This year, Holocaust Remembrance Day will not be like any other that has come before it. Although the spread of the coronavirus has no direct link or correlation to the Holocaust – it has similarly created an atmosphere of global crisis. The pandemic has caused the citizens of the world to feel fragile and ponderous over the future.
The crisis creates incredible uncertainty in almost every aspect of life, and understandably causes anxiety – not just about the day after, but the enormous changes that are happening at incredible speed in our daily lives, over which we feel we have no control.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
Throughout history, events with far-reaching significance have been characterized by the immediate and future implications they have on people's norms, values, and even faith. The force of this crisis, as well as the events that have happened throughout it, to a large extent, determines its impact on the world that we have known thus far, and the extent of the change the world is experiencing because of it.
There is no doubt that the Holocaust (together with but also independently of the Second World War) was an event that shook the very foundations of every aspect of life in the Western world. It was not for nothing that contemporary Jewish philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, said after the Holocaust, that the human count should start from zero.
The Holocaust was a formative event because the Nazis and their accomplices murdered six million innocent Jews, but in order to understand the depth of the crisis and its impact on the world that came after, we must dive into one critical fact: The Holocaust was an event in which the achievements of Western culture – those giant leaps from the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution – were fully channeled towards one goal: The industrial destruction of humans. Of a people. The Jewish people.
While there is not enough room here to fully describe the phenomenon of mobilizing modern human capabilities for destruction and annihilation, we can look at some examples from the Holocaust that are still relevant to our lives today:
First, is the Holocaust as a technological phenomenon: Since the 17th century, we have seen dramatic and world-changing advances in the West's technological capabilities. The scientific industrial-technological revolution led to a dramatic improvement in humans' quality of life – in the economy, health, education, nutrition and more.
During the Holocaust, all these achievements were channeled into murder and destruction. The trains that transported the victims, the engines that operated the gas chambers, the ability to efficiently transfer messages by telephone and telegram, and countless other examples of the use of scientific achievements for human annihilation.
The human nature and the acts of murder in the Holocaust were not new – but the technology that enabled the murder of so many human beings in such little time certainly was. To illustrate: In 1944, over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered between May and July.
Then, there is the modern state: The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman focused a lot on the Holocaust as a modern phenomenon. The nation-states that were established in 19th century Europe gradually brought about equality and liberty that many had not had previously.
The modern state, through the bureaucratic systems it established, created unprecedented efficiency in classifying citizens, giving them suitable services, organizing mass democratic elections, advanced financial systems, industrial initiatives and so on. Moreover, the state offered a collective national identity to all citizens without differentiating (at least, for large portions of them).
During the Holocaust, the tables were turned once again and these achievements became the oil that greased the wheels of the death machine. The efficient census enabled quick classification of Jewish citizens. The bureaucratic systems carried out efficient identification, registration, and classification, which in the past would have been impossible. The clerical apparatus in many countries was mobilized to create one of the largest logistical operations in human history, and all this would not have been possible without the achievements of the modern state.
Finally, Academic developments and modern science were another element of humanity's achievements that were deployed for mass murder (as noted above, there are many more but I will stop at this one).
Scientists, disciplines, and universities date back to the Middle Ages, but from the 18th to the 20th Century they ruled the roost in Europe.
The paradigm of divine faith making the world turn ruled for hundreds of years, but through a very quick (and historic) process, this dogma was replaced by a firm belief that science and progress have the answers to life – both big and small.
The enormous breakthroughs in disciplines both old and new – from psychology, medicine and sociology, through to anthropology, physics, chemistry and more – contributed towards profound achievements for the human race.
And then the Holocaust happened. It isn't discussed enough but already during the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, and even more so following the rise of Nazism, scientists provided a "scientific" backbone for the Nazi ideology and even their practices. The historian Claudia Koonz says that about a million "ethnocrats" (i.e. ethnicity bureaucrats) were involved in creating the race state, and the policy and practices of extermination from 1933-1945.
From the historians who created a new German narrative, psychiatrists who classified disabled people as destined for death, anthropologists and geneticists who focused on proving the superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of the Jewish people, to those who stood at the very front line of the destruction – the doctors.
Without a doubt, the medical profession was the most sullied by the Holocaust. In the 1930s, doctors were already significantly represented in the ranks of the Nazi party and the SS. And during the Holocaust, it was these doctors who carried out the selection, authorized the killings with gas, and carried out medical experiments.
Just like in the previous instances, it is hard to imagine the mass murder of the Holocaust without scientific support – both practical and ideological.
After the Holocaust, human beings took away the lessons in the areas that were relevant to them. The mood towards the modern state, science, technology and other areas was deeply impacted in an attempt to make the world a better place. In many ways, the world did change for better – but in many other ways, not enough and in some, not at all.
During the coronavirus crisis, we are experiencing the helplessness of humanity – and the technology it has created – in the face of this virus. A man eats bat soup in China, and the economies and health systems of the world collapse.
But it's not just that. In the face of this crisis, we are once again seeing that technology and globalization are on the one hand responsible for the spread of the virus, and on the other that the only things that can help contain it.
Against the backdrop of what history has taught us – the Holocaust in particular – we must remember that at times of crisis, humanity can harness its capabilities to achieve new heights of morality and resourcefulness, or can plummet into an abyss that will bring suffering and injustice at an unprecedented scale.
This Holocaust Remembrance Day, although we must remain in our homes, we must make sure that world leaders guide humanity responsibly, fairly and valiantly out of this historic crisis, and safely lead us to the other side. To a different, and better, world.
Dr. Yoav Heller is CEO of Maoz, an NGO dedicated to promoting Israel's socio-economic resilience.
