Early in their studies, most would-be practitioners of the “historians’ craft,” as French scholar Marc Bloch called it, are taught that history must be written, sine ira et studio (without bitterness or bias) – in other words, with equanimity. But it is almost impossible to react calmly to the events of October 7 – truly a “Black Shabbat” – that have left us horrified and heartbroken, bitter, and bewildered.
It is perfectly natural to look for parallels from the past to help us process the horrors of the present. Sadly, Jewish history is replete with such examples, many of which occurred in living memory – or at least in the memory of our parents and grandparents who survived them. Indeed, such massacres have been a recurring reality and nightmare over the course of more than 3,000 years. However, most of us could not have imagined that such mass acts of savagery would occur in our day – and certainly not in the Jewish State.
The shock and revulsion of those compelled to confront such fiendish deeds firsthand should surprise no one and neither should their attempts to find a way to describe them. For instance, a recent Daily Mail headline blared, “Israeli morgue worker says horrors inflicted on Hamas victims are ‘worse than the Holocaust,’ including decapitated pregnant woman and her beheaded unborn child.”
However, despite our collective fury and agony, we must choose our words judiciously. In fact, the gruesome acts of waves of cutthroat shock troops who stormed into Israel (whatever their murderous intentions) were not worse than what the Jews annihilated in the Final Solution endured.
The Shoah was obviously of an entirely different magnitude and Jews then, unlike Israelis today, were utterly defenseless. Mass infanticide and matricide and the dismemberment of the remains of those killed by the Germans and their sadistic partners of other nationalities were not at all exceptional during those years – and numerous contemporaneous accounts of survivors, bystanders, and even perpetrators make that chillingly apparent.
In the 1941 pogrom in Bucharest, members of the Romanian Iron Guard seized Jews on the streets and brought them to a local abattoir where some were hung on meat hooks while still alive. Their stomachs were gutted; their entrails were tied around their necks like cravats, and to their bodies were affixed signs reading “kosher meat.”
According to a report by US envoy Franklin Mott Gunther, who visited the site of this outrage, an employee of the slaughterhouse “found 60 Jewish corpses on the hooks… all skinned alive.” In his widely read book on the massacre at Jedwabne, a place that became a metonym for local collaboration in the dispatch of the Jews, Jan T. Gross described how hundreds of Jews were burned alive and how the head of a Jewish girl who had been decapitated was used as a football.
To be sure, there were innumerable cases of such bloodcurdling crimes across the length and breadth of wartime Europe. Hamas did not invent anything new. And no, his own murderous hatred of Jews notwithstanding, it wasn’t the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who gave Hitler the idea of wiping out European Jewry, as suggested by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a 2015 speech when he declared, “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel the Jews… When Adolf Hitler asked al-Husseini what to do, he replied: ‘Burn them.’”
ACCORDING TO the late Lucy Dawidowicz, author of the groundbreaking War Against the Jews, when German police forces entered the Riga ghetto in December 1941 to round up the elderly and sick, the venerable historian Simon Dubnow called out as he was being carted to his death: “Brothers, write down everything you see and hear. Keep a record of it all!” Many of the doomed Jews of Europe did just that, often in excruciating detail and in unimaginably difficult circumstances.
Writing the history of genocide
The most famous example is the Oneg Shabbat group in the Warsaw Ghetto. Led by Emanuel Ringelblum, those intrepid chroniclers were the subject of a poignant, magisterial study by Samuel Kassow titled Who Will Write Our History? which was also adapted for the screen. In large measure, due to the relentless efforts of generations of researchers, the destruction of European Jewry is one of the best-documented chapters in human history.
Of course, that has not prevented generations of deniers and obfuscators from suggesting that the Holocaust either never happened or that it was exaggerated; that those responsible bear no blame; or that when the Germans or autochthonous populations of the places in which Jews had lived for centuries turned on the local Jewish population, it was in response to purported Jewish misdeeds (whether killing Christ, dominating the economy, using Christian blood for ritual purposes, or imposing communism on the god-fearing locals).
Within hours of the Black Shabbat orgy of hate, many throughout the world questioned the authenticity and accuracy of the gory accounts that emerged from the killing fields. We are living in an era in which information and disinformation spread faster than lightning, and once gone viral the record is very difficult to alter. The advent of artificial intelligence further compounds the problem.
In these dark days, Dubnow’s call resonates almost as strongly as it did then. Our first order of business should be to conduct in-depth interviews with every survivor of the Black Shabbat carnage. These should be carried out by qualified individuals who know what and how to ask.
Information on each one of those who perished and how they were murdered should be collected. Written questionnaires should also be circulated to all survivors. Every piece of evidence must be gathered, and cataloged, including all the footage gleefully taken by the killers.
A central authority should be established to carry out this vital mission. Not all the victims of this barbarism were Jews. The testimony of Israeli Arabs, Thais, Filipinos, Nepalis, and others should also be collected with no less vigor. Those individuals should be assured that they, too, and the loved ones they lost will never be forgotten.
“Man is in his actions and practice, as well as his fictions, essentially a storytelling animal,” observed Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, now 94. However, in recording and recounting what happened on October 7, perhaps the word “stories,” which implies that what is told could be imaginary, should be jettisoned in favor of “accounts” or “testimonies.”
In the Jewish faith, the commandment Zachor [Remember] resonates strongly. The scriptures admonish us to “remember what Amalek did to you on your way after you left Egypt… Do not forget” (Deuteronomy 25:17). Now, more than at any time in recent decades, those words must become a paramount national imperative.
The writer is a historian and founding chief editor of The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs.