BERLIN (AP) – Alarmed by rising online anti-Semitism during pandemic, along with studies indicating younger generations have no basic knowledge of Nazi genocide, Holocaust survivors travel to networks social to share their experiences on how hate speech paved the way for mass murder.
With short video messages telling their stories, participating in the #ItStartedWith Words The campaign hopes to educate people on how the Nazis embarked on an insidious campaign to dehumanize and marginalize Jews, years before death camps were established to carry out industrial-scale murder.
Six individual videos and a compilation premiered Thursday via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, followed by one video per week. The publications include a link to a website with more testimonials and teaching materials.
“We are no longer too many who go out and talk, we are few in number, but our voices are heard,” Sidney Zoltak, an 89-year-old Polish survivor, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Montreal.
“We are not here to tell them stories that we have read or heard: we tell facts, we tell what happened to us, our neighbors and our communities. And I think that’s the strongest way possible. ”
Once the Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933, its leaders immediately set about fulfilling their promises to “Aryanize” the country, segregating and marginalizing the Jewish population.
The Nazi government encouraged the boycott of Jewish companies, which were linked to the Star of David or the word “Jude” – Jewish. Posters and propaganda films suggested that Jews were “fins,” comparing them to rats and insects, while new laws were passed to restrict all aspects of Jewish life.
Charlotte Knobloch, who was born in Munich in 1932, recalls in her video message as neighbors suddenly forbid their children to play with her or other Jews.
“He was 4 years old,” Knobloch recalled. “I didn’t even know what the Jews were.”
The campaign, which began to coincide 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. There is support from many organizations, including the United Nations.
A study published this week by Israeli researchers found that coronavirus blockages last year changed online anti-Semitic hatred, where conspiracy theories abusing Jews blamed for the medical and economic devastation of the pandemic.
Although the annual report Tel Aviv University anti-Semitism researchers showed that the pandemic’s social isolation led to fewer acts of violence against Jews in 40 countries.
Supporting the new online campaign, the Auschwitz International Committee noted that one of the men who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January was wearing a sweatshirt with the slogan “Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom.”
“Auschwitz survivors experienced first-hand what it’s like when words become deeds,” the organization wrote. “His message to us: don’t be indifferent!”
Recent Polls Conference surveys in several countries have also revealed an ignorance about the Holocaust among young people, which the organization hopes the campaign will help address.
In a study conducted in 50 states on people of age Z of millennials and generation Z in the United States last year, researchers found that 63% of respondents did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and 48% could not name even a concentration camp camp.
Claims Conference President Gideon Taylor told the AP that the polls highlighted that “the messages, concepts and ideas that were common and understood 20 years ago, maybe even ten years ago years “are no longer.
Following the success of a social media campaign last year through messages from survivors to pressure Facebook to ban posts Taylor said it made sense to seek help on social media again.
“The Holocaust didn’t come out of nowhere,” he said. “Before the Jews were expelled from their schools, their jobs, their homes, before the synagogues, shops and businesses were destroyed. And before there were ghettos, camps and cattle cars, words were used to provoke fires of hatred. ”
“And who can trace this line of dangerous words to horrible acts better than those who lived the depths of human depravity?”
For Zoltak, the escalation of words to the facts occurred quickly after the invading Nazi army occupied his city east of Warsaw in mid-1941. The Nazis quickly enforced anti-Semitic laws they had already instituted in the western part of Poland they occupied two years earlier and forced Zoltak’s parents to work as slaves, he said.
A year later, the Germans forced all the city’s Jews – about half the population of 15,000 – into a ghetto segregated from the rest of the city, subject to strict regulations and maintaining restricted food rations.
Three months later, the Nazis liquidated the ghetto, transporting its residents to the Treblinka extermination camp or killing them along the way.
Zoltak was one of the lucky few who managed to escape with his parents to a nearby forest. They hid in the area until the following spring, when a Catholic family welcomed them to a nearby farm and protected them during the war.
After the war, he returned to his hometown and learned that all but 7,000 Jews had been killed, including all of his classmates and his father’s entire family.
“Sometimes it’s hard to understand,” he said. “We didn’t really deal with numbers, they were humans who had a name, who had families.”
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