By Andrew Kirsch, January 27, 2025
Holocaust Remembrance Day is a time to reflect on the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jews, along with millions of other minority groups, by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. It is a crime that remains unprecedented in the modern world. Known as the Holocaust, to Jews it is the Shoah, “the Catastrophe.” As the full horror of the Holocaust became self-evident, the term “genocide” was coined in 1943 and adopted by the United Nations Genocide Convention in December 1948.
Recently we have seen attempts to appropriate and distort these sacred words that were conceived to define this particularly horrific moment in human history. Antisemites and their morally vacuous enablers are currently stretching the definition of the word genocide beyond recognizable meaning in a cynical attempt to punish and delegitimize its victims and their legacy.
Today is also the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – the notorious death camp where 1.1 million people were murdered, including 960,000 Jews. Every day the Auschwitz Memorial’s X social media feed posts a photo and brief description of a victim of the Holocaust. Sometimes it’s a prisoner photo but more often, it’s not – it’s a wedding picture, or a cropped family portrait.
And sometimes, as on December 10, 2024, it’s a baby photo. On that day in 1942, 927 Jews arrived in Auschwitz from the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Of those new arrivals, death camp officials sent 898 to be murdered in the gas chambers. One of them was Betje van Delft. She was just 10 months old.
Another word that’s come to be perversely invoked is “Nazi.” All cultures have traditionally created legends and mythical creatures to express their fears and personify evil in the world. Vampires, zombies, and other monsters came to be a colloquial representation of that which is soulless, heartless, destructive, or mindlessly brutal. The informality with which Nazi is now similarly cast about in popular culture is disheartening. To see the word used as slur against supporters of Israel – a last refuge for survivors that continues to be beset by enemies with explicit intent of their destruction – is a disgrace.
The term genocide was created not to include all acts of war, but to distinguish this specific terror from all other crimes against humanity. When Nazis ripped 10-month-old Betje from her parent’s arms, gassed her, and burned her in an oven, they did so with the express intent of wiping Jews from the face of the earth. And they didn’t act alone – they had commanders, and were supported by their neighbours, community, and state.
When we call everyone a Nazi and everything a genocide, we lose our understanding of both the scale of the Holocaust and the specific and intentional cruelty of its perpetrators.
On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, with Jews around the world once again facing rising antisemitism, it is important to reclaim the true meaning of the events, the brutality of the perpetrators, and the innocence of its victims. In so doing we honour the memory of those that perished, strengthen our resolve to combat antisemitism, and re-commit to the sacred promise made in the shadow of the death camps: “Never Again.”
Andrew Kirsch is the founder of Kirsch Group, a risk consulting firm. Kirsch previously served as an intelligence officer with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for just under a decade. He is the author of the bestselling memoir, I Was Never Here: My True Canadian Spy Story of Coffee’s, Code Names and Covert Operations in the Age of Terrorism.
