GUEST OPINION, Oct. 3
By: Eitan Paul
Iranian President Ahmoud Ahmadinejad believes that the murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust is a great exaggeration. "They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets," he has said. "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury."
Because the modern state of Israel was created out of the ashes of the Holocaust, the Iranian president’s effort to discredit the Holocaust is part of a shrewd plan to disavow Israel’s right to exist. This ideology of hate is a great threat to the state of Israel and to Jews everywhere.
This past summer, I visited the former Terezienstadt ghetto in the Czech Republic. Terezienstadt was Hitler’s mythic town where Jewish culture and art was gathered and showcased for the world. In reality, of the nearly 200,000 Czech Jews transported there between 1942 and 1945, a total of 97,297 died. Among the dead, 15,000 were children.
My grandmother was taken from a ghetto similar to Terezienstadt Auschwitz where she was the only member of her large family to survive. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner and fellow Auschwitz survivor, poignantly described the Auschwitz experience as a time and place where death was the norm and life, the exception. At least one third of the estimated 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in Auschwitz.
I asked my grandmother what she thought about President Ahmadinejad’s pursuit to re-examine the Holocaust. In a voice full of anger, she said, "I can’t sleep through a night without seeing the concentration camp. It is painful to live with such an ache in your heart. You carry it with you all of your life. How dare he! Never in history has something so horrific happened. How dare he deny!"
My grandfather, recently awarded the Hungarian Medal of Bravery for saving Jewish lives as a resistance fighter, offered his perspective: "[Denial of the Holocaust] is mind-boggling. The Nazi movement began with lies. (President Ahmadinejad) is looking to carve himself a place in history with this position. He hopes to energize some people and draw more attention to his crippled mind. The facts speak for themselves."
While I was in Israel this past summer, I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust History Museum. There I traveled through time, from the beginnings of hateful propaganda against the Jewish people through Hitler’s genocide of 6 million Jews. I saw anti-Semitic posters created by the Nazis to dehumanize the Jewish population. Dehumanizing the Jewish people was the first step that led to the unthinkable horrors of the Holocaust. Recently, Iran exhibited similarly dehumanizing "art" portraying the Jewish people.
Is the Iranian president a modern-day Hitler? Not yet. But his efforts to create hatred are terrifying. He is not secretive in his wish that Israel be destroyed. We must invigorate mes- sages of peace and continue to spread awareness and tolerance through education. President Ahmadinejad has clearly warned the world what he wishes to accomplish. We must heed his warning and take action.
Eitan Paul is a junior at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South.

