Chronicles of Holocausts foretold.
The death of a French survivor of Auschwitz is a reminder of other genocides, and how "Never again!" has become an empty phrase.
When I was a Jewish boy growing up in Los Angeles and first learning about the Holocaust, I recall my mother telling me that “no one knew” what was going on in the Nazi death camps of Europe. Of course, we now know that was not true. Although most major media outlets downplayed the slaughter at the time, the U.S. government had received many reports about Auschwitz and other camps. It had detailed intelligence about the railroad routes used to transport Jews in boxcars to what, for most of them, would be either a quick or very slow death.
The response of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, now well known, was that the best way to “save” the Jews was to win the war. Well, we did win the war, but we did not save Europe’s Jews. Those who did survive did so through luck, the mercy of neighbors, or the very late rescue that defeating the Nazis before they could kill all of the Jews provided.
One Jew who did survive, Henri Borlant, died just last week, a reminder that these terrible times past are still very much with us today. Borlant was one of about 6,000 French Jewish children who were sent to Auschwitz in 1942, when he was 15 years old. Of the children in that large group, he was apparently the only one to survive. Borlant made it back to Paris, where he reunited with some family members who had also survived, and eventually became a physician.
For many decades after World War II, one French government after another tried to deny what everyone really knew: That the deportations of French Jews to death camps were carried out with the full participation of the French police and the full cooperation of French authorities. Not until 1995 did then French president Jacques Chirac acknowledge that these actions were carried by the French state, and not by some rogue politicians or authorities.
In its article about Borlant’s death, linked to above, The Washington Post quoted something Borlant said in an earlier interview about his experiences.
“Hunger: You may use the same word when you skip lunch, but it doesn’t mean the same thing. We experienced something that cannot be put into words. When you’re hungry like I was, you have no more dreams, nothing.”
This quote about hunger immediately reminded me of the many, many reports I have read over more than a year now about how hungry the children of Gaza are, due to what journalists and human rights organizations have concluded is a deliberate policy by Israeli authorities to starve the Palestinians who live there. Last week, The Guardian published a study concluding that most children in Gaza expect to die and have little hope.
Only Holocaust deniers try to argue that the Holocaust did not happen or that there was no genocide of the Jews. In Gaza, virtually every human rights expert, human rights organization, and expert in international law in the world, including in Israel itself, agrees that Israel is committing war crimes—in fact, that Israeli authorities and its military are violating international laws adopted after World War II to try to prevent future Holocausts and other war-related atrocities from occurring.
And an increasing number of experts are now concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. I think that with the latest lengthy report from Amnesty International, which comes to the same conclusion, the debate over this question is now over. To the extent that anyone continues to argue the question, it is more a matter of trying to deny the facts rather than an honest discussion. There are no more excuses.
Of course, despite the Geneva Conventions and other international laws, there have been a number of well documented genocides in the world over the past decades. The slaughter of at least 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis in 1994 is an uncontroversial example, as is the mass killing of Bosnian Muslims during the wars in the former Yugoslavia about the same time.
David Rieff, in his book “Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West,” pondered what the much hackneyed phrase “Never again!” really meant in the context of that particular genocide:
“After Sarajevo, after Srebrenica, we know what ‘Never again!’ means. ‘Never again’ simply means ‘Never again’’ will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940’s. That is all it means.”
In the case of Bosnia, Bill Clinton, who was the U.S. president at the time, very belatedly and reluctantly took action to stop the killing, and only after a huge amount of public and Congressional pressure had been mounted.
We know what action Clinton took concerning the genocide in Rwanda: None. (I wrote about this moral failure in a piece I published a number of years ago.)
As a Jew, it is especially abhorrent to me that fellow Jews in Israel are not only carrying out a well documented genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, but actually seem to be flaunting and enjoying their crimes. (Thus helping human rights investigators to make the case against them.)
Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders are claiming that they are committing these acts in the name of all Jews, and some who pretend to be supporters of Israel and of Jews in general try to justify them. Thanks, but no thanks. As a Jew, I did not ask to be branded a natural born killer thirsty for the blood of my enemies, and I did not ask to be given a pass on adhering to international laws that were adopted to try to protect me. Clearly, I and all other Jews are now much less safe than we ever were before, because revenge for these atrocities will come, one way or another, that is for sure.
A major moral crisis like Israel’s war in Gaza is not a “niche” issue, but we have just had a presidential election in which it was treated that way at best, and more often completely ignored, by both candidates. Some say that was a significant factor in Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump, and I think there is good evidence for that claim.
So here we are again. A genocide is being committed, and we are letting it happen; in some cases, we are cheering it on; and those in power are enabling it with 2000 pound bombs and billions of dollars of military support for Israel.
But there is a big difference between the genocide in Gaza and the other ones we talk about. Many knew about the Holocaust, but Americans did not participate in it or support it. Same for Rwanda and Bosnia. One can argue about how much we could have done, or how much we should have done, but we were not responsible for it happening.
In this case we are fully responsible. No excuses. For more than a year now, many of us have tried to stop it. So far, we have failed. Many are saying, “History will judge us.” Of course it will. In the meantime, let’s stop saying “Never again!” because we don’t mean it and we never have meant it.
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