Auschwitz was built on lies. They still haunt Israel and our world today.

USA Today

27-01-2025

Elisha Wiesel
Opinion contributor
Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago Monday. Its lies still imprison us today.
It was with lies about work abroad that the Nazis persuaded the Jews of Europe to get on the trains, and it was with lies about showers that Jews were greeted when they got off.
There are the lies the world told itself as these atrocities unfolded. That they were doing all they could − even as the railroad tracks to Auschwitz were not bombed; as the St. Louis ship, full of Jewish refugees, was turned back from Florida to Europe; as Britain froze European Jewish immigration to the British Mandate for Palestine, preventing the escape of hundreds of thousands who could have been saved.
And finally there are the lies told in the following decades because they were convenient. 'They were victims,' President Ronald Reagan said in 1985 of the Wehrmacht soldiers buried at Bitburg cemetery, where he intended to visit, 'just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.'
Elie Wiesel confronted Reagan on national TV
It was too late to stop this last lie, but my father, Elie Wiesel, was determined to try. His response made headlines around the world.
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'The issue here is not politics,' he told Reagan on national TV, 'but good and evil. And we must never confuse them, for I have seen the SS at work, and I have seen their victims.'
My father was unsuccessful. Reagan paid his respects at Bitburg anyway, and the line between the perpetrators of evil and their victims continued to blur.
Today, only 40% of people under 35 recognize the Holocaust as historically accurate. That number is even worse in the Middle East, where only 16% of Israel's neighbors accept the facts.
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But the problem is worse than ignorance. Many in the younger generation, reliving Reagan's moral confusion, see today's Hamas fighters as victims just as surely as the Israelis they kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023. To them, Hamas is the underdog hero.
My father spoke out against indifference. What we now face is something else. Nobody is indifferent; everyone has an opinion on the Israel-Hamas conflict. Is it mass gullibility? Good intentions gone wrong? Surely many Christians who slaughtered Jews in the Middle Ages believed that they were protecting their families, that the Jews had in fact poisoned the wells. Had they not seen the dead body of a child, produced as the blood libel's evidence?
It is hard to look evil in the face. To see the jihadists in Gaza fire rifles in the air as 90 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for only three Israeli women.
One of the terrorists set to be released by Israel is Abu Warda, who was responsible for killing 45 civilians in the 1996 bus bombings in Jerusalem. Does he occupy the same moral universe as these women?
Hamas wants to eradicate Israel
It is easier to believe that this militant mob wants their own state than to hear, really hear, what they shout: that their mission, as the Hamas charter states, is the eradication of Israel. Since this ceasefire, Hamas has retaken the Gazan streets − and we'll watch them wreak further destruction on the people of Gaza.
My father, in his Bitburg speech, quoted the great New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal. He had visited Poland and wrote a piece in 1990 called 'Forgive them not, for they knew what they did.'
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The Christian desire to forgive and move on is a powerful one in the American psyche, especially when the terror being forgiven was visited on others. But Americans must not forgive Hamas. We must confront evil when and where we see it. There is no time to lose.
Good intentions are not enough.
My grandfather Shlomo Wiesel, who perished at Buchenwald a week after the liberation of Auschwitz, was also the son of an Eliezer. My great-grandfather was killed as a medic in World War I, drafted into service for the Kaiser. And now I see my father's rebuke of Reagan drafted into service by those who hate Israel, who shout that to fight indifference is to blindly support the eradication of a democratic state.
It is terrifying to confront a mob, especially when it contains our own − our friends, coworkers, even our children, swept up in that deep moral confusion laying waste to college campuses. But on this anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we must ask ourselves these questions:
Will we continue explaining away the images of non-uniformed Palestinian civilians celebrating − and actively aiding Hamas − in the Oct. 7 attacks, much as a previous generation sought to explain away the SS, the Wehrmacht and the civilians who kept them in power?
Will we continue confusing the concepts of perpetrator and victim, of terror and a just war, losing the distinction between Hamas, who hide behind human shields, and the Israel Defense Forces, who do more than any army ever has to avoid loss of life while bombing the tunnels built to facilitate the next Holocaust?
Will we continue giving moral credibility to voices who say that the tiny nation of Israel is the villain for refusing to die?
To differentiate good from evil, one must begin by choosing between truth and lies.
Forty years ago, President Reagan had not learned this lesson. Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz − have we?
Elisha Wiesel is the son of Marion Wiesel and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel.