Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Surging Antisemitism Around the World
Some Thoughts from a former ISIS war crimes investigator
Three weeks ago, on January 27th, the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Established by the United Nations in 2005 to commemorate the then-60th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, I watched the 80th anniversary commemoration streaming live from Poland via Youtube. It was estimated that 3,000 people attended from around the world, including 1,000 journalists. Royals from across Europe were there, including King Charles III of the United Kingdom, King Christian X of Denmark, King Felipe VI of Spain, and others. The focus was most importantly on the final survivors. Around 50 showed up and this low number was in contrast to the numbers in preceding years; in 2005, 1,000 survivors were present; in 2015, 300 showed up, and now, just under 50.
Only one Soviet soldier who liberated Auschwitz - Ivan Stepanovich Martynushkin - is still living. A few days before the 80th anniversary, he turned 101 years old.
It is thus likely that three weeks ago was the last big gathering of survivors in person. The 85th and 90th anniversaries will be fortunate to have any physically present.
It’s not surprising that the numbers of survivors shrink as time goes on. That is the nature of things. Per the Claims Conference, there are 220,000 living Holocaust survivors around the globe. 95 % are child survivors, born between 1928 and 1945. (https://www.axios.com/2025/01/27/holocaust-remembrance-day-survivors-israel-us)
Yet, this increasing loss of survivors (and their firsthand memories of the Holocaust) takes on heightened meaning as antisemitism surges around the world. It has reached unprecedented numbers since the Shoah ended eight decades ago. Indeed, from Australia to Canada, South Africa to the United Kingdom, and Latin America to the United States. According to the Anti-Defamation League, in the one year since October 7th, over 10,000 antisemitic incidents occurred in the United States.
As a lawyer, scholar, public speaker, former ISIS war crimes investigator, and a legal fellow at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, this global surge in antisemitism and lack of Holocaust awareness is deeply distressing and bodes ill for the future. We must combat it now.
Amid this global milieu, students and the general public need to know how vast and unfathomable the Nazi plan was to exterminate the Jewish people, no matter their age, sex, or location. 1 of every 3 Jews on the planet, and 2 of 3 in Europe, were dead by 1945. As of today, the global Jewish population has yet to recover to its 1939 level.
To describe this unparalleled eradication of a people, Raphael Lemkin – a Polish Jewish lawyer who lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust – coined the very term genocide. 6 million Jews were murdered. How to conceptualize this number? As the Economist observed in 2020, “The tally of the dead is hard to comprehend. Of the 9.5 million Jews in Europe before the war, 6 million were murdered. If you spent five minutes reading about each of them, it would fill every waking hour for 90 years.”
A post-survivor world is rapidly approaching sooner than we would like. To help prepare ourselves, here are four humble suggestions on what can be done to combat surging antisemitism and Holocaust denialism, minimization, or simple lack of awareness, especially among members of the next generation around the world. I offer these having visited Holocaust museums across the United States, ranging from the West Coast to Texas and Florida to New York and our Nation’s capital.
First, a timeline on Jew hatred (antisemitism) in history is critical. Some holocaust museums do a good job; others not so much. Antisemitism is a shadow accompanying Jews on their global journeys. Like a virus, it mutates to every age and ideology, but its essence remains the same, e.g., anti-Judaism in the Middle Ages, anti-Jewish racism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and today’s attacks against Israel, the world’s only Jewish State, subjected to demonization, delegitimization, and double standards, to invoke the former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky’s Three Ds (whom I had the honor of briefly meeting, and hearing speak, at Oxford University last summer as an ISGAP scholar-in-residence on contemporary antisemitism studies).
The Shoah did not emerge from a vacuum; it built on 20 centuries of antisemitism. Nazi Germany utilized traditional pagan and Christian anti-Judaism and melded it with modern racism to form an eliminationist or exterminationist antisemitism, which harnessed a modern state’s power to annihilate Jews across the Mediterranean, the Levant, and Europe. It is shocking to the conscience how deeply this bigotry cuts across time and space. Hitler and the Nazis actively invoked this history, and the Fuhrer was not shy about his plans to exterminate Jews. Indeed, as early as 1922, Adolf Hitler told German journalist Josef Hell, ‘“Once I am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.” A decade later, on the eve of assuming power, he declared to Hermann Rauschning that his mission was to destroy the “tyrannical God of the Jews” and His “life-denying Ten Commandments.”’ The core objective of Nazi extermination was thus not only Jews but the very teachings and testimony of Judaism that Jews represent through their physical presence. (David Patterson, Judaism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust: Making the Connections, 2022, p. 166)
Second, a greater emphasis on the Righteous Among the Nations must take place in Holocaust museums, educational institutions, and Jewish communities. Amidst the maelstrom of destruction that was the Shoah, few glimmers of light appeared. Yet, in many countries, ordinary non-Jews hid Jewish neighbors, diplomats issued visas in defiance of government orders, and royal families protested the Nazi treatment, observing there was no Jewish question in their kingdom. Recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, these (nearly 30,000) individuals saved entire lives. As ancient Jewish tradition famously declares, one who saves a single human life saves a whole universe. (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, 37a)
It is imperative to remember the best of humanity. They include, among others, Oskar Schindler (who saved nearly 1,100 Jews in his factory) and Irena Sendler of Poland (who smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto); Chiune Sugihara of Japan (who issued thousands of visas, including to the entire Mir Yeshiva in Lithuania); Aristides de Sousa Mendes of Portugal (diplomat in Bordeaux, France who issued tens of thousands of visas); Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens (highest ranking prelate of the Greek Orthodox Church who issued fake baptismal certificates); Dimitar Peshev of Bulgaria (who in tandem with the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and civil society prevented 50,000 Bulgarian Jews from being deported to Nazi hands); Selahatin Ulkumen of Turkey (who saved nearly 50 Jews on the isle of Rhodes); Pastor Andre Trocme and his wife Magda of the French town Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (the town collectively saved 5,000 Jews) and Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden (credited with saving up to 100,000). These are only some of the more famous names. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir called them “drops of love in an ocean of poison.”
And, these 30,000 are the ones that can be confirmed with testimony. Most will never be recognized, and will remain known only to the rescuer, rescued, and God.
Third, an acknowledgment that Ashkenazi Jews were not the only Jews impacted by the Shoah. The Holocaust was a pan-Mediterranean event. Jews from dozens of countries were hunted, herded, and murdered, ranging from North Africa to Norway (17 Jews from Tromso, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, were rounded up by Nazi paratroopers and taken to Auschwitz, where they were murdered) and France to the Greek islands in the Ionian and Aegean seas; Corfu (1,800 were deported to Auschwitz in June 1944; only 200 returned); Leros (where one Jew, Daniel Rahamim, was loaded aboard a Nazi ship and deported to Auschwitz, where he too was murdered); and Rhodes (where roughly 1,800 Jews were sent to Auschwitz. 151 returned and five are still living as of 2025). These Sephardic and Mizrahi stories have yet to be mentioned by many Holocaust museums, educational institutions, and be instilled in public consciousness.
On a visit to one museum, which I won’t name, to share one short experience, I found not a single mention of Sephardic Jews, not even the utter destruction of the great Jewish community of the Greek port city of Thessaloniki, or Salonica. From March to August 1943, ~ 50,000 Jews (descendants of 15th and 16th century Jewish exiles from Spain and Portugal and constituted nearly half the entire city’s population) were deported in 19 convoys to Auschwitz, where they were almost all sent to the gas chambers. Less than 2,000 survived for a death rate of 96%, higher than Polish Jewry.
When I asked one of the docents why Salonica was not mentioned at all (even in the chronological timeline of the Shoah), he stared at me and asked, “What’s Salonica?” I later spoke with the Director of Education (who shall remain nameless) and she told me there wouldn’t be any interest in this history, not even to have me give a talk!
She was wrong. This history must be mentioned, especially considering it occurred simultaneously with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April-May 1943) and shortly before revolts at the death camps, Treblinka and Sobibor. (As an aside, as a college student, I was privileged to have met and have been part of a Shabbat dinner with Philip Bialowitz, one of the last survivors of the Sobibor uprising in October 1943).
Finally, many Holocaust museums don’t promote the legacy of the Nuremberg Trials enough. Some have one or two slides, but this was incontrovertible evidence of the atrocities committed by the Third Reich. It was designed to stand the test of time.
In Jan. 1945, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Secretary of State Edward Stettinius sent a joint memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt advocating trials for war criminals. “Condemnation of these criminals after a trial,” this memo noted, “would command maximum public support in our own times and receive the respect of history. The use of the judicial method will, in addition, make available for all mankind to study in future years an authentic record of Nazi crimes and criminality.” These rationales have largely been borne out by the historical record.
The 24 most senior surviving Nazi leaders were indicted on the charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity (a then novel concept), and crimes against peace, or the crime of aggression. Two defendants were not tried (Robert Ley committed suicide and Gustav Krupp was found unfit), so 22 were ultimately judged by the International Military Tribunal, comprised of judges from the four Allied Powers - United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union.
During the trials, the point was made that the Holocaust was an unprecedented event in Jewish and world history. As Sir Hartley Shawcross, the Chief British Prosecutor, said in July 1946, “If there were no other crime [extermination of the Jews] against these men [all leading Nazis in the dock], this one alone, in which all of them were implicated, would suffice. History holds no parallel to these horrors.” Similarly, as Justice Robert Jackson - a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice and the Chief American Prosecutor at the Major Nuremberg Trial - observed near the end of the trial that“[t]he Nazi movement will be of evil memory in history because of its persecution of the Jews, the most far-flung and terrible racial persecution of all time…”
Of the 22 Nazi defendants at the major Nuremberg trial, 12 were sentenced to death, though only 10 were hanged (Martin Bormann was judged in absentia and Hermann Goering committed suicide via cyanide the night before he was to be hanged).
7 were sentenced to various prison terms in Spandau, and 3 were acquitted.
After the trial of the major Nazi war criminals ended in 1946, U.S. military courts in Nuremberg held twelve subsequent trials led by Chief of Counsel Telford Taylor. Among them were ones focusing on doctors (Trial #1), judges (Trial #3), industrialists [Flick (Trial #5), I.G. Farben (Trial #6), and Krupp (Trial #10)] and the Einsatzgruppen (Trial #9). Benjamin Ferencz, the last living Nuremberg Prosecutor, whom I was privileged to meet, prosecuted 24 leading Einsatzgruppen at the age of 27 and rested his opening case after a mere two days, relying on the Nazi documentary record.
In total, at all 13 Nuremberg Trials, 199 defendants were tried, 161 were convicted, and 37 were executed.
(With the late Benjamin Ferencz (1920 – 2023), the last living Nuremberg Prosecutor. At age 27, he led the U.S. prosecution of the Einsatzgruppen– SS death squads who massacred nearly two million Jewish men, women, and children in Eastern Europe in the “Holocaust by Bullets.” All 24 defendants he prosecuted were convicted.)
The Allied decision to prosecute the Nazis established an evidentiary record that can never be challenged. As Justice Jackson put it, “The future will never have to ask, with misgiving, what could the Nazis have said in their favor. History will know that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. They have been given the kind of a Trial which they, in the days of their pomp and power, never gave to any man.”
Accordingly, one of the most powerful acts of memorialization is not only continued preservation of testimonies and dissemination of educational awareness (including the use of 3-D technology) but promoting awareness and remembrance of the Nuremberg Trials, in which the Holocaust was invoked in a legal context and set down in an evidentiary record. This legacy shall live on for centuries to come.
Ultimately, as expressed by Hans Frank, the former governor-general of the General Government in occupied Poland, who was hanged at Nuremberg, “a thousand years will pass, and the guilt of Germany will still not be extinguished.” Or, as Abraham Sutzkever, a Jewish poet from Vilna, Lithuania who testified at the major Nuremberg trial, stated, “the name of Nuremberg w[ill] go down in history for eternity: first as the place of the Nuremberg Laws and now as the place of the Nuremberg Trials.”
In a world of rapidly vanishing survivors, we must all become witnesses and remain the guardians of their memories, now and forever. We owe it to the dead, the living, and perhaps most importantly, all the generations yet to come.
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Thank you for being here. I hope you’ll join me as we seek to explore and uncover stories that remind us all why history and law still matter in the 21st century.
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ABOUT ME:
Dr. Isaac Amon is a lawyer, legal scholar, and professional speaker with national and international experience. He worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague and as an ISIS War Crimes investigator. He has lectured to conferences, communities, synagogues, and universities across North America, Europe, Israel, and Australia on international criminal justice, legal history, crypto-Judaism, and antisemitism, including the Inquisition and Holocaust. Among other places, he has spoken at the University of Iowa; University of Texas-Austin; University of Edinburgh, Scotland; University of Porto, Portugal; National Library of Israel; Temple Emanu-El, New York City; Congregation Mickve Israel, Savannah, Georgia; and the 2024 London Jewish Book Festival. To learn more, please visit www.isaacamon.com and jewishspeakersbureau.com/speakers/isaac-amon.