LONDON – Abe Foxman was a year old when the Nazis ordered his parents to report to the Jewish ghetto in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1941.
His babysitter, a Catholic, told them to leave the child with her, expecting them to return a few weeks later.
Foxman’s stay with her eventually lasted for years until his parents returned. He moved to America in 1950 at the age of 10 – but his early life experience has never left him.
“I’m a survivor, an example of what good words can lead to,” Foxman, 80, said. “My babysitter risked her life for four years to protect and hide me and give me a false identity.”
Foxman, a former director of the Anti-Defamation League, is one of several high-profile survivors who took part in a new campaign, #ItStartedWithWords, reflecting on the origins of the Holocaust.
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The campaign is led by the nonprofit Claims Conference in New York, which works to secure compensation for survivors of the German government. It is supported by the United Nations and Holocaust museums around the world and will be launched on Thursday on the Jewish community’s Holocaust Memorial Day.
And the new quest for awareness comes as polls show an increase in anti-Semitism around the world, as well as a lack of awareness among adults under 40 over the Holocaust.
The Claims Conference interviewed 1,000 adults in what was, according to the first 50-state survey of Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Generation Z. . More than half could not identify the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, and 11 percent believed Jews caused the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, the FBI reports that more than 60 percent of religion-based hate crimes are targeted at Jews in 2019, and a poll released by the Anti-Defamation League and YouGov in March showed that 63 percent of Jews in America say that they have either experienced or seen some form of anti-Semitism over the past five years.
“Around the world, it’s becoming more acceptable to hate, demonize, dehumanize other people, and we’re seeing this now with Asian Americans,” said Greg Schneider, executive vice president of Claims Conference.
‘People do not wake up one day to say that I want to commit mass murder today, but it is a process that dehumanizes people over time. It starts with words and ideas, ”he added.
Research published last month by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, showed that hate crimes against people of Asian descent increased by nearly 150 percent in 2020.
In a video produced for the Claims Conference, the former leader of the German Jewish community recalled that at the age of 4, she was no longer allowed to play with other children on the other side of her house in Munich.
“The apartment manager came out and shouted at me, ‘Jewish children are not allowed to play with our children,'” Charlotte Knobloch, 88, said. “I did not even know what Jews were.”
The push for the campaign comes from survivors, the youngest of whom were now in their late 70s and worried that the lessons of the Holocaust were now being forgotten.
‘There is a politicization, there is a lack of truth, lies are reduced, there is no consensus on civilization, no one listens to each other. “All taboos have been broken on respect and tolerance,” Foxman said. “Unfortunately, 75 years after the massacre, it’s a time to remind people who can do words.”