4 | JUNE 9 • 2022 

PURELY COMMENTARY

essay

‘Never Again’ For Jews
O

ne Sunday morning 
when I was about 9 
years old, my Hebrew 
school class was ushered into 
a large room to watch a film 
about the Holocaust. While I 
don’t remem-
ber much of it, 
one sequence 
was irrevocably 
burned onto 
my brain. At 
the liberation of 
Bergen-Belsen, 
with the camp 
littered with emaciated bod-
ies and a few walking dead, a 
British soldier sat on a bulldozer 
shoving naked dead Jews into a 
mass grave.
I thought about this for a 
considerable time. But rather 
than rage at the Nazis, my anger 
was at the Jews. Why hadn’t the 
Jews fought back? Why had so 
many just gone like sheep to the 
slaughter? Why didn’t anyone 
do anything to stop this?
As time went on, I learned 
more about these events and 
that some Jews did fight back — 
at Treblinka, at Sobibor and in 
the Warsaw Ghetto. From rela-
tives and others, I heard stories 
of survival. 

But most of all, I heard end-
less platitudes. “Never again!” 
was the popular slogan. But 
what did it mean? Never again 
would there be genocides in 
general, or just of Jews? Did 
the world really learn anything, 
or was it just appropriate to 
denounce the Holocaust in the 
way that people perfunctorily 
reply “fine” to “how are you 
doing?” Over time, I became 
numb to all of this. I found that 
I was no longer even surprised 
that the Holocaust occurred. I 
was just amazed at the mecha-

nization of its implementation.
Teaching the Holocaust 
became de rigeur in public 
schools in the United States and 
the West, ignored in the Muslim 
world, and irrelevant in Africa 
and Asia. The world began to 
refer to just about any mass 
killing or population transfer as 
genocide. Were ethnically based 
mass killings even preventable?
Each coming decade since 
the end of World War II 
brought with it more wars, mass 
killings and the like. While 
some eventually were stopped 
by international interventions, 
at the end of the day, they hap-
pened. Rodney King asked, 
“Can’t we all just get along?” 
And I understood that the 
answer, in the long run, was no. 
 I realized this was a pessimis-
tic view of humanity, but it was 
historically realistic. When the 
going gets tough, when chaos 
ensues, people fall back to their 
respective corners. Individuality 
succumbs to group dynamics. 
Each group looks out for its 
own. Woe to those who have no 
group to depend on.
Even though some Jews 
fought back against the 
Germans, they were disorga-
nized and unprepared. I knew 
that the wartime Allies were 
aware of Auschwitz but decid-
ed against bombing the camp 
or the associated rail lines. To 
those countries fighting the 
Nazis, winning the war was 
their main priority and saving 
Jews was very low on the list. 
What about the locals? How 
many were willing to risk their 
lives or those of their children 
to save strangers? Would I have? 
Doubtful. 
That the Jews had no one to 
come to their rescue was due to 

the fact that they were scattered 
willy-nilly in various countries, 
often among people who con-
sidered them interlopers and 
were glad to see them go. No 
matter how long Jews had lived 
in certain lands, no matter how 
much they tried to assimilate 
or ignore their background, 
they were never considered to 
be native citizens. The Nazis 
taught me that being a Jew was 
based on blood, not on reli-
gious observance. There was 
no escape from it. To be a Jew 
means to belong to a club from 
which one can never resign.
To me, the slogan “never 
again” only means never again 
to the Jews. To pretend that the 
Holocaust will teach the world 
to eschew violence against 
“them” in favor of “us” is naïve 
and contrary to historical evi-
dence. The Jews must make 
sure it will never happen to 
them again. Depending on the 
good will of other countries or 
the vague concept of altruism is 
a recipe for disaster.
Jews are more than just a reli-
gious group, they are a people, 
and a people need a country of 
their own. Not just as a home-
land or cultural mecca, but a 
nation which will protect them 
no matter where they reside. 
What the Jews needed in 1939, 
and did not have, was Israel.
Too many diaspora Jews 
think they sit comfortably in 
their Western lives and have 
nothing to fear. But antisem-
itism continues to be present, 
now even more insidiously 
disguised under the veil of 
anti-Zionism. Progressives 
denounce Israel as racist. To 
many Muslims, Jew and Israeli 
are one and the same. Even 
some Jews validate “legitimate” 

criticism of Israel. The U.N. has 
been anti-Israel for as long as I 
personally can remember, going 
so far as to pass a resolution in 
1972 equating Zionism with 
racism. How can criticism of 
Israel be any less than antisem-
itism?
My lesson from the 
Holocaust is this: No one is 
going to save the Jews except 
the Jews. Israel is the guaran-
tor of “never again.
” Israel is 
the only country in the world 
that is tasked with not only 
protecting its own citizens but 
also those of its diaspora. Israel 
had to go after Adolf Eichmann 
and other fugitive Nazis when 
European democracies moved 
on. Israel had to rescue foreign 
Jews when an Air France jet 
was hijacked to Uganda by 
Palestinian terrorists and France 
dithered. Israel rescued the 
Sephardi Jews of Arab lands, the 
Falasha of Ethiopia, and Jews in 
Bosnia and Ukraine when they 
came under fire. Israel’s Law 
of Return offers any Jew a new 
home at any time.
Those Jews who do not 
support Israel or are indiffer-
ent to it, those, including Jews 
among them, who think that 
championing the plight of the 
Palestinians or labeling Israel 
as apartheid are doomed to 
ignorance. Those who fail to 
recognize that only Israel will 
ever truly protect the Jewish 
people have learned nothing 
from the Holocaust. I have. I 
am a Zionist. 

 

Mark Hotz is a history teacher at 

Yeshivat Mekor Chaim High School in 

Baltimore. Recently, he assigned his 11th 

grade students an essay on lessons they 

learned from the Holocaust. As an incen-

tive, since they had to write it, he offered 

to write his own. This is it.

Mark Hotz

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