By people like you, to people like me
Thinking about the Holocaust in the context of the similarities between the victims, the perpetrators, and us.
An open letter to the non-Jewish community who want to better understand the importance of Holocaust Remembrance:
Let me tell you a bit about myself for those who don't know me. I am tall and pale, with wavy brown hair and hazel eyes. My go-to outfit three seasons a year consists of skinny jeans and an oversized crew-neck sweatshirt. I am a runner. I like to knit and to read at cafes. My favourite book is A Room With A View. My favourite TV show is The Office. I spend too much time taking bad selfies with my dog. My favourite thing in my apartment is a red blanket composed of 25% unknown fibres. Odds are, I look and act a lot like a lot of you - or your sister, or cousin, or friend, or colleague. I am also a lot like all of the women in my family who were murdered in the Holocaust.
Today, we commemorate the 6 million Jews from across Europe who were murdered in mass shootings and gas chambers, their bodies left in piles in the woods or outside crematoria. They were, by and large, people who looked a lot like me. And because I look a lot like many of you - they looked like you too. They were men and women who looked, dressed, and acted exactly like the people who handed them over to the Gestapo or took Jewish extermination into their own hands. The uncomfortable thing that we don’t like to talk about when we talk about the Holocaust is that it was done by people like you to people like me. And as we’ve already established, we aren’t very different.
It shouldn’t matter whether or not the victims of the Holocaust were like me. They were people who were dehumanized and systematically murdered. Full stop. But for some reason, relatability with victims of the Holocaust is a condition precedent for empathizing with this most terrible part of history. So setting aside the many victims of the Holocaust with whom I arguably have less in common - members of the Orthodox community, or the Sinti, Roma, and disabled victims - I want to talk about why we cannot distance ourselves from the environment that set the groundwork for the systematic attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.
When we talk about war, violence, genocide, and the atrocities committed by people against one another today, those of us in the West can often rely on ‘otherness’. When we talk about what happened in Cambodia and Rwanda, or with Taliban and Isis, or right now with the Uyghurs in China, we can sigh and say, “Things are different over there. We don’t live in the kind of place where that happens”. We can rely on the excuse that it is violence committed by people who live in sociocultural contexts that we can never understand because of how vastly they differ from our own. This excuse doesn’t exist when it comes to the Holocaust.
The deportation of Jews wasn’t from a country or culture that differed drastically from what those of us in the West are accustomed to - because it was that culture. Jews were deported from Paris, Berlin, Prague, and Vienna. They were dragged out from homes and lives that looked exactly like the homes and lives of their gentile neighbours. There is no excuse that this atrocity was committed by very different people with an unfamiliar culture or that it was an army walking into a country that it didn’t understand; because they weren’t, and it wasn’t.
It would be so much easier - for all of us - if this weren’t true. It would be easier if the Jews murdered in the Holocaust looked or acted very different from people like my friends and me - the almost-lawyers always searching for a good latte. It would be easier if the people who perpetrated the Holocaust weren’t a lot like many of you - who I’m guessing are also in search of a good latte. But those aren’t the facts we are dealing with. The people on both sides of the gun at Babi Yar were remarkably similar.
It cannot even be said that the Jews of Europe were alienated from the gentile population in the years leading up to the first deportations. It’s imperative to understand that they weren’t because of what it tells us about how the Holocaust was enacted. While it is true that there were Jewish populations in shtetls, Jewish villages, predominately in Eastern Europe, by 1938, approximately 10% of the people of Vienna was at least half-Jewish. In the lead-up to the war, some 70% of the Jewish population of Europe lived in major urban centres. Across Europe, but particularly in Germany, Austria, and Lithuania, Jews held high-ranking positions in private and public life. Jews were highly integrated into the societies where they lived. In discussing the purging of Jews from public life, the boycott of their businesses, or their ultimate deportation to ghettos and death camps, there is no excuse to be found in the argument that even if they looked similar, they were still somehow foreign.
I am not one for Holocaust analogies. I don’t like to compare things, even really terrible things, to what happened during the Holocaust. But a few years ago, an Israeli project sought to show what it would have looked like if a tween girl during the Holocaust had Instagram by bringing to life the real diary of a young girl named Eva. And it’s chilling. We see a young girl living her life: going to school, getting her first boyfriend, and goofing around with her friends. Slowly, that life she is living is stripped away from her. We see people living lives precisely like hers, deciding that she is somehow less human than they are. Watching those Instagram stories again now, I see echoes of the very early 1930s in our modern world in the rise of ideological extremism. I see the desire to force one ideological narrative onto others at the expense of truth. I see the attempts to blame the Covid-19 pandemic on the Jewish community, American police violence on Israel, replacement theory, and the so-called progressive stance that Jews in Israel are a problem, and I can’t help but feel a chill run down my spine.
Holocaust education is more important now than ever, with the number of living survivors dwindling each year. It should not be the case that 33% of North American students question whether the Holocaust happened or believe it is exaggerated. It is essential to understand the magnitude of what was lost in lives, language, and culture to understand just how dangerous the present-day rise of Antisemitism truly is. For me, and for you.
I look a lot like you. I live a life that is very similar to yours. Just as it was in 1940, we are not significantly different. When we talk about the Holocaust, we cannot allow ourselves to lose sight of the reality that the Holocaust was perpetrated in geographic and cultural contexts where we continue to live. It wasn’t an army walking into a country full of people who looked and lived very different lives from their own. People turned their neighbours, colleagues, and friends over to gas chambers. We need to remember this when we look at Antisemitism today. Because Antisemitism, including violent Antisemitism, continues to be enacted by people like you on people like me. And as you’ll recall, we’re not very different.
To keep up to date with the latest from Horse of a Different Colour, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
If you want to find thought-provoking writing similar to what you see here, consider checking out Refind.
Exceptionally written, with so much heart. Could not agree more with the points you're raising. It is uncomfortable to think about the ways in which little actions and events here and there together contribute to an environment where something so unspeakably horrific becomes possible. The parallels to some things I've seen happen the past years are unsettling.