#ITSTARTEDWITHWORDS
#ItStartedWithWords is a digital, Holocaust education campaign posting weekly videos of survivors from across the world reflecting on those moments that led up to the Holocaust – a period of time when they could not have predicted the ease with which their long-time neighbors, teachers, classmates, and colleagues would turn on them, transitioning from words of hate to acts of violence.
“The Holocaust started with words,” said Gideon Taylor, President of the Claims Conference. “Hateful words that were yelled in the park, spat on the street, and roared in the classroom. These words alienated, belittled, and shocked; but worse, these words gave birth to the horrific massacre of six million Jews.
The #ItStartedWithWords campaign shows through first-hand survivor testimony that the Holocaust didn’t come out of nowhere. It literally started with words.”
Coming on the heels of the successful #NoDenyingIt campaign, the #ItStartedWithWords initiative is part of a broader effort to raise awareness of the importance of Holocaust education. Specifically, this campaign will use survivor testimony to give context to the origins of the Holocaust, the foundation of antisemitism that Hitler and the Nazis used to generate support across Europe before a single act of war was undertaken. The goal of the campaign is to show how words of hate can become actions, and how those actions can have unimaginable outcomes.
Greg Schneider, Executive Vice President of the Claims Conference said, “You don’t wake up one morning deciding to participate in mass murder. Hate speech, propaganda, antisemitism, and racism were the roots that culminated in genocide. The shocking results of our 2020 U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, which found that 63 percent of Millennials and Gen Z did not know six million Jews were murdered, clarifies for us how important it is, not just to teach the history of the Holocaust, but to provide context for how such a horrific outcome like the Holocaust started.
Several well-known Holocaust survivors from around the world recorded videos to be posted for the campaign.
Holocaust survivor Abe Foxman, born in Poland in 1940, now lives in the U.S. In his campaign video post he shares his thoughts on the origins of the Holocaust, saying “The crematoria, gas chambers in Auschwitz and elsewhere did not begin with bricks, it began with words…evil words, hateful words, antisemitic words, words of prejudice. And they were permitted to proceed to violence because of the absence of words.”
Holocaust survivor and Chairman, Yad Vashem Council Yisrael Meir Lau, born in Poland in 1937, now lives in Israel. His hometown of Piotrkow Trybunalski had more than 10,000 Jews before the war, but most were deported to Treblinka in 1942 and killed. “They thought they could eliminate a people with words,” he says in his video post. “And then it turned out that it indeed happened.”
Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch, was born in 1932 in Munich, Germany where she still lives. In her video post she shares her first memory of being treated differently because she was a Jew. “It began with words. They came before the horrific acts, the murders, the crimes…” she says. “I was four years old, when I was in the courtyard of the house across the street, I wanted to play with the neighbor’s children. I did that almost every day. But now the gate was suddenly locked. My friends looked at me silently, before I could understand what was going on, the concierge’s wife came in and started yelling at me, ‘Jewish children are not allowed to play with our children.’ I was four years old. I didn’t even know what Jews were.”
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) launched a new Holocaust survivor-led, digital campaign Before local anti-Jewish laws were enacted, before neighborhood shops and synagogues were destroyed, and before Jews were forced into ghettos, freight cars, and camps, words were used to stoke the fire of hate.
Paweł Sawicki