BERLIN (AP) – Alarmed by a rise in online anti-Semitism during the pandemic, along with studies showing that younger generations don’t even have a basic knowledge of the Nazi genocide, Holocaust survivors take to social media to share their experiences of how who hated speech prepared the way for mass murder.
With short video messages telling their stories, the participants in #ItStartedWith Words The campaign hopes to educate people about how the Nazis engaged in an insidious campaign to dehumanize and marginalize Jews – years before the death camps were set up to carry out industrial-scale crimes.
Six individual videos and a compilation were released on Thursday on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, followed by one video per week. The posts include a link to a web page with more testimonials and teaching materials.
“There are not too many of us who go out and talk, we are few in number, but our voices are heard,” Sidney Zoltak, an 89-year-old survivor from Poland, told the Associated Press in a telephone interview in Montreal.
“We are not there to tell them stories that we have read or heard – we tell facts, we tell what happened to us, our neighbors and our communities. And I think that’s the strongest way possible. ”
Once the Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933, its leaders immediately fulfilled their promises to “Aryanize” the country, segregating and marginalizing the Jewish population.
The Nazi government encouraged a boycott of Jewish affairs, which were covered with the Star of David or the word “Judah” – Jewish. Propaganda posters and movies suggest that Jews were “parasites,” compared to rats and insects, while new laws were passed to restrict all aspects of Jewish life.
Charlotte Knobloch, who was born in Munich in 1932, recalls in her video message how her neighbors suddenly forbid their children to play with her or other Jews.
“I was 4 years old,” Knobloch recalled. “I didn’t even know what the Jews were.”
The campaign, launched to coincide with Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, was organized by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, which negotiates compensation for victims. It is supported by many organizations, including the United Nations.
A study released this week by Israeli researchers found that the coronavirus blockade last year moved an online anti-Semitic hatred, where conspiracy theories blamed Jews for the medical and economic devastation of the pandemic.
Although the annual report Tel Aviv University researchers on anti-Semitism have shown that the social isolation of the pandemic has led to fewer acts of violence against Jews in 40 countries, and Jewish leaders have expressed concern that online vitriol could lead to physical attacks at the end of the blockade.
Supporting the new online campaign, the Auschwitz International Committee noted that one of the men who stormed the US Chapter in January wore a sweatshirt with the slogan “Auschwitz Camp: Work Brings Freedom.”
“Auschwitz survivors have experienced first-hand what it is like when words become deeds,” the organization wrote. “Their message to us: don’t be indifferent!”
Recent surveys conducted by the Conference on Claims in Several Countries have also revealed a lack of knowledge about the Holocaust among young people, which the organization hopes the campaign will help address.
In a study conducted in 50 states on Millennials and Generation Z in the United States last year, researchers found that 63% of respondents did not know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and 48% could not name one. single death camp or concentration camp.
Gideon Taylor, the president of the Claims Conference, told the PA that the investigations showed that “the messages, concepts and ideas that were common and understood 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago” are gone.
After the success of a social campaign last year, using messages from survivors to put pressure on Facebook to ban posts denying or distorting the Holocaust, Taylor said it makes sense to seek social media help again.
“The Holocaust didn’t come out of nowhere,” he said. “Before the Jews were expelled from their schools, their jobs, their homes, before the synagogues, shops and businesses were destroyed. And before there were ghettos, camps and cattle cars, words were used to ignite hate fires. ”
“And who can draw this line from dangerous words to horrible deeds better than those who have lived through the depths of human depravity?”
For Zoltak, the escalation from words to deeds came quickly after the invading Nazi army occupied its city east of Warsaw in mid-1941. The Nazis quickly implemented anti-Semitic laws they had already instituted in western Poland on who had occupied it two years earlier and forced Zoltak’s parents to work as slaves, he said.
A year later, the Germans forced all the city’s Jews – about half the population of 15,000 – into a ghetto separate from the rest of the city, subject to strict regulations and kept on restricted food rations.
Three months later, the Nazis liquidated the ghetto, transporting residents to the Treblinka camp or killing them along the way.
Zoltak was one of the lucky few, managing to escape with his parents in a nearby forest. They hid in the area until the following spring, when they were taken by a Catholic family to a nearby farm and sheltered during the war.
After the war, he returned to his hometown and learned that all but 70 of the 7,000 Jews had been killed, including all of his classmates and his father’s entire family.
“Sometimes it’s hard to understand,” he said. “Actually we are not dealing with numbers, they were people who had a name, who had families.”
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Follow David Rising at https://twitter.com/davidrising