i’m going to let this video speak for itself. bc i don’t even know what to say anymore. i don’t know how we come back from this level of radicalization among young people to the point where holocaust denial has become the norm.
White supremacists would be fucking *delighted*. Hell, *are* delighted.
To add to this:
Not only were two-thirds of European Jews killed, but the ones who remained faced violence and antisemitism even once they returned home from the camps. There were even two massacres of Jews who’d returned to their towns post-Holocaust; I have a friend who’s descended from one of the survivors of the Kielce pogrom, in which the town’s non-Jews forced the town’s Jews into a barn and set it on fire. Most Holocaust survivors didn’t feel they could stay, and left. Those in the Soviet Union who stayed experienced a cultural genocide where their Judaism was outlawed.
What this means is that the entire European Jewish civilization of language, art, folklore, foodways, literature, theater, and traditions was basically destroyed. The legacies of some of these things persist in a fractured manner, but something of great is now gone with no hope of true recovery.
It was also not just the Ashkenazi world. Salonika (now called Thessaloniki) in Greece used to be a Jewish city. In the 16th century it was known as “Sabatopolis,” Shabbat city, because ships passing by on Friday nights noted the city was dark because lights could not be lit on Shabbat. It was a center of Jewish culture and scholarship, with Jews from the Ashkenazi world coming to study there. By the 20th century, it was majority non-Jewish and the centers of Jewish scholarship had moved to places like Lublin and Vilna, but it still had a large Jewish population.
87% of the Jews in Greece were killed. Do you understand? Only 13% of Greek Jews survived the Holocaust. This is what a campaign of extermination means. The goal of the Nazis was to kill every last Jewish man, woman, and child. In the world.
On that note: I want people to realize that before the Holocaust, there were only 16.6 million Jews in the world. Killing six million meant that more than a third of our global population was gone in just four years. In the ensuing decades, many Jews married non-Jews and raised their kids non-Jewish with the goal to intentionally assimilate for safety so their descendants would be unharmed in the event of another Holocaust. Some of these people kept their Jewishness secret from their families and only revealed it on their deathbeds. They figured, better to hide and lose their identities than to die.
We have not yet been able to recover our population. As I mentioned, before the Holocaust, there were 16.6 million Jews in the world, and just a few short years later, there were less than 11 million. Today, there are still only 15.7 million. After 80 years, there are still fewer Jews in the world than there were before the Holocaust.
The other thing I would like people to understand is that the Holocaust was not a one-off; it was an escalation. Jewish life in Eastern and Central Europe was marked by periodic massacres and constant persecution. The middle ages were especially bad, with a number of large massacres. There were also discriminatory laws in many times and places, for example ones disallowing Jews from owning land. In the late 19th century, pogroms (which were violent riots in the Jewish sections of towns) flared up. This is what spurred the wave of immigration to the US around the turn of the 20th century; that and the fact that we could sense that something horrific was on the horizon.
Also, in Yuval’s video, he mentions that the Holocaust was purely based on hatred, and not out of motivation to steal money or land. I don’t actually agree; Jews had to surrender their possessions and bank accounts, and I assume that was used to further the Nazi war effort. Everything was taken from them; even the glasses off their faces and the hair off their heads, the latter turned into socks and mattresses. Their homes were also immediately taken from them by their neighbors; some did not even wait until the Jews were out of sight before beginning to loot the possessions left behind, and then moving in.
On a personal note, my maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors. My grandfather had a wife and two children who were killed on arrival at Auschwitz. This was normal; even at work camps, children and their mothers were gassed on arrival. His son, my uncle, Usher Meilich was ten when he was murdered; his son Yehuda Yaakov was nine.
My grandmother was one of seven siblings; only three (herself, her brother, and her sister) survived the Holocaust. Her sister, my great-aunt Rochel, was gassed at Auschwitz along with Rochel’s two-year-old son, Zelig. Her parents, my great-grandparents Henna Taltza and Moishe Yehuda, were murdered as well. When I was a little kid I asked my mother if she had grandparents; she had to explain to me that they’d all died before she was born.
I am telling you this not because you deserve me opening up my heart and scooping out the names of half my family tree gone to serve you on a silver platter, but because some part of me believes that having names to attach will break someone’s hard shell and inspire some compassion. But it feels degrading to need to do this at all, and maybe it won’t even help. I hate having to turn out my pockets like this.
Look. I have no interest in claiming that the Holocaust was “the worst tragedy to happen to humanity,” whatever the hell that means. But I am desperately trying to convince people that it was a real tragedy that happened to real people and that we bear the scars and wounds to this day; from intergenerational trauma (a term coined to describe the effects of Holocaust trauma on the grandchildren of survivors, before it was coopted on social media to describe the negative cycles of every dysfunctional family everywhere), to massive language loss, to loss of art and folklore and theater, to our non-recovered population numbers, to the cemeteries left unprotected against local populations destroying them and turning Jewish gravestones into paving stones to be walked upon, to the trauma that manifests itself in catastrophic violence against Palestinians.
also wanna add–the world population in 1930 was only 2 billion. today, it’s over 8 billion. the world population has quadrupled, and the population of jews worldwide STILL has not recovered. the ENTIRE WORLD has 4x as many people as there used to be, and it still hasn’t recovered. just to give some scale
reblogging this again bc ppl should know that after this creator posted this video, he was bombarded with harassment and accusations of him being a “zionist” despite the fact he’s an outspoken antizionist, accused of being racist because he didn’t say that slavery was worse than the holocaust (in a video where he says he doesn’t rank tragedies), and had his jewishness picked apart by gentiles for weeks. gentiles are deeply uncomfortable with the scope of the horrors of the holocaust, and they take that discomfort out on the jews who try to talk about it, which is why holocaust remembrance day is so important. sit in your discomfort and learn how to deal with it.
amhrancas 