holocaust essay ending

DISPLACED COMMUNITIES

Allied advancements across Europe led to the liberation of ghettos, concentration, and death camps across the continent, but it took the total surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945, to end the state sponsored persecution of Europe’s Jews, Roma and Sinti, LBGT, Asocial, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed “enemies of the Nazi” state. Much of Europe lay in ruins by the end of the Second World War and an estimated 55,000,000 people had been displaced across the continent between 1939 and 1947. Whole communities were destroyed and two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population had been murdered. While the end of World War II was embraced and celebrated globally, there was one group of people unable to rejoice upon liberation: Europe’s surviving Jews. For these individuals, the end of the war brought with it the certain knowledge most of their loved ones had been murdered, they had no home where they could return, and their futures remained out of their control.

An estimated 11,000,000 people remained displaced in Europe in the wake of the Second World War. Of the total number of European United Nations Displaced Persons or UNDPs (DPs for short) more than 8,000,000 were in Germany in the immediate postwar period where 6,000,000 foreign civilian workers, 2,000,000 prisoners of war, and somewhere around 700,000 survivors of concentration camps were liberated at the close of the War. While most Jews from Western and Central Europe were able to resettle in their prewar home countries, this was not an option for the majority of East European Jews. The ones who attempted to return to their prewar homes in search of family, friends, often found their communities destroyed, their loved ones murdered, no chance of regaining stolen property, and often angry neighbors who were in a state of total disbelief that any Jews had survived the war. Some of them fled to Germany, where they were housed in centers that were built to house 2,000 people but usually held between 4,000 and 6,000 DPs. Armed guards and barbed wire surrounded the centers. This led many Jews to argue that they were liberated but not free. The DPs were divided into groups based on their prewar nationalities. This meant that Jewish Holocaust survivors were often forced to live among their former oppressors, persecutors, and anti-Semites.

Having lost most of their family members in the Holocaust, many Jewish Displaced Persons began to quickly marry and start new families. In one of history’s greatest ironies, Germany had the highest Jewish birthrate worldwide in 1946. The birth of Jewish babies caused a number of unforeseen issues. The loss of elderly female family members in the Holocaust meant there were few people in the camps who could help teach young women how to nurse their children, be mothers, and keep house. The number of Jewish DPs in postwar Germany increased rapidly in 1946 and 1947 reaching between 250,000 and 300,000 as Jews who had survived the War in the furthest reaches of the Soviet Union were allowed to return to their prewar homes. Meeting violent antisemitism, the vast majority of these Jews fled westward into Germany. The majority of these Jews settled in camps in the American occupation zone where they remained for years awaiting a visa abroad.

IMMIGRATION

Securing visas for resettlement abroad was an incredibly difficult task as many countries continued to have incredibly restrictive immigration quotas. However, changes to United States’ immigration laws, and the creation of the state of Israel allowed many DPs to finally resettle abroad. Somewhere around 800 Jewish DPs remained in camps in Germany until the final center was closed in 1957. The remaining Jews were resettled in various states throughout Germany.

LONG TERM TRAUMA

Many survivors suered from continued traumas from their war experiences and were too sick to be considered attractive immigrants. Many of these Jewish DPs suffered from tuberculosis, mental and physical disabilities.

In order to punish those involved in massacres during the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials, 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Countries around the world secretly granted visas to top Nazis and their collaborators in their efforts to advance science (the atom bomb in the U.S.) and fight the “Red Terror” (Communism in the U.S., France and Great Britain, among others) in the East.

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The Holocaust

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 11, 2023 | Original: October 14, 2009

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews, Romani people, the intellectually disabled, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The word “holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.

After years of Nazi rule in Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”—now known as the Holocaust—came to fruition during World War II, with mass killing centers in concentration camps. About six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust—more than one million of those who perished were children.

Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler . Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine .

The Enlightenment , during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I . Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf ” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer , becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler , head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000—just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. 

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht , or the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

HISTORY Vault: Third Reich: The Rise

Rare and never-before-seen amateur films offer a unique perspective on the rise of Nazi Germany from Germans who experienced it. How were millions of people so vulnerable to fascism?

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland , starting World War II . German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler’s SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution ) to “the Jewish question.”

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins , injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”—the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide . Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz , the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum . What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums . Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe . Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations .

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Behind Every Name a Story

Behind Every Name a Story consists of essays describing survivors’ experiences during the Holocaust, written by survivors or their families. The essays, accompanying photographs, and other materials, including submissions that we are unable to feature on our website, will become a permanent part of the Museum’s records.

Read the Essays

Marian kalwary.

In normal circumstances, time goes fast, but in the ghetto, it dragged exceedingly long. Every day passed very slowly, as if to spite us.

Green and Hoffer Families

My mother and aunt worked for the Russians until my mother was smuggled out of Poland to the American Zone in Germany, where she lived in a displaced persons camp, Feldafing, and married my father on October 16, 1946. They lived in the DP camp until they could immigrate to the United States in November, 1947.

Naki Touron-Fais

In the car I tried to be excited about finally ending this ordeal, but I felt I was dying from agony and fear. I was trying to find a way out. If we went to Lehonia, it would be the end of us. Nobody knew us there. After a while, I asked, “Where are we going?”

Andrew Glass

Finding a way to remain in the United States as an illegal alien proved to be one heck of a sweet bargain.

Simon Family

While in Westerbork, Selma Simon wrote to her daughters, Ruth and Hilda in England. The last letter was written four or five days before they were deported to Poland in which, sadly, Selma said, “We hope to see you soon.”

When Marcel got the news of her deportation, he knew that he would never see his mother again—the person he adored beyond anyone else. It was with a broken body and a broken heart that he arrived in Paris.

Sima Gleichgevicht-Wasser

Sima could easily pass as a non-Jewish Pole because she had a light complexion and was blonde, but to be able to live as a Pole, she needed a Kennkarte (identification card), and to get a Kennkarte she needed a Polish birth certificate.

Rosa Marie Burger

I saw girls weeping—my friends, girls I had grown up with. Their bundles were placed in the last car and the people were herded onto the train. We lived not far from Dachau.

After three weeks in the ghetto of Czernowitz, we were sent to the camps in Transnistria for three terrible years of poverty, hunger, typhus, and fear for the future. We had hope in our hearts and only that kept us alive.

Ester Lupyan

In the memories of those who lived through the occupation, the recollection of the existence and survival in the ghetto is still frightening. I will only say that out of our family, my mother and I were the only ones to survive.

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Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.

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The End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps

Among the thousands of books that have examined various aspects of the Jewish Holocaust, surprisingly few have treated the final days of the death camps in any detail. From July 1944 to May 1945, the Russian army liberated ten camps east of the Oder River; the Allied Forces liberated the five western camps in April and May of 1945. The names—Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald—form the 20th century’s most horrifying litany.

Jon Bridgman’s absorbing account embraces the immediate prelude to the liberation of the camps when the advancing Allied armies provoked contradictory orders from Hitler and Himmler, the circumstances of the liberation of each of the camps, the policies of the various liberators, and the consequences of liberation, in particular its effect on American and European perceptions of the war and its aftermath.

As the author points out, it was the drama of liberation more than any other aspect of the Holocaust that brought home to the West the horror of the Final Solution, ending once and for all the false belief that stories of Nazi atrocities were exaggerated Allied propaganda.

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In the Shadow of the Holocaust

By Masha Gessen

Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures are the least of it. The memorials that sneak up on you—the monument to burned books, which is literally underground, and the thousands of Stolpersteine , or “stumbling stones,” built into sidewalks to commemorate individual Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, mentally ill people, and others murdered by the Nazis—reveal the pervasiveness of the evils once committed in this place. In early November, when I was walking to a friend’s house in the city, I happened upon the information stand that marks the site of Hitler’s bunker. I had done so many times before. It looks like a neighborhood bulletin board, but it tells the story of the Führer’s final days.

In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, when many of these memorials were conceived and installed, I visited Berlin often. It was exhilarating to watch memory culture take shape. Here was a country, or at least a city, that was doing what most cultures cannot: looking at its own crimes, its own worst self. But, at some point, the effort began to feel static, glassed in, as though it were an effort not only to remember history but also to insure that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way. This is true in the physical, visual sense. Many of the memorials use glass: the Reichstag, a building nearly destroyed during the Nazi era and rebuilt half a century later, is now topped by a glass dome; the burned-books memorial lives under glass; glass partitions and glass panes put order to the stunning, once haphazard collection called “Topography of Terror.” As Candice Breitz, a South African Jewish artist who lives in Berlin, told me, “The good intentions that came into play in the nineteen-eighties have, too often, solidified into dogma.”

Podcast: The Political Scene Masha Gessen talks with Tyler Foggatt.

Among the few spaces where memory representation is not set in apparent permanence are a couple of the galleries in the new building of the Jewish Museum, which was completed in 1999. When I visited in early November, a gallery on the ground floor was showing a video installation called “Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres.” The video was set in Kibbutz Be’eri , the community where, on October 7th, Hamas killed more than ninety people—almost one in ten residents—during its attack on Israel, which ultimately claimed more than twelve hundred lives. In the video, Be’eri residents take turns reciting the lines of a poem by one of the community’s members, the poet Anadad Eldan: “. . . from the swamp between the ribs / she surfaced who had submerged in you / and you are constrained not shouting / hunting for the forms that scamper outside.” The video, by the Berlin-based Israeli artists Nir Evron and Omer Krieger, was completed nine years ago. It begins with an aerial view of the area, the Gaza Strip visible, then slowly zooms in on the houses of the kibbutz, some of which looked like bunkers. I am not sure what the artists and the poet had initially meant to convey; now the installation looked like a work of mourning for Be’eri. (Eldan, who is nearly a hundred years old, survived the Hamas attack.)

Down the hallway was one of the spaces that the architect Daniel Libeskind, who designed the museum, called “voids”—shafts of air that pierce the building, symbolizing the absence of Jews in Germany through generations. There, an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, titled “Fallen Leaves,” consists of more than ten thousand rounds of iron with eyes and mouths cut into them, like casts of children’s drawings of screaming faces. When you walk on the faces, they clank, like shackles, or like the bolt handle of a rifle. Kadishman dedicated the work to victims of the Holocaust and other innocent victims of war and violence. I don’t know what Kadishman, who died in 2015, would have said about the current conflict. But, after I walked from the haunting video of Kibbutz Be’eri to the clanking iron faces, I thought of the thousands of residents of Gaza killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews killed by Hamas. Then I thought that, if I were to state this publicly in Germany, I might get in trouble.

On November 9th, to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Star of David and the phrase “ Nie Wieder Ist Jetzt! ”—“Never Again Is Now!”—was projected in white and blue on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. That day, the Bundestag was considering a proposal titled “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility: Protecting Jewish Life in Germany,” which contained more than fifty measures intended to combat antisemitism in Germany, including deporting immigrants who commit antisemitic crimes; stepping up activities directed against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement; supporting Jewish artists “whose work is critical of antisemitism”; implementing a particular definition of antisemitism in funding and policing decisions; and beefing up coöperation between the German and the Israeli armed forces. In earlier remarks, the German Vice-Chancellor, Robert Habeck, who is a member of the Green Party, said that Muslims in Germany should “clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as not to undermine their own right to tolerance.”

Germany has long regulated the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered and discussed. In 2008, when then Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke before the Knesset, on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, she emphasized Germany’s special responsibility not only for preserving the memory of the Holocaust as a unique historical atrocity but also for the security of Israel. This, she went on, was part of Germany’s Staatsräson —the reason for the existence of the state. The sentiment has since been repeated in Germany seemingly every time the topic of Israel, Jews, or antisemitism arises, including in Habeck’s remarks. “The phrase ‘Israel’s security is part of Germany’s Staatsräson ’ has never been an empty phrase,” he said. “And it must not become one.”

At the same time, an obscure yet strangely consequential debate on what constitutes antisemitism has taken place. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization, adopted the following definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This definition was accompanied by eleven examples, which began with the obvious—calling for or justifying the killing of Jews—but also included “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

This definition had no legal force, but it has had extraordinary influence. Twenty-five E.U. member states and the U.S. State Department have endorsed or adopted the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing for the withholding of federal funds from colleges where students are not protected from antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A. On December 5th of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution condemning antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A.; it was proposed by two Jewish Republican representatives and opposed by several prominent Jewish Democrats, including New York’s Jerry Nadler.

In 2020, a group of academics proposed an alternative definition of antisemitism, which they called the Jerusalem Declaration . It defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)” and provides examples that help distinguish anti-Israel statements and actions from antisemitic ones. But although some of the preëminent scholars of the Holocaust participated in drafting the declaration, it has barely made a dent in the growing influence of the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2021, the European Commission published a handbook “for the practical use” of the I.H.R.A. definition, which recommended, among other things, using the definition in training law-enforcement officers to recognize hate crimes, and creating the position of state attorney, or coördinator or commissioner for antisemitism.

Germany had already implemented this particular recommendation. In 2018, the country created the Office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism, a vast bureaucracy that includes commissioners at the state and local level, some of whom work out of prosecutors’ offices or police precincts. Since then, Germany has reported an almost uninterrupted rise in the number of antisemitic incidents: more than two thousand in 2019, more than three thousand in 2021, and, according to one monitoring group, a shocking nine hundred and ninety-four incidents in the month following the Hamas attack. But the statistics mix what Germans call Israelbezogener Antisemitismus —Israel-related antisemitism, such as instances of criticism of Israeli government policies—with violent attacks, such as an attempted shooting at a synagogue, in Halle, in 2019, which killed two bystanders; shots fired at a former rabbi’s house, in Essen, in 2022; and two Molotov cocktails thrown at a Berlin synagogue this fall. The number of incidents involving violence has, in fact, remained relatively steady, and has not increased following the Hamas attack.

There are now dozens of antisemitism commissioners throughout Germany. They have no single job description or legal framework for their work, but much of it appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic, often for “de-singularizing the Holocaust” or for criticizing Israel. Hardly any of these commissioners are Jewish. Indeed, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. These have included the German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who was targeted for supporting the B.D.S. movement, as was the South African Jewish photographer Adam Broomberg.

In 2019, the Bundestag passed a resolution condemning B.D.S. as antisemitic and recommending that state funding be withheld from events and institutions connected to B.D.S. The history of the resolution is telling. A version was originally introduced by the AfD, the radical-right ethnonationalist and Euroskeptic party then relatively new to the German parliament. Mainstream politicians rejected the resolution because it came from the AfD, but, apparently fearful of being seen as failing to fight antisemitism, immediately introduced a similar one of their own. The resolution was unbeatable because it linked B.D.S. to “the most terrible phase of German history.” For the AfD, whose leaders have made openly antisemitic statements and endorsed the revival of Nazi-era nationalist language, the spectre of antisemitism is a perfect, cynically wielded political instrument, both a ticket to the political mainstream and a weapon that can be used against Muslim immigrants.

The B.D.S. movement, which is inspired by the boycott movement against South African apartheid, seeks to use economic pressure to secure equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, end the occupation, and promote the return of Palestinian refugees. Many people find the B.D.S. movement problematic because it does not affirm the right of the Israeli state to exist—and, indeed, some B.D.S. supporters envision a total undoing of the Zionist project. Still, one could argue that associating a nonviolent boycott movement, whose supporters have explicitly positioned it as an alternative to armed struggle, with the Holocaust is the very definition of Holocaust relativism. But, according to the logic of German memory policy, because B.D.S. is directed against Jews—although many of the movement’s supporters are also Jewish—it is antisemitic. One could also argue that the inherent conflation of Jews with the state of Israel is antisemitic, even that it meets the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism. And, given the AfD’s involvement and the pattern of the resolution being used largely against Jews and people of color, one might think that this argument would gain traction. One would be wrong.

The German Basic Law, unlike the U.S. Constitution but like the constitutions of many other European countries, has not been interpreted to provide an absolute guarantee of freedom of speech. It does, however, promise freedom of expression not only in the press but in the arts and sciences, research, and teaching. It’s possible that, if the B.D.S. resolution became law, it would be deemed unconstitutional. But it has not been tested in this way. Part of what has made the resolution peculiarly powerful is the German state’s customary generosity: almost all museums, exhibits, conferences, festivals, and other cultural events receive funding from the federal, state, or local government. “It has created a McCarthyist environment,” Candice Breitz, the artist, told me. “Whenever we want to invite someone, they”—meaning whatever government agency may be funding an event—“Google their name with ‘B.D.S.,’ ‘Israel,’ ‘apartheid.’ ”

A couple of years ago, Breitz, whose art deals with issues of race and identity, and Michael Rothberg, who holds a Holocaust studies chair at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to organize a symposium on German Holocaust memory, called “We Need to Talk.” After months of preparations, they had their state funding pulled, likely because the program included a panel connecting Auschwitz and the genocide of the Herero and the Nama people carried out between 1904 and 1908 by German colonizers in what is now Namibia. “Some of the techniques of the Shoah were developed then,” Breitz said. “But you are not allowed to speak about German colonialism and the Shoah in the same breath because it is a ‘levelling.’ ”

The insistence on the singularity of the Holocaust and the centrality of Germany’s commitment to reckoning with it are two sides of the same coin: they position the Holocaust as an event that Germans must always remember and mention but don’t have to fear repeating, because it is unlike anything else that’s ever happened or will happen. The German historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, who heads the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, in Berlin, has argued that unified Germany turned the reckoning with the Holocaust into its national idea, and as a result “any attempt to advance our understanding of the historical event itself, through comparisons with other German crimes or other genocides, can [be] and is being perceived as an attack on the very foundation of this new nation-state.” Perhaps that’s the meaning of “Never again is now.”

Some of the great Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust spent the rest of their lives trying to tell the world that the horror, while uniquely deadly, should not be seen as an aberration. That the Holocaust happened meant that it was possible—and remains possible. The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued that the massive, systematic, and efficient nature of the Holocaust was a function of modernity—that, although it was by no means predetermined, it fell in line with other inventions of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno studied what makes people inclined to follow authoritarian leaders and sought a moral principle that would prevent another Auschwitz.

In 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the I.H.R.A.’s definition of antisemitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part by the Irgun, a paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a military objective. The attackers “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.”

The occasion for Arendt’s letter was a planned visit to the United States by the party’s leader, Menachem Begin. Albert Einstein, another German Jew who fled the Nazis, added his signature. Thirty years later, Begin became Prime Minister of Israel. Another half century later, in Berlin, the philosopher Susan Neiman, who leads a research institute named for Einstein, spoke at the opening of a conference called “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” She suggested that she might face repercussions for challenging the ways in which Germany now wields its memory culture. Neiman is an Israeli citizen and a scholar of memory and morals. One of her books is called “ Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil .” In the past couple of years, Neiman said, memory culture had “gone haywire.”

Germany’s anti-B.D.S. resolution, for example, has had a distinct chilling effect on the country’s cultural sphere. The city of Aachen took back a ten-thousand-euro prize it had awarded to the Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad; the city of Dortmund and the jury for the fifteen-thousand-euro Nelly Sachs Prize similarly rescinded the honor that they had bestowed on the British-Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie. The Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe had his invitation to a major festival questioned after the federal antisemitism commissioner accused him of supporting B.D.S. and “relativizing the Holocaust.” (Mbembe has said that he is not connected with the boycott movement; the festival itself was cancelled because of COVID .) The director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Peter Schäfer, resigned in 2019 after being accused of supporting B.D.S.—he did not, in fact, support the boycott movement, but the museum had posted a link, on Twitter, to a newspaper article that included criticism of the resolution. The office of Benjamin Netanyahu had also asked Merkel to cut the museum’s funding because, in the Israeli Prime Minister’s opinion, its exhibition on Jerusalem paid too much attention to the city’s Muslims. (Germany’s B.D.S. resolution may be unique in its impact but not in its content: a majority of U.S. states now have laws on the books that equate the boycott with antisemitism and withhold state funding from people and institutions that support it.)

After the “We Need to Talk” symposium was cancelled, Breitz and Rothberg regrouped and came up with a proposal for a symposium called “We Still Need to Talk.” The list of speakers was squeaky clean. A government entity vetted everyone and agreed to fund the gathering. It was scheduled for early December. Then Hamas attacked Israel . “We knew that after that every German politician would see it as extremely risky to be connected with an event that had Palestinian speakers or the word ‘apartheid,’ ” Breitz said. On October 17th, Breitz learned that funding had been pulled. Meanwhile, all over Germany, police were cracking down on demonstrations that call for a ceasefire in Gaza or manifest support for Palestinians. Instead of a symposium, Breitz and several others organized a protest. They called it “We Still Still Still Still Need to Talk.” About an hour into the gathering, police quietly cut through the crowd to confiscate a cardboard poster that read “From the River to the Sea, We Demand Equality.” The person who had brought the poster was a Jewish Israeli woman.

The “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility” proposal has since languished in committee. Still, the performative battle against antisemitism kept ramping up. In November, the planning of Documenta, one of the art world’s most important shows, was thrown into disarray after the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung dug up a petition that a member of the artistic organizing committee, Ranjit Hoskote, had signed in 2019. The petition, written to protest a planned event on Zionism and Hindutva in Hoskote’s home town of Mumbai, denounced Zionism as “a racist ideology calling for a settler-colonial, apartheid state where non-Jews have unequal rights, and in practice, has been premised on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on it under the heading “Antisemitism.” Hoskote resigned and the rest of the committee followed suit. A week later, Breitz read in a newspaper that a museum in Saarland had cancelled an exhibit of hers, which had been planned for 2024, “in view of the media coverage about the artist in connection with her controversial statements in the context of Hamas’ war of aggression against the state of Israel.”

This November, I left Berlin to travel to Kyiv, traversing, by train, Poland and then Ukraine. This is as good a place as any to say a few things about my relationship to the Jewish history of these lands. Many American Jews go to Poland to visit what little, if anything, is left of the old Jewish quarters, to eat food reconstructed according to recipes left by long-extinguished families, and to go on tours of Jewish history, Jewish ghettos, and Nazi concentration camps. I am closer to this history. I grew up in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-seventies, in the ever-present shadow of the Holocaust, because only a part of my family had survived it and because Soviet censors suppressed any public mention of it. When, around the age of nine, I learned that some Nazi war criminals were still on the loose, I stopped sleeping. I imagined one of them climbing in through our fifth-floor balcony to snatch me.

During summers, our cousin Anna and her sons would visit from Warsaw. Her parents had decided to kill themselves after the Warsaw Ghetto burned down. Anna’s father threw himself in front of a train. Anna’s mother tied the three-year-old Anna to her waist with a shawl and jumped into a river. They were plucked out of the water by a Polish man, and survived the war by hiding in the countryside. I knew the story, but I wasn’t allowed to mention it. Anna was an adult when she learned that she was a Holocaust survivor, and she waited to tell her own kids, who were around my age. The first time I went to Poland, in the nineteen-nineties, was to research the fate of my great-grandfather, who spent nearly three years in the Białystok Ghetto before being killed in Majdanek.

The Holocaust memory wars in Poland have run in parallel with Germany’s. The ideas being battled out in the two countries are different, but one consistent feature is the involvement of right-wing politicians in conjunction with the state of Israel. As in Germany, the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands saw ambitious memorialization efforts, both national and local, that broke through the silence of the Soviet years. Poles built museums and monuments that commemorated the Jews killed in the Holocaust—which claimed half of its victims in Nazi-occupied Poland—and the Jewish culture that was lost with them. Then the backlash came. It coincided with the rise to power of the right-wing, illiberal Law and Justice Party, in 2015. Poles now wanted a version of history in which they were victims of the Nazi occupation alongside the Jews, whom they tried to protect from the Nazis.

This was not true: instances of Poles risking their lives to save Jews from the Germans, as in the case of my cousin Anna, were exceedingly rare, while the opposite—entire communities or structures of the pre-occupation Polish state, such as the police or city offices, carrying out the mass murder of Jews—was common. But historians who studied the Poles’ role in the Holocaust came under attack . The Polish-born Princeton historian Jan Tomasz Gross was interrogated and threatened with prosecution for writing that Poles killed more Polish Jews than Germans. The Polish authorities hounded him even after he retired. The government squeezed Dariusz Stola, the head of POLIN , Warsaw’s innovative museum of Polish Jewish history, out of his post. The historians Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking were dragged into court for writing that the mayor of a Polish village had been a collaborator in the Holocaust.

When I wrote about Grabowski and Engleking’s case, I received some of the scariest death threats of my life. (I’ve been sent a lot of death threats; most are forgettable.) One, sent to a work e-mail address, read, “If you keep writing lies about Poland and the Poles, I will deliver these bullets to your body. See the attachment! Five of them in every kneecap, so you won’t walk again. But if you continue to spread your Jewish hatred, I will deliver next 5 bullets in your pussy. The third step you won’t notice. But don’t worry, I’m not visiting you next week or eight weeks, I’ll be back when you forget this e-mail, maybe in 5 years. You’re on my list. . . .” The attachment was a picture of two shiny bullets in the palm of a hand. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, headed by a government appointee, tweeted a condemnation of my article, as did the account of the World Jewish Congress. A few months later, a speaking invitation to a university fell through because, the university told my speaking agent, it had emerged that I might be an antisemite.

Throughout the Polish Holocaust-memory wars, Israel maintained friendly relations with Poland. In 2018, Netanyahu and the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, issued a joint statement against “actions aimed at blaming Poland or the Polish nation as a whole for the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators of different nations.” The statement asserted, falsely, that “structures of the Polish underground state supervised by the Polish government-in-exile created a mechanism of systematic help and support to Jewish people.” Netanyahu was building alliances with the illiberal governments of Central European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, in part to prevent an anti-occupation consensus from solidifying in the European Union. For this, he was willing to lie about the Holocaust.

Each year, tens of thousands of Israeli teen-agers travel to the Auschwitz museum before graduating from high school (though last year the trips were called off over security issues and the Polish government’s growing insistence that Poles’ involvement in the Holocaust be written out of history). It is a powerful, identity-forming trip that comes just a year or two before young Israelis join the military. Noam Chayut, a founder of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation advocacy group in Israel, has written of his own high-school trip, which took place in the late nineteen-nineties, “Now, in Poland, as a high-school adolescent, I began to sense belonging, self-love, power and pride, and the desire to contribute, to live and be strong, so strong that no one would ever try to hurt me.”

Chayut took this feeling into the I.D.F., which posted him to the occupied West Bank. One day he was putting up property-confiscation notices. A group of children was playing nearby. Chayut flashed what he considered a kind and non-threatening smile at a little girl. The rest of the children scampered off, but the girl froze, terrified, until she, too, ran away. Later, when Chayut published a book about the transformation this encounter precipitated, he wrote that he wasn’t sure why it was this girl: “After all, there was also the shackled kid in the Jeep and the girl whose family home we had broken into late at night to remove her mother and aunt. And there were plenty of children, hundreds of them, screaming and crying as we rummaged through their rooms and their things. And there was the child from Jenin whose wall we blasted with an explosive charge that blew a hole just a few centimeters from his head. Miraculously, he was uninjured, but I’m sure his hearing and his mind were badly impaired.” But in the eyes of that girl, on that day, Chayut saw a reflection of annihilatory evil, the kind that he had been taught existed, but only between 1933 and 1945, and only where the Nazis ruled. Chayut called his book “ The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust .”

I took the train from the Polish border to Kyiv. Nearly thirty-four thousand Jews were shot at Babyn Yar, a giant ravine on the outskirts of the city, in just thirty-six hours in September, 1941. Tens of thousands more people died there before the war was over. This was what is now known as the Holocaust by bullets. Many of the countries in which these massacres took place—the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine—were re-colonized by the Soviet Union following the Second World War. Dissidents and Jewish cultural activists risked their freedom to maintain a memory of these tragedies, to collect testimony and names, and, where possible, to clean up and protect the sites themselves. After the fall of the Soviet Union, memorialization projects accompanied efforts to join the European Union. “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, “ Postwar .”

In the Rumbula forest, outside of Riga, for example, where some twenty-five thousand Jews were murdered in 1941, a memorial was unveiled in 2002, two years before Latvia was admitted to the E.U. A serious effort to commemorate Babyn Yar coalesced after the 2014 revolution that set Ukraine on an aspirational path to the E.U. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, in February, 2022, several smaller structures had been completed and ambitious plans for a larger museum complex were in place. With the invasion, construction halted. One week into the full-scale war, a Russian missile hit directly next to the memorial complex, killing at least four people. Since then, some of the people associated with the project have reconstituted themselves as a team of war-crimes investigators.

The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has waged an earnest campaign to win Israeli support for Ukraine. In March, 2022, he delivered a speech to the Knesset, in which he didn’t stress his own Jewish heritage but focussed on the inextricable historical connection between Jews and Ukrainians. He drew unambiguous parallels between the Putin regime and the Nazi Party. He even claimed that eighty years ago Ukrainians rescued Jews. (As with Poland, any claim that such aid was widespread is false.) But what worked for the right-wing government of Poland did not work for the pro-Europe President of Ukraine. Israel has not given Ukraine the help it has begged for in its war against Russia, a country that openly supports Hamas and Hezbollah.

Still, both before and after the October 7th attack, the phrase I heard in Ukraine possibly more than any other was “We need to be like Israel.” Politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and ordinary Ukrainians identify with the story Israel tells about itself, that of a tiny but mighty island of democracy standing strong against enemies who surround it. Some Ukrainian left-wing intellectuals have argued that Ukraine, which is fighting an anti-colonial war against an occupying power, should see its reflection in Palestine, not Israel. These voices are marginal and most often belong to young Ukrainians who are studying or have studied abroad. Following the Hamas attack, Zelensky wanted to rush to Israel as a show of support and unity between Israel and Ukraine. Israeli authorities seem to have other ideas—the visit has not happened.

While Ukraine has been unsuccessfully trying to get Israel to acknowledge that Russia’s invasion resembles Nazi Germany’s genocidal aggression, Moscow has built a propaganda universe around portraying Zelensky’s government, the Ukrainian military, and the Ukrainian people as Nazis. The Second World War is the central event of Russia’s historical myth. During Vladimir Putin’s reign, as the last of the people who lived through the war have been dying, commemorative events have turned into carnivals that celebrate Russian victimhood. The U.S.S.R. lost at least twenty-seven million people in that war, a disproportionate number of them Ukrainians. The Soviet Union and Russia have fought in wars almost continuously since 1945, but the word “war” is still synonymous with the Second World War and the word “enemy” is used interchangeably with “fascist” and “Nazi.” This made it that much easier for Putin, in declaring a new war, to brand Ukrainians as Nazis.

Netanyahu has compared the Hamas murders at the music festival to the Holocaust by bullets. This comparison, picked up and recirculated by world leaders, including President Biden, serves to bolster Israel’s case for inflicting collective punishment on the residents of Gaza. Similarly, when Putin says “Nazi” or “fascist,” he means that the Ukrainian government is so dangerous that Russia is justified in carpet-bombing and laying siege to Ukrainian cities and killing Ukrainian civilians. There are significant differences, of course: Russia’s claims that Ukraine attacked it first, and its portrayals of the Ukrainian government as fascist, are false; Hamas, on the other hand, is a tyrannical power that attacked Israel and committed atrocities that we cannot yet fully comprehend. But do these differences matter when the case being made is for killing children?

In the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when its troops were occupying the western suburbs of Kyiv, the director of Kyiv’s museum of the Second World War, Yurii Savchuk, was living at the museum and rethinking the core exhibit. One day after the Ukrainian military drove the Russians out of the Kyiv region, he met with the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and got permission to start collecting artifacts. Savchuk and his staff went to Bucha, Irpin, and other towns and cities that had just been “deoccupied,” as Ukrainians have taken to saying, and interviewed people who had not yet told their stories. “This was before the exhumations and the reburials,” Savchuk told me. “We saw the true face of war, with all its emotions. The fear, the terror, was in the atmosphere, and we absorbed it with the air.”

In May, 2022, the museum opened a new exhibit, titled “Ukraine – Crucifixion.” It begins with a display of Russian soldiers’ boots, which Savchuk’s team had collected. It’s an odd reversal: both the Auschwitz museum and the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., have displayed hundreds or thousands of shoes that belonged to victims of the Holocaust. They convey the scale of loss, even as they show only a tiny fraction of it. The display in Kyiv shows the scale of the menace. The boots are arranged on the floor of the museum in the pattern of a five-pointed star, the symbol of the Red Army that has become as sinister in Ukraine as the swastika. In September, Kyiv removed five-pointed stars from a monument to the Second World War in what used to be called Victory Square—it’s been renamed because the very word “Victory” connotes Russia’s celebration in what it still calls the Great Patriotic War. The city also changed the dates on the monument, from “1941-1945”—the years of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany—to “1939-1945.” Correcting memory one monument at a time.

In 1954, an Israeli court heard a libel case involving a Hungarian Jew named Israel Kastner. A decade earlier, when Germany occupied Hungary and belatedly rushed to implement the mass murder of its Jews, Kastner, as a leader of the Jewish community, entered into negotiations with Adolf Eichmann himself. Kastner proposed to buy the lives of Hungary’s Jews with ten thousand trucks. When this failed, he negotiated to save sixteen hundred and eighty-five people by transporting them by chartered train to Switzerland. Hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews were loaded onto trains to death camps. A Hungarian Jewish survivor had publicly accused Kastner of having collaborated with the Germans. Kastner sued for libel and, in effect, found himself on trial. The judge concluded that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil.”

The charge of collaboration against Kastner rested on the allegation that he had failed to tell people that they were going to their deaths. His accusers argued that, had he warned the deportees, they would have rebelled, not gone to the death camps like sheep to slaughter. The trial has been read as the beginning of a discursive standoff in which the Israeli right argues for preëmptive violence and sees the left as willfully defenseless. By the time of the trial, Kastner was a left-wing politician; his accuser was a right-wing activist.

Seven years later, the judge who had presided over the Kastner libel trial was one of the three judges in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here was the devil himself. The prosecution argued that Eichmann represented but one iteration of the eternal threat to the Jews. The trial helped to solidify the narrative that, to prevent annihilation, Jews should be prepared to use force preëmptively. Arendt, reporting on the trial , would have none of this. Her phrase “the banality of evil” elicited perhaps the original accusations, levelled against a Jew, of trivializing the Holocaust. She wasn’t. But she saw that Eichmann was no devil, that perhaps the devil didn’t exist. She had reasoned that there was no such thing as radical evil, that evil was always ordinary even when it was extreme—something “born in the gutter,” as she put it later, something of “utter shallowness.”

Arendt also took issue with the prosecution’s story that Jews were the victims of, as she put it, “a historical principle stretching from Pharaoh to Haman—the victim of a metaphysical principle.” This story, rooted in the Biblical legend of Amalek, a people of the Negev Desert who repeatedly fought the ancient Israelites, holds that every generation of Jews faces its own Amalek. I learned this story as a teen-ager; it was the first Torah lesson I ever received, taught by a rabbi who gathered the kids in a suburb of Rome where Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union lived while waiting for their papers to enter the United States, Canada, or Australia. In this story, as told by the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust is a predetermined event, part of Jewish history—and only Jewish history. The Jews, in this version, always have a well-justified fear of annihilation. Indeed, they can survive only if they act as though annihilation were imminent.

When I first learned the legend of Amalek, it made perfect sense to me. It described my knowledge of the world; it helped me connect my experience of getting teased and beaten up to my great-grandmother’s admonitions that using household Yiddish expressions in public was dangerous, to the unfathomable injustice of my grandfather and great-grandfather and scores of other relatives being killed before I was born. I was fourteen and lonely. I knew myself and my family to be victims, and the legend of Amalek imbued my sense of victimhood with meaning and a sense of community.

Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek in the wake of the Hamas attack. The logic of this legend, as he wields it—that Jews occupy a singular place in history and have an exclusive claim on victimhood—has bolstered the anti-antisemitism bureaucracy in Germany and the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right. But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time. Just as much of Israel’s claim to impunity lies in the Jews’ perpetual victim status, many of the country’s critics have tried to excuse Hamas’s act of terrorism as a predictable response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Conversely, in the eyes of Israel’s supporters, Palestinians in Gaza can’t be victims because Hamas attacked Israel first. The fight over one rightful claim to victimhood runs on forever.

For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.

The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.

From the earliest days of Israel’s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away. In 1948, the year the state was created, an article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv described the dire conditions—“old people so weak they were on the verge of death”; “a boy with two paralyzed legs”; “another boy whose hands were severed”—in which Palestinians, mostly women and children, departed the village of Tantura after Israeli troops occupied it: “One woman carried her child in one arm and with the other hand she held her elderly mother. The latter couldn’t keep up the pace, she yelled and begged her daughter to slow down, but the daughter did not consent. Finally the old lady collapsed onto the road and couldn’t move. The daughter pulled out her hair … lest she not make it on time. And worse than this was the association to Jewish mothers and grandmothers who lagged this way on the roads under the crop of murderers.” The journalist caught himself. “There is obviously no room for such a comparison,” he wrote. “This fate—they brought upon themselves.”

Jews took up arms in 1948 to claim land that was offered to them by a United Nations decision to partition what had been British-controlled Palestine. The Palestinians, supported by surrounding Arab states, did not accept the partition and Israel’s declaration of independence. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan invaded the proto-Israeli state, starting what Israel now calls the War of Independence. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the fighting. Those who did not were driven out of their villages by Israeli forces. Most of them were never able to return. The Palestinians remember 1948 as the Nakba, a word that means “catastrophe” in Arabic, just as Shoah means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. That the comparison is unavoidable has compelled many Israelis to assert that, unlike the Jews, Palestinians brought their catastrophe on themselves.

The day I arrived in Kyiv, someone handed me a thick book. It was the first academic study of Stepan Bandera to be published in Ukraine. Bandera is a Ukrainian hero: he fought against the Soviet regime; dozens of monuments to him have appeared since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. He ended up in Germany after the Second World War, led a partisan movement from exile, and died after being poisoned by a K.G.B. agent, in 1959. Bandera was also a committed fascist, an ideologue who wanted to build a totalitarian regime. These facts are detailed in the book, which has sold about twelve hundred copies. (Many bookstores have refused to carry it.) Russia makes gleeful use of Ukraine’s Bandera cult as evidence that Ukraine is a Nazi state. Ukrainians mostly respond by whitewashing Bandera’s legacy. It is ever so hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea that someone could have been the enemy of your enemy and yet not a benevolent force. A victim and also a perpetrator. Or vice versa. ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described what Jan Tomasz Gross wrote. It also misstated when Anna’s parents decided to kill themselves and Anna’s age at the time of those events.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Nazi Germany — Holocaust

Essays on Holocaust

Hook examples for holocaust essays, the unimaginable horror hook.

Begin your essay by vividly describing the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, such as concentration camps, mass extermination, and the human suffering that occurred during this dark period in history. Use powerful and descriptive language to evoke emotions in your readers.

The Survivor's Testimony Hook

Share a compelling personal testimony of a Holocaust survivor. Use direct quotes or excerpts from survivors' accounts to provide firsthand insights into the experiences and resilience of those who lived through the Holocaust.

The Nuremberg Trials and Justice Hook

Discuss the Nuremberg Trials and the pursuit of justice for the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Highlight the importance of holding individuals accountable for their actions and the establishment of principles for international law.

The Heroes of the Holocaust Hook

Introduce the stories of individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, such as Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg. Emphasize acts of bravery and compassion in the face of extreme adversity.

The Lessons of History Hook

Reflect on the broader lessons and moral implications of the Holocaust. Discuss the importance of remembering and learning from this tragic event to prevent future genocides and promote tolerance and understanding.

The Art and Literature of Survival Hook

Showcase how Holocaust survivors used art, literature, and other forms of expression to cope with their trauma and convey their experiences. Explore the therapeutic and documentary aspects of creative works produced during and after the Holocaust.

The Holocaust in Contemporary Context Hook

Connect the Holocaust to current events, discussing instances of hate crimes, discrimination, and genocide in the modern world. Highlight the importance of remembrance and education to prevent the recurrence of such atrocities.

The Resilience and Hope Hook

Share stories of resilience and hope within the Holocaust, such as clandestine education in concentration camps or acts of solidarity among prisoners. Explore the indomitable human spirit that emerged even in the darkest times.

The Forgotten Victims Hook

Draw attention to less-discussed aspects of the Holocaust, such as the experiences of Romani people, disabled individuals, or political dissidents who also suffered persecution. Shed light on the diversity of victims and their stories.

The Role of Witnesses and Documentation Hook

Discuss the significance of witnesses, both survivors and liberators, who documented the Holocaust through photographs, diaries, and testimonies. Emphasize the importance of preserving and sharing these historical records.

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Disastrous Event in Jewish History: The Holocaust

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1933 - 1945

German Reich and German-occupied Europe

The Holocaust was a genocidal event that took place during World War II, orchestrated by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany. It was a systematic and state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of approximately six million Jews, along with millions of other victims, including Romani people, disabled individuals, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and others deemed "undesirable" by the Nazis. The Holocaust was marked by horrific atrocities, including the establishment of concentration camps, mass shootings, forced labor, and the implementation of gas chambers in extermination camps. It was an unparalleled act of inhumanity and racial hatred, driven by the Nazis' ideology of racial superiority and the desire to create a homogeneous "Aryan" society.

One such figure is Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl whose diary provided a poignant firsthand account of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. Her diary, discovered after her death in a concentration camp, has become an iconic symbol of hope and resilience. Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist, is another notable person associated with the Holocaust. Through his efforts, Schindler saved the lives of over 1,000 Jewish people by employing them in his factories and ensuring their protection. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, dedicated his life to bearing witness to the Holocaust and promoting Holocaust education and remembrance. His powerful memoir, "Night," chronicles his experiences in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, is remembered for his courageous actions in saving tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews by issuing protective passports and providing safe houses.

The historical context of the Holocaust can be traced back to the rise of Nazi ideology and its virulent antisemitism. Hitler's regime implemented a series of discriminatory laws known as the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their rights and subjected them to persecution. This was followed by the establishment of concentration camps and the implementation of the "Final Solution" – a plan to exterminate all Jews within Nazi-controlled territories. The Holocaust occurred within the broader context of World War II, as Nazi Germany sought to expand its territories and exert dominance over Europe. The war provided a cover for the implementation of mass murder and allowed the Nazis to carry out their genocidal agenda with relative impunity.

The Holocaust has had a profound impact on international law and the concept of human rights. The Nuremberg Trials, held after World War II, established the precedent for prosecuting individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, was a direct response to the atrocities of the Holocaust, emphasizing the inherent dignity and rights of all individuals. The Holocaust also serves as a reminder of the dangers of prejudice and discrimination. It has prompted ongoing efforts to combat antisemitism, racism, and bigotry in all forms. The Holocaust education and memorialization have become vital tools in raising awareness and fostering tolerance, ensuring that the lessons of the past are not forgotten. Furthermore, the Holocaust has inspired countless works of literature, art, and film, which bear witness to the horrors experienced by its victims. These creative expressions serve as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the importance of remembering the past to prevent similar atrocities in the future.

Public opinion on the Holocaust varies, but it is generally characterized by shock, horror, and condemnation. The Holocaust is widely regarded as one of the most egregious crimes against humanity in history, and the vast majority of people view it with deep sorrow and sympathy for the victims. Public opinion acknowledges the gravity of the Holocaust and recognizes its impact on the world. The overwhelming sentiment is one of condemnation towards the Nazi regime and the individuals who perpetrated these heinous acts. People express profound empathy for the millions of innocent lives lost and the immense suffering endured by survivors. Moreover, public opinion acknowledges the importance of remembering the Holocaust as a means of honoring the victims and preventing future atrocities. Holocaust education and commemorative events have garnered significant support, with many recognizing the need to preserve the memory of the Holocaust as a stark reminder of the consequences of hatred and prejudice.

Film: Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" (1993) is a critically acclaimed movie based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of over a thousand Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. The film vividly portrays the atrocities and human suffering while highlighting acts of bravery and compassion. Literature: Elie Wiesel's memoir "Night" (1956) provides a firsthand account of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. It is a powerful and haunting narrative that has become a significant literary work, capturing the physical and emotional hardships endured by those subjected to Nazi persecution. Art: The artwork of Holocaust survivor and painter Samuel Bak often explores the themes of loss, resilience, and memory. His paintings depict scenes from his own experiences as a child during the Holocaust, offering a deeply personal and introspective perspective on the tragedy.

1. The Holocaust witnessed the systematic annihilation of six million Jewish individuals at the hands of the Nazis. This accounts for approximately two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe at that time. 2. The Holocaust took place between 1941 and 1945 during World War II, primarily in German-occupied territories. It involved the mass extermination of Jews, as well as other groups such as Romani people, Poles, disabled individuals, and political dissidents. 3. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration and extermination camp, was responsible for the deaths of over one million people. Other notorious camps include Treblinka, Sobibor, and Dachau. 4. The Nuremberg Laws, implemented in 1935, stripped Jews of their citizenship, rights, and protections. These laws laid the foundation for the persecution and eventual mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. 5. Rescuers, such as Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, risked their lives to save Jews from persecution. Their heroic actions demonstrated courage and compassion in the face of immense danger.

The topic of the Holocaust is of utmost importance to write an essay about due to its profound historical significance and the lessons it teaches us about humanity. By exploring the Holocaust, we delve into one of the darkest periods in human history, where millions of innocent lives were brutally extinguished. Writing an essay about the Holocaust allows us to honor and remember the victims, ensuring that their stories are never forgotten. It serves as a powerful reminder of the consequences of unchecked hatred, discrimination, and prejudice. Through examining the causes, events, and aftermath of the Holocaust, we gain a deeper understanding of the depths of human cruelty and the dangers of ideological extremism. Moreover, studying the Holocaust prompts critical reflection on the importance of promoting tolerance, empathy, and respect for human rights. It compels us to confront the potential for evil within society and to actively work towards creating a world that rejects bigotry and embraces diversity. By writing an essay on the Holocaust, we contribute to the preservation of historical memory, promote empathy and understanding, and strive to ensure that such atrocities are never repeated. It is a testament to our commitment to learning from the past and building a more compassionate and just future.

1. Browning, C. R. (1992). Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland. Harper Perennial. 2. Dawidowicz, L. S. (1981). The war against the Jews, 1933-1945. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 3. Evans, R. J. (2008). The Third Reich at war: How the Nazis led Germany from conquest to disaster. Penguin. 4. Gilbert, M. (1985). The Holocaust: A history of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. Henry Holt and Company. 5. Kershaw, I. (2000). Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis. W. W. Norton & Company. 6. LaCapra, D. (2004). History, memory, and representation: An essay in cognitive historiography. Cornell University Press. 7. Levi, P. (1986). Survival in Auschwitz. Touchstone. 8. Snyder, T. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books. 9. Wiesel, E. (2006). Night. Hill and Wang. 10. Yahil, L. (1991). The Holocaust: The fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945. Oxford University Press.

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Joan Miriam Ringelheim asks, “Did anyone really survive the Holocaust?” It is a question more difficult to answer than it might at first appear. The Holocaust breaks down the definitions of words such as “survival.” Memoirist Charlotte Delbo wrote after the war’s end, “I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it.” And as idealistic as it may sound, there is some truth to the notion that Anne Frank and Charlotte Salomon manage, despite their brutal and meaningless murders, to live on after death. They wrote, after all, with that possibility in mind.

If to survive means to come through unscathed, the answer to Ringelheim’s question must be no. But if to survive means to live through an experience of such horror still be able to desire connection with the world–to create, narrate, innovate, to invoke the voices of the dead and of the living–then the answer is yes. To survive: “sur”–over, “vive”–live; the verb implies both to surmount an event, to live through it, and to relive it, live it over. Perhaps the simplest and somewhat tragic truth is that the one necessarily involves the other.

I find some sense of closure in Felstiner’s loving exploration of Charlotte Salomon because it is one which treats both the creator and the creation with equal care. What distinguishes Lucille E. from Anne Frank and Charlotte Salomon, of course, is that only the first survived the Holocaust. Yet all three have created voices which seek to bear witness to the Shoah, if only the world will let them. The skill which it would benefit the world to develop is that of simultaneously recognizing the fundamental point that memoirs of female Holocaust witnesses are authored by women, and that they each nevertheless are not utterly circumscribed by that fact. To neglect the first point contributes to an artificial universalization of men’s experience and a silencing of painful but important questions. To neglect the second points to essentialism and dogmatic discourse. These women have taken a great step in creating a stand-in, a memorial protagonist, which can continue to tell their story after their own ends. They have invested the memoir with a certain autonomy; that autonomy needs to be acknowledged by the rest of us.

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Holocaust Centre North launches first digital archive

Holocaust Centre North in Huddersfield, west Yorkshire, has launched a new digital archive of 70 collections of papers and personal testimonies from Holocaust survivors and refugees.

The archive is the first phase of an ambitious three-year project, Homeward Bound, by the museum to catalogue its extensive Holocaust collection and make it accessible online.

The new archive can be accessed remotely via the National Archives website, opening up the centre’s collections to anyone with an interest in Holocaust history, such as academics, artists, schools, researchers and survivors’ families.

In a statement, the institution said: “Following months of painstaking work for the centre’s archivist, this groundbreaking and transformative service enables global public online access to its collections and supports the centre’s strategy to becoming a world-class destination for Holocaust education and research.”

The statement added: “Not only is this level of access and depth of information invaluable for worldwide Holocaust education, this cataloguing has also greatly benefitted the centre’s own staff.

Through complete immersion in its records, collections and learning staff have gained a far greater understanding and increased knowledge of its collection, its stories and the survivors themselves.”

The cataloguing process helped to uncover previously unknown connections and stories in the collections.

In one such instance, it was discovered that a well-known magician, David Berglas, had shown kindness to a newly arrived Jewish refugee. The centre was subsequently able to interview Berglas and digitise his collection of family photographs before his death in 2023.

The project also led the collections team to establish a stronger connection with Yorkshire resident Gail Simon, the granddaughter of a couple who ran a hostel for Kindertransport boys in Bradford. Simon has since donated personal and institutional records, photographs and a menorah to the centre, which can be viewed in the new digital archive.

“On a personal level, it has been thoroughly enjoyable getting to know the archive better and, as a result, becoming better equipped to support Holocaust Centre North’s team and external users to share in the richness of these extraordinarily compelling collections,” said Holocaust Centre North archivist Hari Jonkers, who helped secure funding for the project and worked on the hands-on cataloguing together with archives assistant Barbora Vackova. 

“ Sharing ‘new discoveries’ with colleagues is incredibly rewarding and has increased staff awareness of the work that archivists do, which can often be hidden. Cataloguing has already enabled us to strengthen our existing relationships within the northern community of Holocaust survivors and their descendants and to seek out and develop new relationships. It has been a crucial learning curve, illustrating the depth and dedication cataloguing demands within archival operations.”

Jonkers added: “As an organisation devoted to ‘fostering a culture of care’ when engaging with traumatic stories, this work has also taught our team that an archive is the perfect place to foster that culture of care. It is exciting and rewarding to see the fruits of our hard work online at the National Archives so that these remarkable and vital Holocaust histories can be preserved and accessed globally.”

The initial digitisation of Holocaust Centre North’s archives and collections was funded as part of the Archives Revealed Grant managed by the National Archives.

Phase two of the Homeward Bound project will involve the scanning and photographing of the centre’s materials. Holocaust Centre North aims to make digitised collections available by the end of December 2025 through a collection browser on its website.

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Biden to Address Holocaust Remembrance While Still Quiet on Campus Unrest

The president has largely left it to aides to respond to anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country, but he is planning a speech next week at an event sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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By Peter Baker

Reporting from Washington

President Biden, who has personally stayed relatively quiet during college campus protests in recent days, plans to speak out against antisemitism next week at a ceremony hosted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual “days of remembrance” commemoration, the White House announced on Wednesday.

While his spokesmen have denounced violence and antisemitism on campus, Mr. Biden has made little effort to personally address the anti-Israel protests that have roiled colleges across the country, drawing criticism from Republicans and frustrating some Democrats who want him to show more public leadership.

Mr. Biden will travel to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to deliver the keynote address of the Holocaust museum’s yearly event and remember the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. “The president will also discuss our moral duty to combat the rising scourge of antisemitism,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters.

Ms. Jean-Pierre noted that the Biden-Harris administration had developed a national strategy to counter antisemitism even before the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attack killed 1,200 people in Israel and touched off a war in Gaza that has killed an estimated 34,000 people. The goal of the effort, she said, is “to make real the promise of never, never again.”

But in response to repeated questions from reporters, Ms. Jean-Pierre offered no explanation for why Mr. Biden has not spoken out more himself about the campus unrest that has led to suspensions and arrests, including the nationally televised police raid on Tuesday night clearing out a building at Columbia University that had been taken over by protesters. “No president has spoken more forcefully about combating antisemitism than this president,” she said.

Mr. Biden has made no public comments since last week when he said only briefly that he condemns “antisemitic protests” while also denouncing “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians,” a response that struck critics and even some allies as an equivocation that did not meet the moment. Since then, Mr. Biden has left it to aides to speak for him, trying to balance the free speech rights of protesters with rejection of violence and antisemitic statements.

“Americans have the right to peacefully protest as long as it’s within the law and it’s peaceful,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said. “Forcibly taking over a building is not peaceful. It’s just not. Students have the right to feel safe. They have the right to learn. They have the right to do this without disruption.”

Former Representative Ted Deutch, a Democrat from Florida who is now the chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, said it was important for Mr. Biden to publicly condemn antisemitism and was glad to hear of his planned address next week. “I hope the president speaks as boldly and as forcefully as this moment requires,” Mr. Deutch told Julie Mason on her Sirius/XM radio show.

Republicans have eagerly sought to take advantage by positioning themselves as defenders of Jewish Americans, despite a history by their putative nominee, former President Donald J. Trump, of meeting with or not disavowing the support of known antisemites and making sympathetic or envious comments about Adolf Hitler .

The Republican National Committee sent out an email on Wednesday trying to pin antisemitism on Mr. Biden, even though the campus demonstrators have labeled him “Genocide Joe” as they protest his support for Israel’s war against Hamas. “While Biden and Democrats allow antisemitism to flourish, Jewish Americans are increasingly finding a home with the Republican Party,” the email said.

Speaker Mike Johnson held a vote in the House on Wednesday on a resolution condemning antisemitism and mandating that the Education Department use the definition of antisemitism embraced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

While it passed on an overwhelming 320-to-91 bipartisan vote, 70 Democrats and 21 Republicans voted against it. Some Democrats were worried if such a large number of their party opposed it because it would be easier to portray them as not serious about antisemitism.

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker

How does Scout’s Age Influence to Kill a Mockingbird

This essay about “To Kill a Mockingbird” examines how the narrator, Scout Finch’s youth from ages six to eight, critically shapes the novel’s narrative and themes. It highlights how Scout’s innocence and naive questioning expose the racial and social prejudices of the 1930s South. The text discusses Scout’s role in revealing the adult world’s moral failings and her personal growth in understanding complex moral issues, emphasizing her influence on the thematic development of justice and morality in the novel.

How it works

In Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the narrator, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, begins her story at the tender age of six and matures to about eight by the novel’s end. Scout’s age is crucial to the narrative structure and thematic development of the novel, providing a unique perspective on the adult world around her. This essay explores how Scout’s youthful innocence, observational skills, and gradual maturation significantly influence the story’s development and the conveyance of the novel’s central themes of racism, moral growth, and social injustice.

Scout’s perspective as a child is essential for the reader to engage with the complexities of the social and racial injustices depicted in the novel. Her young age and naiveté allow her to question the irrationality of the adult attitudes towards race and class that prevail in the racially segregated South of the 1930s. Through Scout, Lee is able to present a candid critique of these attitudes. For instance, Scout’s straightforward and innocent questions about why she should not socialize with Walter Cunningham—a boy of lower socio-economic status—highlights the arbitrary nature of class distinctions. Furthermore, her reaction to the overt racism displayed during Tom Robinson’s trial exposes the inherent unfairness of racial prejudices. Scout’s inability to fully grasp why the jury would convict an obviously innocent man solely based on his race allows the reader to see the clear moral failings of the adults around her, illustrating the destructive nature of ingrained racial biases.

Scout’s age also influences the narrative style of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” As a child, Scout’s recounting of events tends to focus on details that an adult might deem insignificant, yet these observations often provide deeper insights into the complexities of human behavior. For example, her detailed descriptions of her play with Jem and Dill, such as their attempts to make Boo Radley come out, add a layer of childhood innocence to the narrative. This innocence acts as a stark contrast to the adult themes of racism, violence, and moral decline that permeate the story. The juxtaposition of childhood innocence with adult prejudice and hatred serves as a powerful critique of the moral failings of society, emphasizing how prejudice is a learned trait.

Moreover, Scout’s development over the course of the novel—from a naive child to a more aware individual—mirrors the thematic development of the narrative. Initially, Scout is oblivious to the complexities of the adult world, but as she faces the realities of her community, especially during and after the trial of Tom Robinson, she begins to gain a deeper understanding of the moral and ethical dilemmas that challenge her father, Atticus. This gradual awakening is poignantly illustrated in her reflections on Boo Radley. Early in the story, she perceives him as a source of childish superstition and fear, but by the end, she recognizes him as a fundamentally kind person who has been victimized by societal prejudices. This shift not only signifies Scout’s personal growth but also underscores the novel’s message about the destructive nature of prejudice and the potential for justice and understanding.

Additionally, Scout’s interactions with her father, Atticus, are crucial to her development and the thematic depth of the story. Atticus’s guidance and moral teachings are filtered through Scout’s interpretative lens as a child. Her understanding of Atticus’s principles—such as the importance of empathy and the need to fight for justice despite the odds—gradually evolves, adding layers of moral complexity to the narrative. Through Scout’s eyes, the reader experiences the struggle between maintaining one’s moral compass and confronting the often overwhelming social forces that favor prejudice and inequality.

In conclusion, Scout’s age is not just a background detail in “To Kill a Mockingbird”; it is integral to the narrative structure and thematic exploration of the novel. Her child’s view provides innocence, directness, and clarity, contrasting sharply with the murky, biased attitudes of the adult world. Through Scout’s eyes, the reader experiences a journey of moral and ethical awakening—a journey that challenges prejudices, champions social justice, and advocates for a more empathetic understanding of human complexities. Harper Lee masterfully uses Scout’s youthful perspective to critique societal flaws and highlight the possibility of moral growth and redemption. This literary choice not only deepens the novel’s impact but also ensures its enduring relevance in discussions about justice and morality.

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The wrongs and harms of a Roma register in Norway

The existence of a Roma police register is shocking but not surprising. It is directly linked to Norway’s long history of antigypsyism.   

I was trained to be an academic, not a whistleblower. But when I found out that the Norwegian police had put together a register of Roma people, a national minority in Norway, I had no choice but to bring it to public and legal scrutiny.

I first saw the “family tree” of Norwegian Roma people put together by police officers in a meeting I was invited to about crime prevention work in Oslo in the fall of 2023. The police officers wanted to expand their knowledge about Roma people and had invited me as I had worked with Roma-related issues in my research. I photographed the “family tree” and, suspecting that there was a register behind the graphics, accepted an invitation to a follow-up meeting with the police officers who presented it.

My suspicion was correct. In the follow-up meeting, an officer showed me the register on his computer and explained how he had created it. The register includes 14 people facing charges in ongoing criminal cases, 74 who are their close relatives and 567 other people. The register even includes Holocaust survivors, deceased people as well as Roma children.

I recorded the meeting and took notes, thus securing proof. Based on the recording and the family tree photo, investigative journalists at the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten released a report last month revealing the existence of the Roma register to the Norwegian public.

Keeping registers of citizens based on their ethnic and racial background is illegal in Norway, which is itself reason enough for the Norwegian authorities to act on this revelation. But the history of police registration of Roma in the country and its tragic consequences adds to the gravity of this violation.

From ethnic registration to Auschwitz-Birkenau

In the early 1920s, the Norwegian authorities launched a campaign to register all Roma people in the country, who numbered no more than 150 at that time. In parallel, they also started denying members of the group Norwegian citizenship and made their Norwegian identification papers invalid, rendering them stateless.

A new “G*psy clause” of the Norwegian Alien Act that prevented the Roma from obtaining Norwegian citizenship was adopted unanimously by parliament in 1927. There was consensus from the extreme right to the extreme left that Roma people were unwanted in the country. Thus, Norway was able to declare itself “G*psy free” long before the Nazis occupied the country in the 1940s.

These harsh policies allowed for the Norwegian Roma to be pushed out of the country. As stateless individuals, many were unable to secure legal stays in other countries, and they kept getting deported from place to place. In the 1940s, many of them were rounded up and sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex in Nazi-occupied Poland. Of those deported to the camps, only four survived.

After the war, some of the surviving Norwegian Roma tried to go back to the country but were prevented by the “G*psy clause” of the Alien Act. Four of them led a years-long battle on behalf of the community to regain their citizenship rights and were only allowed to return in 1956 after the clause was repealed.

This was a largely silenced chapter in Norwegian history until Maria Rosvoll, Lars Lien and Jan Alexander Brustad, scholars at the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies, published a  report about it in 2015 . This led to an apology from the Norwegian prime minister, and the descendants of the Holocaust survivors were given a collective compensation.

That the Norwegian police were aware of this historical background was obvious to me as they used the report’s photos of Holocaust survivors in their meticulous mapping of the Roma people in Norway.

A broad consensus to register Roma

The idea that it is necessary to keep registers of Roma people is a historically rooted practice. In 1932, the predecessor of Interpol, the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC) established an international “G*psy centre” in Vienna to centralise the exchange of information about Roma people.

In 1934, a permanent committee was formed to support the “G*psy centre” and what it called “a fight against the G*psy plague”. In the same year, the ICPC had an outspoken goal to carry out registration of all individuals who were racially defined as “G*psies” or living a “G*psy lifeslyle”.

Historian Jan Selling’s research has shown that the Roma were the only ethnic group that was singled out in this way by the ICPC and there was a broad consensus among Nazi and non-Nazi police chiefs in Europe in their view of the Roma as “hereditary criminals”. Despite this fact, there has been a lack of interest among European police organisations in confronting this part of history, indicating that there is an ideological and operative continuity in European policing since the 1940s.

Norway clearly followed up on the ICPC’s intentions to register all Roma. In addition to the Norwegian Roma, the minority known as Travellers (Romanifolk/tatere) were also registered by the police in 1927.

These practices continued even after the end of World War II as the presence of such registers in the National Archive reveals. Some of them were extensive and included information such as current names, dates of birth, social security numbers, passport numbers, photos, occupations, places of residence and kinships.

These registers were not closed down even after legislation was passed in Norway restricting the legality of registering ethnic and racial belonging in 1978.

There is, in other words, every reason to believe that registration of Roma and Travellers (Romanifolk/tatere) has taken place continuously in Norway for the past 100 years. The comprehensive registration practices suggests that Norwegian authorities see criminality as “hereditary” to Roma people.

Therefore, the recent disclosure of a Roma registry should infuriate but not surprise us.

‘Does the police have my name?’

When I left the police office where I had witnessed the ethnic register, I struggled to breathe. I was furious, but I also felt scared. Given that I am not a Roma individual and that neither I nor my family are in the register, I could not even imagine how Roma people would feel about this disclosure.

The news, of course, received strong reactions from the Norwegian Roma. One of their greatest fears was confirmed. Intergenerational trauma was reactivated. Having experienced state-committed genocide and being hunted by the police, they know what such a register might lead to.

Norwegian Roma have told the media that many have considered leaving the country out of fear. Natalina Jansen, leader of the Roma Council in Norway, said in an interview: “You get the same fear that family members had when in 1934 they were refused entry to Norway and the persecution in Europe increased. Panic sets in.”

A Roma child I recently met at a meeting about the register looked at me with serious eyes and asked, “Does the police have my name?”

Time for truth and recourse

Norway’s brutal treatment of Roma people throughout history has not only directly caused death and trauma for the community, but it has also deprived our country of citizens who should have been part of our society. How Norway would have been with them present, we will never know.

As a Norwegian citizen, I am grateful that the four Roma individuals at the foundation of the police’s “family tree” fought for their right to return to their home country. And I am grateful that their descendants have stayed in Norway and enriched our society despite an environment that has been largely hostile towards them.

It is time for a serious reckoning to be taken with the racist notion that Roma are more inclined to be criminals than other people. But words are not enough. Action must follow.

A well-formulated and substantive apology from the Norwegian prime minister in 2015 is close to worthless if the Norwegian police, in parallel, continue the practice of registering and racially profiling Roma people behind closed doors.

After the disclosure that Roma had been registered by the police in Sweden in 2013, the government responded by establishing a commission against antigypsyism. This could be a step in the right direction in Norway too. Further action could involve suggestions made by various scholars and community members.

A recent research project by the Centre for European Policy Studies recommends that antigypsyism be more closely monitored and regional and local truth and reconciliation commissions be considered in the European Union.

Given that injustices against Roma are not a closed chapter of history but rather an enduring oppression, scholars Margareta Matache and Jacqueline Bhabha have suggested a programme for reparatory justice that goes beyond truth-telling and apology to include offender accountability, restitution, reparative compensation, and new and stronger legal protections.

The Roma in Norway have repeatedly pleaded with Norway to take historical responsibility. Safira Josef and others have requested a truth commission, and Solomia Karoli has requested a memorial to the Roma murdered in the Holocaust. Furthermore, in speeches on International Holocaust Day, Josef, Amorina Lund and Palermo Hoff requested an action plan against antigypsyism. Their demands have gone unheard.

The world should now turn their eyes towards Norway. The country was the only one that achieved the goal of being “G*psy free” in the 1930s, and it has now made a complete register of its Roma national minority again.

Will Norway take this opportunity to make serious efforts to break with the past? Or will the authorities simply give an empty promise that this will be the last time? The choice Norway will make will show the world where this country stands on justice and anti-racism.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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• Introduction to the Holocaust
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The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. It took place between 1933 and 1945. In 1933, more than 9 million Jews lived in Europe (1.7% of the total population). By 1945, the Germans and their allies and collaborators had killed nearly two out of every three European Jews. Nazi policies also led to the discrimination, persecution, and murder of millions of others. Explore a timeline of events that occurred before, during, and after the Holocaust.

Before 1933

WWI, its Aftermath, and the Growth of the Nazi Party

Countries across Europe struggled to recover from the devastation caused by World War I after it ended in 1918. This was a time marked by massive social and political change, revolution, and the establishment of new states. In this postwar environment, extreme nationalism, racism, and antisemitism found fertile ground. The Nazi and the Italian Fascist political parties, along with many other similar groups across Europe, emerged from this chaos to become visible threats to new and fragile democracies, including Germany's Weimar Republic.

Highlighted events

May 07, 1919

Treaty of Versailles Presented to German Delegation

November 09, 1923

Beer Hall Putsch

June 12, 1929

Anne Frank Born

View all events before 1933

Prewar Nazi Germany and the Beginnings of the Holocaust

Following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor on January 30, 1933, the Nazis and their allies transformed Germany from a multi-party republic into a one-party dictatorship. The Nazi dictatorship implemented radical racial, political, and social policies. During the first six years of Hitler’s rule, German Jews felt the effects of legislation that transformed them from “citizens” to “outcasts.” In the 1930s, the regime also targeted a variety of alleged “enemies of the state” within German society.

January 30, 1933

Adolf Hitler Appointed Chancellor

March 22, 1933

Establishment of Dachau Camp

November 09, 1938

Kristallnacht

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World War II and the Mass Killing of Jews

On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany unleashed World War II by invading Poland. The war radicalized Nazi policies, leading to brutal occupations of conquered territory. German authorities in occupied Poland established ghettos for Jews. They also introduced harsh measures against non-Jewish Poles. Inside Germany and in occupied Polish territories, German physicians and SS staff used gas chambers to kill institutionalized persons with disabilities. In June 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union, unleashing a “racial war” that led to the mass murder of Soviet Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. In the weeks and months that followed, Nazi Germany’s leaders decided to carry out the systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews.

November 15, 1940

Warsaw Ghetto Sealed

December 08, 1941

Killing Operations Begin at Chelmno

United States Declares War on Japan

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Intensification of Mass Killings

In early 1942, Nazi Germany stood at the height of its power. Germany and its allies controlled most of Europe and even parts of North Africa. The SS had established special killing centers with large gas chambers, expanding the “Final Solution,” the mass murder of European Jews. The perpetrators counted on the cooperation of government agencies, local collaborators, and the support or acquiescence of the general population. Even as the war turned against Germany, the Nazi leadership continued its murderous polices. By May 1945, when the war ended, the Nazis and their allies had killed about 6 million Jews. Millions more people had suffered grievous oppression or death under Nazi tyranny.

January 20, 1942

Wannsee Conference

April 19–May, 1943

June 06, 1944

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End of WWII, Aftermath of the Holocaust, and Genocide after 1945

As Allied troops drove German troops towards defeat, they uncovered Nazi camps and massive evidence of Nazi crimes. The war had uprooted millions who were now “displaced persons” (DPs) waiting for repatriation to their home countries. For tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors, the choices were limited and daunting. Allied occupation forces faced enormous responsibilities: housing and feeding DPs, denazifying and democratizing Germany, and bringing those responsible for Nazi crimes to justice. This section also addresses genocides that have occurred since the Holocaust.

July 04, 1946

Kielce Pogrom

October 01, 1946

Nuremberg Trial Verdicts

September 02, 1998

First Conviction for Genocide

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