Questions for My Grandfather, Answers for My Grandchildren
As a child, I couldn’t understand how the world let the Holocaust happen, but now we see Gaza: a personal reflection on genocide, the repetition of history, and the unbearable weight of looking away
Words by Lucy Elizabeth
At seven years old, I walked into my grandfather’s living room to see black and white footage of World War II. Once a military man, he often watched many the war documentaries, and so I did too. I shouldn’t have, or he shouldn’t have let me, but perhaps he thought it was character building. I felt so incredibly pulled to what was happening on the screen in front of my childish eyes. Perhaps it was in my blood to wonder, and the more I watched, the little me began to ask my grandfather:
‘Why were those bad soldiers bad and why did they try to take over the world and hurt lots of people?’.
My fascination with World War II only grew throughout the remainder of my life thus far, leading me to become my own war historian in my downtime. But when it came to me discovering and then studying the Holocaust all those years ago, the questions for my grandfather only grew. I had to understand how such an ungodly injustice happened. I had to know what the earth felt like at the time, and of course, how the world let it all happen.
I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandfather when I was a child. He was once part of the Royal Artillery Mounted Band, before immigrating his young family to settle in Aotearoa, New Zealand in the late 1970’s. His father, my great-grandfather, was a surviving sargent during World War II. I further learnt of my great-grandfather and his experiences in Dunkirk — his survival as a rare guard, his lucky return halfway across the channel on a rowboat using only his hands as oars. I learnt of how not long after he had first arrived in France in 1940, he wrote to my great-grandmother, telling her that when the Nazi’s got to England, she had to kill their nine children and then herself, because our last name was Hebrew.
I also learnt of how my granddad, at 10 years old, snuck into what he thought was a restricted adult film, with his friend. Hiding under the seats of the front row, the boys saw a film that was most certainly not the risqué film they were hoping for. It was footage of the newly discovered concentration camps, soon after their liberations. Granddad never forgot what he saw on the screen that day.
I remember my own moment of discovering the Holocaust, when I was around 8 years old –– black and white photographs in a book, literal piles of flattened, skin and bone bodies. Those photos for me were what my granddad saw in that London cinema those eighty years ago.
In the present, there is an inhuman mass killing that is being labeled a ‘war’.
At first, when I had heard that Israel had been attacked, I thought: “Jew’s being attacked?” It played into my war-historian worry of history repeating, and I thought that surely the world wouldn’t let this happen to them again. And to be honest at first, I barely knew anything on the history of Palestine and Israel –– so I researched, I watched, and I listened, as I always have when trying to understand why humans are killing each other. And then I saw it, an attempt at the eradication of a people. A genocide.
We’ve been watching the horrors of this live-streamed genocide for over four hundred days now. The current death toll reported is over 58,000 Palestinians. And this is just since October 2023, despite Palestinian civilians actually being killed under an occupation/apartheid state since 1948. I do believe the death toll is vastly higher.
We’ve seen premature newborns left to die alone in intensive care. Hospitals and aid stations purposefully bombed off the map. 224 aid workers and 217 journalists and media workers dead. More dead children filled with aimed bullet holes as if they were target practice. A ‘keeping up appearances’ ceasefire. We are seeing humans being starved to sickness and death, children and babies and their petrified parents begging for our help over social media, as we’re their only chance.
And we have also undeniably seen the clear admittance from the Zionist settlers, of their longed plan of a complete rebuild of Gaza. We’ve confirmed their intentions have always been to cleanse the land of Palestine for their own benefit. A final solution.
For anyone still wondering if you can appropriately compare this ethnic cleansing of Palestine to the Jewish genocide of the 1930’s and 1940’s –– from Auschwitz to Gaza, yes, you can compare it. It is wise to also remember, that just like the Holocaust, there will be further inhuman acts happening now in Gaza that we will not learn of for some time. Although we see a lot thanks to social media, we aren’t seeing it all.
How have the once oppressed become the oppressors? How has the “Never again” now turned into the “Never again to us. But you on the other hand…”. I can tell you how: it’s a concoction of warped entitlement and the guilt-card. The Zionists are crafty and are well aware that to have an ‘anti-Semite’ label slapped upon a ‘non-supporter’ can be life damaging for that person.
The Zionist see the Palestinian as ‘less than’, as not a real person, which is the exact same beliefs and ideologies that the Nazi’s had of the Jews. Speaking of the once masters of propaganda, the Zionists too have used propaganda much to their advantage of brainwashing their own people into seeing the Palestinian person as a hindrance upon Jewish rights.
To note, it is crucial to know the difference between Zionism and Judaism, for Zionism is also poisoning Judaism. The Jewish Holocaust should never have happened, and the Palestinian Genocide should neither be happening. There never was and never will be justification for either. And being a supporter of Palestine and human rights, does not make you an antisemite.
Twenty-four years after first asking my grandfather why and how the holocaust was allowed to happen, I now know how a genocide can be successfully orchestrated whilst the world allows it, for I am seeing it now before my very eyes.