6 | APRIL 20 • 2023 

1942 - 2023

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opinion
What Do You Think 
When You See a 
Pile of Rings from 
Auschwitz?
T

wo hands holding wed-
ding rings from a huge 
pile on display in the 
Auschwitz concentration camp 
museum. Those rings belong to 
murder victims, mostly to Jews 
who were mass 
murdered by 
Zyklon B gas and 
stripped of all of 
their belongings — 
rings, jewelry and 
even gold teeth, 
the valuable mate-
rials that were left 
after their extermination. 
How much empathy do you 
have toward the victims and their 
surviving families? Do you won-

der if there is a difference in your 
reaction if you are a Jew or if 
you aren’t? I have so many more 
questions, and I really am inter-
ested to know your answers.
I’ll tell you why. It is because 
both of my parents are Holocaust 
survivors. This picture is a real 
photo from Auschwitz, and the 
Holocaust really did happen. 
It is amazing to me that 
someone would deign to use 
Holocaust imagery to support 
their political agenda, even going 
so far as to call the other side 
Nazis. Can it be that these people 
are misinformed, unaware or 
ignorant of that time in history? 
Of course; but I believe in the 

case I am discussing, the people 
who used this Holocaust imagery 
to support their political views 
did this fully aware of the histor-
ical facts and used it to stoke fear 
and hate with implicit antisemitic 
over- and undertones. 
Last month, Kristina Karamo, 
chair of the Michigan Republican 
Party, used the above-mentioned 
photo to stoke fear about upcom-
ing gun safety legislation in the 
state legislature. She purposefully 
used this horrific image with 
untruthful captioning to claim 
that “they” are coming to take 
your freedom, stoking hate and 
fear. She then doubled down 

when called on it.
Freedom is not defined by 
the number of guns one has. 
The freedom to purchase mil-
itary-style weapons has led to 
hundreds of mass shootings with 
higher and higher victim counts 
every year, and that number is 
increasing by the moment. 
No, the poor victims of the 
Holocaust had no guns. They 
were unarmed, scared and 
defenseless. They were mostly 
Jews but were also LGBTQ+, 
the disabled, the Roma and even 
Black people like Chairwoman 
Karamo, none of whom deserved 
to be discriminated against or to 

PURELY COMMENTARY

continued on page 9

Avishay 
Hayut

HOLOCAUST ENCYCLOPEDIA

Rings collected 
from Holocaust 
victims.

