As the world becomes a strange, hostile place, I have begun to look differently at the lives of the relatives lost in the Holocaust. I’m not abandoning the family ghosts who have stalked me for the dozen-odd years since I started unearthing them, but my approach to them has become more urgent. Six months after the Hamas massacre of 10/7, I’m trying to fathom what my ancestors might have to teach me about the rise in antisemitism, to understand how they coped – or didn’t – with the escalation of hatred directed towards them.
It wasn’t a natural shift of perspective.
My first reaction to the horrific events of last October was to think, “I’m glad my Holocaust survivor parents aren’t alive to see this.” It took me a minute to realize that I am, and that a key reason to explore the past is to prevent its recurrence. I began wondering whether my relatives’ experiences might be instructive, what the similarities and differences in our circumstances were.
What Happened Then
The lead-in to the Final Solution in Europe was frog-in-boiling-water slow – so much so that, for many, the need to escape came too late.
My mother, Rita Rosenbaum, was able to flee Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1939, but had to leave her parents behind; the SS having drained their bank accounts, Ernestine and Herman Rosenbaum had just enough money to send their only daughter abroad, hoping she could scrape together sufficient funds to allow them to follow. Rita managed to get some money together, but Europe’s borders closed before she could send it. The Nazis’ meticulous transport records reveal that my grandparents were deported to Riga in Latvia, either to be shot in a forest as soon as they got off the transport train, shot in the purpose-built Riga ghetto, or sent off to die in the city’s Kaiserwald concentration camp.
My father, Paul Jarolim, was also from Vienna and the only one in his family who managed to reach the U.S., where he met my mother in Brooklyn. One of his brothers, Fritz, survived by joining the French Foreign Legion; the other, Richard, escaped to Belgium with my father but got sent back to Austria and met his death in Auschwitz. My grandmother Mathilde and Aunt Edith were left behind; Mathilde died in Vienna in 1941, spared the fate of her daughter, who was deported less than eight months later to the Łódź ghetto. Edith either died of starvation there or was sent to Chelmno, which earned the dubious distinction of being the first stationary facility where poison gas was used for the mass murder of Jews.
Several great uncles and aunts survived by fleeing Austria to Shanghai, Australia, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Curacao, England, the U.S., and British-mandated Palestine.
One group of cousins hid in an attic on the outskirts of Amsterdam.
In brief: a lot of fleeing, mostly successful, a smidgen of hiding, one enlistment in foreign military service, and a great deal of death for those unable to manage any of the aforementioned.
What Is Happening Now
How does this compare to what’s happening today?
Unlike Hitler’s war against the Jews, which was mostly stealthy or denied and took years to be fully realized, the Hamas massacre was a shocking quick strike shared with millions online in real time. Instead of public awareness leading to the sympathy and support that many Jews expected, the GoPro’d details were downplayed and distorted, the incursion celebrated, even as bloodied hostages were being dragged off to Gaza.
Another key difference: the site of the murders was the soil of the world’s only Jewish nation.
Even before the Israeli military response, antisemitism went through the roof – up 400% in the U.S. by December, according to the ADL. Suddenly, everyone was a Middle East historian. Holocaust inversion, calling Israelis Nazis and turning the charge of genocide against the Jews, became newly in vogue.
The responses of diaspora Jews to the post-10/7 onslaught of hate, dramatically divided by generation, ranged on an emotional scale from Denial and Undercurrent of Concern to Be Afraid and Be Very Afraid. A sampling of Jews on the social media platforms that I mostly frequent these days – private Jewish Facebook groups, sympathetic Instagram accounts, X with one eye closed, and never, ever Tik Tok – reacted with solutions similar to those of my family when faced with the onset of Nazism.
Several – except, ironically, those who live in Israel — said that they felt unsafe in their home countries and were looking to relocate.
Some, bemoaning a general lack of allyship from their peers, passed around an online essay that suggested asking friends, “Would you hide me?”
Still others, vowing to go down fighting, bought firearms and started taking shooting lessons.
My Personal Take
Me? I don’t feel physically unsafe. Yes, synagogues and Jewish shops are being vandalized at an increasingly high rate in the US, and keffiyah-heavy protests, on campuses, in the streets, and at city council meetings, feel threatening, but I don’t believe there will be mass roundups and death camps in America. The two major political parties could never agree on a rationale for the arrests or on the scope and administration of the punishment. Should Jews be carted off and corralled because we are white oppressor colonialists or because we are racially impure and working with other inferior races to replace the rightful (whiteful?) Americans? Would the party opposed to the death penalty make an exception for the Jews, perhaps outsourcing the killing to Mexico, as the Germans did to Poland?
Maybe, like Hamas, members of the drug cartels would be considered revolutionaries and therefore ideal for executing Jews, er, Zionists.
Then again, my circumstances are different from those of many who are rightly concerned about their families. My parents are long gone and, after an early marriage and divorce, I have lived single and childless by choice. I am responsible only for myself. I have far more of my life behind me than I do ahead of me and I am set in my ways.
In any case, should worse come to worst, neither hiding, shooting, nor fleeing would work.
I grew up in New York City but now live in Tucson, Arizona. Heat rises, so few houses here are built with attics. That takes care of the hiding option, assuming one would not be able to safely fly or drive to attic-friendly cities to seek sanctuary.
Guns are easy enough to procure in Arizona, but I am a klutz and would be more likely to shoot myself in the foot than injure anyone who was coming to get me.
As for fleeing, where would I go?
I now have dual citizenship with Austria, but don’t imagine I would feel comfortable in the country that stripped citizenship from my family members and sent them off to be murdered. I appreciate the implicit apology that offering dual citizenship conferred and the explicit apology of Vienna’s new Holocaust memorial. Still, too little too late. Most important: I don’t speak German, though I’ve tried many times to learn. My parents’ aversion therapy to their native tongue seems to have had a permanent negative impact on my German acquisition skills.
The rest of the EU-member countries, where my Austrian citizenship also allows me to settle, are no prize either, antisemitism-wise. My French could be serviceable if I worked at it – but hello, Charlie Hebdo.
Intifada, intischmada. It’s Jew hatred that has been globalized.
Israel is tempting, and my rusty Hebrew could be resurrected but, as I’ve said, I’m set in my ways. I’ll stick to my Arizona desert, the Sonoran rather than the Negev, and show my support for Israel in other ways.
What I Have—or Haven’t—Learned
So what has my family history taught me about recent events? Nothing I didn’t already know, or would have known if I’d believed what my parents had to say over the years about the pervasiveness and intransigence of antisemitism. I now understand, viscerally, that those who want to justify their ingrained views about the Jewish people don’t care who you voted for, how observant you are, how you feel about Israel, how much you advocate for Palestinian children – or, on the other end of the political spectrum, how poor you are and how little control you actually have of the media. The intense focus on the actions of the world’s only Jewish state is just the latest excuse to indulge in an ancient hatred.
No matter how the Middle East conflict plays out, I harbor no illusions about returning to a “before” life, one where I trust that members of my political and professional cohort have my back. On the surface, and for large stretches of time, I imagine life will go on as it did before. Underneath, I will never regain my former sense of emotional safety.
What can I do differently from what my ancestors did? Probably not a damn thing. My parents and other forebears did their best under the circumstances to survive and thrive and so will I.
In the end, I believe that I have asked the wrong question. It is not the Jews that need to learn from the past, but the world. And it has failed miserably.
