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In the Shadow of the Holocaust

By Masha Gessen

Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures are the least of it. The memorials that sneak up on you—the monument to burned books, which is literally underground, and the thousands of Stolpersteine , or “stumbling stones,” built into sidewalks to commemorate individual Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, mentally ill people, and others murdered by the Nazis—reveal the pervasiveness of the evils once committed in this place. In early November, when I was walking to a friend’s house in the city, I happened upon the information stand that marks the site of Hitler’s bunker. I had done so many times before. It looks like a neighborhood bulletin board, but it tells the story of the Führer’s final days.

In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, when many of these memorials were conceived and installed, I visited Berlin often. It was exhilarating to watch memory culture take shape. Here was a country, or at least a city, that was doing what most cultures cannot: looking at its own crimes, its own worst self. But, at some point, the effort began to feel static, glassed in, as though it were an effort not only to remember history but also to insure that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way. This is true in the physical, visual sense. Many of the memorials use glass: the Reichstag, a building nearly destroyed during the Nazi era and rebuilt half a century later, is now topped by a glass dome; the burned-books memorial lives under glass; glass partitions and glass panes put order to the stunning, once haphazard collection called “Topography of Terror.” As Candice Breitz, a South African Jewish artist who lives in Berlin, told me, “The good intentions that came into play in the nineteen-eighties have, too often, solidified into dogma.”

Podcast: The Political Scene Masha Gessen talks with Tyler Foggatt.

Among the few spaces where memory representation is not set in apparent permanence are a couple of the galleries in the new building of the Jewish Museum, which was completed in 1999. When I visited in early November, a gallery on the ground floor was showing a video installation called “Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres.” The video was set in Kibbutz Be’eri , the community where, on October 7th, Hamas killed more than ninety people—almost one in ten residents—during its attack on Israel, which ultimately claimed more than twelve hundred lives. In the video, Be’eri residents take turns reciting the lines of a poem by one of the community’s members, the poet Anadad Eldan: “. . . from the swamp between the ribs / she surfaced who had submerged in you / and you are constrained not shouting / hunting for the forms that scamper outside.” The video, by the Berlin-based Israeli artists Nir Evron and Omer Krieger, was completed nine years ago. It begins with an aerial view of the area, the Gaza Strip visible, then slowly zooms in on the houses of the kibbutz, some of which looked like bunkers. I am not sure what the artists and the poet had initially meant to convey; now the installation looked like a work of mourning for Be’eri. (Eldan, who is nearly a hundred years old, survived the Hamas attack.)

Down the hallway was one of the spaces that the architect Daniel Libeskind, who designed the museum, called “voids”—shafts of air that pierce the building, symbolizing the absence of Jews in Germany through generations. There, an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, titled “Fallen Leaves,” consists of more than ten thousand rounds of iron with eyes and mouths cut into them, like casts of children’s drawings of screaming faces. When you walk on the faces, they clank, like shackles, or like the bolt handle of a rifle. Kadishman dedicated the work to victims of the Holocaust and other innocent victims of war and violence. I don’t know what Kadishman, who died in 2015, would have said about the current conflict. But, after I walked from the haunting video of Kibbutz Be’eri to the clanking iron faces, I thought of the thousands of residents of Gaza killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews killed by Hamas. Then I thought that, if I were to state this publicly in Germany, I might get in trouble.

On November 9th, to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Star of David and the phrase “ Nie Wieder Ist Jetzt! ”—“Never Again Is Now!”—was projected in white and blue on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. That day, the Bundestag was considering a proposal titled “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility: Protecting Jewish Life in Germany,” which contained more than fifty measures intended to combat antisemitism in Germany, including deporting immigrants who commit antisemitic crimes; stepping up activities directed against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement; supporting Jewish artists “whose work is critical of antisemitism”; implementing a particular definition of antisemitism in funding and policing decisions; and beefing up coöperation between the German and the Israeli armed forces. In earlier remarks, the German Vice-Chancellor, Robert Habeck, who is a member of the Green Party, said that Muslims in Germany should “clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as not to undermine their own right to tolerance.”

Germany has long regulated the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered and discussed. In 2008, when then Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke before the Knesset, on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, she emphasized Germany’s special responsibility not only for preserving the memory of the Holocaust as a unique historical atrocity but also for the security of Israel. This, she went on, was part of Germany’s Staatsräson —the reason for the existence of the state. The sentiment has since been repeated in Germany seemingly every time the topic of Israel, Jews, or antisemitism arises, including in Habeck’s remarks. “The phrase ‘Israel’s security is part of Germany’s Staatsräson ’ has never been an empty phrase,” he said. “And it must not become one.”

At the same time, an obscure yet strangely consequential debate on what constitutes antisemitism has taken place. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization, adopted the following definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This definition was accompanied by eleven examples, which began with the obvious—calling for or justifying the killing of Jews—but also included “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

This definition had no legal force, but it has had extraordinary influence. Twenty-five E.U. member states and the U.S. State Department have endorsed or adopted the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing for the withholding of federal funds from colleges where students are not protected from antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A. On December 5th of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution condemning antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A.; it was proposed by two Jewish Republican representatives and opposed by several prominent Jewish Democrats, including New York’s Jerry Nadler.

In 2020, a group of academics proposed an alternative definition of antisemitism, which they called the Jerusalem Declaration . It defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)” and provides examples that help distinguish anti-Israel statements and actions from antisemitic ones. But although some of the preëminent scholars of the Holocaust participated in drafting the declaration, it has barely made a dent in the growing influence of the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2021, the European Commission published a handbook “for the practical use” of the I.H.R.A. definition, which recommended, among other things, using the definition in training law-enforcement officers to recognize hate crimes, and creating the position of state attorney, or coördinator or commissioner for antisemitism.

Germany had already implemented this particular recommendation. In 2018, the country created the Office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism, a vast bureaucracy that includes commissioners at the state and local level, some of whom work out of prosecutors’ offices or police precincts. Since then, Germany has reported an almost uninterrupted rise in the number of antisemitic incidents: more than two thousand in 2019, more than three thousand in 2021, and, according to one monitoring group, a shocking nine hundred and ninety-four incidents in the month following the Hamas attack. But the statistics mix what Germans call Israelbezogener Antisemitismus —Israel-related antisemitism, such as instances of criticism of Israeli government policies—with violent attacks, such as an attempted shooting at a synagogue, in Halle, in 2019, which killed two bystanders; shots fired at a former rabbi’s house, in Essen, in 2022; and two Molotov cocktails thrown at a Berlin synagogue this fall. The number of incidents involving violence has, in fact, remained relatively steady, and has not increased following the Hamas attack.

There are now dozens of antisemitism commissioners throughout Germany. They have no single job description or legal framework for their work, but much of it appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic, often for “de-singularizing the Holocaust” or for criticizing Israel. Hardly any of these commissioners are Jewish. Indeed, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. These have included the German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who was targeted for supporting the B.D.S. movement, as was the South African Jewish photographer Adam Broomberg.

In 2019, the Bundestag passed a resolution condemning B.D.S. as antisemitic and recommending that state funding be withheld from events and institutions connected to B.D.S. The history of the resolution is telling. A version was originally introduced by the AfD, the radical-right ethnonationalist and Euroskeptic party then relatively new to the German parliament. Mainstream politicians rejected the resolution because it came from the AfD, but, apparently fearful of being seen as failing to fight antisemitism, immediately introduced a similar one of their own. The resolution was unbeatable because it linked B.D.S. to “the most terrible phase of German history.” For the AfD, whose leaders have made openly antisemitic statements and endorsed the revival of Nazi-era nationalist language, the spectre of antisemitism is a perfect, cynically wielded political instrument, both a ticket to the political mainstream and a weapon that can be used against Muslim immigrants.

The B.D.S. movement, which is inspired by the boycott movement against South African apartheid, seeks to use economic pressure to secure equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, end the occupation, and promote the return of Palestinian refugees. Many people find the B.D.S. movement problematic because it does not affirm the right of the Israeli state to exist—and, indeed, some B.D.S. supporters envision a total undoing of the Zionist project. Still, one could argue that associating a nonviolent boycott movement, whose supporters have explicitly positioned it as an alternative to armed struggle, with the Holocaust is the very definition of Holocaust relativism. But, according to the logic of German memory policy, because B.D.S. is directed against Jews—although many of the movement’s supporters are also Jewish—it is antisemitic. One could also argue that the inherent conflation of Jews with the state of Israel is antisemitic, even that it meets the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism. And, given the AfD’s involvement and the pattern of the resolution being used largely against Jews and people of color, one might think that this argument would gain traction. One would be wrong.

The German Basic Law, unlike the U.S. Constitution but like the constitutions of many other European countries, has not been interpreted to provide an absolute guarantee of freedom of speech. It does, however, promise freedom of expression not only in the press but in the arts and sciences, research, and teaching. It’s possible that, if the B.D.S. resolution became law, it would be deemed unconstitutional. But it has not been tested in this way. Part of what has made the resolution peculiarly powerful is the German state’s customary generosity: almost all museums, exhibits, conferences, festivals, and other cultural events receive funding from the federal, state, or local government. “It has created a McCarthyist environment,” Candice Breitz, the artist, told me. “Whenever we want to invite someone, they”—meaning whatever government agency may be funding an event—“Google their name with ‘B.D.S.,’ ‘Israel,’ ‘apartheid.’ ”

A couple of years ago, Breitz, whose art deals with issues of race and identity, and Michael Rothberg, who holds a Holocaust studies chair at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to organize a symposium on German Holocaust memory, called “We Need to Talk.” After months of preparations, they had their state funding pulled, likely because the program included a panel connecting Auschwitz and the genocide of the Herero and the Nama people carried out between 1904 and 1908 by German colonizers in what is now Namibia. “Some of the techniques of the Shoah were developed then,” Breitz said. “But you are not allowed to speak about German colonialism and the Shoah in the same breath because it is a ‘levelling.’ ”

The insistence on the singularity of the Holocaust and the centrality of Germany’s commitment to reckoning with it are two sides of the same coin: they position the Holocaust as an event that Germans must always remember and mention but don’t have to fear repeating, because it is unlike anything else that’s ever happened or will happen. The German historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, who heads the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, in Berlin, has argued that unified Germany turned the reckoning with the Holocaust into its national idea, and as a result “any attempt to advance our understanding of the historical event itself, through comparisons with other German crimes or other genocides, can [be] and is being perceived as an attack on the very foundation of this new nation-state.” Perhaps that’s the meaning of “Never again is now.”

Some of the great Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust spent the rest of their lives trying to tell the world that the horror, while uniquely deadly, should not be seen as an aberration. That the Holocaust happened meant that it was possible—and remains possible. The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued that the massive, systematic, and efficient nature of the Holocaust was a function of modernity—that, although it was by no means predetermined, it fell in line with other inventions of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno studied what makes people inclined to follow authoritarian leaders and sought a moral principle that would prevent another Auschwitz.

In 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the I.H.R.A.’s definition of antisemitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part by the Irgun, a paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a military objective. The attackers “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.”

The occasion for Arendt’s letter was a planned visit to the United States by the party’s leader, Menachem Begin. Albert Einstein, another German Jew who fled the Nazis, added his signature. Thirty years later, Begin became Prime Minister of Israel. Another half century later, in Berlin, the philosopher Susan Neiman, who leads a research institute named for Einstein, spoke at the opening of a conference called “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” She suggested that she might face repercussions for challenging the ways in which Germany now wields its memory culture. Neiman is an Israeli citizen and a scholar of memory and morals. One of her books is called “ Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil .” In the past couple of years, Neiman said, memory culture had “gone haywire.”

Germany’s anti-B.D.S. resolution, for example, has had a distinct chilling effect on the country’s cultural sphere. The city of Aachen took back a ten-thousand-euro prize it had awarded to the Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad; the city of Dortmund and the jury for the fifteen-thousand-euro Nelly Sachs Prize similarly rescinded the honor that they had bestowed on the British-Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie. The Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe had his invitation to a major festival questioned after the federal antisemitism commissioner accused him of supporting B.D.S. and “relativizing the Holocaust.” (Mbembe has said that he is not connected with the boycott movement; the festival itself was cancelled because of COVID .) The director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Peter Schäfer, resigned in 2019 after being accused of supporting B.D.S.—he did not, in fact, support the boycott movement, but the museum had posted a link, on Twitter, to a newspaper article that included criticism of the resolution. The office of Benjamin Netanyahu had also asked Merkel to cut the museum’s funding because, in the Israeli Prime Minister’s opinion, its exhibition on Jerusalem paid too much attention to the city’s Muslims. (Germany’s B.D.S. resolution may be unique in its impact but not in its content: a majority of U.S. states now have laws on the books that equate the boycott with antisemitism and withhold state funding from people and institutions that support it.)

After the “We Need to Talk” symposium was cancelled, Breitz and Rothberg regrouped and came up with a proposal for a symposium called “We Still Need to Talk.” The list of speakers was squeaky clean. A government entity vetted everyone and agreed to fund the gathering. It was scheduled for early December. Then Hamas attacked Israel . “We knew that after that every German politician would see it as extremely risky to be connected with an event that had Palestinian speakers or the word ‘apartheid,’ ” Breitz said. On October 17th, Breitz learned that funding had been pulled. Meanwhile, all over Germany, police were cracking down on demonstrations that call for a ceasefire in Gaza or manifest support for Palestinians. Instead of a symposium, Breitz and several others organized a protest. They called it “We Still Still Still Still Need to Talk.” About an hour into the gathering, police quietly cut through the crowd to confiscate a cardboard poster that read “From the River to the Sea, We Demand Equality.” The person who had brought the poster was a Jewish Israeli woman.

The “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility” proposal has since languished in committee. Still, the performative battle against antisemitism kept ramping up. In November, the planning of Documenta, one of the art world’s most important shows, was thrown into disarray after the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung dug up a petition that a member of the artistic organizing committee, Ranjit Hoskote, had signed in 2019. The petition, written to protest a planned event on Zionism and Hindutva in Hoskote’s home town of Mumbai, denounced Zionism as “a racist ideology calling for a settler-colonial, apartheid state where non-Jews have unequal rights, and in practice, has been premised on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on it under the heading “Antisemitism.” Hoskote resigned and the rest of the committee followed suit. A week later, Breitz read in a newspaper that a museum in Saarland had cancelled an exhibit of hers, which had been planned for 2024, “in view of the media coverage about the artist in connection with her controversial statements in the context of Hamas’ war of aggression against the state of Israel.”

This November, I left Berlin to travel to Kyiv, traversing, by train, Poland and then Ukraine. This is as good a place as any to say a few things about my relationship to the Jewish history of these lands. Many American Jews go to Poland to visit what little, if anything, is left of the old Jewish quarters, to eat food reconstructed according to recipes left by long-extinguished families, and to go on tours of Jewish history, Jewish ghettos, and Nazi concentration camps. I am closer to this history. I grew up in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-seventies, in the ever-present shadow of the Holocaust, because only a part of my family had survived it and because Soviet censors suppressed any public mention of it. When, around the age of nine, I learned that some Nazi war criminals were still on the loose, I stopped sleeping. I imagined one of them climbing in through our fifth-floor balcony to snatch me.

During summers, our cousin Anna and her sons would visit from Warsaw. Her parents had decided to kill themselves after the Warsaw Ghetto burned down. Anna’s father threw himself in front of a train. Anna’s mother tied the three-year-old Anna to her waist with a shawl and jumped into a river. They were plucked out of the water by a Polish man, and survived the war by hiding in the countryside. I knew the story, but I wasn’t allowed to mention it. Anna was an adult when she learned that she was a Holocaust survivor, and she waited to tell her own kids, who were around my age. The first time I went to Poland, in the nineteen-nineties, was to research the fate of my great-grandfather, who spent nearly three years in the Białystok Ghetto before being killed in Majdanek.

The Holocaust memory wars in Poland have run in parallel with Germany’s. The ideas being battled out in the two countries are different, but one consistent feature is the involvement of right-wing politicians in conjunction with the state of Israel. As in Germany, the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands saw ambitious memorialization efforts, both national and local, that broke through the silence of the Soviet years. Poles built museums and monuments that commemorated the Jews killed in the Holocaust—which claimed half of its victims in Nazi-occupied Poland—and the Jewish culture that was lost with them. Then the backlash came. It coincided with the rise to power of the right-wing, illiberal Law and Justice Party, in 2015. Poles now wanted a version of history in which they were victims of the Nazi occupation alongside the Jews, whom they tried to protect from the Nazis.

This was not true: instances of Poles risking their lives to save Jews from the Germans, as in the case of my cousin Anna, were exceedingly rare, while the opposite—entire communities or structures of the pre-occupation Polish state, such as the police or city offices, carrying out the mass murder of Jews—was common. But historians who studied the Poles’ role in the Holocaust came under attack . The Polish-born Princeton historian Jan Tomasz Gross was interrogated and threatened with prosecution for writing that Poles killed more Polish Jews than Germans. The Polish authorities hounded him even after he retired. The government squeezed Dariusz Stola, the head of POLIN , Warsaw’s innovative museum of Polish Jewish history, out of his post. The historians Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking were dragged into court for writing that the mayor of a Polish village had been a collaborator in the Holocaust.

When I wrote about Grabowski and Engleking’s case, I received some of the scariest death threats of my life. (I’ve been sent a lot of death threats; most are forgettable.) One, sent to a work e-mail address, read, “If you keep writing lies about Poland and the Poles, I will deliver these bullets to your body. See the attachment! Five of them in every kneecap, so you won’t walk again. But if you continue to spread your Jewish hatred, I will deliver next 5 bullets in your pussy. The third step you won’t notice. But don’t worry, I’m not visiting you next week or eight weeks, I’ll be back when you forget this e-mail, maybe in 5 years. You’re on my list. . . .” The attachment was a picture of two shiny bullets in the palm of a hand. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, headed by a government appointee, tweeted a condemnation of my article, as did the account of the World Jewish Congress. A few months later, a speaking invitation to a university fell through because, the university told my speaking agent, it had emerged that I might be an antisemite.

Throughout the Polish Holocaust-memory wars, Israel maintained friendly relations with Poland. In 2018, Netanyahu and the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, issued a joint statement against “actions aimed at blaming Poland or the Polish nation as a whole for the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators of different nations.” The statement asserted, falsely, that “structures of the Polish underground state supervised by the Polish government-in-exile created a mechanism of systematic help and support to Jewish people.” Netanyahu was building alliances with the illiberal governments of Central European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, in part to prevent an anti-occupation consensus from solidifying in the European Union. For this, he was willing to lie about the Holocaust.

Each year, tens of thousands of Israeli teen-agers travel to the Auschwitz museum before graduating from high school (though last year the trips were called off over security issues and the Polish government’s growing insistence that Poles’ involvement in the Holocaust be written out of history). It is a powerful, identity-forming trip that comes just a year or two before young Israelis join the military. Noam Chayut, a founder of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation advocacy group in Israel, has written of his own high-school trip, which took place in the late nineteen-nineties, “Now, in Poland, as a high-school adolescent, I began to sense belonging, self-love, power and pride, and the desire to contribute, to live and be strong, so strong that no one would ever try to hurt me.”

Chayut took this feeling into the I.D.F., which posted him to the occupied West Bank. One day he was putting up property-confiscation notices. A group of children was playing nearby. Chayut flashed what he considered a kind and non-threatening smile at a little girl. The rest of the children scampered off, but the girl froze, terrified, until she, too, ran away. Later, when Chayut published a book about the transformation this encounter precipitated, he wrote that he wasn’t sure why it was this girl: “After all, there was also the shackled kid in the Jeep and the girl whose family home we had broken into late at night to remove her mother and aunt. And there were plenty of children, hundreds of them, screaming and crying as we rummaged through their rooms and their things. And there was the child from Jenin whose wall we blasted with an explosive charge that blew a hole just a few centimeters from his head. Miraculously, he was uninjured, but I’m sure his hearing and his mind were badly impaired.” But in the eyes of that girl, on that day, Chayut saw a reflection of annihilatory evil, the kind that he had been taught existed, but only between 1933 and 1945, and only where the Nazis ruled. Chayut called his book “ The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust .”

I took the train from the Polish border to Kyiv. Nearly thirty-four thousand Jews were shot at Babyn Yar, a giant ravine on the outskirts of the city, in just thirty-six hours in September, 1941. Tens of thousands more people died there before the war was over. This was what is now known as the Holocaust by bullets. Many of the countries in which these massacres took place—the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine—were re-colonized by the Soviet Union following the Second World War. Dissidents and Jewish cultural activists risked their freedom to maintain a memory of these tragedies, to collect testimony and names, and, where possible, to clean up and protect the sites themselves. After the fall of the Soviet Union, memorialization projects accompanied efforts to join the European Union. “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, “ Postwar .”

In the Rumbula forest, outside of Riga, for example, where some twenty-five thousand Jews were murdered in 1941, a memorial was unveiled in 2002, two years before Latvia was admitted to the E.U. A serious effort to commemorate Babyn Yar coalesced after the 2014 revolution that set Ukraine on an aspirational path to the E.U. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, in February, 2022, several smaller structures had been completed and ambitious plans for a larger museum complex were in place. With the invasion, construction halted. One week into the full-scale war, a Russian missile hit directly next to the memorial complex, killing at least four people. Since then, some of the people associated with the project have reconstituted themselves as a team of war-crimes investigators.

The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has waged an earnest campaign to win Israeli support for Ukraine. In March, 2022, he delivered a speech to the Knesset, in which he didn’t stress his own Jewish heritage but focussed on the inextricable historical connection between Jews and Ukrainians. He drew unambiguous parallels between the Putin regime and the Nazi Party. He even claimed that eighty years ago Ukrainians rescued Jews. (As with Poland, any claim that such aid was widespread is false.) But what worked for the right-wing government of Poland did not work for the pro-Europe President of Ukraine. Israel has not given Ukraine the help it has begged for in its war against Russia, a country that openly supports Hamas and Hezbollah.

Still, both before and after the October 7th attack, the phrase I heard in Ukraine possibly more than any other was “We need to be like Israel.” Politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and ordinary Ukrainians identify with the story Israel tells about itself, that of a tiny but mighty island of democracy standing strong against enemies who surround it. Some Ukrainian left-wing intellectuals have argued that Ukraine, which is fighting an anti-colonial war against an occupying power, should see its reflection in Palestine, not Israel. These voices are marginal and most often belong to young Ukrainians who are studying or have studied abroad. Following the Hamas attack, Zelensky wanted to rush to Israel as a show of support and unity between Israel and Ukraine. Israeli authorities seem to have other ideas—the visit has not happened.

While Ukraine has been unsuccessfully trying to get Israel to acknowledge that Russia’s invasion resembles Nazi Germany’s genocidal aggression, Moscow has built a propaganda universe around portraying Zelensky’s government, the Ukrainian military, and the Ukrainian people as Nazis. The Second World War is the central event of Russia’s historical myth. During Vladimir Putin’s reign, as the last of the people who lived through the war have been dying, commemorative events have turned into carnivals that celebrate Russian victimhood. The U.S.S.R. lost at least twenty-seven million people in that war, a disproportionate number of them Ukrainians. The Soviet Union and Russia have fought in wars almost continuously since 1945, but the word “war” is still synonymous with the Second World War and the word “enemy” is used interchangeably with “fascist” and “Nazi.” This made it that much easier for Putin, in declaring a new war, to brand Ukrainians as Nazis.

Netanyahu has compared the Hamas murders at the music festival to the Holocaust by bullets. This comparison, picked up and recirculated by world leaders, including President Biden, serves to bolster Israel’s case for inflicting collective punishment on the residents of Gaza. Similarly, when Putin says “Nazi” or “fascist,” he means that the Ukrainian government is so dangerous that Russia is justified in carpet-bombing and laying siege to Ukrainian cities and killing Ukrainian civilians. There are significant differences, of course: Russia’s claims that Ukraine attacked it first, and its portrayals of the Ukrainian government as fascist, are false; Hamas, on the other hand, is a tyrannical power that attacked Israel and committed atrocities that we cannot yet fully comprehend. But do these differences matter when the case being made is for killing children?

In the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when its troops were occupying the western suburbs of Kyiv, the director of Kyiv’s museum of the Second World War, Yurii Savchuk, was living at the museum and rethinking the core exhibit. One day after the Ukrainian military drove the Russians out of the Kyiv region, he met with the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and got permission to start collecting artifacts. Savchuk and his staff went to Bucha, Irpin, and other towns and cities that had just been “deoccupied,” as Ukrainians have taken to saying, and interviewed people who had not yet told their stories. “This was before the exhumations and the reburials,” Savchuk told me. “We saw the true face of war, with all its emotions. The fear, the terror, was in the atmosphere, and we absorbed it with the air.”

In May, 2022, the museum opened a new exhibit, titled “Ukraine – Crucifixion.” It begins with a display of Russian soldiers’ boots, which Savchuk’s team had collected. It’s an odd reversal: both the Auschwitz museum and the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., have displayed hundreds or thousands of shoes that belonged to victims of the Holocaust. They convey the scale of loss, even as they show only a tiny fraction of it. The display in Kyiv shows the scale of the menace. The boots are arranged on the floor of the museum in the pattern of a five-pointed star, the symbol of the Red Army that has become as sinister in Ukraine as the swastika. In September, Kyiv removed five-pointed stars from a monument to the Second World War in what used to be called Victory Square—it’s been renamed because the very word “Victory” connotes Russia’s celebration in what it still calls the Great Patriotic War. The city also changed the dates on the monument, from “1941-1945”—the years of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany—to “1939-1945.” Correcting memory one monument at a time.

In 1954, an Israeli court heard a libel case involving a Hungarian Jew named Israel Kastner. A decade earlier, when Germany occupied Hungary and belatedly rushed to implement the mass murder of its Jews, Kastner, as a leader of the Jewish community, entered into negotiations with Adolf Eichmann himself. Kastner proposed to buy the lives of Hungary’s Jews with ten thousand trucks. When this failed, he negotiated to save sixteen hundred and eighty-five people by transporting them by chartered train to Switzerland. Hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews were loaded onto trains to death camps. A Hungarian Jewish survivor had publicly accused Kastner of having collaborated with the Germans. Kastner sued for libel and, in effect, found himself on trial. The judge concluded that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil.”

The charge of collaboration against Kastner rested on the allegation that he had failed to tell people that they were going to their deaths. His accusers argued that, had he warned the deportees, they would have rebelled, not gone to the death camps like sheep to slaughter. The trial has been read as the beginning of a discursive standoff in which the Israeli right argues for preëmptive violence and sees the left as willfully defenseless. By the time of the trial, Kastner was a left-wing politician; his accuser was a right-wing activist.

Seven years later, the judge who had presided over the Kastner libel trial was one of the three judges in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here was the devil himself. The prosecution argued that Eichmann represented but one iteration of the eternal threat to the Jews. The trial helped to solidify the narrative that, to prevent annihilation, Jews should be prepared to use force preëmptively. Arendt, reporting on the trial , would have none of this. Her phrase “the banality of evil” elicited perhaps the original accusations, levelled against a Jew, of trivializing the Holocaust. She wasn’t. But she saw that Eichmann was no devil, that perhaps the devil didn’t exist. She had reasoned that there was no such thing as radical evil, that evil was always ordinary even when it was extreme—something “born in the gutter,” as she put it later, something of “utter shallowness.”

Arendt also took issue with the prosecution’s story that Jews were the victims of, as she put it, “a historical principle stretching from Pharaoh to Haman—the victim of a metaphysical principle.” This story, rooted in the Biblical legend of Amalek, a people of the Negev Desert who repeatedly fought the ancient Israelites, holds that every generation of Jews faces its own Amalek. I learned this story as a teen-ager; it was the first Torah lesson I ever received, taught by a rabbi who gathered the kids in a suburb of Rome where Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union lived while waiting for their papers to enter the United States, Canada, or Australia. In this story, as told by the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust is a predetermined event, part of Jewish history—and only Jewish history. The Jews, in this version, always have a well-justified fear of annihilation. Indeed, they can survive only if they act as though annihilation were imminent.

When I first learned the legend of Amalek, it made perfect sense to me. It described my knowledge of the world; it helped me connect my experience of getting teased and beaten up to my great-grandmother’s admonitions that using household Yiddish expressions in public was dangerous, to the unfathomable injustice of my grandfather and great-grandfather and scores of other relatives being killed before I was born. I was fourteen and lonely. I knew myself and my family to be victims, and the legend of Amalek imbued my sense of victimhood with meaning and a sense of community.

Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek in the wake of the Hamas attack. The logic of this legend, as he wields it—that Jews occupy a singular place in history and have an exclusive claim on victimhood—has bolstered the anti-antisemitism bureaucracy in Germany and the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right. But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time. Just as much of Israel’s claim to impunity lies in the Jews’ perpetual victim status, many of the country’s critics have tried to excuse Hamas’s act of terrorism as a predictable response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Conversely, in the eyes of Israel’s supporters, Palestinians in Gaza can’t be victims because Hamas attacked Israel first. The fight over one rightful claim to victimhood runs on forever.

For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.

The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.

From the earliest days of Israel’s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away. In 1948, the year the state was created, an article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv described the dire conditions—“old people so weak they were on the verge of death”; “a boy with two paralyzed legs”; “another boy whose hands were severed”—in which Palestinians, mostly women and children, departed the village of Tantura after Israeli troops occupied it: “One woman carried her child in one arm and with the other hand she held her elderly mother. The latter couldn’t keep up the pace, she yelled and begged her daughter to slow down, but the daughter did not consent. Finally the old lady collapsed onto the road and couldn’t move. The daughter pulled out her hair … lest she not make it on time. And worse than this was the association to Jewish mothers and grandmothers who lagged this way on the roads under the crop of murderers.” The journalist caught himself. “There is obviously no room for such a comparison,” he wrote. “This fate—they brought upon themselves.”

Jews took up arms in 1948 to claim land that was offered to them by a United Nations decision to partition what had been British-controlled Palestine. The Palestinians, supported by surrounding Arab states, did not accept the partition and Israel’s declaration of independence. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan invaded the proto-Israeli state, starting what Israel now calls the War of Independence. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the fighting. Those who did not were driven out of their villages by Israeli forces. Most of them were never able to return. The Palestinians remember 1948 as the Nakba, a word that means “catastrophe” in Arabic, just as Shoah means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. That the comparison is unavoidable has compelled many Israelis to assert that, unlike the Jews, Palestinians brought their catastrophe on themselves.

The day I arrived in Kyiv, someone handed me a thick book. It was the first academic study of Stepan Bandera to be published in Ukraine. Bandera is a Ukrainian hero: he fought against the Soviet regime; dozens of monuments to him have appeared since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. He ended up in Germany after the Second World War, led a partisan movement from exile, and died after being poisoned by a K.G.B. agent, in 1959. Bandera was also a committed fascist, an ideologue who wanted to build a totalitarian regime. These facts are detailed in the book, which has sold about twelve hundred copies. (Many bookstores have refused to carry it.) Russia makes gleeful use of Ukraine’s Bandera cult as evidence that Ukraine is a Nazi state. Ukrainians mostly respond by whitewashing Bandera’s legacy. It is ever so hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea that someone could have been the enemy of your enemy and yet not a benevolent force. A victim and also a perpetrator. Or vice versa. ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described what Jan Tomasz Gross wrote. It also misstated when Anna’s parents decided to kill themselves and Anna’s age at the time of those events.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Philosophical and Theological Responses to the Holocaust

Introduction, general overviews.

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• The Holocaust as a Problem of Modernity
• The Problem of Heidegger
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Philosophical and Theological Responses to the Holocaust by Zachary Braiterman LAST REVIEWED: 25 August 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 29 August 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199840731-0021

Raising pressing theoretical, philosophical, and theological questions, the Holocaust has become a major watershed in Western thought, prompting reflection regarding the historical uniqueness of the event itself and the operation and transmission of collective memory. A heavy moral responsibility devolves upon artists, cultural critics, historians, novelists, poets, politicians, philosophers, and theologians. What are the right words, images, and concepts; what kind of affect and what kind of ethical or political charge should these carry before the sheer magnitude of catastrophic suffering? How and under what conditions have these changed, and will they continue to change over time? The term “post-Holocaust,” which appears in the vast archive that has formed around the Holocaust, is not a simple chronological indicator. By it, one means specifically bodies of thought in which the Holocaust is the central, conscious, and even self-conscious motivator for a work or a body of work. Historically, post-Holocaust thought in theology and philosophy emerged primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, once the event had been named, and once attention had been drawn to emblematic narratives and images specific to that event. One of the key arguments common to much of this discourse speaks to the perceived uniqueness of the Holocaust, the claim that the Holocaust marks a new thing in Jewish, European, modern, or world history, with which all cultural forms—art, architecture, law, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion—must come to terms in ways that are themselves unique and even radical. This bibliography focuses primarily on theological and philosophical responses, but includes memoirs and other works by survivors as well as reflections by sociologists and historians on the nature of memory and the problem of representation.

The most comprehensive overview of theological and philosophical responses to the Holocaust is Katz, et al. 2007 , an anthology framed around perspectives from Judaism and Jewish history. Rosenberg 1992 has the same focus but is less comprehensive. Rubenstein and Roth 1987 includes varieties of religious response to the Holocaust in Orthodox and liberal Jewish and Christian religious thought. Katz 1985 , Schweid 1994 , and Braiterman 1998 are all scholarly monographs that investigate a variety of Jewish thinkers, from liberal to Orthodox. Morgan 2001 takes up both theologians and philosophers, but is limited specifically to America. Mintz 1984 and Roskies 1984 both situate the responses to the Holocaust in the long tradition of Jewish responses to catastrophe, Mintz focusing more on Hebrew literature and Roskies on Yiddish literature.

Braiterman, Zachary. ( God ) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Explores theological and textual revision in post-Holocaust Judaism concerning the relationship between God and catastrophic suffering. Draws on postmodern literary theory and the interpretation of classical Jewish sources to make sense of how once-central ideas and texts are displaced in favor of more anti-theodic expression drawn from the margins of the textual tradition.

Katz, Steven. Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought . New York: New York University Press, 1985.

One of the first major published works on post-Holocaust thought, this study includes an argument for understanding what the author calls the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The critical, analytic assessments of Rubenstein, Berkovits, and Fackenheim set the philosophical terms of discussion for all future analysis of these thinkers.

Katz, Steven, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg, eds. Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust . New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

A massive, indispensable anthology of theological responses to the Holocaust. Includes ultra-Orthodox writings from shortly after the war, post-Holocaust thought, and contemporary theology and critical studies. Many of the citations and selections from almost all of the authors cited below can be found in this anthology. Also includes an indispensable bibliography.

Mintz, Alan. Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature . New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

While its explicit focus is modernist Hebrew literature, this signature study, published in the 1980s, was formed by and helped set the post-Holocaust mood in Jewish studies. Central to this literature and its discussion is the figure of angry protest.

Morgan, Michael. Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America . New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

An exhaustive, evenhanded survey that philosophically and culturally situates thought about the Holocaust, from Hannah Arendt and the post-Holocaust theologians to the reception of post-Holocaust thought. A central focus is the recovery of a sense of history.

Rosenberg, Bernhard, ed. Theological and Halakhic Reflections on the Holocaust . Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1992.

A comprehensive overview from the 1950s to the late 1980s of primary sources reflecting modern Orthodox responses to the Holocaust. Includes essays by Berkovits, Lamm, Lookstein, Rackham, Soloveitchik, and others.

Roskies, David. Against the Apocalypse: Response to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

While focusing explicitly on modernist Yiddish literature, this signature study, published in the 1980s, was formed by and helped set the post-Holocaust mood in Jewish studies. Central to this literature and its discussion is the figure of angry protest.

Rubenstein, Richard L., and John K. Roth. Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy . Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987.

Ecumenical in approach, this volume provides the historical and theological background to the origins of ancient and medieval anti-Judaism, modern anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the variety of Jewish and Christian responses to the Holocaust.

Schweid, Eliezer. Wrestling until Day-Break: Searching for Meaning in the Thinking on the Holocaust . Lanham, MD: University Press Of America, 1994.

A critical survey of Jewish religious response to the Holocaust, from Leo Baeck to post-Holocaust writers. Charts out how the Holocaust disrupts religious faith in God and secular faith in mankind. Assumes the need to struggle with and search for revolutionary forms of new theology. Originally published in Hebrew in 1990.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Nazi Germany — Holocaust

Essays on Holocaust

Hook examples for holocaust essays, the unimaginable horror hook.

Begin your essay by vividly describing the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, such as concentration camps, mass extermination, and the human suffering that occurred during this dark period in history. Use powerful and descriptive language to evoke emotions in your readers.

The Survivor's Testimony Hook

Share a compelling personal testimony of a Holocaust survivor. Use direct quotes or excerpts from survivors' accounts to provide firsthand insights into the experiences and resilience of those who lived through the Holocaust.

The Nuremberg Trials and Justice Hook

Discuss the Nuremberg Trials and the pursuit of justice for the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Highlight the importance of holding individuals accountable for their actions and the establishment of principles for international law.

The Heroes of the Holocaust Hook

Introduce the stories of individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, such as Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg. Emphasize acts of bravery and compassion in the face of extreme adversity.

The Lessons of History Hook

Reflect on the broader lessons and moral implications of the Holocaust. Discuss the importance of remembering and learning from this tragic event to prevent future genocides and promote tolerance and understanding.

The Art and Literature of Survival Hook

Showcase how Holocaust survivors used art, literature, and other forms of expression to cope with their trauma and convey their experiences. Explore the therapeutic and documentary aspects of creative works produced during and after the Holocaust.

The Holocaust in Contemporary Context Hook

Connect the Holocaust to current events, discussing instances of hate crimes, discrimination, and genocide in the modern world. Highlight the importance of remembrance and education to prevent the recurrence of such atrocities.

The Resilience and Hope Hook

Share stories of resilience and hope within the Holocaust, such as clandestine education in concentration camps or acts of solidarity among prisoners. Explore the indomitable human spirit that emerged even in the darkest times.

The Forgotten Victims Hook

Draw attention to less-discussed aspects of the Holocaust, such as the experiences of Romani people, disabled individuals, or political dissidents who also suffered persecution. Shed light on the diversity of victims and their stories.

The Role of Witnesses and Documentation Hook

Discuss the significance of witnesses, both survivors and liberators, who documented the Holocaust through photographs, diaries, and testimonies. Emphasize the importance of preserving and sharing these historical records.

Informative Speech on Anne Frank

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Selfishness in Night by Elie Wiesel

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Arek Hersh – a Story of a Holocaust Survivor

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Disastrous Event in Jewish History: The Holocaust

Holocaust denial: anti-semitic conspiracy theory, the reasons we should not forget the holocaust, irena sendler - a person who saved hundreds of lifes during holocaust, homosexuality and the holocaust, the physical and mental impact of holocaust on its victims, the influence of jewish music on the holocaust, the holocaust: historical anti-semitism, the possibility of the holocaust to have been avoided, "after i no longer speak"; a message on the impact of the holocaust in "shooting stars", the boy in the striped pajamas - the holocaust drama, understanding the holocaust through "schindler's list", a nazi’s metamorphosis in maxine kumin’s poem "woodchucks", experiences of the survivors in night by elie wiesel and maus by art spiegelman, the use of visual narrative and formal structure in maus: a survivors tale by art spiegelman, analysis of author’s struggles in night by elie wiesel, holocaust through the eyes of a child in the boy in the striped pajamas, the holocaust: chronicle of murders, analysis of artie's impressions of the holocaust in maus, time of savagery: churchill's speech, diary of anne frank and history of shmuel and bruno.

1933 - 1945

German Reich and German-occupied Europe

The Holocaust was a genocidal event that took place during World War II, orchestrated by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany. It was a systematic and state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of approximately six million Jews, along with millions of other victims, including Romani people, disabled individuals, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and others deemed "undesirable" by the Nazis. The Holocaust was marked by horrific atrocities, including the establishment of concentration camps, mass shootings, forced labor, and the implementation of gas chambers in extermination camps. It was an unparalleled act of inhumanity and racial hatred, driven by the Nazis' ideology of racial superiority and the desire to create a homogeneous "Aryan" society.

One such figure is Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl whose diary provided a poignant firsthand account of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. Her diary, discovered after her death in a concentration camp, has become an iconic symbol of hope and resilience. Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist, is another notable person associated with the Holocaust. Through his efforts, Schindler saved the lives of over 1,000 Jewish people by employing them in his factories and ensuring their protection. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, dedicated his life to bearing witness to the Holocaust and promoting Holocaust education and remembrance. His powerful memoir, "Night," chronicles his experiences in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, is remembered for his courageous actions in saving tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews by issuing protective passports and providing safe houses.

The historical context of the Holocaust can be traced back to the rise of Nazi ideology and its virulent antisemitism. Hitler's regime implemented a series of discriminatory laws known as the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their rights and subjected them to persecution. This was followed by the establishment of concentration camps and the implementation of the "Final Solution" – a plan to exterminate all Jews within Nazi-controlled territories. The Holocaust occurred within the broader context of World War II, as Nazi Germany sought to expand its territories and exert dominance over Europe. The war provided a cover for the implementation of mass murder and allowed the Nazis to carry out their genocidal agenda with relative impunity.

The Holocaust has had a profound impact on international law and the concept of human rights. The Nuremberg Trials, held after World War II, established the precedent for prosecuting individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, was a direct response to the atrocities of the Holocaust, emphasizing the inherent dignity and rights of all individuals. The Holocaust also serves as a reminder of the dangers of prejudice and discrimination. It has prompted ongoing efforts to combat antisemitism, racism, and bigotry in all forms. The Holocaust education and memorialization have become vital tools in raising awareness and fostering tolerance, ensuring that the lessons of the past are not forgotten. Furthermore, the Holocaust has inspired countless works of literature, art, and film, which bear witness to the horrors experienced by its victims. These creative expressions serve as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the importance of remembering the past to prevent similar atrocities in the future.

Public opinion on the Holocaust varies, but it is generally characterized by shock, horror, and condemnation. The Holocaust is widely regarded as one of the most egregious crimes against humanity in history, and the vast majority of people view it with deep sorrow and sympathy for the victims. Public opinion acknowledges the gravity of the Holocaust and recognizes its impact on the world. The overwhelming sentiment is one of condemnation towards the Nazi regime and the individuals who perpetrated these heinous acts. People express profound empathy for the millions of innocent lives lost and the immense suffering endured by survivors. Moreover, public opinion acknowledges the importance of remembering the Holocaust as a means of honoring the victims and preventing future atrocities. Holocaust education and commemorative events have garnered significant support, with many recognizing the need to preserve the memory of the Holocaust as a stark reminder of the consequences of hatred and prejudice.

Film: Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" (1993) is a critically acclaimed movie based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of over a thousand Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. The film vividly portrays the atrocities and human suffering while highlighting acts of bravery and compassion. Literature: Elie Wiesel's memoir "Night" (1956) provides a firsthand account of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. It is a powerful and haunting narrative that has become a significant literary work, capturing the physical and emotional hardships endured by those subjected to Nazi persecution. Art: The artwork of Holocaust survivor and painter Samuel Bak often explores the themes of loss, resilience, and memory. His paintings depict scenes from his own experiences as a child during the Holocaust, offering a deeply personal and introspective perspective on the tragedy.

1. The Holocaust witnessed the systematic annihilation of six million Jewish individuals at the hands of the Nazis. This accounts for approximately two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe at that time. 2. The Holocaust took place between 1941 and 1945 during World War II, primarily in German-occupied territories. It involved the mass extermination of Jews, as well as other groups such as Romani people, Poles, disabled individuals, and political dissidents. 3. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration and extermination camp, was responsible for the deaths of over one million people. Other notorious camps include Treblinka, Sobibor, and Dachau. 4. The Nuremberg Laws, implemented in 1935, stripped Jews of their citizenship, rights, and protections. These laws laid the foundation for the persecution and eventual mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. 5. Rescuers, such as Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, risked their lives to save Jews from persecution. Their heroic actions demonstrated courage and compassion in the face of immense danger.

The topic of the Holocaust is of utmost importance to write an essay about due to its profound historical significance and the lessons it teaches us about humanity. By exploring the Holocaust, we delve into one of the darkest periods in human history, where millions of innocent lives were brutally extinguished. Writing an essay about the Holocaust allows us to honor and remember the victims, ensuring that their stories are never forgotten. It serves as a powerful reminder of the consequences of unchecked hatred, discrimination, and prejudice. Through examining the causes, events, and aftermath of the Holocaust, we gain a deeper understanding of the depths of human cruelty and the dangers of ideological extremism. Moreover, studying the Holocaust prompts critical reflection on the importance of promoting tolerance, empathy, and respect for human rights. It compels us to confront the potential for evil within society and to actively work towards creating a world that rejects bigotry and embraces diversity. By writing an essay on the Holocaust, we contribute to the preservation of historical memory, promote empathy and understanding, and strive to ensure that such atrocities are never repeated. It is a testament to our commitment to learning from the past and building a more compassionate and just future.

1. Browning, C. R. (1992). Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland. Harper Perennial. 2. Dawidowicz, L. S. (1981). The war against the Jews, 1933-1945. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 3. Evans, R. J. (2008). The Third Reich at war: How the Nazis led Germany from conquest to disaster. Penguin. 4. Gilbert, M. (1985). The Holocaust: A history of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. Henry Holt and Company. 5. Kershaw, I. (2000). Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis. W. W. Norton & Company. 6. LaCapra, D. (2004). History, memory, and representation: An essay in cognitive historiography. Cornell University Press. 7. Levi, P. (1986). Survival in Auschwitz. Touchstone. 8. Snyder, T. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books. 9. Wiesel, E. (2006). Night. Hill and Wang. 10. Yahil, L. (1991). The Holocaust: The fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945. Oxford University Press.

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Tracing the Origins: the Genesis of the Holocaust

This essay about the Holocaust traces its origins from the aftermath of World War I to the rise of National Socialism and Hitler’s ascension to power. It explores how deep-seated prejudices, political upheavals, and economic turmoil converged to unleash one of humanity’s darkest chapters. The essay highlights the genocidal campaign of World War II, collaborationist regimes, international indifference, and the fragility of human morality. Despite the darkness, it also illuminates acts of resistance and the enduring lessons the Holocaust imparts on the consequences of unchecked hatred and the importance of defending human dignity and rights.

How it works

In the annals of human history, few events have left as indelible a mark as the Holocaust. Its genesis, however, is not a tale of sudden eruption, but rather a chilling convergence of historical, social, and ideological currents that flowed through the early 20th century. To trace the origins of the Holocaust is to navigate through a labyrinth of political upheavals, economic turmoil, and deep-seated prejudices that coalesced into one of the darkest chapters of human civilization.

The seeds of the Holocaust can be found in the aftermath of World War I, a conflict that shattered empires and left Europe scarred and destabilized.

The Treaty of Versailles, with its punitive measures against Germany, sowed the seeds of resentment and provided fertile ground for the rise of extremism. In the crucible of economic hardship and political chaos, extremist ideologies found fertile ground, promising desperate populations a return to glory and stability.

One such ideology was National Socialism, espoused by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Central to Nazi ideology was the notion of racial purity and superiority, with Jews singled out as the ultimate scapegoats for Germany’s woes. Drawing on centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes, the Nazis propagated a virulent hatred of Jews, portraying them as subhuman parasites responsible for the perceived decline of German society.

The ascension of Hitler to power in 1933 marked a turning point in the history of the Holocaust. With the consolidation of Nazi control over Germany, anti-Semitic policies were swiftly implemented, stripping Jews of their rights, livelihoods, and dignity. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 institutionalized racial discrimination, relegating Jews to second-class citizenship and paving the way for further persecution.

Yet, it was not until the outbreak of World War II in 1939 that the full horror of the Holocaust would be unleashed. The invasion of Poland marked the beginning of Hitler’s genocidal campaign, as Einsatzgruppen units followed the German army, rounding up and executing Jews en masse. The establishment of ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination centers soon followed, forming the backbone of the Nazi’s Final Solution – a euphemism for the systematic murder of six million Jews.

But the Holocaust was not merely a product of Nazi Germany; its roots extend far beyond the borders of the Third Reich. Across Europe, collaborationist regimes and opportunistic individuals willingly aided and abetted the Nazi regime in its quest for racial purity. From the Vichy regime in France to the puppet governments of Eastern Europe, collaboration with the Nazis facilitated the deportation and murder of millions of Jews.

At the same time, the indifference and inaction of the international community played a crucial role in enabling the Holocaust to unfold. Despite mounting evidence of Nazi atrocities, the Allies failed to take decisive action to halt the genocide, prioritizing military objectives over humanitarian concerns. Even as reports of mass murder filtered out of occupied Europe, the world remained largely silent, allowing the Holocaust to continue unabated.

The Holocaust also laid bare the fragility of human morality in the face of totalitarianism and mass hysteria. Ordinary individuals, swept up in the tide of hatred and propaganda, became willing participants in the machinery of genocide. From the bureaucrats who meticulously organized the deportation of Jews to the ordinary citizens who stood by as their neighbors were carted off to their deaths, the Holocaust exposed the banality of evil that lurks within us all.

Yet, amidst the darkness of the Holocaust, there were also glimmers of hope and resistance. Across occupied Europe, brave individuals and underground organizations risked their lives to save Jews from deportation and certain death. From the righteous among the nations who sheltered Jews in their homes to the partisans who fought valiantly against Nazi tyranny, these acts of defiance serve as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable evil.

Seventy-five years have passed since the end of the Holocaust, yet its legacy continues to reverberate through our collective consciousness. The Holocaust serves as a stark reminder of the consequences of unchecked hatred and prejudice, and the dangers of succumbing to the seductive allure of authoritarianism. As we bear witness to rising xenophobia and intolerance in our own time, the lessons of the Holocaust remain as relevant as ever, reminding us of our shared responsibility to confront injustice and defend the dignity and rights of all humanity.

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N.Y.C. Public Schools Will Send 8th Graders to Visit Holocaust Museum

New York City will give schools the option to send eighth-graders on field trips to the Museum of Jewish Heritage as part of an effort to address antisemitism.

By Emma G. Fitzsimmons

As tension continues to simmer over the Israel-Hamas war, New York City officials have embraced a privately funded initiative to send all eighth graders in public and charter schools to visit the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

The program, part of a $2.5 million public-private partnership to address antisemitism, will be seeded with $1 million from a foundation run by Jon Gray, the president of the investment firm Blackstone.

The citywide field trip plan, which was announced on Thursday, will center on the museum’s efforts to educate younger visitors about the Holocaust. The initiative comes as schools grapple with questions about how to approach the Israel-Hamas war and what to teach about the history of the conflict. It will be optional for schools and will start this fall.

In places like California , there have been pushes for teaching pro-Palestinian lessons in schools. Leaders in New York City’s school system, which is particularly diverse, with tens of thousands of Jewish, Muslim and Arab students, are moving to offer new curriculum materials about antisemitism and Islamophobia .

New York is one of nearly two dozen states that are required to teach students about the Holocaust, and lawmakers included $500,000 in the state budget this year to review and update Holocaust curriculums in schools.

The field trip program was created by Julie Menin, a Jewish city councilwoman from Manhattan whose mother and grandmother survived the Holocaust in Hungary. She said that she was worried about a rise in antisemitic attacks in the city.

“We need a proactive approach to combat this hatred at its roots,” she said.

Ms. Menin said that eighth grade was an appropriate time for students to learn about the atrocities of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were killed. She said that visiting the exhibition would make a more lasting impression than reading about it in a textbook.

“We know there are Holocaust deniers,” she said. “When you see this exhibition and you personally witness the stories of survivors, it truly makes a difference.”

The program will be offered to more than 85,000 students in public and charter schools over the next three years. The museum , in Lower Manhattan, opened in 1997 and describes itself as a living memorial to the Holocaust.

Shahana Hanif, the first Muslim woman elected to the City Council, who represents a district in Brooklyn, said the program was a good investment and also underscored the need for programming built around Palestinian history.

“There is no Palestinian Cultural Center in New York City, nor an Islamic Heritage Museum,” she said. “These would be great investments for an inclusive education and learning opportunity.”

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also supported the use of field trips to “help students of today recognize and oppose modern genocides, whether in China, Sudan, Myanmar, Gaza or anywhere else.”

Mr. Gray, who is Jewish, has worked with Ms. Menin on other programs to offer free swim lessons and college savings accounts to public school students. He and his wife, Mindy, said in a statement that an “alarming rise in antisemitism today must be addressed through better education about our past — both its darkest moments and the incredible displays of courage in response.”

The museum will hire additional staff to run the program and work with schools to schedule tours and to provide free transportation.

The city’s Education Department is also working with the museum to create a new Holocaust teaching guide for educators that will be released in the fall. The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, has said that by June 2025, the system will offer separate curriculum series on the culture and contributions of Jewish and Muslim Americans to society — as part of a social studies initiative that has already offered materials on Asian Americans and L.G.B.T.Q. stories.

Mr. Banks, who attended the announcement along with City Council members and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, praised the field trip program.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage is currently offering a new exhibit, called “Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark,” which is designed for 9- to 12-year-olds and explores how ordinary Danes saved 7,200 Jews by smuggling them into Sweden by boat.

Troy Closson contributed reporting.

Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall Bureau Chief for The Times, covering Mayor Eric Adams and his administration. More about Emma G. Fitzsimmons

Hamas is using people of Gaza as human shields. You can't avoid that fact. | Letters

I have two issues with the op-ed in the Ideas Lab of May 19 (“ Student protesters won’t be silent about genocide unfolding in Gaza ”).

For starters, I should state that I believe there should be an immediate cease fire in Gaza and that the continued loss of civilian life only harms the long-term efforts for peace and stability. I also support the right to peaceful protest , but if protests turn into racist confrontations, it is counterproductive. Violence and inflammatory rhetoric are never the answers.

However, the first issue is that she wrote that Israel is populated by “European ‘settlers.’” But nearly a million Jews fled or were expelled by Muslim countries and settled in Israel. There are also Muslim and Christian citizens of Israel.

The second is she avoids dealing with Hamas, which started this current conflict and is using the population of Gaza as human shields. Having traveled to the Middle East, I believe there is much to make amends for. I do believe that Israel as a nation should have done more to try to find lasting solutions, but Islamic terrorist groups have made that more difficult.

Both sides in this conflict need to come together and create a state for the Palestinians and use the resources being used for war to bring some measure of social justice.

Joseph Geck, Waukesha

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Academic Research

About the mandel center.

The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies is a leading generator of new knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust, inspiring us to continually reexamine and grapple with fundamental problems of human nature and societies. By working with partner institutions and producing publications and programs, we support researchers and faculty worldwide, especially young scholars, to create the next generation of professors, authors, and researchers to ensure the continued growth and vitality of Holocaust studies.

Museum fellowships support research about the Holocaust from scholars of all disciplines.

Our seminars assist faculty members who are teaching or preparing university-level courses on the Holocaust.

The Center offers a variety of programs to help ensure the development of future generations of Holocaust studies scholars.

Publications

The Mandel Center makes significant contributions to Holocaust studies through the publication of some of the most important works in the field:

Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos - This groundbreaking reference work documents the vast Nazi camp and ghetto system.

Holocaust and Genocide Studies - This scholarly journal features research articles, interpretive essays, book reviews, and more.

Explore different ways to conduct research using the Museum’s resources.

Use this comprehensive search tool to access records across the Museum’s collections.

This tool allows instructors and students to engage directly with primary sources related to the Holocaust.

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The Holocaust in the Soviet Union

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How the first National Book Awards reflected 1950s America

In the start of a new series reflecting on 75 years of the awards, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about how societies and juries read and recognize literature

The National Book Awards will celebrate its 75th anniversary at this year’s ceremony, on Nov. 20. To mark the occasion, The Washington Post has collaborated with the administrator and presenter of the awards, the National Book Foundation, to commission a series of essays by National Book Award-honored authors who will consider (and reconsider), decade by decade, the books that were recognized and those that were overlooked; the preoccupations of authors, readers and the publishing industry through time; the power and subjectivity of judges and of awards; and the lasting importance of books to our culture, from the 1950s to the present day. In this essay, Viet Thanh Nguyen — a finalist in 2016 for “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War” and longlisted in 2023 for “A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial” — looks back at the 1950s.

It’s tempting to think that literary awards go to the “best” books of a given year, and most tempting for the winners. As Saul Bellow said while accepting a National Book Award for “The Adventures of Augie March,” in 1954, “When you get a prize you feel very virtuous.” Bellow’s name still carries weight among readers, but many prize winners have been forgotten; conversely, many older books still read today never won awards in their time. Prizes sometimes predict a future member of the literary hall of fame; sometimes they’re simply given to the books that a majority of judges can agree on. Juries are not immune to the passions and prejudices of their times, so it’s no surprise that they can be both prophetic and fallible.

The worldliness of prizes, including what John O’Hara teasingly called the National Book Reward (of which he was the 1956 fiction recipient for “Ten North Frederick”), also make them an awkward fit with how many writers see their art. For Wallace Stevens, who won in 1955 for his collected poems, “awards and honors have nothing to do” with the life of a poet. “He does not accept them as a true satisfaction because there is no true satisfaction for the poet but poetry itself.” That same year, William Faulkner, who won the fiction prize for “A Fable,” said that writers are “doomed to fail,” because what they accomplish cannot match their aspirations.

From the vantage point of today, the awards from the 1950s are a mixed record, if measured by the current reputations of the 224 nominated authors (of 274 books) who were winners or finalists. Readers will know many of the names, but far from all. Let’s begin with the famous: William Carlos Williams was an eight-time finalist across categories during the ’50s, winning once for poetry; Stevens, Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren had three each; John Steinbeck, Rachel Carson and Hannah Arendt had two apiece. Most of the nominated authors scored only one appearance, including Mary McCarthy, Ezra Pound and Flannery O’Connor. Finalist recognition went to highbrow writers like E.E. Cummings (twice) and to middlebrow writers like Herman Wouk (also twice). Under which brow should a writer like Ayn Rand, a finalist in fiction for “Atlas Shrugged” in 1958, be filed? I have yet to read that novel, so I cannot say for sure.

I confess to having read only 12 of the books (although I have read poems by many of the poets) and to having heard of only 97 of the authors. Among those I had not heard of, to pick three at random: Ralph L. Rusk, nonfiction winner for “The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson” (1950); Horace Gregory, poetry finalist for his “Selected Poems” (1952); and H.L. Davis, fiction finalist for “Winds of Morning” (1953). Then there are authors whose names I knew but whose nominated books I have not read, including: George F. Kennan, “Russia Leaves the War” (nonfiction winner, 1957); John Ciardi, “As If” (poetry finalist, 1956); and Paul Bowles, “The Spider’s House” (fiction finalist, 1956). I consider myself a fairly literary person, but these results indicate not only my ignorance but also how few of these books are still widely read, or even available to read.

Umberto Eco’s notion of one’s library as inevitably being composed mostly of books one has not read may be helpful here. “It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy,” Eco wrote, and we might approach lists of literary award winners and finalists in the same spirit: They are aspirational, a log of what we could be reading and might yet read. These lists also remind us that we are probably overlooking work today that will be considered important in the future. Countercultural writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs are still read, but they did not merit notice from the National Book Awards in the 1950s. Neither did Isaac Asimov (“I, Robot”) or Ray Bradbury (“Fahrenheit 451”), foundational authors working in a genre that literary purists might have been prone to look down on as lowbrow and minor then, but one that is more esteemed in our time.

Science fiction was far from the only genre neglected by high-profile awards during the 1950s. Américo Paredes published “With a Pistol in His Hand,” John Okada wrote “No-No Boy,” Paule Marshall appeared with “Brown Girl, Brownstones,” Jade Snow Wong achieved success with “Fifth Chinese Daughter,” and C.Y. Lee shook up popular culture with “Flower Drum Song,” which became a Broadway musical and a landmark movie for Asian Americans. These works by writers of color helped push American literature to grapple with the complexity and heterogeneity of American experiences, but none were finalists for a National Book Award.

The equivalent of these books today might be more competitive for awards. The cultural landscape has shifted a great deal because of political and social transformations that became increasingly visible starting in the 1950s, such as the civil rights movement and the Beat Generation. Greater attention is now paid to diversity in literature, from the ranks of published authors and their editors to the composition of literary juries and the recipients of awards. While some decry this concern for diversity of various kinds, the symbolic power of book awards to address inequity was already visible in the 1950s, most notably for Jewish writers.

By my count, they made up 25 of the finalists, as compared with 42 women and only two Black writers, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, who won in fiction for “Invisible Man.” White men made up all the other finalists. Some Jewish American writers did not write books having to do with Jewishness, like Henry Kissinger (“Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” nonfiction finalist, 1958); some are now obscure, like Eli Siegel, a finalist in poetry in 1958 for “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana”; and some notably dealt with Jewishness and became enduring names, like Bernard Malamud, winner in fiction for “The Magic Barrel” (1959) and finalist for “The Assistant” (1958). Were these writers being rewarded purely for literary merit? Or was the shadow of the Holocaust influencing the decisions of the judges, who might have become more sensitive or oppositional to the racist and antisemitic treatment of Jewish people that was more common before the 1950s in the United States?

Without access to the deliberations and thoughts of the jurists, we do not know. But the 1950s were an important decade in American Jews’ transition from being considered non-White in the early 20th century to being accepted as conditionally White. Literature played a crucial role, with Jewish writers like Bellow, Malamud and Philip Roth (fiction winner for “Goodbye, Columbus” in 1960) grappling with the ambivalent, fraught condition of Jewishness in American life. Today, when more than 90 percent of Jewish Americans identify as White and are generally seen as such, the urgency of rewarding literature by and about Jewish Americans seems to have receded, if the taste of the judges is any indication. So far as I can tell, only one or two Jewish writers have been shortlisted for an award this decade.

The finalists of this decade (who include non-American authors in a translated literature category, which did not exist in the 1950s) look radically different from those of seven decades earlier: By my count, there are 54 men, 42 women and three nonbinary people; about half of the authors are White, and the rest — American or international — are Black, African, Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, Arab, Native or Pacific Islander. Several are queer, compared with only one openly gay writer in the 1950s, Truman Capote, a finalist for his novel “The Grass Harp” (1952). For some critics , this shift away from the dominant Whiteness, maleness and straightness of the 1950s indicates the troubling triumph of a suspect diversity. The ’50s, they might argue, were a time of perhaps less tolerance but greater objectivity about artistic accomplishment.

The liberal deification of minority trauma and representative “voices for the voiceless” undoubtedly exists, as Percival Everett’s “Erasure” (2001) scathingly depicts. The novel (recently adapted into the Oscar-winning “American Fiction”) includes a hilarious satire of a prestigious literary prize that looks suspiciously like the National Book Award, with an overwhelmingly White jury that votes unanimously — except for the lone Black judge — to reward a novel by a Black writer that dwells excessively on Black pain and dysfunction. But the opposite of this trauma porn scenario — the supposedly universal aesthetic standards of the ’50s — could also be seen as the genteel literary equivalent of White supremacy.

By mid-century, racial engineering through immigration law had altered the American population. In 1882, the United States excluded the Chinese from entering, and in 1924 the government shut down all Asian immigration while greatly limiting other immigrants from non-Western countries. Not until 1965 would the bans on Asian immigrants, and the low quotas on other immigrants, be fully lifted, allowing White people more than 80 years to inhibit economic, cultural and political competition from immigrants. If the Chinese immigrant population had continued its trajectory from 1880 , when it accounted for 9 percent of California’s population, and if Chinese men had been allowed to bring wives from China and form families, then by the 1950s there might have been a large pool of second- and third-generation Chinese American writers to compete for awards.

This is exactly what has happened since 1965, with at least a dozen Asian American writers among the finalists in the 2020s.

Race probably affected not only who became writers but the decisions of judges. In their survey of 35 years of National Book Award decisions, Alexander Manshel and Melanie Walsh concluded that “when a majority of the judges in the room were people of color … the shortlist becomes significantly more diverse.” That majority has happened only five times in National Book Award history. And the reverse is also true: “When the jury was composed of only white judges, they selected a white winner every single time.” Ellison appears to have been the only judge of color in the 1950s, serving once. The overwhelming majority of judges were men, with perhaps one or two women in each of the years for which we have the rosters. If the gender composition of those juries foreshadowed the subsequent decades, the results were predictable: Fiction prizes have been awarded to women only 24 times.

One of the major themes of literature by writers from minoritized populations is the erasure and silencing of those who are dominated, both past and present. That theme extends to how societies and juries read and recognize literature. While some of the National Book Award winners and finalists are undoubtedly phenomenal works, the lists from which they are drawn inevitably include between their lines the potential for alternative literary histories, composed of those who might have won and those never nominated. Even these alternate lists are a palimpsest, layered over a haunting possibility: the books that might have been written by those who were suppressed before they even had the opportunity to find a voice.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” and the memoir “A Man of Two Faces,” among other books.

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