SOTU Schiff FULL_00022803.jpg
Schiff: Border facilities not 'concentration camps'
01:04 - Source: CNN

Editor’s Note: Lev Golinkin writes on refugee and immigrant identity, as well as Ukraine, Russia, and the far right. He is the author of the memoir “A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN  — 

The debate over invoking concentration camps and the Holocaust in response to the US asylum seeker crisis shows no signs of abating. Hundreds of scholars signed a letter condemning the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s statement – rejecting the analogy – on the matter. Meanwhile, Jewish activists held protests in New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, with more scheduled this week. The protests use the hashtag #NeverAgain, clearly alluding to the Holocaust.

Many Americans forget that this isn’t the first human rights movement to do so. The 1970’s – 1980’s campaign to free Soviet Jews, including me and my family, made liberal use of the Holocaust by inaccurately comparing the USSR to Nazi Germany.

Lev Golinkin

I know my family greatly benefited from Holocaust guilt. I’m not sorry, and I’m not sorry to see it being put to work again against the atrocities on our southern border.

Ex-Soviet Jews who fled to the West were stationed in refugee camps in Italy and Austria. Both nations paid a heavy price for sheltering us, enduring numerous attacks by Palestinian terror groups determined to staunch Jewish emigration. Yet despite the bloodshed and tensions between us and the locals, the former Axis states continued to grant us asylum. As one Jewish organizer told me, “After the Holocaust, they pretty much had to say yes.”

Families like mine, who didn’t have relatives in the US, came to America sponsored by Jewish federations. Communities across the country accepted responsibility for – and opened their homes to – complete strangers. Here, too, Holocaust guilt played a role.

Some American Jews were haunted by their inaction in the lead-up to the Holocaust, when so many powerful figures had elected to remain silent rather than aid their brethren. Years later, when stories of Moscow’s anti-Semitism reached US shores, many were determined to atone for the apathy of an earlier generation. An entire generation of American Jews marched for our freedom, chaining themselves to the Soviet embassy, and lobbying DC to pressure Moscow to release its Jews.

The organizers of this decades-long campaign made unambiguous use of the Holocaust by bluntly comparing the USSR to Nazi Germany. “Three Million More?” proclaimed one popular button worn at marches and protests. Another button featured a yellow star trapped in the Soviet Union. One poster had the hammer and sickle next to a swastika. “This Time We Won’t Be Silent” said another poster. Yet another warned of Moscow’s “cultural genocide” of the Jews.

Truth is, the USSR had little in common with Nazi Germany.

Yes, the Kremlin imprisoned Jewish prisoners of conscience in the gulags. Yes, there was rampant anti-Semitism, state-led persecution of dissident families, anti-Jewish quotas at universities, and suppression of Jewish religion and culture. But that’s light years away from ghettos and camps, to say nothing of Auschwitz. From the mid-1950s onward, there was no indication of Moscow planning to imprison or exterminate Jews en masse. The “cultural genocide” wasn’t actual genocide; there were no “Three Million More.”

It’s not a light thing to realize your freedom was made possible by piggybacking on shame, guilt, and overstretched analogies to one of the greatest atrocities of human history. But I don’t feel guilty about it: I can’t.

The most depressing part about studying the Holocaust isn’t the Nazis; it’s everyone else. It’s learning about people who sold milk to SS guards coming home from the camps, the ones who gleefully moved into vacated Jewish apartments, the ones who yawned while cattle cars rattled by. It’s hearing about America closing its doors to the M.S. St. Louis – the ship, which carried over 900 German Jews seeking asylum, made its way to the US border after first being refused by the Cuban government.

By the time you read about the New York Times deliberately downplaying Nazi atrocities, the full scope of the apathy emerges, and you realize that Nazis were aided by an indifference that reached across continents.

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    And yet, the Holocaust also led ordinary people to fight for strangers halfway across the world. It inspired everyday Austrians who gave us clothing, food, and shelter when I was a refugee. It galvanized an entire generation of Americans into interrupting their sheltered lives to march for people they’d never met. Today, it’s leading Jews and non-Jews alike to stand against the inhumanity of ICE camps.

    Seven and a half decades later, the most massive display of apathy in history still manages to impel us to speak for the rights and dignity of others.

    And I’m eternally grateful for that.