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October 31, 2023

One should not trivialize the Holocaust by equating it with October’s attacks by Hamas.  In the actual Holocaust, 6 million Jews were murdered along with an estimated 5 million non-Jews.  On October 7, some 1,400 Israelis, mostly Jews, were murdered by Hamas terrorists.  This is not murder on the same scale, even if the motives were similar.

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Hundreds if not thousands of books recount the unspeakable viciousness of the Nazis and their collaborators.  The scale and degree of savagery is beyond nearly anything else in recorded history — though, sadly, it was within the same 40-year period of terror that two of the other great genocides took place: Mao’s elimination of millions of his own people, with estimates running from 45 to 50 million, and Lenin’s and Stalin’s political murders totaling 110 million, according to one credible estimate.  (These figures are buried in search results that attribute as few as 1 million deaths to Lenin and 1.5 million to Stalin, presumably by those today who are sympathetic toward communism.)

Then there are the communist genocides in Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, and a host of other countries.  Based on exhaustive research, R.J. Rummel pegs the world total of 20th-century “murders by government” at 262 million.  One must be careful not to trivialize the memory of any of these events by comparing them with lesser crimes.

And yet I deeply empathize with the victims of the October 7 attacks, which were horrific and extensive.  It should be obvious that Israel must respond, though in a way that does not simply seek revenge.  Israel has a legitimate right to attempt to neutralize Hamas, though in doing so, it may foment only more anti-Israeli hatred among its enemies.

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On October 7, I happened to be reading Jay Winik’s 1944: FDR and the Year that Changed History.  Winik’s book includes an account of the persecution of European Jews in 1943, 1944, and 1945 — the height of the Final Solution.  It is dizzying to contemplate the horror of these years — not just the numbers killed, but the viciousness and inhumanity of the crimes.  What is most appalling is the utter lack of conscience and human feeling on the part of Hitler and his aides and, indeed, on the part of millions of others throughout the world, who made no effort to stop the killing, including FDR.  Even Winik’s condensed account of what happened is enormously troubling, both because of the cruelty of the events themselves and the suggestion that the potential exists to repeat them in our own time.  That is why the Hamas Attack of October 7 shook the world, as it should have.

The crucial point of similarity is that the Hamas attacks consisted of not simply killing, but also barbaric forms of abuse, and pleasure in the abuse, that recalled the Nazi crimes.  Before and as they were killed, the Holocaust victims suffered from unspeakable cruelty, and after they were killed, their bodies were subjected to disgusting abuse.  Most readers are familiar with the details of these crimes, so I will not repeat them in detail here.  But it’s necessary to recall the attacks, roundups, beatings, rape and torture, executions, burning alive of victims, gassing, theft of valuables, extraction of gold fillings, cremation of remains, use of those remains as fertilizer, and a thousand other brutalities in order to compare the Holocaust with what Hamas has perpetrated in Israel. 

As Winik points out, “annihilation” was one of Hitler’s favorite words used in connection with Jewish people, and in most cases, Jewish victims were not simply shot and buried.  They were rounded up, transported in slow boxcars to the camps, made to undress, packed into false “showers,” and gassed, and their bodies were burned to ashes.  Others were shot with revolvers, machine-gunned, burned alive, and buried in pits that they had been forced to dig themselves.  What took place at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, and other death camps was a precise enactment of Hitler’s thinking and of millions of other Germans and others: 6 million Jews were annihilated.

According to published reports, in the October 7 attack, Hamas terrorists behaved in much the same way.  Jews were not simply shot: they were riddled with bullets from automatic weapons; they were burned alive, beheaded, beaten to death, and in 200 cases led off as captives to be used, perhaps, in an even more hideous fashion.  Bodies of victims were dragged half-naked through the streets of Gaza as crowds cheered and screamed their hatred of Jews.

All of these crimes occurred, on a much greater scale, during the Holocaust.  October 7 was not “another Holocaust,” as some commentators have stated, but it was a day of vicious behavior that suggested a comparison with those much greater crimes because it proceeded from the same well of hatred and vengefulness.  It is wrong to equate October 7 with the Holocaust, but it is not wrong to see in both the same fanatical hatred based on deep resentment and religious and cultural differences.  I can’t help but see that same hatred as motivating some who are readily participating in pro-Palestinian rallies so soon after the events of October 7.

In order to annihilate on a mass scale, it was necessary for the Nazis to depict Jews as sub-human or not even sentient.  In Hitler’s parlance, Jews were insects, parasites, germs.  At the same time that he attempted to hide the full scale of genocide from the world, Hitler “sold” the Holocaust to the German people by dehumanizing Jews and other victims.