Never say ‘Never Again’: Opinion

“You didn’t learn anything from this war?”

That’s what Holocaust survivor Henny Fischler wants to know in the five-part docuseries “Never Again is Global”. Produced by Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav, the film features several survivors who discuss their experiences. 

One by one, they speak of the horrors they’ve seen — not just from the Holocaust, but from the pandemic, when the demons returned for an encore and brought their Nuremberg Laws with them.

“You are going like sheep again, again, and again,” warns Henny Fischer. “The Nazis, they didn’t die. They’re still living here in between us, even here in Israel. I don’t know how they did it, but they are here,” she adds.

They say straying from the herd kept them alive. As a little girl at the time, Vera Sharav refused to board an orphans’ boat with the rest of the children and threw a tantrum until she could join a family on theirs. The orphans’ boat was later torpedoed, and none of the children survived. 

By refusing to be governed, they escaped mass slaughter and lived to tell the tale to their grandchildren.

But their grandchildren were not impressed. They, after all, had grown up with a Holocaust industry that defined what tyranny was and stuffed it into museums and speeches and memorial sculptures and ceremonies and cries of “Never again!”. Oppression and dictatorship were compressed into glossies of barbed wire and emaciated skeletons and made into Hollywood feature films. The captains of the Shoah industry then put it all on neat display and told the younger generations that hate was safely locked up in the museums. For a fee, they told them, they can view cruelty; all they must do is chant “Never again!” 

But then it really did happen again. The brown shirts turned into white coats and we fell in love. They told us they would again experiment with our lives, for our own good, and we swooned like Stockholm hostages. They said it right to our scarred, stupidly trusting faces and we smiled back with gratitude.

Never again

Flóra Kovács was a young girl who survived the Nazi concentration camps where her entire family was murdered except for her brother. She fled to Israel and married a man named Yehiel Witz. In 1949 she gave birth to a boy named Haim.

When he was eight, Haim Witz and his mother moved to the United States, where Haim eventually entered the music scene. He changed his name to Gene Simmons, co-founded the rock group Kiss, and later was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In 2021 Simmons gave several interviews raging against those who refused the COVID-19 vaccines. He called them “delusional,” demanded they be “exposed,” and scorned them for their talk of “freedom”.

Haim “Gene Simmons” Witz — who grew up hearing stories about helmeted monsters with tanks who slaughtered children and forcibly vaccinated helpless women — said that the people who refused the COVID shots were “evil” and identified them as “the enemy”.

Never again

Jim and Myrna Bennett moved to Israel from San Francisco in 1967 just as Israel was establishing its military prowess. Myrna, who lost family members in the Holocaust, gave birth to a boy named Naftali.

In 1990, as a young adult, Naftali Bennett was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). He was accepted into the elite counterterrorist Sayeret Matkal unit and became renowned for his skill at killing Hezbollah terrorists.

Bennett would go on to become Israel’s prime minister in 2021 at the height of the pandemic. He imposed harsh vaccine mandates and publicly orated about the unvaccinated “going around with a machine gun firing Delta variants at people.” When still some held out, Bennett proposed that bracelets be worn in shopping malls to publicly identify the unvaccinated, who would be banned from most stores.

Bennett — who lost family members in World War II and presided over a country with deep ties to the Holocaust — hugged Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and thanked him for “the gift of life”.

Never again

Albert Bourla’s parents were among only 2,000 out of 50,000 Jews from Thessaloniki, Greece who survived the Holocaust. Bourla has said that his mother was only minutes from being murdered by a Nazi firing squad when she was bailed out by a ransom paid by her non-Jewish brother-in-law. Bourla’s father happened to be outside his ghetto walls the day they took its Jews away.

In 2019 Bourla became the CEO of Pfizer. Under his auspices, the COVID-19 shot was created and tested on billions of people around the world. COVID-19 was a boon for Bourla, who became wealthier with every vaccine mandate.

Recently it was discovered that Pfizer is exploring how to create new COVID-19 variants so that it can sell more vaccines, and is planning to use mRNA vaccine technology for “gene editing”.

Never again

It’s not a slogan you hear Holocaust survivors use because they never did let it happen. Vera Sharav, Henny Fischer, Sarah Gross, Herve Seligman and the other survivors featured in Never Again is Global knew it was never about the angry Austrian with the tiny mustache. They saw past the jackboots and salutes and yellow stars. They recognized tyranny when it slipped through the door with the first Nuremberg Race Laws. They drew a line in the sand and made crossing it verboten. 

“I’m against people who are telling me what to do with my body,” says Henny.

We’re the ones who kept chanting “Never Again” to convince ourselves we’d see it coming. And a small minority did; but most didn’t, and our children didn’t. Goebbels changed his name to “Science”, called out to our children from their smartphone screens and they demanded seats on the cattle cars.

Never say “Never again” again.