BERLIN (AP) – Shocked by an increase in online anti-Semitism during the pandemic, coupled with studies showing that younger generations do not even have a basic knowledge of the Nazi genocide, Holocaust survivors are taking to social media to share their experiences to share about how hate speech paves the way for mass murder.
With short video messages participants in the #ItStartedWithWords story about their stories campaign hopes to educate people on how the Nazis launched a treacherous campaign to dehumanize and marginalize Jews – years before death camps were set up to carry out industrial-scale assassinations.
Six individual videos and a compilation will be 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 going to talk anymore, we are few, but our voices are being heard,” Sidney Zoltak said., an 89-year-old survivor from Poland, The Associated Press said in a telephone interview from Montreal.
‘We are not there to tell their stories what we have read or what we have heard; we tell facts, we tell what happened to us and our neighbors and communities. And I think that’s the strongest possible way. ”
After the Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933, its leaders immediately made their promises to “Arianize” the country and segregated and marginalized the Jewish population.
The Nazi government encouraged the boycott of Jewish enterprises, which were covered with the Star of David or the word “Jew” – Jew. Propaganda posters and films suggested that Jews were ‘pests’, comparing them to rats and insects, while new laws were passed to restrict all aspects of the Jews’ lives.
Charlotte Knobloch, who was born in Munich in 1932, remembers in her video message how her neighbors suddenly forbade their children to play with her or other Jews.
“I was 4 years old,” Knobloch recalls. “I did not even know what Jews were.”
The campaign, launched in conjunction 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.
This comes from a study released this week by Israeli researchers found that the closure of coronavirus last year shifted some anti-Semitic hatred online, where conspiracy theories blame the Jews for the medical and economic devastation of the pandemic.
Although the annual report by Tel Aviv University researchers on anti-Semitism, showed that the social isolation of the pandemic led to less violence against Jews in 40 countries, the Jewish leaders expressed their concern that online vitriol could lead to physical attacks when the blockades end.
The International Auschwitz Committee supports the new online campaign and notes that one of the men who stormed the US Capitol in January was wearing a sweater with the slogan ‘Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom’.
“The survivors of Auschwitz experienced first-hand what it is like when words become deeds,” the organization wrote. “Their message to us: do not be indifferent!”
Recent surveys by the Claims Conference in several countries have also revealed that there is a lack of knowledge about the Holocaust among young people, which the organization hopes the campaign will help.
In a 50-state study of Millennials and Generation Z-age people in the U.S. last year, researchers found that 63% of respondents did not know that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust and 48% could not name a single death camp. or concentration camp.
Claims Conference President Gideon Taylor told the AP that the polls highlighted that ‘messages and concepts and ideas that were common and understandable 20 years ago, maybe even ten years ago’ are no more.
Following the success of a social media campaign last year by using the messages of survivors to push Facebook to ban posts denying or distorting the Holocaust, Taylor said it makes sense to seek social media help again.
“The massacre came from nowhere,” he said. ‘Before Jews were expelled from their schools, their jobs, their homes, were before the synagogues, shops and businesses were destroyed. And before there were ghettos and camps and cattle cars, words were used to put out the fires of hatred. ‘
“And who can draw the line from dangerous words to horrible deeds better than those who have lived through the depths of human depravity?”
For Zoltak, the escalation of words to deeds took place quickly after the invading Nazi army occupied his city east of Warsaw in mid-1941. The Nazis quickly implemented anti-Semitic laws they had already enacted in the western part of Poland that had occupied them two years earlier, forcing Zoltak’s parents into slavery.
A year later, the Germans forced all the Jews of the city – about half of the population of 15,000 – into a ghetto set apart from the rest of the city, subject to strict regulations and kept limited food rations.
Three months later, the Nazis liquidated the ghetto and transported its residents to the Treblinka death camp or killed them along the way.
Zoltak was one of the few lucky ones and managed to escape with his parents in a nearby forest. They hid in the area until the following spring, when they were taken up by a Catholic family in a nearby farm and sheltered for the duration of the war.
After the war, he returned to his city and learned that all but 7,000 of his Jews had died, including 70, including all his classmates and his father’s entire family.
“It’s sometimes hard to understand,” he said. “We are not really dealing with numbers, they were people who had a name and who had families.”
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