What is ‘Just Like the Holocaust?’ Nothing. Nothing Else

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, here is my family’s story. No current events can or should be compared to it.

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I think of my great-grandmother Betty Lövy. In 1944, she was deported from Hungary, forced onto a train, and murdered in Auschwitz. My grandfather told me of her quiet faith and strength. Here is her Yad Vashem Page of Testimony.

Somewhere in the USA, there is a Latina Anne Frank hiding from ICE in an attic.

This meme has been circulating on social media, and it demonstrates how comparisons to the Holocaust can diminish its singular horror. The current treatment of immigrants in the United States, especially children, may be tragic. But there is a profound difference between deportations and family separations and the systematic, state-sponsored genocide of an entire people.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It’s a day to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, including 1.5 million children, and the countless individual stories of loss and survival.

I think of the story of my great-aunt Hedwig. My grandfather said she looked a great deal like my daughter, with blonde hair.

She, her husband, and their children were hiding in the forests of Slovakia during the Holocaust, living in constant fear. At one point, a rumor spread that it was safe for Jews to come out of hiding. Aunt Hedwig believed it. Her family emerged, only to be handed over to the Germans and murdered.

If there’s an appropriate analogy to Anne Frank, it’s my great-aunt’s children’s story. Before I get back to that, though, let me tell you the rest of my family’s Holocaust story.

This story is based on memories passed on to me by my grandfather and by my great-uncle Charles, who went back to Hungary after the war, but changed his name to Lukacs, which sounded less Jewish. Charles became a journalist in postwar Hungary, and many relatives said that I take after him. My grandfather helped Charles get out in 1956 during the Soviet invasion, and he Americanized his name to Lucas. I spent a lot of time with my great-uncle Charles before he passed away in his 90s. It’s where I get a lot of my firsthand information about the Holocaust.

It was in 1939 that Charles put a four-year-old Andrew Lovy—my father—on a train heading west out of Budapest. He was accompanied by my grandmother Elza. They both later joined my grandfather, who had gone on ahead to America to establish a life there. My grandparents didn’t have to see the crematoria to know that they were waiting for them. I owe my existence to the far-sightedness of my Grandpa Joe, who got out in time.

Hungarian Jews sat out most of the war in relative peace, although with increasingly draconian anti-Jewish laws passed. Hungarian ruler Admiral Horthy was allied with the Germans, but would not do the Nazis’ bidding when it came to the Jews. At least, not yet.

But toward the end of the war—when Horthy knew it was lost—he tried to make a separate peace with the Russians, who were already on Hungary’s doorstep. So, on October 15, 1944, the day Horthy was to announce his surrender to the Russians, the Germans stepped in and installed a Nazi puppet regime run by the viciously anti-Semitic Arrow Cross.

Then the familiar pattern began. First, influential Jews were stripped of their government and teaching positions. Next, Jewish businesses were smashed, looted, burned, or confiscated. Then Jews were stripped of all their possessions, rounded up and, starving, forced into cramped and disease-ridden ghettos. Entire villages in the Hungarian countryside were drained of their Jews, who were transported to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, or Mauthausen.

Already, most of European Jewry had been murdered. The world knew that Hungary was next—including Franklin Roosevelt. There were formal protests, and attempts to make secret deals to save the lives of a few Jews here and there, but the Allies—by then firmly superior in the air and on the ground—did nothing to save the Hungarian Jews.

The world watched.

Death-camp deportations and mass executions of Hungarian Jews were recorded matter-of-factly on the inside pages of the New York Times.

Sometime in the summer of 1944, my great-grandmother—a deeply religious woman who came from a long line of rabbis and Jewish scholars—was placed in a cattle car, taken to Auschwitz, and murdered in a gas chamber.

My uncles Andor and Charles were able-bodied men, so they were used as slave labor. By the end of 1944, they were marched from one camp to another, just a few steps ahead of the advancing Allies. They were taken to the border of Austria and made to dig anti-tank trenches to try and slow the Russian army. The conditions were appalling, as sadistic German guards murdered Jews at random and threw their bodies in the trenches dug by the victims.

It was by chance that Andor, in a separate death march, met up with his brother Charles. They marched together for a while. But soldiers of the nearly defeated German army were firing random machine-gun volleys into the marchers. My uncles decided it would be best if they split apart, so one of them would have a better chance of surviving until liberation.

They were right. Andor fell when one of his German guards opened fire. He would have been killed, but the Germans were in a hurry at this point. He heard one of the say, “Don’t waste a bullet on him. He’s dead already.”

Charles found Andor critically wounded but alive among a heap of bullet-ridden bodies. Charles picked his brother up and helped him continue the march to the Mauthausen concentration camp. There, despite horrible deprivations and abuse, he was able to nurse Andor back to health and wait it out until the Americans came six months later.

After the war, Andor testified against one of his Mauthausen guards, who was hanged for his crimes.

A few relatives survived Auschwitz and were sent to displaced persons camps. Many immigrated to Israel, but the trauma continued. An uncle could not cope with the memories of Auschwitz and committed suicide. My brother is named for him.

The Holocaust story involving my family is both unusual in its cruelty, but not so unusual in the context of the Holocaust. Many families suffered worse. Life-and-death decisions that would impact the existence of future generations were made in split seconds.

This is the face of a true Holocaust. A real genocide. It stands alone in history. It wasn’t about laws. The Nuremberg Laws were just one step in a process rooted in thousands of years of anti-Jewish hatred, fueled by myths of power and money—myths that still persist today. The Holocaust didn’t begin with Hitler’s rise or with legal decrees; it began with ancient prejudices and the willingness of societies to believe the worst about Jews.

Should the Holocaust be bottled up and never compared with anything else? I’m not saying that. It can and should be held up as a warning to us all—this is what happened specifically to the Jews. Genocides have occurred to other people, and each was unique in its causes and context. Certainly, lessons can be learned from all of them.

But what was “just like the Holocaust?” Nothing. Nothing else.