Features
Auschwitz, the reality of evil
(Ed. note: We received an inquiry from someone by the name of Richard Britton, who asked us whether we would consider printing something he had written about a recent visit he took to Auschwitz. Richard wrote: “May I send for your consideration an article (1050 words) I wrote following a recent visit to Auschwitz? This isn’t a ‘tour guide’ piece it’s about my personal reactions and outrage to what I saw and heard.”
We said we would. What follows is what Richard wrote:
I’m not entirely sure why I wanted to go to Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp in Poland – it was not the most obvious place to go for an Easter break! But I think it was prompted by something more than just morbid curiosity. A prominent local political figure – a Muslim whom I had known for several years – had made some anti-semitic comments which shocked me, happening as it did in my local community. It suddenly seemed a dangerously short step from anti-semitic remarks to persecution and violence against the Jews.
So against this background I wanted to try to understand the reality of the mechanistic killing of over a million Jews which took place there and to explore my own reactions when confronted with the hideous reality of genocide.
Born in 1942 I grew up in a small provincial town in the East Midlands. Although the war was very real for us – surrounded as we were by American Air Force bases – the enormity of the Holocaust didn’t really enter our consciousness until well into the 1950s. And it was not taught or talked about during my Grammar school years right up to 1960.
Although I am neither Jew nor Christian I think there was also an element of atonement – a wish to express my personal outrage at the enormity of the wickedness of cold, systematic murder.
Upon my return I find I have difficulty in processing and coming to terms with what I have seen and learned about those frightful wartime years in Poland. Writing this is, I think, part of that process. I don’t want to write a tour guide – there’s plenty of information readily available on the Internet. Instead I want to explain my reaction to what I saw and heard – things I shall remember and ponder on for a long time to come.
There are two camps about an hour’s journey from Krakow: Auschwitz itself and, about a mile away, the industrialised killing centre of Birkenau where between one and one-and-a-half million Jews were murdered in little more than two years.
Auschwitz is entered via the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate and the museum there contains many disturbing exhibits including the luggage and personal possessions of the last trainloads of victims; items which had not yet been sent back to Germany when the camp was finally abandoned early in 1945 as the Russian army closed in.
There are piles of cooking pots and utensils (victims had been told to take with them what they would need for their ‘new lives after resettlement’); luggage of all kinds – carefully marked with the names or addresses of their owners; spectacles; prosthetic limbs; and human hair shorn from the victims of the gas chambers, some of it woven into a fabric.
Amongst the displays was a pile of shoes and there jumped out at me the sight of a small child’s very faded red shoe. I was stunned and shocked to a standstill in front of the display cabinet. Here was a direct and intimate connection with a real child – almost standing in front of me – who had been led to their death by their, perhaps unsuspecting, Mother. That child looked at me across the years. Here was reality.
Amongst other horrors to be seen in Auschwitz, there remains a small gas chamber where the use of Zyklon B cyanide pellets had been pioneered. Unlike the large gas-chamber at Birkenau it is intact and to stand in the very place where thousands of people were murdered was a frightful, chilling experience.
But the Nazis realised that a larger-scale and more efficient killing process was required to deliver their mass-extermination plans of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish question’ and it is at Birkenau where the mind-blowing industrial scale of the killing of Jews and other undesirable ethnicities such as Romas, strikes home. Up to 2,000 people at a time could be murdered in the large Birkenau gas chamber. Murder by the trainload.
The Auschwitz museum contains some remarkable photographs of people being unloaded from a train onto the infamous ‘ramp’ at Birkenau with the obscene selection process already in progress. Probably taken from a guard tower they show confused and anxious people but the scene is very orderly – no panic or violence of any kind. Clearly, the arrivals had been carefully persuaded that they were being ‘resettled’ in a work camp.
Even standing on that very ramp shown in those photographs where Jews from across Europe were offloaded it is difficult to come to terms with the realisation that the majority of them would be dead in the next hour or so as a result of a casual, off-hand, life-or-death decision taken in a couple of seconds. That this is so far outside any understanding of human norms of morality and that it happened in the very place I was standing was almost incomprehensible.
Although the Nazis blew up the undressing room, gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau in an effort to destroy the evidence of their crimes as the Russian advance neared the camp, the ruins can still be accessed and one stands before them mesmerised, humbled and angered.
Despite being at the very site where all this took place it is difficult to grasp the horror, evil and extent of the cold, casual routine of murder which took place there only 80 or so years ago – just as my own life was beginning.
This is the reality of genocidal anti-semitism. This is maniacal Fascism. This is routine state-backed mass murder, planned and conducted on a systematic industrial scale. This is pure evil and wickedness and it really happened. Perpetrated by real people against other people they judged inferior and undesirable is, alarmingly, recent history.
Of course there have been genocidal killings around the world since then. Sparked by racial, religious and cultural differences and fuelled by fear, hate and ignorance, they are a depressingly regular occurrence through history.
I’m glad I went to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I experienced astonishment, sadness, outrage and other sentiments I haven’t come to terms with yet. And great depression at the evidence of man’s inhumanity to man and the feeling that evil lies just beneath the surface in a great many of us.
I was gratified to hear that visiting Auschwitz and learning about the Holocaust is a part of the school curriculum for Polish children. I wish it was possible for all young people to visit. We must not allow what happened at Auschwitz and similar camps to simply fade into history.
I have not previously been engaged with Holocaust Day. Now I shall be.
Features
River Heights home close to school & synagogue
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Features
Will the Democratic Socialists of America control the Democratic Party?
By HENRY SREBRNIK On June 23, radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates backed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won multiple Democratic Party primaries in New York City and elsewhere in the state. They also were victorious in other parts of the country.
The socialist victories in New York far surpassed anyone’s predictions. Who, three years ago, could have predicted that a Muslim anti-Zionist would be elected mayor of a city with 900,000 Jews and would lead insurgents to victories in that party’s primaries in 2026? Yet here we are.
Marxist Third Worldist ideology has moved out of the universities into the polling booths, after campus activism, divestment campaigns, and social media have reinforced an anti-Israeli framework for years. The DSA’s platform states it plainly: It pledges “support for Palestinian self-determination against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”
The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander. The last two unseated incumbent Democratic congressmen. Mamdani has assembled a coalition in New York City that is capable of elevating like-minded candidates to office.
In the Seventh Congressional District, which straddles northern Brooklyn and southwestern Queens, an open primary to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia Velázquez saw State Assembly Member Claire Valdez’s’s defeat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. She was even further left than Mamdani himself. In the end, it was not even close: Valdez prevailed with 56.1 per cent of the vote to Reynoso’s 35.8 per cent.
In 2019, Valdez joined the DSA after seeing the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state senator Julia Salazar, both of whom were elected with the DSA’s help. Valdez emphasized her anti-Israel activism as a key part of her campaign. At events, her staff handed out signs that said “Free Palestine.” She launched her campaign alongside Mahmoud Khalil, a key anti-Israel leader at Columbia University that the Donald Trump administration has tried to deport.
Valdez referred to Israel’s war against Hamas as a “genocide” as early as October 13, 2023. She lambasted police for restraining anti-Israel mobs chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and waving Hezbollah flags outside a Brooklyn synagogue last June. “New Yorkers don’t just have the right to protest the sale of stolen Palestinian land — they have a responsibility to,” she declare. She has repeatedly criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She also boasted on social media of having “wiped my hand on the American flag.”
In the Thirteenth Congressional District, covering the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights and parts of the West Bronx, Darializa Avila Chevalier won a much more startling victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent Democratic Party power broker and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat’s campaign was heavily backed by AIPAC. Chevalier defied expectations and won by gaining 49 per cent to Espaillat’s 46 per cent. She told the crowd at her watch party that she had fought against the “Democratic machine.” Espaillat lost despite the backing of Democratic leaders in Congress and the state, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council.
When Chevalier, draped in a keffiyeh, first announced her candidacy in November of last year, few outside her immediate circle knew her name. But her message was clear: she presented herself as an organiser working to unite families torn apart by the immigration system and against “what we all know is a genocide in Palestine.”
Chevalier has publicly proclaimed her hatred for Israel, the United States, and “Western civilization” as a whole. She has called for the abolition of prisons, open borders and an end to deportations — even for people convicted of violent crimes. As a student at Columbia University, she was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that was ultimately disbanded by the police.
She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one,” it states.
The day after the October 7 attack, Chevalier attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. “I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,” when asked about her attendance at the rally. Chevalier has said that her conversion to Islam was inspired by the Israel-Hamas war. Mamdani celebrated her win, describing Chevalier as a person “of clarity, of conscience and of conviction.”
The war was also on the minds of voters in former Comptroller Brad Lander’s race against another AIPAC-funded incumbent, Rep. Dan Goldman, in New York’s Tenth District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Both are Jewish, but Goldman has been a steadfast friend of Israel while Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist and a key faction of his coalition was anti-Israel. It was a contest that laid bare the party’s divisions over the Israel-Gaza war.
At his son Marek’s bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel. “We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,” which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. Lander enjoyed the night’s biggest victory, winning 65.8 per cent of the vote to Goldman’s 34 per cent. Many Democrats have suggested that Lander has proved useful to Mamdani and other leftists who have been accused of antisemitism for singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium.
In the run-up to Election Day, a chain of Brooklyn coffee shops called Poetica posted that it would have barred Goldman entry had they recognized him during a recent visit to their storefront. “We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers,” Poetica declared. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
At the state level, seven of the eight candidates endorsed by the DSA for the New York State legislature also won their primary elections. One of them is Aber Kawas, a Queens-based community organizer. If she, as expected, wins in November, she will be the first Palestinian woman elected to state office in New York history.
“Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump?” asked Will Rahn, a senior editor and writer for The Free Press, rhetorically, in a June 26 column. “Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough. ‘Free Palestine’ is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters.” No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.
For most of the postwar era, support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic Party politics. That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism has been reframed by radical thinkers as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians. Opposition to Israel is now the litmus test in Democratic Party politics. “There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” warned Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton University professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.
The DSA has now built an entire ecosystem that runs parallel to the official Democratic apparatus, equipped with their own consultant network, endorsing organizations, donors and even billionaires who back them.
A generation after Pat Buchanan was denounced as an antisemite by all proper liberals for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” will the left now embrace him as a “premature antizionist”? Even satire can’t match this.
Think about it: Since October 7, Israel has done what every other country viciously attacked by implacable enemies throughout history has done: It has lashed back in a defensive war. This is a policy that any state that cared for the life of its citizens would have to adopt.
Yet Israel has become the “omnicause.” That’s why antisemitism and antizionism are two sides of the same coin: hatred of Jews. Jews around the world aren’t being attacked because of Israel. Israel is itself being condemned because it’s Jewish.
American Jews have been blindsided by this, as the French writer Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells us in a brilliant article, “Stand Up,” Tablet, July 6, 2026. “When anti-Jewish hostility arrives wrapped in the language of liberation, antiracism, decolonization, and human rights –when it emerges among allies, colleagues, students, professional peers, or other minority communities — the disorientation is deeper. It is inside the world in which one has built a life. It speaks in familiar accents. It borrows cherished values.”
In “A Profound Question Haunting Jews Today,” New York Times, July 6, 2026, Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, agrees. He writes that for half a century or more, American Jews could achieve, “through being successful, culturally Jewish, Zionist, liberal and not especially observant,” a status that elsewhere has persistently eluded them.
“This set of certainties has evaporated. Today, Israel is the pariah nation of the world, and ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet, something it’s unacceptable to be, at least in progressive circles,” where most Jews have usually found themselves.
So, are the Democrats going to become America’s anti-Israel party? And then what?
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Discover Your Ultimate Smooth at Sets on Corydon: Nanoplasty vs. Keratin vs. Japanese Straightening
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