The universal lessons of the Shoah and how to act upon them

I write on Yom HaShoah Vehagvurah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, an important historical moment of remembrance and reminder, of witness and of warning, of learning and acting upon the universal lessons of history and the Shoah, when “Never Again is Now” is not an idle slogan, but a commitment to action.

I write also in the aftermath of the oft-ignored, if it is even known at all, 83rd anniversary of the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, convened by the Nazi leadership to address “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question” – the blueprint for the annihilation of European Jewry – which was met by the indifference and inaction of the international bystander community. There is a straight line between Wannsee and Auschwitz; between the indifference of one and the genocide of the other.

I write on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp Auschwitz, the most brutal extermination camp of the twentieth century. Let there be no doubt about it: Jews were murdered at Auschwitz because of antisemitism, but antisemitism itself did not die at Auschwitz. It remains the bloodied canary in the mineshaft of global evil, with the Holocaust as a paradigm for radical evil, as antisemitism is a paradigm of radical hate.

I write on the 565th day of hostages in torturous Hamas captivity – of starvation, intense suffering, and cruel and inhumane treatment – when hostages are deprived of the necessities of life – hostages whose every day in captivity is an ongoing crime against humanity; and where the “immediate” and “unconditional” release of all hostages is a standalone imperative in international law, a humanitarian, moral, legal, and international responsibility of the first order.

I write also amidst an unprecedented global explosion of antisemitism in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th “barbaric acts,” acts that should have “outraged the conscience of mankind”, but which have shockingly been met by the silence of our friends and indifference of our allies; or worse, denial even that these atrocities took place, support for them, justification of them, and even glorification and celebration of them in our democracies.

I write also in the wake of the 80th anniversary of the arrest and disappearance on January 17, 1945 of Raoul Wallenberg, Canada’s first honourary citizen, and an honourary citizen of the US, Australia and Israel. Wallengerg rescued some 100,000 Jews in the last six months of 1944 and the beginning of 1945 alone – more than any other single government or organization. He demonstrated how one person with the compassion to care and courage to act can confront evil, prevail and transform history – an inspirational role model for our time.

Finally, I write at an historical inflection moment of the international drumbeat of evil, as documented in the Reports of our Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights on mass atrocity crimes and the “crime of crimes” – genocide, and which include:

• The aftermath of the third anniversary of Putin’s Russia’s unprovoked and premeditated crime of aggression in Ukraine, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and mass atrocity crimes constitutive of genocide;
• The ongoing mass atrocities targeting the Muslim Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region of China, themselves, also constituting acts of genocide, let alone China’s assault on the rules-based order;
• The forgotten or silent genocide in Sudan – the second such genocide in Sudan in the 21st century – and generating the most catastrophic international humanitarian crisis today;
• The 46th anniversary of Khomeini’s Iranian “revolution” and its seven-fold threat, including massive domestic repression by the Iranian regime of the Iranian people;
• The exponential increase in political prisoners and human rights defenders as we mark the fourth anniversary of the Declaration on Arbitrary Detention in State-to-State Relations, intended to prevent, protect against, and punish these egregious international crimes – including coercive hostage diplomacy – a standing threat to international peace and security;
• The dramatic increase in not only transnational repression, but also assassination, threatening the security and sovereignty of the Community of Democracies.

And so, we must ask ourselves, what is it that we have learned? And more importantly, what must we do amidst the imperative and urgency of action when Never Again is Now.

Lesson One: “Zachor” The danger of forgetting and the imperative of remembrance – le devoir de memoire

The first lesson is the danger of forgetting – the killing of the victims a second time – and the imperative of remembrance. As my mentor, Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust survivor Prof. Elie Wiesel put it: “The Holocaust was a war against the Jews in which not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were targeted victims”; and October 7th, where mass atrocity crimes were genocidal acts targeting the Jews but, here too, not all victims or hostages were Jews, but all Jews were targeted victims.

As we remember the victims of the Shoah, we must understand that the mass murder of six million Jews and millions of non-Jews is not a matter of abstract statistics.

As we say at these moments of remembrance, “Unto each person there is a name, each person is an identity, each person is a universe.” As the Talmud reminds us, “Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe.”

Just as if you kill a single person, it is as if you have killed an entire universe. Thus, the abiding universal imperative and urgency of action: we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other’s destiny.

Lesson Two: The Holocaust as a paradigm for radical evil, and antisemitism as a paradigm for radical hate

The second lesson is the danger of antisemitism – the oldest and most enduring of hatreds – and the most lethal. One point three million people were deported to the death camp Auschwitz, 1.1 million of them were Jews. Let there be no mistake about it: Jews were murdered at Auschwitz because of antisemitism, but antisemitism itself did not die. It remains the bloody canary in the mineshaft of global evil today. And as we have learned only too painfully and too well, while antisemitism begins with Jews, it doesn’t end with Jews.

As Ahmed Shaheed put it in his landmark report to the UN, antisemitism is “toxic to democracies,” a threat not only to Jews, but to our common humanity. In combating antisemitism, we defend our democracy and protect our national security, just as in securing the release of the hostages, we redeem our common humanity.

Lesson Three: The Jew as the enemy of all that is good and the embodiment of all that is evil

The third lesson is that antisemitism is not only the oldest of hatreds but one anchored in a generic, historical, foundational, international, conspiratorial trope – of the Jew, the Jewish people, and Israel as the “Jew Among the Nations” – as the enemy of all that is good and the embodiment of all that is evil. In a word, the demonization and dehumanization of the Jew as prologue and justification for their mass murder.

Lesson Four: The danger of state-sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide – the responsibility to prevent and protect

The fourth enduring lesson is that the genocide of European Jewry – like the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, the 31st anniversary of which we are commemorating, and in which 10,000 Tutsis were murdered every day from April to early July 1994 – succeeded not only because of the machinery of death, but because of hate speech atrocity crimes.

For example, the Jew was seen as the personification of the devil – as the enemy of humankind – and humanity could only be redeemed by the death of the Jew. As the Canadian Supreme Court affirmed, and as echoed by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, “the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – it began with words.”

These, as the court put it, are the catastrophic effects of racism. These, as the court put it, are the chilling facts of history. Indeed, in another important principle and precedent, the Supreme Court held that the very incitement to genocide constitutes the crime in and of itself, whether or not acts of genocide follow.

As well, in a word, the Hamas charter of 1988 is, itself, a standing incitement to genocide, which underpinned the mass atrocities of October 7th, and which continues to find expression in Hamas’ undertaking to commit October 7th “again and again and again – until Israel’s annihilation.”

Lesson Five: The danger of Holocaust denial and distortion, trivialization and inversion – the responsibility to unmask the bearers of false witness

The fifth enduring lesson concerns the Holocaust denial and distortion movement – the cutting edge of antisemitism, old and new – which is not just an assault on Jewish memory and human dignity in its accusation that the Holocaust is a hoax. Rather, it constitutes an international criminal conspiracy to cover up or distort the worst crimes in history.

It is our responsibility to unmask the bearers of false witness, to expose the criminality of the deniers as we protect the dignity of their victims.

Lesson Six: The danger of silence in the face of evil – the responsibility to protest against injustice

The sixth lesson is the danger of complicity by way of silence or inaction. As Elie Wiesel put it in his famed 1986 Nobel Prize address: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim; silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented… wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

He added: “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest against injustice.”

It is also a lesson that went unheeded in the aftermath of the barbaric acts of October 7, where the response was not outrage but silence and inaction, involving the erosion of allyship and friendship.

Lesson Seven: The responsibility to pay tribute to the rescuers

The Righteous Among the Nations personified by Swedish diplomat and non-Jew Raoul Wallenberg – “Hero of the Holocaust” – whom the United Nations called “the greatest humanitarian of the 20th century” – metaphor and message for the international bystander community of our time.

Lesson Eight: The dangers of indifference and inaction in the face of mass atrocity and genocide – the responsibility to act

The eighth painful and poignant lesson is that Holocaust crimes and genocides, such as that of the Tutsis in Rwanda, resulted not only from state-sanctioned incitement to hatred and genocide, but from crimes of indifference and conspiracies of silence.

What makes the Holocaust and the genocide of the Tutsis so unspeakable is not only the horror of the crimes, but that these crimes were preventable. No one can say that we did not know. We knew, but we did not act.

Moreover, today we know, but have yet to combat the mass atrocities targeting the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region of China; the Ukrainians; the Rohingya; or the genocide in Sudan, the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of our time.

Let there be no mistake about it: indifference and inaction always mean coming down on the side of the aggressor, never the victim. In the face of evil, indifference is acquiescence to, if not complicity with, evil itself.

Lesson Nine: The dangers of the culture of impunity – the responsibility to bring war criminals to justice

The ninth lesson calls on us to combat mass atrocity and the culture of impunity that underpins it.

If the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century are the age of mass atrocity, they are also the age of mass impunity. Just as there must be no sanctuary for hate, no refuge for bigotry, there must be no base or sanctuary for these genocidaires – these enemies of humankind. Let there be no mistake about it – indulging impunity only incentivizes mass atrocity crimes.

Lesson Ten: La Trahison des Clercs – the betrayal of the elites

The tenth lesson is that the Holocaust was made possible not only because of the “bureaucratization of genocide,” as Robert Lifton put it – and as the Wannsee Conference and the Nazi desk murderer Adolf Eichmann personified – but where Nuremburg crimes were the crimes of Nuremberg elites: doctors and scientists, judges and lawyers, church leaders and teachers, educators and architects. Our responsibility, therefore, is always to speak truth to power and to hold power accountable to truth.

Lesson Eleven: Antisemitism is toxic to democracies

In the 1930s and yet again today, antisemitism is not only toxic to our democracies, but a threat to our safety and security – an assault on our common humanity. Jews cannot and should not combat it alone. What is required is a whole of government – whole of society – commitment to action; where action is not performative tweets or virtue signaling, which is all too common amongst the leadership of democracies today, but actionable deliverables, in actionable timeframes.

Lesson Twelve: The historical inflection moment – the “Axis of Evil” and the backsliding of democracies

The international drumbeat of evil referenced earlier underpins this emerging and compelling historical inflection moment: the concerted, intensifying and collaborative axis of evil on the one hand – and the backsliding of democracies on the other – including also the increasing divisiveness and polarization within democracies and between democracies; where Trump’s United States is no longer the lynchpin of the rules-based international order and the transatlantic alliance, but where we are witnesses a growing chaotic international disorder, incentivized by the concerted axis of aggression of Russia, China and Iran.

Lesson Thirteen: Defending political prisoners – defending democracy and human rights

The present historical inflection moment is also witnessing an exponential increase in political prisoners and the related arbitrary detention of journalists, dissidents, human rights defenders and leaders of diaspora communities who are increasingly the targets of transnational repression by the Axis of Authoritarians. As such, political prisoners are a looking glass not only into the erosion of the rules-based order and the Authoritarian Axis of Evil, but have emerged as the torch-bearers for the protection of democracy, human rights and the cause of freedom.

Accordingly, this must be our task: to speak on behalf of those who cannot be heard, to bear witness on behalf of those who cannot testify, to act on behalf of those who are not only putting their livelihood but their lives on the line in defense and protection of our common cause. They are a standing source of inspiration, demonstrating that even in the face of tyranny, the voices of truth and justice will not be silenced.

Similarly, the suffering captive hostages are not only a looking glass into the mass atrocities of October 7th – and a continuing crime against humanity – but a reminder that their redemption is a Jewish and Israeli imperative of the first order, let alone an international one.

Lesson Fourteen: The assault on the vulnerable and powerless – the responsibility to give voice to the voiceless

The fourteenth lesson concerns the vulnerability of the powerless and the powerlessness of the vulnerable, as dramatized at Auschwitz by the remnants of shoes and suitcases, crutches and hair of the murdered. Indeed, it is revealing, as Prof. Henry Friedlander points out in his work “The Origins of Nazi Genocide,” among the first groups targeted for killing were the Jewish disabled. It is our responsibility to give voice to the voiceless and to empower the powerless, be they the disabled, poor, elderly, women victimized by violence, or vulnerable children – the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. The test of a just society is how it treats its most vulnerable.

Lesson Fifteen: Israel as the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people – an antidote to Jewish powerlessness

Nazism succeeded not only because of the state-sanctioned hate and crimes of indifference, not only because of “la trahison des clercs” and eliminationist antisemitism, but because of the powerlessness of the Jew, and hence – the vulnerability of the Jew.

Simply put, it is not the case, as we are sometimes told, that if there had not been a Holocaust, there would not be a state of Israel. It is the other way around – that if there had been an Israel, there might well not have been a Holocaust, or the horrors of Jewish history. As Nobel Laureate Professor Elie Wiesel put it:

At least there would have been a place for refuge. At the Evian conference in 1938 and beyond, Europe was divided into two places – those where the Jews could not leave – or even live – and those where they could not enter.

At least there would have been universes that could have been saved, an antidote to the radical evil of the Shoah.

At least there would have been an old-new state, an “ancient homeland for an ancient people,” for the ingathering of the exiles.

May I add, at least there would have been a living expression of “zachor” – remembrance – as an antidote to the oldest and most enduring and most toxic of hatreds – of antisemitism.

At least there would have been a state founded – however imperfectly it may act – on “tzedek, tzedek tirdof” – “justice, justice, shall you pursue” – which must inspire and underpin our work together in common cause.

Conclusion:

May I say a closing word to the survivors, and what I have learned from you. For you have endured the worst of inhumanity, but somehow found in the resources of your own humanity the will to go on, the resilience to build families and relationships, and to make enduring contributions to every community and country you inhabit. We are all your beneficiaries and we will continue to be inspired by your teachings and your example.

And so may this Yom Ha’Shoah Vehagvurah – this National Holocaust Remembrance Day – be not only an act of remembrance, which it is, but may it also be an ongoing remembrance and commitment to act on behalf of our common humanity.