Co-authored by Chava Gal-Or and Joseph Say
The Truth of Words
The story of humanity is a complicated tale. It’s highly dependent upon the perspectives of those that write the story, and the words they choose to use. Stories of triumph and tragedy are intertwined and dependent on who gets to pen the tale, because of how widespread our populations are, and how easy it is for the victors of war to squash the stories of those that have lost.
Our modern world is no longer dependent on the tales spun by colonizing victors and the historians that pen their tales best on surviving stories. We can know, in an instant, what is happening in the further reaches of our “Pale Blue Dot”. This gives us the ability to truly look back at the recent past and present to give a more holistic story for the generations to come.
Some of these stories that we must tell are so utterly tragic, full of the worst possible examples of human tragedy that the words used to describe them have become almost forbidden in their reuse. The story of the Holocaust is, or should be, well known. While most of us focus on the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, the number is even more staggering than that. The Nazis murdered eleven million people. As amateur historians, we remember the six million innocent Jews who were subjugated to the endless humiliation, torment, and death in the worst possible of ways. The phrase “Never Again” was uttered at the end of World War II, once the scope and impact of Hitler’s “Final Solution” was finally fully revealed.
The tragedy of the Holocaust was beyond comprehension. Never Forget that the story of Nazi concentration camps included the internment of Allied troops, Romani, Slavs, the disabled, and the LGBTQ populations of occupied territories. Each population experienced humiliation, slave labor in fields and factories, starvation, and disease. Death was not limited to the Nazi gas chambers. Many were shot down where they lived, so the Nazis would not have to transport them.
Concentration camps were not invented by the Nazis; the concept was born out of wars in Cuba, utilized in Africa, and perfected in the fires of WWII. The horror and scope of what happened in Nazi Europe has overshadowed the past uses of these camps, but they existed long before Hitler saw his first morning, and they have been used long after. In the gulags of Stalinist USSR, the killing fields of Cambodia, or the hellish death camps of Rwanda.
We are now seeing the same thing happen in the US, born out of the demonization of Latin American migrants seeking asylum in the US. A self proclaimed nationalist, Donald Trump, has utilized our immigration system to imprison and torment migrants. Many children have been separated from their families, some lost, some have died in custody, and others continue to endure inhumane treatment under the pretense of “security”.
This is a story that is well known, taken from a playbook that has existed for over a century, in order to justify ignorant hatred and blind nationalism. Those that are being tormented are exploited in order to distract our population from the greed and corruption that has taken over our nation.
The question remains. Do we dare to call these camps what they are — concentration camps — or do we argue among ourselves in order to ignore the echoes of our past?
This question comes at an important time. Locally we have seen candidates, who seek to represent communities directly impacted by the camps, reach out to warn others out of using the term “concentration camps”. While it’s important to understand the sensitivity regarding the use of terms related to the Holocaust in Europe, would we also be doing a disservice to all of the other victims of senseless hate throughout history, and throughout the world, by not explicitly calling these camps what they really are?
The backlash on the use of the term has stirred debate within the Jewish community. There has been push back, with “Never Again Means Now” actions being set across the nation. Sophie Ellman-Golan has stated that the situation inside the camps “makes me angry and horrified, and it should make every single person — Jewish and non-Jewish — angry and horrified. That’s truly the only acceptable reaction to seeing that,” she says. “There is a very clear moral line here, and it’s past time for people to take a side.”
If we are to tell this story, we must not lack the moral courage to use the words necessary to adequately explain the injustice that is now happening.
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