A small group of Jews was assigned to a factory owned by Oskar Schindler. They, too, expected to die within months. But as viewers of the film Schindler’s List know, the stern-faced boss saved more than a thousand of his employees.
The remainder became part of the Six Million murdered by the Nazis. Most were ordinary Jews like those in Finkel’s account. If their tragedy is to have any meaning some 70 years after the fall of the Third Reich, it is because in their very ordinariness they represented a recognizable humanity—tradespeople, laborers, professionals, shoppers, neighbors. On the other side of the ledger, by employing all the modern means of propaganda, barbarism, and genocide, the Nazis have become the very definition of evil.
These facts are documented online, in countless films, in grade-school textbooks, in voluminous histories, in contemporary accounts, and in biographies. Those who refuse to acknowledge the truths of these works we know as Holocaust deniers, but those who persist in comparing Adolf Hitler with any U.S. politician reveal themselves as members of a group just to the side of the Holocaust denier—the Holocaust trivializer. There are no lower categories.
Which brings us to this Tweet from Slate, the last journalistic redoubt of the Graham family, which once owned the Washington Post and Newsweek. File under “Questions Nobody is Asking:”
