In 1993, I visited the site of the German extermination camp of Belzec in Poland where my grandparents were murdered during the Holocaust. The inscription on the memorial, erected by the former Communist government of Poland, read: “In memory of the victims of Hitler’s terror.” Nothing about the Jews.
In fact, almost all of the half million who perished at Belzec in 1942 were Jews. But according to the ideology of the then-rulers of Poland and their Soviet overlords, it was politically unacceptable to admit what in fact happened – that Jews were singled out and systematically murdered in a vast industrial effort to rid Europe of their presence.
Both the Soviets and the Poles wanted to highlight their own sufferings (and hide their own culpability) and had little empathy for the Jews either before or after World War II.
This incident came to mind last week when the Trump administration issued a statement on international Holocaust Day that contained no mention of the Jews. “It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust,” Trump’s statement began. “It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.”
When Jewish groups objected to being airbrushed from history, the Trump administration doubled down. The White House made it clear that the omission of Jews was no accident. Trump’s people wanted to make the point that other victims also suffered and died in the Holocaust.
The fact is, when we speak of the “Holocaust,” we are referring to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis specifically against the Jews. That’s what the word means. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “Holcoaust” in its modern, and accepted meaning, as “the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis in the war of 1939-1945.”
Conservative commentator John Podhoretz slammed the White House’s defense of its actions in a column on Saturday, noting that Nazi ideology rested on the aim of exterminating Jewish people from the face of earth.
“The Nazis killed an astonishing number of people in monstrous ways and targeted certain groups — Gypsies, the mentally challenged, and open homosexuals, among others,” Podhoretz wrote. “But the Final Solution was aimed solely at the Jews. The Holocaust was about the Jews.
In this statement and other actions taken in the first days of the Trump administration, the influence of chief White House strategist Steve Bannon has been clearly felt. Before joining the Trump campaign, Bannon ran the alt-right Breitbart News, which was notorious for tolerating and spreading anti-Semitic lies and slanders. For example, during Bannon’s reign over Breitbart, the website ran articles referring to conservative commentator Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew” and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum as “a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned.”
After Bannon joined Trump’s campaign, it too started flirting with anti-Semitic tropes, including tweeting an image of a star of David with Hillary Clinton’s face superimposed on a pile of money. His closing ad warned of a shadowy cabal of bankers and international elites.
In each case, Trump refused to back down or apologize, and his anti-Semitic fans took heart from the coded signals in their favor. Now that Trump is president, the same dynamic is playing out around his statement on the Holocaust.
How can we best describe Trump’s Holocaust Day statement? I call it Holocaust denial. It says in effect, that there was nothing special about the fate of the Jews under the Nazis. They were just unfortunate victims along with all the other unfortunate victims.
Trump’s statement seems deliberately designed to hurt and wound us. I know this is strong language but I feel almost as if Trump is in effect completing Hitler’s work. Hitler took away the lives of our people. Trump is taking away their memory. Shame on him!
After a campaign of several years, we managed to get rid of the memorial at Belzec and replace it with one that did justice to the Jews who died there. The horrible sign disappeared.
Now we have to do the same to this President and his administration – as soon as humanly possible.
Alan Elsner is Special Advisor to the President of J Street and the son of a Holocaust survivor.
