Being Jewish and the Shoah
When I was 8 or 9 years old, I went to a school called St. Georges. It was a wonderful school.
That school had an impressive library. When I turned 7, my reading aptitude jumped. My mother tested it, and I could read at a 10th-grade level. I started reading books for older kids. One of those books was titled - “The Shoah.”
The book’s existence in 1979 or 1980 was in itself remarkable. Although books about the Holocaust are large and voluminous, the topic was curiously taboo in that era. Gentiles were ashamed. Jews didn’t want to talk about it with non-Jews. And the books that existed were few and far between.
I learned of the Holocaust because I read a book about World War 2. And in that book there were pictures of the Allies who had arrived in Germany and saw the human suffering.
When I wanted to learn something, I couldn’t just learn superficially; I would read everything I could.
And so when this book appeared in my hands, I read it.
As an eight-year-old, I should never have been allowed to read it unsupervised. It was a book that covered in graphic detail the Holocaust. It covered the origins of antisemitism, the German Jewish experience, and the horrors of the first phase when over a million Jews were killed at gunpoint. Many folks think of the Holocaust in this sanitized form, as if the massacre of millions can be sanitized. What they don’t know is that a million Jews were killed at gunpoint. The killers personally shot women, children, and older men.
The assembly line and gas and ovens were created to kill Jews efficiently. And they were designed in part to minimize the impact on the killers.
That particular bit makes it, for some reason, unimaginably worse. The massacre was considered too inhumane for the killers.
Imagine the scale of evil that the killers wanted a more humane way for them to kill so that they could do the job. They wanted to find a way that their basic human decency could be managed. I write these words and want to vomit out of my rage.
The book had pictures of naked women in Latvia being shot. I saw a naked woman for the first time in those pictures. My first picture of the nude female form was just before some butcher shot her. I believe it was also the first time I saw the nude male form.
I learned how Gentiles overwhelmingly helped the Nazis get rid of their neighbors. And I knew of the very few who helped save a handful of Jews.
But that was not the real horror. The real horror was growing up. My Gentile society refused to admit what happened. Not everyone, but some.
“Jews are lying.”
“Jews did it.”
“Jews control the media.”
“Jews deserved it.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“It’s not uniquely Jewish; other people have had this, and they should shut up.”
“You only read what the Jews tell you to. You should read more.”
Imagine being an 8-year-old boy who stumbles on Babyn Yar and the dead lying all over as far as the eye could see, and he could hear the moaning of the dying and the crying of those about to be killed, and everyone told him that he had not seen what he had seen.
The denialism was so intense that I buried that trauma. Not only had I seen things beyond evil, but I had also been told I had not. I was traumatized twice, the first in seeing the horror and the second when I was told that I had not seen it.
But that trauma never went away.
For years, I obsessed over the topic of the Shoah in particular and genocide in general. I suspect that part of the reason was to discover that maybe those Holocaust deniers were right. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Learning that it was not six million but 600,000 would have been a comfort. That Babyn Yar was an exaggeration.
No matter how much horror or evil I discovered, there was always more. There was always one more act of depravity.
At first, we blamed the SS. Then the Nazis. Then, the German Wehrmacht. Then the Luftwaffe. Then, the industrialists competed for the contracts to build the gas chambers. German society conspired to kill Jews because they were Jews.
When folks talked about the horror of Dresden, I grew up thinking, pity so few died. I had a hate of Germans that was so intense that I didn’t even understand it. It was only when I was 30, and I was talking to a German coworker, that I realized that I hated him for being German. And I realized that was not good. That was how innocents died.
Later on in life, I expanded my obsession with other genocides. Because if this was normal, this kind of murder was normal, then perhaps I just needed to accept it like I accepted death.
And it is not normal. What happened in the Holocaust was not normal. The Final Solution is called the Final Solution because it answers an age-old question - “What to do about the Jewish Problem?”
I have read, in detail, about Rwanda, Cambodia, Greeks in Smyrna, Armenians in Turkey, the Rape of Nanking, and the Massacres of the Congo. I read Archipelago Gulag. I read Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow. I read the memoirs of the author of the Nuremberg Laws. I have read, thanks to online archives, details of meetings where the murder of Jews was decided. I have read the Testaments of Survivors.
Over the years, I realized I know more about this than others. And that most people have a sanitized view of the Holocaust. They are not shown the brutal horror of the systematic personal murder of Jews and the cruelty. And it’s why they can use the word genocide and not recoil in horror.
Only Rwanda and Armenia come close to the kind of genocidal slaughter that the Jews experienced.
I have obsessed over this topic because I swore I would find a moment when this made sense.
Then October 7th happened, and I thought it would be different this time. They would see this slaughter. And it wasn’t. I saw the same things from my friends, people I had mentored.
“Jews are lying.”
“Jews did it.”
“Jews control the media.”
“Jews deserved it.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“It’s not uniquely Jewish; other people have had this, and they should shut up.”
“You only read what the Jews tell you to. You should read more.”
And I realized it was happening again in the same way.
And I now realize that I am Jewish. That only a Jew could understand this hate. And I understood this hate. And only an assimilated Jew could fool himself into thinking it didn’t exist.
Because when it happened again, the silence of the Gentiles was, deafening.