great a price. And the call to think the unthinkable, required vanishingly rare courage.

Thus, tonight we commemorate the liberation and yet recognise with sadness that in the broader context it represents, as it were, a punctuation - an abeyance in a state of Gentile hostility extending three and half millennia, of a persistent hatred that reinvents itself from age to age.

Sadly, too little changed in 1945. And if we have a debt to those who perished it includes a willingness to think honestly about the causes of the Shoah. And a call to honour and emulate those who act in the spirit of Le Chambon.

It is not sufficient merely to remember. If the need arises, we must be willing to think what many deemed unthinkable, and to see what many refused to see. 

And having thought and having seen, we have a debt to act.

Guest Post: The Current State of Things

On Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day 2019,  Ateret Violet Shmuel, human rights advocate, indigenous rights activist, artist, director of Indigenous Bridges, takes stock of the current state of things for her people.

Today begins Yom Ha’Shoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Today, a third of Americans and nearly half of British people do not believe that 6 million Jews, more than one-third of the entire population of Jews in the whole world, were systematically murdered by the Nazis. Those who believe that the Holocaust happened at all, far under-estimate the death toll.

Today, the global Jewish population is still only about 12-14 million, whereas before the Holocaust we were about 18 million. We have still not recovered.

Today, about 2.6 million British people don’t think the Holocaust happened at all. They believe Jews made it up.

Today, the British (Left) Labour party has hardened its open antisemitic stance, and are solidifying their relationships with genocidal antisemitic terror organizations, while kicking Jews out of the party.

Today, Poland has passed laws to restrict what can be said about Polish involvement in the Holocaust.

Today, we have seen Polish nationals take to the streets in both Europe and the US to demand that those evil Jews stop trying to make them look bad.

Today, we are watching as European Jews leave France, Belgium, England, the Netherlands, etc because of the sharp increase of normalized antisemitic hate speech and violent hate crimes.

Today, we are watching a global trend of far right antisemitic political parties beginning to gain power.

Today, almost one quarter of generation Z and millennial North Americans are not sure that they have ever heard of the Holocaust, or know what it was.

Today, we are watching the vandalisation of Jewish cemeteries with swastikas.

Today, I am watching in horror as people within *my* human rights, social justice, and grassroots peace groups justify the murder of Jews, by Nazis, white supremacists, and Islamic extremists. I have seen people who claim to be anti-fascists, spout fascism.

Today, even the most widely read centrist papers in the US “accidentally” run cartoons that use the old antisemitic tropes about those disgusting, inhuman, conniving Jews running the world and leading world leaders astray.

Today, we are dealing with the aftermath of the second deadly synagogue shooting in the US this year.

Today, antisemitic attacks against Jews have sharply increased in the last year.

Today, we are watching as most major news agencies publish intentionally misleading or objectively false stories about Israel in order to drum up hatred for the Jewish country under false pretenses.

Today, we are seeing Nazis and white supremacists openly marching in the streets, emboldened by current politicians.

Today, we are seeing fliers claiming Jews are pedophiles and murderers posted in suburban American public spaces.

Today, we watch as the Internet overflows with hateful memes about Zionists and Jews (left, right, and center).

Today, we watch as those who spout pure racist hatred under the guise of “legitimate criticism of Israel”, claim they are being unfairly attacked by Zionists and are undeserving of being labeled “antisemitic”. They claim, as they always have, that they are not the aggressors, but really the “victims” of those horrible Jews.

Today, we are watching as leaders on both the far right (Davis Duke, Richard Spenser, Patrick Little, Andrew Anglin, etc) and those on the far left (Louis Farrakhan, Linda Sarsour, Ilhan Omar, Jeremy Corbyn) meet in congratulatory agreement about the sinister role that Jews play in the world.

Today, we are watching western Jews branded as ‘whites’ in order to delegitimize their lived experience of oppression, sweep them into the category of oppressors, and reject their claims of victimhood.

Today, I think it’s time we acknowledge that we may have collectively forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust, and we should all be working much harder to make sure we are not complicit in spreading or normalizing hate. Today we really have to ‘up our game’ to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Because, friends, we really do have a problem.