JNS
Gabriella Major told attendees at an AJC event that she survived the Holocaust based on a stroke of luck some 80 years ago.
It was a stroke of luck that the cattle car in which Gabriella Major sat as a small child with her mother and grandmother in 1944 diverted to the Strasshof transit camp near Vienna, Austria, rather than its original destination of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“It was a horrible place,” Gabriella Major, 81, said at an International Holocaust Remembrance Day event on Monday hosted by the American Jewish Committee to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
“At 2 years old, I was fending for myself,” she told the crowd of about 50 at the nonprofit’s Upper East Side headquarters in New York City. “Miraculously, my mother and I survived through nine months of very tough kinds of disease, extreme hunger and guilt.”
The native of Debrecen—Hungary's second-largest city after the capital of Budapest—was held in the city’s ghetto for months before being deported on the train, which diverted to Strasshof. After the transit camp was liberated, her family returned to Debrecen to “rebuild from the ashes.” She lost 28 family members in the Holocaust, she told attendees.
Her family remained in the country until 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution, which followed years of Jew-hatred under the Communist government, forced her and her relatives to flee to the United States.
“I was 14 at the time, and I prevailed on my family, especially my father, to flee our country in order to become free Jews,” she said. “We escaped to Austria, and eventually were able to enter the United States, where we started a new life once again.”
Her greatest revenge against the Nazis has been building a family.
“Together with my husband, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor from Hungary, we were blessed with a large family,” she told attendees. “I am grateful to have a wonderful family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
“They give me much joy and happiness, a real vengeance to the Holocaust,” she said.
Sharing her story of survival is even more urgent amid rising Jew-hatred, according to Major.
“For 12 years, I have been educating students and adults about the horrors and lessons of the Holocaust,” she stated. “My message is passionate, and I tell them that they are my ambassadors to convey to the world that hatred of people of any race, religion, color, cannot be tolerated—and that hate kills.”
“I explained to them that history might repeat itself. Unfortunately, it already has,” she added.
Surging antisemitism today includes “open hatred with posts on social media that deny and distort the Holocaust, with hateful statements that spread like wildfire,” she told attendees.
“We must fight this baseless hatred,” she said.
It has been difficult for Major and other survivors to witness the explosion of antisemitism on college campuses since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, especially at Columbia University, where her grandson is a student.
“He worked so hard to get in, and we were so excited for him,” she said. “Columbia University is one of the best Ivy League schools in the country, and Jewish students were unable to study and live on campus.”
“When I came to the United States at 14-and-a-half, I remember telling myself, ‘I am in a safe place, and my children and grandchildren will not have to experience what I did,’” she said. “But we survivors cannot remain silent.”
Major encouraged attendees to contact their elected officials to speak up about bigotry.
“Jews and other faiths alike must unite to repair our world, as we call it in Hebrew, tikkun olam,” she said. “We cannot be passive. We must be active and proactive. We need to reach out to our elected officials, through phone calls and emails, to represent us in fighting hatred, antisemitism and prejudice of any kind. I have been doing this since Oct. 7.”
“We need to maximize our efforts to educate and teach zero tolerance for hatred and build a better world one good deed at a time,” she added.
‘Holocaust inversion’
Major shared her story of survival at the Jan. 27 event, which drew diplomats from the United Nations and included a discussion with experts about the rise of Holocaust denial and the future of Holocaust education in countering Jew-hatred.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) told attendees that it is important to pass the Holocaust Education and Antisemitism Lessons (HEAL) Act, of which he is a co-sponsor, and that Israel is not guilty of “genocide” against the Palestinian population in Gaza, contrary to antisemitic accusations.
Goldman said younger people have a “jarring” lack of understanding about the Holocaust compared to older generations, which he said is the reason that Holocaust denial is rising. “It’s part of the reason why Elon Musk is trying already to whitewash the Holocaust and why the AfD in Germany is rising,” he said.
Gideon Taylor, president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said at the event that new patterns of Holocaust denial and distortion have been emerging in recent years.
“What we are increasingly calling ‘Holocaust inversion,’ is the attribution of the characteristics of the Nazis to Israel and Israelis,” he told attendees. “The epithet that someone is ‘like the Nazis’ is one that has been likely thrown around for years but is moving from isolated individuals and creeping into academic and public discourse.”
“It is not just an attack on the actions of Israel,” he said. “It is a perverse use of the history and imagery of the Holocaust to do so.”
Embracing artificial intelligence technology and social media can be an effective strategy to teach younger generations about Holocaust memory, according to Taylor.
“AI is enabling the creation of effective ‘deep fakes’ around the Holocaust, which are then amplified by social media and can cause enormous damage to having the truth be understood,” he said.
“On the other hand, AI also enables us to digitize millions and millions of pages that will serve as evidence of what happened for generations to come,” he said. “It can allow us to take films and photos that would otherwise remain fragments, unknown, unnamed in archives, and put names to those faces.”
