Gaza Genocide is not happening in my name. – Stephen Kapos

As with other videos, I look the liberty of creating a transcript of this interview with Stephen Kapos, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, with the assistance of TurboScribe.

Mr. Kapos is one of my heroes on a very short list.

Peace, MAA

I say this as a Holocaust survivor, that the genocide in Gaza is not happening in my name and in our name. The way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they are doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust. It’s an outrage.

When I saw the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations putting on a yellow star or stomach turning, somebody who had to wear a yellow star like myself and my entire family, I’m insulted by that. What distinguishes the Jewish Holocaust is its industrial scale and industrial methods being applied. And what has been happening to Gaza is similar in that the scale of the bombing and the indiscriminate nature of the bombing, the complete lack of care about children and women being the majority of the victims, amounts to industrial scale of genocide.

The painting of the Palestinian people as worthless, almost animal-like by the description of some of the leaders, that dehumanization enables the population of Israel to tolerate what’s going on. The way that Palestinian people who were arrested were treated, having to take their clothes off and parading them, it’s part of the humiliation. In the West Bank, the way the checkpoints are organized, the way you are forced to wait for hours for no reason in order to go to school or go to work, etc.

All this amounted to humiliation similar to what we experienced. The sort of determination and consistency with which they are setting about to destroy the whole of Gaza is very similar to the kind of cruelty and determination of the fascist regimes. Some of the actions of the Nazi state in dehumanizing and completely cruel large-scale killings, etc., if it is repeated, I don’t see why you couldn’t make the parallel.

It can only be helpful in understanding what’s going on to make the parallel. I don’t think there should be any taboo against that. I think I particularly find painful to see the children, because I remember after the war, we played in the ruins like they do now, but particularly their losses, to suddenly lose parents and siblings and so on.

There was a boy in the same rescue homes where I was. He was traveling on a tram with his parents. This boy moved to the front to stand behind the tram driver because he was interested in how he was working the levers and so on.

At the next stop, an Arrow Cross raiding party came on and asked for papers, and the parents were identified as Jews and arrested straight away. The son was separated at the front, and they had to make an immediate decision whether to say something to him and involve him or let him perhaps escape the net, and that’s what they decided. So they were taken down from the tram and sent to Auschwitz.

They never said goodbye to their son, and they perished in Auschwitz. So that was the end of the family. Now, can you imagine the psychological state of that boy who suddenly found himself on his own in this way, not saying goodbye to his parents? And I think this kind of thing, this separation, and the sense of complete inability to intervene or in any way exert any kind of positive influence on events, this kind of separation and destruction of families in this manner is again something that repeats in Gaza now, I think.

I heard that some families divide the children and leave some with one branch and some with the other, so that at least somebody should survive from the family. There’s an echo of the same experience. What happened to the Jewish people, the gas chambers and the industrial scale of extermination, and also the sort of invisible aspects, the incredible emotional pain cause, is so horrendous taken together that it seems to me inconceivable that it should be repeated anywhere in the world.

That is why we say, not in our name and never again, and this is why I was so totally shocked, particularly by those who I know have gone through the same themselves, repeating it on another people. I take as an extreme example one of my cousins, a late cousin, she died some years ago, who was a young girl taken to Auschwitz from Transylvania. Because she was young and strong, she was put to work and she worked in a warehouse sorting clothes, and one day she was sorting her parents’ clothes, meaning that they had already been taken to the gas chamber.

I think it’s difficult to understand the emotional experience of being in that situation. Yet she came back to Israel, first to Romania and then Israel, and she was as racist as the rest of them against the Palestinians. Now, it’s beyond understanding how you can do that with the background that she had.

I think this is to do with the extreme propaganda and the dehumanization. Zionism was a very unfortunate and sad development for the Jewish people. It broke a much longer tradition of always being on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressor, and the charitable nature of Judaism and the humanity that they advocate into a kind of exceptionalism and nationalism.

Everything is the Jews, not a single piece for other people, only for us. And in practical terms, impossible project of taking over another people’s country, which led to all the trouble that followed. Also, I agree with my cousin, late cousin, a very bright guy, who said, well, if we claim that there is a people who tend to be the victims of other people’s discrimination, etc., then the last thing you want to do is to collect them up into one place as a target.

And I think he was right, and I think current events prove it. Zionism started to proclaim that the only safe place for Jews is in Israel, and what we are seeing today is the worst, the most dangerous place for Jews is Israel. Quite a number of my family from Romania ended up in Israel.

So when I visited them, that was my first brush with Zionism. I was completely shocked how, despite their experiences during the Holocaust, they were racist, basically, against the Palestinians, and couldn’t understand it. And I can’t understand it to this day fully, how that could happen, but they were, there’s no denying it.

And I found that atmosphere of racism was prevailing generally in Israel, and I turned strongly against that. Later on, I saw the repeated brutality of action against Palestinians, and it became more and more horrifying. And the very cruel attack on Gaza was the ultimate.

And the use of the Holocaust background as a cover for all this was just unbearable. I mean, it was criminal, I felt. And this is when I became more active in trying to protest.

Today’s marches are having a very hopeful aspect. It is so large, so persistent, so global, that eventually the Western leadership, which are trying to deny what is actually going on, will be forced to face up to it. And I think we are not far from that.

There was no parallel to that in the Jewish Holocaust experience. In fact, there was great abandonment. There were some, very few, very brave people who risked everything to be on the right side of history and to rescue as much as possible.

But the majority of people were too afraid and looked the other way. I find it completely incomprehensible, really, how you can do anything but totally condemn quite clear genocide. And anybody who doesn’t do that, it will be revisited on him or her to look back on, to be on the wrong side of history and seriously guilty.

And that goes for the UK government, to Kirschtarma and the shadow cabinet, and some of the church leaders. The chief rabbi completely identifies with Israel and Zionism. I think it’s important to stand up against this conflation that is propagated between Jewishness and Zionism.

If you do not stand up and criticize it and divorce yourself from it, then it sort of besmirches all Jews, basically. And I think it’s essential to show that, from a point of view of the morale of the people that is being victimized in the name of the Jewish people, that this is not supported universally by Jewish people at all. But it’s simply the Zionist and Israeli establishment which does it, which are not too far from a fascistic attitude.

I think fascism thrives on indifference and the general public being intimidated or looking the other way out of self-preservation and comfort. And it’s essential that it’s not practiced, that a certain degree of risk is even taken, and always making a stand against injustice. The time will come when history will judge these events.

If you are just indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt without any doubt. And it’s important that when that judgment comes, you are found to be on the right side of history, that you had not been, for sake of comfort and advancement or whatever, you had not been inactive. You have to assert yourself against the evils around you.