2 weeks Ago
Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler in ‘Schindler’s List’, which tells the story of the man who saved 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust. Photo: NBCUniversal Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler A Palestinian child who survived an Israeli strike that killed her entire family last month cries at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Reuters Last Saturday night, when I should have been going to bed, I found myself watching Schindler’s List .
I had just switched off a streaming service and there it was on RTÉ One. I’ve seen the film before. In fact, I’ve seen it many times.
As a child, the Holocaust was one of my areas of interest and I sought out as much information about it as I possibly could. I read countless books and watched any films or TV shows I could find. That might seem strange to some, but it’s common for children to fixate on things they struggle to understand.
The Holocaust was something I couldn’t get my head around. How could anyone hate people they had never met, based on religion? And how could so many people join in? How could human beings be so cruel as to enslave and murder millions? I was looking for sense in it. I never found it.
This time, watching Schindler’s List felt different. The film tells the story of Oskar Schindler, an industrialist who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. It portrays him charming SS officers and relying heavily on his relationships with them to achieve his goals.
We see the disgusting way that those in charge of concentration camps, and who generally led Adolf Hitler’s assault on Jewish people, spoke about their victims. Of course, while elements of Schindler’s List are fictionalised, the Nazis were (and in some ways, are) real. Historical records of Nazi propaganda show Jewish people being depicted as subhuman, cultural parasites who were a danger to German society.
A man says: ‘Islam is a very bad disease...
If you’re not Islam, they will kill you.’ I remember being horrified by the things the SS officers said in the film the first time I saw it. This time I was doubly horrified, as some of it felt familiar in the context of the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
While this phase of the conflict began almost a year ago, last October 7, the attitudes that fuel it are much older, both for Hamas and sections of Israeli society. In a six-year-old video on YouTube by Telesur, a Latin American news network, Israelis are interviewed about life in conflict. A man says: “Islam is a very bad disease.
.. If you’re not Islam, they will kill you.
” A teenage boy speaks of being a member of Lehava, an organisation against marriage between Jews and Arabs. He says they want to protect Judaism, before adding: “The Arabs, may their name and memory be obliterated.” One man expresses his belief that there is no other course of action than to “carpet-bomb them”.
The interviewer seeks clarity and asks if he means “all Arabs”. “You can’t trust them,” the man replies, before adding: “I think Jews have the right to hate them.” Separately, a teenage girl giggles as she says: “We need to kill Arabs.
” A Palestinian child who survived an Israeli strike that killed her entire family last month cries at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Reuters More recently, many people were shocked by a clip of Israel’s self-described “longest-running Israeli podcast in English”, Two Nice Jewish Boys. In it, one of the nice boys says that if he was given a button to push that would “obliterate” every living person in Gaza, he would press it in a second, and adds: “I think most Israelis probably would.
” Of course, the aforementioned podcasters and interviewees are not in charge of Israeli military action. The Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, is. For the last year, they have told us they are trying to eliminate Hamas, not destroy the population of Palestine.
This is difficult to accept for many people, when just last week the Ministry for Health in Gaza published a 649-page document with the details of Palestinians killed since last October 7. The first 14 pages are filled with the names of babies less than a year old. It’s even harder to accept when Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament, posts things like: “Now we all have one common goal – erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.
” I am not Israeli and I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to live in long-term conflict. I also can’t imagine a situation where I would want to eradicate an entire people on the basis of what some of them have done. I’m not suggesting that what happened during the Holocaust is the same as what is happening now in Gaza, but the parallels in attitude from many of those in support of this military action are striking.
Also, there is no getting away from the fact that conservative estimates place the Palestinian death toll at just under 41,000, while Israel’s is about 1,400. The little girl in me, who believed in the ‘Never again’ slogan, can’t understand how this is happening Of course, other genocides have happened in my lifetime. However, I never believed that anyone who had been a victim of the kind of oppression that occurred during the Holocaust could possibly want to inflict it on someone else.
Yet here we are, in a time when Two Nice Jewish Boys speak openly about obliterating the people of Palestine. The little girl in me, who so believed in the “Never again” slogan associated with the lessons of the Holocaust, can’t understand how this is happening. Last week, I heard the audio of the conversations emergency call operators had with six-year-old Hind Rajab as she hid among bodies of her dead relatives while shots from the Israel Defence Forces were fired into their car.
The operator asks her to hide by making herself small so that no one can see her, and she says she will. As you probably know, she died in the car. It also emerged that an ambulance on its way to rescue Rajab was blown up, killing two paramedics.
Later that day, my five-year-old son played a joke on me, hiding his little body in our car in the space under the steering wheel so I couldn’t find him. I struggled not to cry. While I could never quite make sense of the Holocaust in my childhood research, I felt safe in the belief it would never happen again.
It had happened in a time when it was easy to hide things. People around the world hadn’t really known what was going on. Now the world’s atrocities are staring us in the face on our phones.
As a child, I believed good always won in the end. Now I’m not so sure. Join the Irish Independent WhatsApp channel Stay up to date with all the latest news.
