Holocaust Survivors
The Holocaust was one of the worst crimes in human history, millions of Jews were murdered in a systematic genocide in Europe. Naturally, many Jews felt no longer safe in European lands, however some of the most ardent opponents of the Zionist agenda in Palestine were the Holocaust survivors themselves.
Dr. Rudolf Vrba
Dr. Rudolf Vrba (11 September 1924 - 27 March 2006) is a Jewish hero. He was a survivor of Majdanek concentration camp, and was one of the first Jews to escape from Auschwitz in 1944. He raised the alarm to warn the Hungarian Jews and the Allied Powers about the Nazi extermination programme. His actions helped halt the Holocaust, he said save more than 200,000 Jewish lives.
Read more about Rudolph Vrba here.
Zionists were fanatics
There was a small minority of Jewish fanatics (Zionists) They stated that all Jews should go to Palestine and establish their own state, to preserve the Jewish cultural heritage. Then came the Nuremberg Law. Issued by a nominally civilized state, it stated that Jews do not belong to Europe, but to Palestine. The Zionists realized that the Jews have been saying the same thing that the Nuremberg Law says. The Jewish council consisted of Zionists who were chosen from the upper crust of Jewish society. They and their children were totally protected. I considered the Jewish council as Fascists just as the Gentiles.
Dr. Rudolph Vrba, ‘Oral history interview with Rudolf Vrba’, World at War TV Series, 1972
Pretend protectors of Jews
“The Zionist movement of Europe played a very important role in the mass extermination of Jews. Indeed, I believe that without the cooperation of Zionists it would have been a much more difficult task…. [The Zionists] said that we are not Czechoslovaks or we are not Germans, we are not French, we are Jews and we must, as Jews, go back to our country, to Israel or to Palestine and found our state … Then came the Nuremberg Law, which was a law, issued by a nominally civilized state [Nazi Germany], which said that Jews do not belong to Europe, but to Palestine. … So, on one platform, Nazism and Zionism had something in common: they both preached that Jews don’t belong to Europe but to Palestine. … And naturally, the Germans said: ‘You see the Jews may not trust us but they will trust you’, to the Zionists, ‘because they have seen that they have always told them actually the truth: that you belong to Palestine, that you are a foreign element here.’ … And so the Jewish councils were preferably selected from well-known Zionists. And, because the well-known Zionists became respectable, many Jews who were respectable anyway became Zionists. So they formed Jewish councils from a Zionist core, fortified by respectable members of society: top lawyers, top business people, top economists and that was the Jewish councils. … They were promised by the Germans or by the local fascist government to be protected from any discrimination because they are needed for administering of the Jewish affairs. … So you had here already a Zionist clique enforced by money of big Jewish businessmen who would be prepared to go along with the discrimination against the masses of the Jewish population which were neither rich nor Zionist, and in other words did not belong to the clique. … So I didn’t trust them in spite of the fact that the Nazis gave them the right after the Nuremberg Laws. I considered them plain fascists and I considered them from the very start as despicable creatures who deal with the fascists and take profit out of it in order to be exempted from discrimination conducted against the others. … So I didn’t trust the Nazis any more or any less than the Jewish Zionist councils. Indeed, I realised that the Zionists and the Nazis are approximately identical enemies of mine who have got both one thing in common, to get me out from home with 25 kilos to an unknown place and to leave my mother completely defenceless at home. … The young people, the core of resistance, is always 16 to 30. Every soldier knows that they are the best material for fighting. … I was flabbergasted by the fact that the Zionists who pretended to be the protectors of the Jews, the first thing which they agreed to was to let go away a potential core of resistance who could in the last resort protect the families with force if necessary. …”
Dr. Rudolph Vrba, ‘Oral history interview with Rudolf Vrba’, World at War TV Series, 1972, 1st section, extracts from 32 to 45mins. *
Zionist Failure To Act
“I am a Jew. In spite of that – indeed because of that – I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr. (Rudolf) Kastner, leader of the council which spoke for all Jews in Hungary… While I was prisoner number 44070 at Auschwitz – the number is still on my arm – I compiled careful statistics of the exterminations … I took these terrible statistics with me when I escaped in 1944 and I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers. … Kastner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’ Eichmann not only agreed, but dressed Kastner up in S.S. uniform and took him to Belsen to trace some of his friends. Nor did the sordid bargaining end there.
Kastner paid Eichmann several thousand dollars. With this little fortune, Eichmann was able to buy his way to freedom when Germany collapsed, to set himself up in the Argentine… “
Dr. Rudolf Vrba, Daily Herald, February 1961 (cited in Ben Hecht, Perfidy, 1962, p. 231)
Dr. Marek Edelman
Marek Edelman was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and a commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
European Jews did not ‘directly concern’ them
“[During the war] it never even entered any of our minds that the Zionists were deliberately remaining passive in regard to the physical destruction of the Jews in order to additionally justify the founding of the State of Israel… But today, even acknowledged historians speak out loud about the way that some of the Zionists living in Palestine exploited the Holocaust politically! … [The first Israeli Prime Minister] Ben Gurion believed that the worse it is for the Jews in Europe, the better for Israel. He put that into practice… Ben Gurion washed his hands of the Diaspora… As early as a Mapai party conference in December 1942, he said that the tragedy of the European Jews did not ‘directly concern’ them. Those were the words of a leader who was willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of Jews to the idea of a Jewish state. I’m not saying he could have saved thousands of people, but he could have fought for those thousands of people. He did not do so. I don’t know whether this was deliberate.”
Dr. Marek Edelman, 2016. Being On the Right Side: Everyone in the Ghetto Was a Hero, pp. 223, 448.
Dr. Marika Sherwood,
Marika Sherwood (born 1937) is a Hungarian-born historian, researcher, educator and author based in England.
Weren’t the Israelis also Jews?
“Sometime after [1956] I heard a news item about Israelis herding Palestinians into settlement camps. I just could not believe this. Weren’t the Israelis also Jews? Hadn’t we – they – just survived the greatest pogrom of our history? Weren’t [concentration] camps – often euphemistically called ‘settlement camps’ by the Nazis – the main feature of this pogrom? How could Jews in any measure do unto others what had been done to them? How could these Israeli Jews oppress and imprison other people? In my romantic imagination, the Jews in Israel were socialists and people who knew right from wrong. This was clearly incorrect. I felt let down, as if I was being robbed of a part of what I had thought was my heritage. …
I have to say to the Israeli government, which claims to speak in the name of all Jews, that it is not speaking in my name. I will not remain silent in the face of the attempted annihilation of the Palestinians; the sale of arms to repressive regimes around the world; the attempt to stifle criticism of Israel in the media worldwide; or the twisting of the knife labelled ‘guilt’ in order to gain economic concessions from Western countries. Of course, Israel’s geo-political position has a greater bearing on this, at the moment. I will not allow the confounding of the terms ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘anti-Zionist’ to go unchallenged.”
Dr. Marika Sherwood, ‘How I became an anti-Israel Jew’, Middle East Monitor, 7/3/18.
Dr. Israel Shahak
Israel Shahak was a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Desire for domination
“Israel, in order to survive, has to renounce the wish for domination and then it will be a much better place for Jews also. The immediate analogy which a lot of people are making in Israel is Germany. Not only the Germany of Hitler and the Nazis but even the former German Empire wanted to dominate Europe. What happened in Japan after the attack on China is that they wanted to dominate a huge area of Asia. When Germany and Japan renounced the wish for domination, they became much nicer societies for the Japanese and Germans themselves. In addition to all the Arab considerations, I would like to see Israel, by renouncing the desire for domination, including domination of the Palestinians, become a much nicer place for Israelis to live.”
Dr. Israel Shahak, Middle East Policy Journal, Summer 1989, no.29.
Dr. Gabor Mate
Gabor Mate is a survivor of the Budapest ghetto.
Ethnic Cleansing Operation
“As a Jewish youngster growing up in Budapest, an infant survivor of the Nazi genocide, I was for years haunted by a question resounding in my brain with such force that sometimes my head would spin: ‘How was it possible? How could the world have let such horrors happen?’ It was a naïve question, that of a child. I know better now: such is reality. Whether in Vietnam or Rwanda or Syria, humanity stands by either complicitly or unconsciously or helplessly, as it always does. In Gaza today we find ways of justifying the bombing of hospitals, the annihilation of families at dinner, the killing of pre-adolescents playing soccer on a beach. … There is no understanding Gaza out of context – Hamas rockets or unjustifiable terrorist attacks on civilians – and that context is the longest ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in the recent and present centuries, the ongoing attempt to destroy Palestinian nationhood. The Palestinians use tunnels? So did my heroes, the poorly armed fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Unlike Israel, Palestinians lack Apache helicopters, guided drones, jet fighters with bombs, laser-guided artillery. Out of impotent defiance, they fire inept rockets, causing terror for innocent Israelis but rarely physical harm. With such a gross imbalance of power, there is no equivalence of culpability. … And what shall we do, we ordinary people? I pray we can listen to our hearts. My heart tells me that ‘never again’ is not a tribal slogan, that the murder of my grandparents in Auschwitz does not justify the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, that justice, truth, peace are not tribal prerogatives. That Israel’s ‘right to defend itself,’ unarguable in principle, does not validate mass killing.”
Dr. Gabor Mate, ‘Beautiful Dream of Israel has become a Nightmare’, Toronto Star, 22/7/14.
Prof. Zeev Sternhell
Zeev Sternhell was a Polish-born Israeli historian, political scientist. He was one of the world’s leading theorists of the phenomenon of fascism.
Toxic Ultra-Nationalists
“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here [in Israel], the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people. The interviews Haaretz’s Ravit Hecht held with [the right-wing Israeli politicians] Smotrich and Zohar (December 3, 2016 and October 28, 2017 ) should be widely disseminated on all media outlets in Israel and throughout the Jewish world. In both of them we see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages. Like every ideology, the Nazi race theory developed over the years. At first it only deprived Jews of their civil and human rights. It’s possible that without World War II the ‘Jewish problem’ would have ended only with the ‘voluntary’ expulsion of Jews from Reich lands. After all, most of Austria and Germany’s Jews made it out in time. It’s possible that this is the future facing Palestinians.”
Prof. Zeev Sternhell, ‘Opinion in Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism’, Haaretz, 19/1/18.
Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor.
‘Fascist’ is a definition I can accept
“[As for Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin] ‘Fascist’ is a definition I can accept. I think even Begin would not deny it. He was a student of Jabotinsky, who represented the right wing of Zionism, who called himself a Fascist and was one of Mussolini’s interlocutors. Yes, Begin was his pupil. That is Begin’s history…. [The Holocaust] is Begin’s favourite defence. And I deny any validity to that defence.”
Primo Levi, The Voice of Memory: Primo Levi Interviews, 1961-1987, pp. 285-286. The quote is from 1982.
Reuben Moscovitz
Reuben Moscovitz was survivor of the Holocaust in Romania.
It’s just immoral.
“I as a Holocaust survivor cannot live with the fact that the State of Israel is imprisoning an entire people behind fences. … It’s just immoral.
What happened to me in the Holocaust wakes me up every night and I hope we don’t do the same thing to our neighbours. … [I compare] what I went through during the Holocaust to what the besieged Palestinian children are going through.”
Reuben Moscovitz, ‘Jewish Gaza-bound Activists: IDF Used Excessive Force in Naval Raid’, Haaretz, 28/9/10.
Hajo Meyer
Dr. Hajo G. Meyer was born in 1924 in Bielefeld, Germany. Not allowed to attend school there after November 1938, he fled to the Netherlands, alone. In I944, after a year in the underground, he was caught and subsequently survived 10 months at Auschwitz. After the war he returned to the Netherlands, where he studied physics and eventually became director of the Phillips Physics Laboratory.
Parallels with Nazi Germany
“I am pained by the parallels I observe between my experiences in Germany prior to 1939 and those suffered by Palestinians today. I cannot help but hear echoes of the Nazi mythos of ‘blood and soil’ in the rhetoric of settler fundamentalism which claims a sacred right to all the lands of biblical Judea and Samaria. The various forms of collective punishment visited upon the Palestinian people – coerced ghettoization behind a ‘security wall’; the bulldozing of homes and destruction of fields; the bombing of schools, mosques, and government buildings; an economic blockade that deprives people of the water, food, medicine, education and the basic necessities for dignified survival – force me to recall the deprivations and humiliations that I experienced in my youth. This century-long process of oppression means unimaginable suffering for Palestinians.”
Dr. Hajo Meyer, ‘An Ethical Tradition Betrayed’, Huffington Post, 27/1/10.
Deeply Bad
”It is an ideology which is deeply bad. It is ideology with an eschatological view comparable to Stalinism, comparable with Nazism: hoping for a bliss state without any enemy. So it’s eschatological: it’s based on the view that the enemy must be completely wiped out. This is the intrinsic bad nature of Zionism.”
Saturday 23 January 2010, Speech at Augustine Church, Edinburgh.SACC
Zionism and the Holocaust
""…important Zionism had no sympathy whatsoever for the victims during and after the holocaust. When there were chances to do something, Ben Gurion used to say that those who had been in the concentration camp were ‘non-useable material’ like me. The victims in the camps were not Zionists. I hope you will remember this for the rest of your lives.""
Saturday 23 January 2010, Speech at Augustine Church, Edinburgh.SACC
Never Again
As Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine. We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world. We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians and right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia. Furthermore, we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water. We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!
August 2014, Letters from Holocaust Survivors to the New York Times. IJAN
Gabor Mate
Dr Gabor Mate is a infant survivor of the holocaust, and now a renowned expert on childhood trauma.
Multiple Massacres
”Zionism was very important for me as a salvation of the Jewish people until I found out that the state was founded based upon the extripation, the expulsion and multiple massacres of the local population and that’s not historically controversial”
Tuesday 28th, November 2023. Interview with Piers Morgan