Is it happening again? No, it is worse. Antisemites of the 1930s weren’t always aware of the consequences of what they were saying or doing, while our contemporaries know and understand all too well. Back then, most of them couldn’t even imagine that a multimillion-strong ethnic group could be demonized and systematically annihilated by such advanced and seemingly cultured and civilized segments of humankind. In the 1930s, no one chanted “Gas the Jews!”
Writing in his Jewish News Syndicate on January 26, 2024, Jonathan S. Tobin wonders what allowed the Nazis to succeed as well as they did in exterminating European Jews and “how a supposedly civilized people like the Germans, with the help of various collaborators from other nations, convinced themselves that it was not only acceptable to kill that many people but justified to do so.”
As an eyewitness to and survivor of the greatest crime against the Jewish people and perhaps humanity, my answer is that a pre-existing conviction—Jew-hatred or antisemitism—which had been an inherent part of culture long before the emergence of Fascism or Nazism, meant there was no need to convince anybody of anything. According to sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, all that was necessary was twentieth-century technology and communication. Pointing to Fascists, Nazis, Germans, Austrians, or other major participants only adds to the confusion. They were all antisemites, and hatred of Jews was their common denominator.
For many years after the Holocaust, antisemites badly needed a substitute or a code name to camouflage their hatred. One such euphemism was “anti-Zionism,” a term invented by Soviet propaganda mavens after Israel had attained its independence and most Zionists had turned to the West instead of to the East. The popularity of this clever new code name skyrocketed after Israel’s stunning June 1967 victory over the Arab–Soviet coalition. Anti-Zionism as a cover for antisemitism has been especially useful in my native Poland—the epicenter of the Holocaust—where “Jew” was always, and still remains, a dirty word. Overnight, every Jew and virtually anyone related to anyone of Jewish descent was branded a “Zionist,” though most of them were actually anti-Zionists of pro-Communist or Bundist persuasion. Ironically, until 1967, some of those who were later victimized as Zionists had not even known of their Jewish roots. Nonetheless, they were all purged from their jobs, universities, and the country.
However, even at the height of that political hysteria, they were not denied the right to live in Israel (never called the “Zionist entity”). Equipped with one-way passports that barred them from returning to Poland, they were harassed and maltreated by officials all the way to the border, not unlike what happened during the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain. Yet contrary to what is being heard nowadays, nobody denied them the right to live. Yes, there were demands that Israel withdraw to the pre-1967 demarcation lines, but nobody anywhere chanted “from the river to the sea.” On the contrary, Polish protesters chanted “Zionists to Zion!” Some of the more disoriented carried banners proclaiming “Syjoniści do Syjamu!” [Zionists to Siam].
Yes, in 1975, the UN, led by an Austrian ex-Nazi, adopted Moscow’s infamous “Zionism = Racism” resolution. Yet no one dared publicly declare that Zionists “don't deserve to live,” as did a Black American student activist on a worldwide social network after October 7. I mention his race because “students of color” are prominent in the global academic coalition against Jews, having forgotten that Blacks had been our fellow Untermenschen according to Nazi race theory, and that we had been true allies in the long struggle for human and civil rights in America and Africa. It is important to draw attention to the differences between the 1930s and the 2020s, when, due to intersectional race theory—more preposterous, divisive, and disastrous than even Nazi race theory or the Communist class war—we are now being more alienated and isolated than ever.
Yes, forty-two Holocaust survivors were butchered in a shocking pogrom on July 4, 1946, in Kielce, Poland, but at that time, governments and the media both in the East and the West condemned the crime, and no one dared publicly justify or support the perpetrators. This stands in stark contrast to what has been seen since the even more heinous, and genocidal, pogrom of October 7, 2023, which claimed the lives of thirty times more victims. Yes, the cruelty and inhumanity of the October 7 assault was much like the 1940–41 pogroms in Romania, Poland, Lithuania, and Iraq—amazingly perpetrated in the absence of “Zionist occupation,” “Zionist genocide,” or a “Zionist entity” of any kind. Despite a thoroughly Nazified Europe and a Nazi-influenced Middle East, however, public opinion in those days was clearly divided between left and right, and a chance for shelter and protection could still be found on the left. Now the diabolically clever totalitarian intersectionality leaves us virtually alone.
In the summer of 1967, I met a translator in Poland employed by Interpress, a government PR outfit producing material for foreign consumption—the Warsaw-based counterpart to the US Information Agency (USIA). The man, a skilled Anglicist (also an alcoholic), tearfully confided in me that he was forced to translate disgusting antisemitic propaganda from Polish to English for Poland’s not-so-clever Arab allies. Once I defected to the US (in late 1967) and was employed by the USIA a few years later, I often detected Polish- and Soviet-style anti-Jewish tropes and tricks—particularly misinformation, disinformation, and censorship—not only in the Arabic Middle Eastern media, but even in the supposedly sophisticated West.
Now I can see that this trend has only intensified. For example, a short satirical poem on Karl Marx’s antisemitism that I posted on Facebook was at first blocked and then restricted with a warning. The same happened when I merely quoted Steven Spielberg’s prediction that we may “once again have to fight for the very right to be Jewish.” Even more “community standards” were invoked in response to my attempt to demonstrate the idiocy of the antisemitism of supposedly bright and educated Ivy League co-eds who loudly support Hamas—the backward and bloodthirsty Iranian proxy that fanatically denies women equal rights, including the right to education.
Trying to outsmart Facebook’s AI, I clicked on “boost post,” which promises additional exposure for a moderate price. To my surprise, my request “wasn’t approved.” Why? “Your ad may have been rejected because it mentions politicians or is about sensitive social issues that could influence public opinion or how people vote and may impact the outcome of an election or pending legislation.” First, it wasn’t an “ad,” but a statement. Second, under the US Constitution, I have the right to speak about “sensitive” issues that may influence public opinion or affect the outcome of an election or pending legislation. Facebook also asked who was paying for the ads. This was all in response to my logical observation that support of Hamas among women is idiotic. This makes me suspect that “anti-Zionism” is more welcome in American social media than my opposition to it as a Jew. I suspect these “community standards” were invented in order to gag opinions inconvenient for antisemites— a new form of censorship that muzzles a Holocaust survivor who resists post-Holocaust antisemitism.
After fleeing Communist antisemitism in 1967 for American freedom, I wrote The Victory, a sequel to The Jewish War, which had been written and published in Poland. While writing The Victory, for the first time in my life I experienced the feeling that no one was looking over my shoulder, and the lack of such control or the need to exercise self-censorship—the strange feeling of freedom. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, an iconic figure in twentieth-century Polish literature, praised The Jewish War for its skillful “concealments and insinuations.” In The Victory—considered by some literary experts to be my best prose—I did not need to make use of such a technique.
But now, in the same America, I again have that familiar feeling of my writing being scrutinized by someone who may not “approve” of it. Correction: This is not the same America. For years now, a creeping coup against its freedom has been underway, stealthily waged by forces that usually show their true colors when they are firmly in power, as my generation experienced in postwar Poland and other “people’s republics,” or later in Cuba. Here, I pose a rhetorical question: Are those who seek to gag or castrate the opinion of a Holocaust survivor merely antisemitic? I think not. An unusually candid professor in Tehran has admitted, “The anti-Israel protestors are our people.” In other words, antisemitism is yet again a means to achieve a more important goal.
“Life as Disintegration” was the title of the first in my collection of essays, The Non-Artistic Truth, because disintegration was the predominant phenomenon in my life: the disintegration of a feudal-based countryside and the Jewish shtetl; one culture after another; the physical annihilation of Yiddishkeit as well as of the Haskalah; a liberation that quickly became the opposite; and, finally, the persistent increase of post-Holocaust antisemitism that logically seemed impossible. Even the traditional escape to America now seems futile.
Nowadays, paradoxically, the old country seems less hostile. “American politicians have sufficiently learned from their Eastern colleagues, and the owners of American mass media from their Eastern counterparts,” I noted forty years ago in the aforementioned essay. That statement was never truer than it is now. The widespread “anti-Zionist” campaign, containing overt promises that October 7 will be repeated “10,000 times” and “every day,” and declarations that “Zionists have no right to live” have surpassed all the murderous Jew-baiting of my own memorable past (even Hitler himself didn’t dare spell out his plans so literally). These utterances have to be taken at face value, as they cross a new red line, and we have yet another reminder of something that I have long insisted: that the Holocaust was not a crime against what, ironically, is called humanity, but by it.
In conclusion, I turn to Jews who once again sympathize with the suffering of their enemies more than that of the people into which they were born. Make no mistake: Genocide is the premeditated slaughter of 1,200 Jewish men, women, and children in southern Israel on October 7, not the subsequent bombings of Gaza. Genocide was the deliberate murder of at least one million children by European antisemites in the 1940s, not the unintentional deaths of thousands of children in Gaza—the unavoidable collateral damage of Israeli air raids over Hamas targets. In World War II, as I remember it, the air forces of all sides involved perpetrated such acts without being accused of deliberate mass murder, except for the German Luftwaffe.
The latest war in Gaza—still much less devastating and tragic than concurrent conflicts in Sudan and Yemen, which have not precipitated a single student protest—can be halted immediately by those who started it in the first place if they release all the hostages and surrender. For incomprehensible reasons, such a simple solution is hardly ever taken into consideration. Instead, all demands are being directed at Israel and the Jews, who were the first victims of this latest Jewish war for survival. I wonder whether post-Holocaust Jews are prepared to accept this new anti-Jewish precedent, this “for-Jews-only” new normal. I certainly am not. And I must confess that I am glad that most of my fellow Holocaust survivors have not lived to see what I am seeing.
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Henryk Grynberg
Henryk Grynberg is a Polish–Jewish novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist who has won many prestigious literary awards and is the author of more than forty books, many of which have been translated into other languages. His works tell the story of Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust and the challenges faced by the survivors in postwar Poland and the United States. The struggle for memory and the widespread suppression of the truth are recurrent themes in his writings. Mr. Grynberg lives in Falls Church, Virginia.