In an essay published last week in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Dutch writer Arnon Grünberg explains that for centuries Jesus represented the moral compass of the West. After the Second World War and with secularization, we wanted to be the exact opposite of Hitler. “An aura of the sacred was conferred on the victim, which allowed anyone who perceived themselves as a victim to claim privileges," Grünberg writes. “The term ‘woke’ fits perfectly with the era of Hitler. Injustice must be corrected or compensated. But if the condition of being a victim takes on sacred dimensions, it will end up becoming generalized, until everyone becomes a victim." And the true victims of the Shoah will end up disappearing.
Eva Geller -ninety years old, a Shoah survivor from Romania-died one year after being gravely wounded in the Bondi Beach attack. She was the fifteenth victim of the terrorists who opened fire on the crowd gathered to celebrate Hanukkah on the beach in Sydney. Two other survivors, the Ukrainian Alex Kleytman and the Hungarian Marika Pogany, had lost their lives in the massacre in Australia. A fifth of the Bondi victims were therefore Shoah survivors.
Throughout the world, after eighty years lived in substantial peace, the survivors have become victims of a modern antisemitic violence that has only intensified since October 7. “Globalize the Intifada" often translates into “globalize the Shoah."
In Petah Tikva, Iranian missiles assassinated the survivor Yvette Shmilovich. The same fate befell two other veterans of the Nazi extermination camps, Bella Ashkenazi and Olga Weissberg. Gina Semiatichova, a survivor of the Terezin lager (concentration camp), lived in the kibbutz of Kisufim. Hamas terrorists dragged her from the shelter into the living room, where they killed her with a bullet to the head during “Black Saturday." Moshe Ridler’s life also ended more or less as it had begun. Ridler, 91 years old, who as a boy escaped from a Nazi concentration camp where his mother and sister died of typhus, was murdered in the kibbutz of Holit.
Yaffa Adar, a survivor, became one of the symbolic images of October 7, when she was kidnapped and dragged to Gaza on a golf cart during the massacre carried out by Hamas. Another Shoah survivor, Barbara Steinmetz, was seriously injured in the attack by Mohamed Sabry Soliman: he was shouting “Free Palestine" as he began throwing Molotov cocktails at the march in Boulder, Colorado in support of the Israeli hostages. Mireille Knoll, 85 years old, who escaped the Vel d’Hiv roundup-the winter velodrome in Paris-was murdered in her apartment in Paris.
In the circuits of Western public opinion there is not the scandal one would expect, as if contemporary antisemitic violence were a secondary detail, a side effect, or even a legitimate response to Israel.
To fight evil, Grünberg concludes, one is forced to continually evoke it, and “the Nazi uniform is almost reassuring: they are the bad guys, we are the good guys, regardless of what we do." Regardless of the fact that, in the name of antizionism, even the survivors of the Shoah are being killed. That is the real scandal.