In a recent interview on the CNN podcast “The Axe Files,” crime writer Sara Paretsky talked about the antisemitism she faced growing up in a Jewish family in Kansas in the 1950s — antisemitism that limited what neighborhoods she and her family were allowed to live in.
Paretsky noted that Jews were subject to the same racially restrictive covenant laws as African Americans, which excluded them from housing in small Midwestern towns as well as in big cities such as Chicago.
As we recognized Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, we should recall that the links between white supremacy and antisemitism have deep roots across the Midwest, roots that help feed the violence and vitriol we are seeing across the U.S. right now.
And that denial of the Holocaust is key to understanding that linkage.
I was in my late 20s the first time I met a Holocaust denier in a university classroom in Terre Haute, Indiana, in the early 1990s. I knew that Nazis had marched in Skokie and that antisemitism was not a thing of the past. But it’s safe to say that if I thought about denialism at all, I imagined it happened in Europe, not in my Midwestern backyard.
And then there I was, facing two students who told the class that the concentration camps established by the Nazis were simply places where Jews were “allowed to go” so that they could “worship separately.” I was stunned and speechless. Apparently, the shock was evident on my face. An older student approached me after class and asked: Did you know there is a Holocaust survivor living in town?
That is how I met Eva Mozes Kor, a real estate agent in Terre Haute. Not only was she a Holocaust survivor, but also, she and her twin sister, Miriam, had been subject to the medical “experiments” of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, at Auschwitz.
I invited Eva to my classroom, where she told her story: the trauma of her family being pulled from their home in the village of Portz, Romania, and taken to Auschwitz. There, the children were forcibly separated from their parents, whom they never saw again. Eva rolled up her sleeve and revealed the concentration camp number — A-7063 — that had been inked into her forearm. And she narrated everything that happened to her and Miriam until the end of the war and the liberation of the camps in 1945.
Eva traveled extensively to bring her message to the world, giving tours of various camps and preaching her message about the power of the human spirit. She was steely in her determination that no one could or should ever doubt the truth of her story or of the Holocaust as genocide. When she was interviewed on “60 Minutes” in 1992 from her home in Terre Haute, the world could see who she was: defiant, resilient and a pacifist.
But Eva never forgot how important the hometown audience was. She built a museum called CANDLES, which stands for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors, in Terre Haute. A space of memory and education, CANDLES was firebombed in 2003, two years after Oklahoma City bomber and anti-government extremist Timothy McVeigh was executed in the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute. The graffiti scrawled at the scene said, “Remember Timmy McVeigh.”
No one was ever prosecuted for the crime. And CANDLES was rebuilt. But that graffiti speaks to links between white supremacy and antisemitism that are long and deep in American history. So, when we remember the Holocaust, we should recall Eva Kor and the work she did in Terre Haute, as well as on the world stage.
Kor was as American as apple pie. She died in 2019 on the Fourth of July. She is buried in Highland Lawn Cemetery in Terre Haute — a town which, thanks to its proximity to Route 66, is known colloquially as the Crossroads of America. And there’s a mural of her in Indianapolis right next to one of writer Kurt Vonnegut.
I’ve recounted this story to friends for decades to remind people that the Holocaust is not something “out there,” disconnected from the American heartland. And that the kinship between Holocaust denialism and white supremacy is as American as apple pie too.
As the world rages over and grieves for the death and destruction wrought by sectarian hatred, we must work to make the links between antisemitism, Islamophobia and white Christian nationalism better known.
“Forgive your worst enemy,” was Eva Kor’s watchword. Forgive, and acknowledge wrongdoing.
