Are We Capable of Learning From the Murders of the Past? | Opinion

It snowed at Bergen-Belsen on Dec. 8, two months after Hamas' carnage on the Israel-Gaza border changed the world.

It snowed as we walked past the mass-graves of the infamous Nazi concentration camp where thousands upon thousands of victims of Hitler's Third Reich, the vast majority of them Jews, lie buried anonymously.

It snowed as I was standing with Dunja Mijatovic, the commissioner for human rights of the Council of Europe, beside the Jewish monument that has watched over these mass-graves ever since it was inaugurated by my father, Josef Rosensaft, the chairman of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone of Germany, on April 15, 1946, the first anniversary of the camp's liberation by British troops.

We had come to the memorial site of Bergen-Belsen in north-central Germany to take part in a panel discussion about surging antisemitism in Germany and across the globe since Oct. 7.

But before discussing the here and now, we wanted to anchor ourselves in the past that Belsen epitomizes. We wanted to walk with the ghosts who never leave this place, to feel their presence, perhaps even hear their whispers, pretend that the snow falling on our faces was their tears.

It snowed at Belsen as we read the words defiantly carved into the monument. "Earth conceal not the blood shed on thee" they scream in a deafening silence that evokes Edvar Munch's painting.

It snowed at Belsen as we walked shivering along the manicured paths of what is the largest Jewish cemetery in Western Europe, with our warm coats, heavy shoes, and scarves to protect us. Here, tens of thousands of inmates had to endure the harsh winter of 1944-1945 wearing nothing but the paper thin camp uniforms that offered no protection from the rain, the sleet, the snow, a bitter cold made even harsher by the vicious cruelty that had brought them here.

It snowed at Belsen as I allowed myself to be transported back in time to 79 years earlier. December 1944. By then, my mother, a 32-year-old Jewish dentist from Poland, was already at Belsen after more than 14 months at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her parents, her husband, her five-and-a-half-year-old son, her sister all had been suffocated by Zyklon-B gas before their lifeless bodies were consumed in crematory flames. By rights, my mother should have given up on the world, on humankind. Instead, she had saved the lives at Birkenau by performing rudimentary surgeries in the camp infirmary and enabling women inmates to avoid selections for the gas chambers. And over the course of the following four months, she and a group of women inmates kept 149 Jewish children alive at Belsen until the camp's liberation.

It snowed at Belsen as I thought of the SS officers and guards who delighted in the suffering of the Jews they wanted to annihilate in order to make Germany, in order to make all of Europe judenfrei—that is, free of Jews. And I was jarringly reminded of Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists (no, they are decidedly not militants or freedom fighters) delighted in murdering and raping Jews, inflicting the maximum pain and anguish possible, as part of their genocidal mission to make the entire biblical land of Israel, including the State of Israel, judenfrei.

It snowed at Belsen as images of Jewish women and girls who were abused, brutalized, and, yes, raped by German soldiers, SS men, and Nazi collaborators metamorphed in my mind into the Israeli Jewish women and girls whom Hamas predators abused, brutalized and raped on and since Oct. 7.

It snowed at Belsen as I thought of my father and his colleagues who insisted on seizing control of their destinies as soon as the Nazi yoke was lifted from them by creating a vibrant Jewish community in the nearby Displaced Persons camp, complete with schools, a rabbinate, a newspaper, sports clubs, Zionist political parties, and two theater companies. They were the antitheses of the Nazis then and of Hamas today: they sought to build, not to destroy, to create hope, not desolation.

It snowed as we headed toward the Belsen museum where we would redirect our focus on the antisemitism that targets Jews in 2023 just as it had in the 1930s and 1940s. And as we walked past the mass-graves in the cold, I thought of Benny Gantz, the former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and former defense minister, now a member of the Israeli war cabinet whose mother was liberated here and who understands the meaning of Belsen. He had come here himself, stood next to the Jewish monument, absorbed its words.

Gantz understands that the State of Israel is a link in Jewish history, as is Belsen. So does Israeli President Isaac Herzog whose father, Chaim Herzog—who would also serve as president of Israel—encountered the survivors of Belsen in 1945 as an officer in the British liberating army. Chaim Herzog taught his son, who came to Belsen with German President Franz-Walter Steinmeier last year, that the bequest of the survivors of Belsen was "the imperative of life."

Both Herzog and Gantz know that Belsen represents Jewish survival and perseverance, not victimhood, that Belsen, the State of Israel, and the Jewish people are interrelated, symbiotically intertwined.

Standing in the snow at Belsen, I also thought of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli ultranationalists who never understood—or perhaps never wanted to acknowledge—the core lessons of Belsen, that human rights and human dignity need to be nurtured and protected, that all human beings are sacred, and that the core Palestinian national aspiration, the desire to live freely in a state of their own, deserves the same respect as these same sentiments proclaimed in Israel's national anthem, Hatikva.

A palpable difference between Netanyahu and Herzog, one of many, is that Netanyahu does not care about, even despises, the Palestinians while Herzog told a joint session of Congress less than three months before Oct. 7 that "my deep yearning . . . is for Israel to one day make peace with our Palestinian neighbors." Even though Herzog believes that now, with his nation "in trauma," is not the time to speak of a two-state solution, he understands that eventually Israel will have to "get back to the idea of dividing the land, of negotiating peace or talking to the Palestinians." Netanyahu, in contrast, rejects out of hand the very notion of Palestinian statehood in any form, even at the cost of American support.

The Prophet Isaiah's words, "Earth conceal not the blood shed on thee" do not only refer to the dead buried in the Belsen mass-graves. The phrase also commands the commemoration and sanctification of all innocent blood shed in the name of hatred, Jewish blood, Muslim blood, Christian blood, Buddhist blood, Israeli Jewish blood shed by Hamas on Oct. 7, Bosnian Muslim blood shed by Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, Armenian blood shed by Ottoman Turks, Tutsi blood shed by Hutus in Rwanda, Cambodian blood shed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, Ukrainian blood shed by Russian troops at Bucha, Palestinian blood shed by extremist Israeli Jewish settlers on the West Bank. And these words demand that we and future generations hold accountable all who shed or call for the shedding of innocent blood.

Walking in the snow at Belsen alongside Dunja Mijatovic reminded me that while Belsen was the result of unbridled hatred, it can and must also be the antidote to unbridled hatred. The dead buried in the Belsen mass-graves command us not to allow what happened to them, what was done to them, to happen, to be done to anyone else. It is the most ecumenical of all commands.

Walking in the snow at Belsen seemed a universe away from Oct. 7 and the devastation of that watershed day. And yet being at Belsen, in the snow, in the cold, reminded me why I was born three years after its liberation, less than a mile from its Jewish monument, in the Displaced Persons camp where my parents and thousands of other Jewish survivors of the Holocaust not just returned to life but dedicated themselves to life.

Walking at Belsen in the snow, standing at Belsen in the cold, I instinctively knew that while Oct. 7 cannot be analogized or compared to the Holocaust, the ultimate evil perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7 can only be truly grasped through the prisms of Belsen and Auschwitz, of Srebrenica, Kigali, and the killing fields of Cambodia.

Walking in the snow at Belsen, I wished that all those university and college presidents and professors who do not consider hatred toward Jews to be inherently repugnant could be brought here to walk with us in the snow, in the cold, so that they might realize, perhaps even internalize, that the Nazis' antisemitic dream is identical to Hamas' antisemitic dream, that Hamas savages are no more militants or freedom fighters than the SS or ISIS or Al Qaeda, and that Hamas is not and has never been a liberation movement.

You see, it's not that the genocide of Jews is in any way worse, in any way more heinous than the genocides or slaughters of other peoples. They are all equally abhorrent. The outrage brought to the fore since Oct. 7 is that there are people, educated people, presumably fundamentally decent people, for whom the hatred of Jews that can lead—that has led—to the genocide of Jews is somehow less loathsome than the hatred of other peoples and groups.

I do not believe that the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, or M.I.T., or of any other reputable American college or university for that matter, would have tolerated calls for any sort of violence, let alone genocide, against African Americans, or Muslims, or Asian Americans, or Latino immigrants, or women, or the LGBTQ community on their campuses even for a second. I do not believe that they would have hesitated to categorically repudiate any glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, even for a second.

Walking at Belsen in the snow, standing at Belsen in the cold, it became clear to me why I was put on this earth in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It is to do everything in my power to confront evil, and antisemitism is evil just as all hatreds and bigotries are evil. And it is to make sure that the likes of Harvard President Claudine Gay and now former Penn President Elizabeth Magill will not ever again try to intellectualize or rationalize not just antisemitism and calls for the "genocide of Jews" but all forms of hatred, xenophobia, and bigotry and all calls for genocide against any group or people.

That is the imperative of "Earth Conceal not the blood shed on thee." That is the imperative of Belsen.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft teaches about the law of genocide at the law schools of Cornell and Columbia Universities. He is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress and the author of Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen (Kelsay Books, 2021).

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.