May 28, 2025 - Epoch Times
09:58
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| They have begun programs to bring Muslims from Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, to Israel, and to, as you said, Poland, to see Auschwitz. | |
| And so I was there with your producer for March of the Living, which is an event that happens every year on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which is sort of, you know, a brave, defiant moment in Jewish history, which is when Yom HaShoah is now, which is Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day. | |
| people march the like 1.2 miles from Auschwitz one which is sort of the administrative area to Auschwitz to also known as Birkenau which is where the prisoners were enslaved and killed and gassed which is the opposite of what the actual death marches were when they were the Germans knew the Russians were closing in they marched the prisoners in the freezing snow from Auschwitz 2 to Auschwitz 1 so they could burn as much of So they had to clear it out. | |
| So people go now and do the opposite and say sort of here we are. | |
| We are survivors. | |
| And a lot of people after that trip will then go to Israel, which is sort of like this is where we were. | |
| This is where we are. | |
| I didn't get to go to Israel, but I did get to be in Auschwitz with 20 Muslims from Morocco, Pakistan, Jordan, Bahrain, Lebanon, Yemen. | |
| Really An amazing, eclectic group, Syria. | |
| And it was really an incredible experience for me. | |
| I thought, really, I was going... | |
| I think that's really key, not just for the Jewish community, but for humanity. | |
| Like, we need to be talking to each other. | |
| And so they know that that's my work. | |
| They brought me along and I thought I was going to sort of teach these 20 And I did do that. | |
| But really, I learned so much from them. | |
| And I was so pleasantly overjoyed to see how many moderate Muslims there are who are just like you and me, just happen to live in Morocco and smoke more cigarettes than we do, but are compassionate, well-educated, intelligent, moderate, modern. | |
| People who want better relationships and want more understanding. | |
| I mean, some of these people came on this trip at great personal risk. | |
| If you're coming from Pakistan to hang out with Jews in the middle of this Israel-Gaza war, I mean, you could be in real physical danger. | |
| some people we had to, you know, they couldn't be in any photos and their identities had to be kept secret to protect them. | |
| And that they want to understand the truth about Jews and connect in that way so deeply that they're willing to put And that's absolutely fascinating. | |
| I want to dig into that a little more. | |
| Just on the Auschwitz-Birkenau side, I often tell people Auschwitz was the concentration camp. | |
| Birkenau was the death camp. | |
| Right, basically. | |
| I mean, Auschwitz, they still killed people there too, but it was more, it started for sort of Polish. | |
| Prisoners, like political prisoners, if you will. | |
| A lot of people were executed there, but not in sort of the mass gas chamber way that they were in Auschwitz, too. | |
| Right. | |
| More firing squad and torture, you know, the easier ones than the gasser. | |
| Were you surprised at the conversations? | |
| Presumably you're talking about the conversations you were able to have with people. | |
| It's funny because in the Jewish community, we're always saying, and rightfully so, you know, People don't know what Jews are. | |
| They don't know who Jews are. | |
| Most people on planet Earth will never meet a Jew. | |
| Your main touch points, if you're not connected to the Jewish community, are what you see on the news, which right now is mostly Israel bombing civilians, is what it looks like on the news, and what you see in the movies and TV, which is mostly Seinfeld or ultra-Orthodox jewelry dealers. | |
| The same really is true of Muslims. | |
| And there's two billion of them. | |
| So your stereotypes that you had were challenged? | |
| Immediately. | |
| And I didn't even know I had them, really. | |
| And they, you know, I recognized it immediately. | |
| Like, as soon as we were together, I could feel a, let's say, a very slim, thin wall kind of up of like, do I need to be cautious here? | |
| Because, you know, how safe am I to be? | |
| Fully, openly Jewish and American. | |
| Like, how connected can we get here? | |
| And I felt that right away, and I saw it in myself. | |
| I was like, wow, you have this little wall up with these people sort of that you've never met. | |
| And because I noticed it right away, I was able to drop it right away. | |
| And it was beautiful. | |
| That's where all the magic happens, right? | |
| You go to these different sites and you're looking at the tourist things and learning, and then you get on the bus together, and that's when you really get to talk and get to make connections. | |
| And the Moroccan contingent, led by this 21-year-old Sufi shikh, He has like millions of disciples and travels all over. | |
| He sort of led this outbreak of song. | |
| Some Muslim sort of religious song, but was being sung not in a so prayerful way, but in a celebratory, sing-songy way. | |
| and I just felt like I was back in like Jewish sleepaway camp on the bus singing Hebrew songs first of all Hebrew and Arabic are Some of the words are like literally the same word. | |
| Salam aleichem, shalom aleichem. | |
| It's like the same thing. | |
| So I'm hearing words I recognize, the melody, the enthusiasm. | |
| In Hebrew, we call it ruach. | |
| It's like spirit. | |
| And it felt so familiar and so normal and so joyful. | |
| and I felt so at home with them. | |
| And the conversations we had... | |
| were incredible and, you know, different with everybody. | |
| So I don't want to overgeneralize the conversation I had with, you know, an ex-anti-Semite was different than what I had with a 20-year-old French Moroccan girl who's a student in France and teaching herself Hebrew because she is so fascinated and so in love with sort of the Jewish way of life. | |
| So just the fact that I would meet a 20-year-old Moroccan girl who speaks Hebrew was... | |
| So how knowledgeable were the people on the trip that were from the Islamic countries about the Holocaust and the realities of it? | |
| Very little. | |
| I mean, they knew what they were getting into. | |
| They knew they were coming on this trip to go to this site and that the Holocaust was a thing. | |
| But like, for example, I mentioned I spoke to a Yemeni ex-antisemite. | |
| He was very passionate. | |
| And again, the communities where they come from, there's a ton of just straight Holocaust, now that didn't happen, or it wasn't that many, because they're literally being taught that. | |
| I mean, it is very clearly indoctrination. | |
| So once they came and got to see it for themselves, that was a very meaningful part of the trip was seeing people People decided that this group of people should be absolutely wiped out. | |
| Man, woman, child, elder, you're all getting killed. | |
| And seeing people grapple with that and really take it in was very meaningful. | |
| And I hope it's something they take back to their communities and talk about and help disseminate around them. | |
| Because it's vital. | |
| Misinformation is maybe the most potent weapon against Jews and Israel and Western values that we're seeing right now. | |
| What did you do other than, you know, which sites did you visit? | |
| So we spent about 24 hours in Berlin to start, which was sort of like a scene-setting moment. | |
| So we saw the Brandenburg Gate, and we went outside the Reichstag building, and we went to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, which is this really sort of haunting collection of slabs of concrete, sort of almost a maze. | |
| That's just sort of meant to disorient you. | |
| very powerful. | |
| And we met with the And we met someone from within the German government who's sort of their liaison for fighting anti-Semitism, got to hear from him. | |
| And then we went to Krakow, which is where we were based out of, in Poland. | |
| And the bulk of that stop was Auschwitz, so we went twice. | |
| We went for the March of the Living, which you don't really get to explore too much. | |
| It's, you know, everybody gets set up. | |
| You march and that's kind of over and it was pouring pouring rain like the hardest rain that I've been outside in in a very long time which was sort of fitting and for me it really sort of grounded me in like where I was in the history and thinking about how there were Jewish slaves there working out in that kind of rain in you know threadbare pajamas starving to death and having to do physical labor and be shot if they Didn't keep | |
| up. | |
| And meanwhile, I'm freezing in the cold, but I get to go on a warm bus and get a hot meal after this. | |
| So we did that, but then we came back the next day and were able to do an immersive three-, four-hour visit where we really were taken around with a guide and got to see everything that's on display there and go into the gas chambers and to the barracks and understand, |
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