Holocaust Survivors Take to Social Media Fight Against Growing Anti-Semitism
For Holocaust Remembrance Day, Holocaust survivors took to social media to take on anti-Semitism and inform the youngest generation on the Holocaust and what the National Socialist Party (Nazi Party) of Germany did during World War II.
The social media outreach is in the form of six videos that were released on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
The campaign is titled #ItStartedWithWords and particularly focuses on hate speech and how the Nazis used it to marginalize Jewish communities and throw Jewish people into concentration camps. “The campaign will demonstrate how hateful language can evolve into unimaginable outcomes,” the campaign says on its Facebook compilation video.
The videos are by six Holocaust survivors, and in them, the survivors recount how the Holocaust happened and how they were treated.
One of the survivors, Eva Schloss, was just nine years old when her neighbors shunned her and her family. She remembers visiting a neighbor and watching the door be slammed in her face as the neighbors said, “We never want to see you again.”
There’s a compilation of all the videos released by the organization that is backing the campaign. The organization describes the #ItStartedWithWords campaign as a “Claims Conference Holocaust education campaign in which Holocaust survivors from around the world reflect on a time when they could not have predicted how their neighbors, teachers, classmates and colleagues transitioned from using hurtful words to deadly violence.”
The campaign also has a website, ItStartedWithWords.org. The purpose of the campaign is to teach people the history of the Holocaust and to demonstrate how hateful language can turn into horrific actions toward human beings.
Their website states, “#ItStartedWithWords is a Holocaust education campaign in which Holocaust survivors from around the world reflect on the moments leading up to the Holocaust – a time they could not have predicted the transition their neighbors, teachers, classmates and colleagues made from words to violence – that will demonstrate how hateful language can evolve into actions with unimaginable outcomes.”
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Carsten Koall/Stringer
John Paluska has been a contributor for Christian Headlines since 2016 and is the founder of The Washington Gazette, a news outlet he relaunched in 2019 as a response to the constant distribution of fake news.
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