Remembering the Sho'ah | Passover haggadah by Noraa Kaplan

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cw: sexual assault

As we break the middle matzah tonight, we remember the break in Jewish life that happened during World War II. The Nazis did irreperable damage to our people, killing six million of us—two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Jews call this genocide the Sho’ah, the catastrophe.

It’s difficult to try to sum up an atrocity of such horrific magnitude as the Sho’ah. The scale of human suffering is beyond comprehension. Quantifying the Sho’ah is hard enough—it’s hard to wrap our heads around numbers like six million. Attempting to truly appreciate the diversity of experiences victims of the Sho’ah went through is all but impossible. We tend to focus on the deaths alone, without thinking about the ordeals victims went through before they died.

Millions of Jews were incarcerated in concentration camps, where they were dehumanized and forced to do backbreaking labor and live in deplorably unsanitary conditions. Diseases like typhus ran rampant, and prisoners regularly collapsed from hunger. Upon arriving at these camps, Jews would generally be stripped, have their heads shaved and be assigned a number which was tattooed on their arm. Many Jews were tortured, used for medical experimentation, or sexually assaulted. The Jews who survived these concentration camps were left with permanent trauma from witnessing the deaths of their loved ones and fellow prisoners.

Some Jews have criticized comparing ICE detention centers and American prisons to Nazi concentration camps. They say that doing so diminishes the Holocaust’s legacy, but this is ahistorical for many reasons. What they fail to understand about Hitler’s concentration camps is that they were not a new innovation or an anomaly unique only to Nazi Germany—they were prisons. That’s not to say there aren’t significant differences between contemporary American prisons and extermination camps like Auschwitz. American prisons aren’t killing prisoners en masse, and unlike Auschwitz’s prisoners, most American prisoners have been duly convicted of a crime, albeit through a corrupt justice system. But in most other respects, American prisons and German concentration camps work the same way for the same goal: maintaining white supremacy.

The conditions of American prisons are comparable to concentration camps in many ways. Hunger and malnutrition due to inedible or insufficient food are widespread issues in American prisons. Prisons are extremely unsanitary places with deplorable living conditions—often infested with rats, mice and other pests, insufficiently heated, cramped and over-crowded with facilities that have fallen into disrepair where diseases and sexually transmitted infections run rampant. Despite having little access to adequate medical care, incarcerated people in the US have

historically been used as test subjects for medical experimentation and clinical drug trials, a practice which continues to this day.
Like Nazi concentration camps, virtually all American prisons force incarcerated people into slave labor, often dangerous and exhausting work. For instance, in California, some incarcerated people work 24-hour shifts risking their lives fighting wildfires, for which they are paid $2 a day. Ironically, spots at these Conservation Fire Camps are considered highly coveted among California prisoners, simply because the conditions of regular institutions are so dangerous and poor. Prisoners are subjected to a wide spectrum of extrajudicial punishment by correctional officers, including (but not limited to) beatings, waterboarding, chemical weapons, starvation, torture, denial of essential medications, and placement in solitary confinement for weeks, months, or years at a time. Guards also often sexually assault and murder prisoners, with no repurcussions.

Some might concede that American prisons are cruel, but disagree with comparing them with concentration camps because they don’t share the Nazi camps’ genocidal purpose. What they fail to consider is the long history of institutional eugenics in the United States, which continues to this day. From 2006 to 2010, California illegally sterilized 150 incarcerated prisoners; in 2020, ICE forcibly sterilized several detainees by giving them unwanted hysterectomies. Seven US states chemically castrate people on their sex offender lists. Some US judges offer reduced prison sentences to all criminals (not just those classified as sex offenders) if they are willing to undergo a sterilization procedure. Blatant eugenics in the American justice system may be a surprise to some people, but in fact it’s nothing new. In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that forcible sterilization of the ‘unfit’ (a catchall term for mentally ill and disabled people, as well as incarcerated people) was constitutional. This case, Buck v. Bell (which has not been overtuned) was used by Nazis at the Nuremburg Trials as part of their defense for ‘euthanizing’ disabled people at the beginning of the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler himself based his “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” on American eugenics legislation.

In addition to the six million Jews murdered during the Shoah, the Nazis killed five million non-Jews in their concentration camps. Among those killed were: Polish people, Ukrainians, Serbs, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and disabled people. In recent years, greater attention has been shown to the thousands of gay men who died in concentration camps. The pink triangle that they were forced to wear on their uniforms has been reclaimed as a symbol of gay pride. Few people realize that after the war, most gays who survived the Sho’ah were prosecuted and incarcerated for their ‘crimes’ under Paragraph 175, a Nazi-era law criminalizing homosexual acts that “offended the general sense of shame” which wasn’t repealed after World War II.

But there were other victims of the Holocaust who are almost never mentioned in conversations about this great atrocity. In addition to the pink triangles worn by gay men, there were also red triangle prisoners— anarchists, socialists, communists, and people who joined the resistance against fascism, as well as non-Jews who hid Jews or helped them escape Nazi Europe. There were also black triangle prisoners—people who were deemed ‘asocial’ or ‘work-shy’ including mentally ill and developmentally disabled people, alcoholics, drug addicts, homeless people, unemployed people, sex workers, people with diabetes (considered to be a “Jewish disease”) and lesbians. Then there were green triangle prisoners, who were sent to the concentration camps for the same reason most American prisoners are incarcerated today: they had committed a crime.

One of the reasons the Sho’ah is popularly imagined by many as the “ultimate evil,” the epitome of injustice is that the six million Jews who died were killed so senselessly. They weren’t guilty of any crime. But there were gay Jews in the concentration camps, as well as leftist Jews and Jews who were political prisoners. Among the six million there were Jews who developmentally disabled and mentally ill, there were alcoholic Jews and Jews who were addicted to drugs, there were Jewish sex workers and antifascist resistance members, there were homeless Jews, unemployed Jews, lesbian Jews, and yes, there were Jewish ‘criminals.’ They wore the pink, red, black, and green triangles too—superimposed on top of the yellow stars sewn into their uniforms. Their deaths are just as tragic as the deaths of the Jews who were ‘innocent,’ their stories are just as important. Even the criminals among them did not deserve to be treated like cattle, dehumanized and stripped of their identity, forced into slave labor, turned into walking skeletons by malnutrition, made to live in squalor, exposed to deadly diseases and used for medical experimentation, forcibly sterilized, beaten, raped, or killed. Neither do the people incarcerated in prisons today. During the Sho’ah, Jews and ‘criminals’ faced a common enemy, and they met a common fate. Tonight, we are all criminals.

The generations of Jews who’ve grown up in the wake of the Sho’ah have been given a 614th mitzvah: never again. It seems even the most secular of Jews accept this commandment as binding, and understand its gravity. The Jewish people is obligated to ensure that the horrors of the Sho’ah are never repeated. But frankly, we have failed to fulfill this commandment. Only three years after the Sho’ah ended, the Nakba began. Israel is still occupying Palestinian land and carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign. And American Jews are all too often silent about ICE’s concentration camps, the police’s mass murder of Black people, and human rights abuses in prisons. With the recent rise of blatant fascism in the United States, we can no longer afford to be silent about the genocides being perpetuated in our name.

haggadah Section: Yachatz

Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan