Letters/Discussion Forums
It’s wrong to equate all Europeans with the Nazis
In last week’s Jewish Report, Nathan Cheiman asks in his letter under the headline “Seventy years after [the] Shoah, has Europe really changed?” the following: “One of the questions asked by some Jews today, is that having regard to the Holocaust some 70 years ago, why did Jews elect to stay (or go back) to Europe?”
Avner Eliyahu Romm
My response is that those who caused the Holocaust were the Nazis and their collaborators, who were a tiny minority of the inhabitants of Europe. And by the way, one should remember that millions, if not tens of millions, of gentiles were also butchered by the Nazis. In short, most Europeans tried to resist Nazi rule and Nazi occupation.
To say that “the world was silent” is more accurate regarding the Holodomor (Ukrainian Holocaust) of 1932 – 1933 for example, than it is regarding the Second World War. After the war, many Nazi leaders were prosecuted and punished, unlike those responsible for the Holodomor and those responsible for the Katin massacres.
After the Second World War, the different Communist regimes imprisoned people in terrible concentration camps. A Holocaust survivor, who later spent some time in Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s camps in Yugoslavia, recalls how her father greeted her when she was finally released: He was shocked, realising that she had suffered terribly, and said: “What did they do to you? You look like one who just came from Auschwitz.”
So, things should be put into perspective; not all Europeans are at all similar to the Nazis.
Har Nof, Jerusalem
nat cheiman
March 2, 2016 at 11:12 am
‘You are quite correct. Not all Europeans are similar to Nazi’s’