BERLIN (AP) – Alarmed by an increase in online anti-Semitism during the pandemic, coupled with studies indicating that younger generations do not even have a basic understanding of the Nazi genocide, Holocaust survivors are taking to social media to share their experiences of how utterances the way for mass murder.
With short video messages tell their stories, participants of the #ItStartedWithWords campaign hopes to educate people on how the Nazis started an insidious campaign to dehumanize and marginalize Jews – years before death camps were set up to carry out industrial-scale murder.
Six separate videos and a compilation were released on Thursday via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, followed by one video per week. The posts contain a link to a webpage with more testimonials and teaching materials.
“There are not too many of us who go out and talk, we are few, but our voices are heard”, Sidney Zoltak, an 89-year-old survivor from Poland, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Montreal.
“We’re not there to tell their stories that we’ve read or heard – we’re telling facts, we’re telling what happened to us, our neighbors and our communities. And I think this is the strongest possible way. ”
When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, its leaders immediately began to fulfill their promises to “Aryanise” the country by segregating and marginalizing the Jewish population.
The Nazi government encouraged the boycott of Jewish businesses defaced with the Star of David or the word “Jude” – Jew. Propaganda posters and movies suggested that Jews were ‘vermin’, compared to rats and insects, while new laws were passed to restrict all aspects of Jews’ lives.
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 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 is negotiating compensation for victims. It is supported by many organizations, including the United Nations.
It comes as a study released this week by Israeli researchers found that the coronavirus blocking last year shifted some anti-Semitic hatred online, where conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the pandemic’s medical and economic devastation abound. .
Although the annual report Tel Aviv University researchers on anti-Semitism showed that the social isolation of the pandemic resulted in fewer acts of violence against Jews in 40 countries. Jewish leaders expressed concern that online vitriol could lead to physical attacks when the lockdowns end.
In support of the new online campaign, the International Auschwitz Committee noted that one of the men who stormed the Capitol in January was wearing a sweatshirt with the slogan “Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom.”
“The survivors of Auschwitz have experienced firsthand what it is like when words become actions,” the organization wrote. “Their message to us: don’t be indifferent!”
Recent investigations by the Claims Conference in several countries have also revealed a lack of awareness about the Holocaust among young people, which the organization hopes the campaign will help address.
In a study of 50 states of millennials and generation Z-age people in the US last year, researchers found that 63% of respondents were unaware that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and 48% could not name or name any death camp concentration camp.
Claims Conference President Gideon Taylor told the AP that the investigations highlighted that “messages and concepts and ideas that were common and understood 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago” are no longer there.
Following the success of a social media campaign last year using survivors’ posts to pressure Facebook to ban posts denying or distorting the Holocaust, Taylor said it made sense to seek help again on social media.
“The Holocaust did not come out of nowhere,” he said. Before Jews were expelled from their schools, their jobs, their homes, before synagogues, shops and businesses were destroyed. And before there were ghettos and camps and cattle wagons, words were used to kindle the fires of hatred. ”
“And who better to draw that line from dangerous words to heinous acts than those who have experienced the depths of human depravity?”
For Zoltak, the escalation from words to action came soon after the invading Nazi army occupied his town east of Warsaw in mid-1941. The Nazis quickly enacted anti-Semitic laws they had already instituted in the western part of Poland they occupied two years earlier and forced Zoltak’s parents into slave labor, he said.
A year later, the Germans forced all of the city’s Jews – about half of the population of 15,000 – into a ghetto that was separate from the rest of the city, subject to strict rules and limited food rations.
Three months later, the Nazis liquidated the ghetto, took the residents to the Treblinka extermination camp or murdered them on the way.
Zoltak was one of the lucky few who managed to escape with his parents to a nearby forest. They hid in the area until the following spring, when they were taken in by a Catholic family at a nearby farm and given shelter for the duration of the war.
After the war, he returned to his city to learn that all but 70 Jews had been killed, including all his classmates and his father’s entire family.
“It’s hard to understand sometimes,” he said. “We’re not really dealing with numbers, they were people with names, who had families.”
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