The world watched last week as hostages held in Gaza returned home. It was a moment of relief and grief intertwined. Some walked free into their families’ arms; others are coming home only for burial. For a brief instant, humanity seemed to hold its breath.
Still, for those of us who work in the shadow of Auschwitz, this is more than a headline. It’s a reminder that civilizations rise or fall by what they choose to remember and what they permit themselves to forget.
To see a hostage step into daylight is a small resurrection. However, redemption continues in how we restore humanity and ensure that the innocent are never used as bargaining chips again.
In Jewish tradition, redeeming captives ranks among the highest commandments because captivity extinguishes personhood. Release is only the beginning.
Since October 7, when families were torn from their homes by Hamas terrorists, the world has grown perilously comfortable with blurring lines that should never blur. Kidnapping children and the elderly is not resistance.
It is terrorism – the deliberate weaponization of innocence. To equate Israel’s defense with Hamas’s atrocities ignores intent: a nation’s duty to protect its citizens versus a terror group’s purpose to annihilate them.
The difference between a state defending its people and a movement devoted to their extermination is not nuance. It is civilization versus barbarism.
Holocaust inversion and weaponizing Jewish trauma
In the wake of the hostage crisis, a more insidious phenomenon has emerged: Holocaust inversion – the grotesque rewriting of history that paints Jews as Nazis and terrorists as freedom fighters.
This inversion desecrates the memory of the six million murdered and assaults the truth on which postwar civilization was rebuilt.
A particularly cruel distortion has appeared across social media. Some posts have falsely equated Gaza’s suffering with the Holocaust, weaponizing Jewish trauma to vilify Israel.
This is not solidarity. It is a hijacking of history. The Holocaust was the systematic, industrial extermination of a people for being Jewish. To appropriate that identity in the service of anti-Jewish propaganda is to participate in denial itself.
It turns remembrance into parody and victimhood into weaponry, a betrayal of truth and of every survivor who bore witness so the world might know the difference.
The art of moral corrosion
The moral corrosion we witness today was not spontaneous. It was cultivated in comment threads, conspiracy channels, and studios masquerading as newsrooms. Nazi propagandists once perfected the art of turning lies into ideology.
Joseph Goebbels learned that repetition and outrage could transform prejudice into policy. Today, social media has industrialized that process, rewarding antisemitic conspiracies and grievance-based outrage.
The names have changed – Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, George Galloway – but the pattern is familiar: resentment packaged as revelation, ancient tropes recycled as truth.
After World War II, humanity stood amid the ruins of its conscience. Yet from that devastation emerged a new vocabulary: crimes against humanity, universal rights, and never again.
At Nuremberg, the world affirmed that ideology is no defense for atrocity. Evil must be named publicly and precisely.
Germany’s transformation wasn’t automatic. Through decades of civic education, it rebuilt its identity on truth. Classrooms replaced propaganda halls. Memorials rose where death camps once stood.
Students learned to confront their nation’s crimes – not to wallow in guilt but to safeguard conscience. Those dividends were measured not in currency but in courage.
We must rediscover that courage now. The fight against antisemitism, disinformation, and extremism is not a Jewish project. It is a democratic one. The same principles that rebuilt Europe must guide the world again: truth above ideology, empathy above rage, and education above exploitation.
This lesson also applies to Palestinian schools. Replacing textbooks that glorify martyrdom with curricula emphasizing shared humanity would mirror Germany’s reforms, teaching history that fosters peace rather than perpetuates hate.
It applies equally to our own universities, where moral clarity erodes under slogans and intimidation. The postwar world rebuilt itself by teaching the difference between truth and propaganda, and we must do the same, from Gaza’s schools to America’s lecture halls.
After the war, the free world built more than cities; it built moral infrastructure: the United Nations, UNESCO, and human rights courts designed to anchor conscience in law. Those guardrails are weakening.
When universities excuse hate as scholarship and international bodies hesitate to name terror, the postwar order crumbles brick by brick. When the UN still fails to designate Hamas as a terrorist organization despite its record of civilian attacks, it undermines the very human rights principles it was created to defend.
Remembrance without responsibility is only nostalgia
Auschwitz is not only a cemetery of the past; it is a mirror for the present. Each time a hostage is taken and the world hesitates, we see that reflection again.
The Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation exists to turn memory into responsibility. Our programs train young leaders to confront hate with knowledge and to understand that antisemitism is never only about Jews but about the corrosion of truth itself.
We bring together black, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim students to learn that intolerance, when unchallenged, never stays confined to one group.
In 2024, 85% of participants reported a deeper understanding of how propaganda fuels intolerance, and many went on to challenge hate in their own communities.
We build partnerships from Polish classrooms to American universities, ensuring that the lessons of the Shoah are lived, not merely recited. Because remembrance without responsibility is only nostalgia.
After 1945, the world stood at a moral crossroads and chose reconstruction through truth. Today, we face that choice again.
Will we confront the machinery of lies or surrender to it? Will we honor the survivors of Auschwitz and of captivity today by building a world in which their suffering was not in vain?
The hostages’ return is a moment of grace, but only conscience can heal the world. The postwar generation built an order that valued human dignity above political convenience.
Our generation must decide whether to preserve this order or let it crumble into the algorithmic abyss. When I walk through Auschwitz, I am reminded that evil never announces itself as evil.
It presents itself as reason, as necessity, as defense. The same rhetoric echoes now in posts, in protests, and in parliaments. We must have the courage to recognize it before it grows fangs again.
From the fragile shelters of Sukkot to the fragile shelters of captivity, Jewish history teaches that freedom is never secure. It must be rebuilt generation after generation.
The release of the hostages is not an end but a beginning, a summons to moral clarity in an age of distortion. Let us not waste the lessons our ancestors paid for in blood.
Let us remember what the world once knew: truth is sacred, hate is contagious, and silence is never neutral.
The writer is director-general of The Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation.