Nothing could be more grotesque than the sight of pro-Palestinian protesters at the gates of Auschwitz yesterday as Jews around the world celebrated Yom HaShoah.
That is the day in memory of the six million souls who perished at the hands of the Nazis.
As the son of a refugee from the horrors of the Holocaust, I can feel nothing but contempt for the ignorance, gross callousness, and misguided hatred that inspired such an outcry.
Auschwitz, which I have visited several times, is at the center of my personal story.
My beloved grandparents Sandor and Fanya died there in the gas chambers.
Sandor is a Hungarian version of Alexander and I am named after him.
Pro-Palestinian protesters wave flags as the annual Holocaust remembrance event, the ‘March of the Living’ takes place in memory of the six million victims of the Holocaust in Oswiecim, Poland, Monday, May 6, 2024.
Participants carry the Israeli flag as they pass through the entrance gate during the 36th March of the Living at the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz.
Pro-Palestinian protesters hold Palestinian flags and banners depicting victims of Israeli bombings.
They were transported in horrific conditions from their home on the Hungarian-Czech border to Auschwitz as Adolf Eichmann, architect of the so-called Final Solution, raced to kill Hungary’s Jews in the desperate final days of World War II.
Auschwitz, where these shameful protesters gathered, is the anonymous cemetery for my grandparents’ ashes.
My elderly Aunt Sussie and cousin Sheindy had been teenagers in Auschwitz and Belsen, but they survived and are alive to this day.
I can’t imagine what they will do about the protesters who waved flags, heckled and chanted as Israelis participated in the March of the Living – the annual walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau.
The images now circulating of protesters are indescribably disturbing.
They can only bring back memories of those last moments Sheindy shared with my grandparents when my grandmother Fanya squeezed his hand and told him to lie about his age to avoid the gas chambers.
Claiming that he was old and could work meant that Sheindy lived, not died.
The attack carried out by Hamas on October 7 has brought back the most terrifying memories for these two women: memories of looting, mutilation and hunger.
The Holocaust, or Shoah to use the Hebrew word, was the deliberate murder of Jews on an industrial scale.
It’s bad enough that pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas sympathizers have chosen to steal the language of the Holocaust.
Any comparison between Israel’s retaliation and the monstrous genocide of the 1940s is hateful and anti-Semitic.
Now they have sullied the sacred memory of those gassed, shot and burned in the great incinerators of the extermination camps.
There are no words.