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This is a guest essay by Andrew Fox, a former British Army paratrooper and lecturer in war studies and behavioural science at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The last few days have been a maelstrom of contrast and dichotomy, terror and grief and horror, all colliding in the space of a few days.
Last week, I was enjoying a cold beer on the beach in Tel Aviv, surrounded by vibrant and joyous Jewish life. The following weekend brought a chilled shot of grief, as Britain took a moment to remember our war dead on Remembrance Sunday. Then, early on Monday, I flew to Krakow for a visit to Auschwitz, in the aftermath of a murderous terror attack in that city.
My first event was a talk with my great friend, Jonny Gould, at the European Jewish Association symposium. We spoke of his family who died in the Holocaust, and of my grandfather, who was part of the U.S. military that helped liberate Europe in the Second World War.
My American-born Welsh father tells how his father could speak only in a limited way about the aftermath of Dachau, liberated by the 7th U.S. Army in 1945, and how U.S. servicemen were warned not to feed the newly liberated prisoners. Their bodies were so malnourished that American GI-issue chocolate could kill them.
At our live event in Jerusalem, Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur asked me where I came from, and why I care so much about antisemitism. There is your answer: Ending the Holocaust is in my DNA. As I left the stage in Krakow, someone wished that my grandfather’s memory would be a blessing. It is.
And so to Auschwitz and Birkenau. I have visited Dachau and Theresienstadt, but only, one supposes, as an atrocity tourist. In my previous experience, these camps were experienced as one step removed: I was a dispassionate observer and a keen historian, able to observe the echoes of the horror from a distance. My only personal connection was being two generations removed from a liberator.
The scale of these places is so vast, the deaths so many, that one may elide the individuality of atrocity and simply view them as broad historical monuments from 10,000 feet, where the numbers are so vast as to be meaningless.
This time, things were different — for two reasons. Firstly, I had just returned from Israel: the living, joyous antithesis of the Holocaust. The place where, even in the aftermath of a second Holocaust attempt on October 7th, Jews can now punch back.
Secondly, this time I was visiting the camps not only with Jews, but with Jews who are my friends, and Jews who are generational victims of the Holocaust. One family had been almost completely exterminated on the very ground upon which we walked. Jonny’s great-grandparents are in the directory of the dead. Whole branches of their family trees had been broken off, cast upon the ground and scorched into ashes.
As you drive to Auschwitz, the striking thing is how close it is to the town centre of modern Oświęcim. There is a McDonald’s less than a mile from the gates. It feels inherently crass that life in 2026 continues in the shadow of humanity’s greatest monstrosity. For those unaware, over a million Jews were exterminated in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The proximity of normal life to the skeletons of these camps, where the ashes of a million Jews salt the earth, is utterly jarring.
Auschwitz itself looks like what it was originally: an army barracks, an awkward familiarity to the camps I lived in for 16 years of my life. There is a jolting disconnect between the busy groups of tourists being shown around and the scale of what those day-trippers are seeing. A Shoah Disneyland. I do not mean that especially pejoratively; it simply feels as if they should instead only let people in one at a time.
These exhibits should not be drifted past in a crowd. The tsunami of atrocity makes one feel like a man standing alone in the scorching heat of a nuclear blast of inhumanity. There are crowds, but if you take a moment to appreciate the scale of what you are observing, you will never feel so small and alone. Let the scale overwhelm you, and your knees will buckle.
The obvious and famous exhibits are obvious and famous for a reason — two tonnes of human hair, representing some 35,000 scalped corpses, a drop in the million-deep ocean of death. The Nazis took the hair of murdered Jews for textiles and their gold teeth for bullion.
There were piles of Zimmer frames, fake legs, and supportive corsets belonging to the infirm, who were ushered, deemed useless, immediately to the gas chambers to be swiftly disposed of; then the piles of suitcases, with names inscribed on the lids in the hope that their owners would one day find a use for the contents. Instead, they were heaped together as a damning testimony to the inhumanity of antisemitism, hatred, and dehumanisation.
And the piles of shoes — some utilitarian, some fancy. The shoes of women who clearly took pride in their appearance; a whole separate exhibit for the shoes of thousands of children, some so small that their owners were young enough for their parents to have had to drop to a knee to buckle them on, so they could toddle onto cattle trucks.
It is a juxtaposition of the loving care of parents for children with the inhumanity that saw them all as disposable Untermenschen (“subhumans”) to be eradicated; men and women who loved their children as much as we love ours. The Nazis dehumanised their victims. Today, they are rehumanised by the buckles on a discarded child’s shoe.
Behind every one of those shoes, suitcases, and locks of hair was a human being whose final journey followed the same monstrous process — men, women and children, transported to the camps on cattle trucks from all over Europe in their millions, guided off the trucks under the cover of SS machine guns, separated into columns of men and women; the able set to work to death, while their wives, children and elderly relatives were guided straight to gas chambers, murdered, then incinerated. No graves; ashes spread around the surrounding fields. Mechanised, industrialised slaughter.
It was in one of those gas chambers that the personal and historical dimensions of this visit collided most painfully. My friends stopped to pray Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. I turned away. They would have been happy for me to join them, but the moment was too overwhelming, too intimate.
Happy, successful Jews of 2026 praying for their dead in the place where the Nazis tried to exterminate their people and succeeded in killing their recent ancestors. Both my friends had antecedents who were ushered to their extermination within a mile of the spot where they prayed for the unimaginable totality of the dead.
Standing there, I found myself struggling with what Auschwitz-Birkenau actually represents. Victory, defeat, or something of both? Is defeat even the right word at all? The Holocaust was not a fight. The helpless were persecuted by the strong.
I would suggest, however, that the fight was decency versus dehumanisation, and in that respect, the Holocaust was a defeat for decency. And yes, the victory lies with the Allies who won the Second World War. The ideology that caused the Holocaust was defeated, for a time. Is not the real victory, though, the fact that Jews can now walk the scene of their greatest tragedy, their Holocaust, and tell jokes and laugh amongst the skeletons of those buildings where their grandparents died, screaming?
But did the ideology that caused the Holocaust truly disappear, or did it simply dive undercover and bide its time?
Today, on the streets of Britain, America, and Europe, Jews are abused, beaten, and falsely accused of the crime of which they themselves were the victims. In the last three years, Jews have been murdered on our streets and in their places of prayer. The Gaza genocide hoax, the globalised antisemitic blood libel, is a dominant narrative in public discourse. Once again, Jews are portrayed as child-killers, as globalist string-pullers, as The Other.
We are not yet back in 1938. The anniversary of Kristallnacht was just days ago, and we do not yet fully see mobs engaging in orgies of Jewish destruction. We are not far off. When diaspora Jews cannot attend synagogue without guards, bullet-proof doors, and a fear of walking the streets whilst wearing visible signs of their Judaism, we are on a branch line to the railway tracks that lead to the gates of Birkenau.
I never before understood how humanity could reach the point where the Holocaust was possible. I do now. Our public discourse is a sewer. One of the most memorable afternoons of my life was spent talking with Holocaust survivors in London. When those who were there tell me that the atmosphere in modern Britain reminds them of Germany in 1933, I listen.
And it is precisely because I listen that I cannot regard what is happening around us as someone else’s problem. For three years, I have been doing two things: trying to let our Jewish community know that they have allies, and trying to encourage other non-Jews to follow my lead. It is to the latter audience that I speak now, because the question is no longer simply whether we recognise the danger, but what we are prepared to do about it.
Antizionism is simply a synonym for antisemitism. It is the new Juden verboten (“Jews forbidden”). Jews who do not disavow Israel must wear their Zionism as they would a numbered tattoo on their arms. Attacking Jewish businesses in London, as the organization Palestine Action did, is not striking a blow against Israel. Stabbing Jews to death in Manchester is not striking a blow for Palestinians. Demonising the world’s only Jewish state and sanctuary for imaginary crimes, after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, is not striking a blow for the side of righteousness.
Friends, if you do not want to see a repeat of Jews either fleeing to Israel or being trucked to gas chambers, the time to change course is now. The answer sits at two levels: the personal and the political. At the personal level, I implore you to aggressively reject Holocaust inversion in the genocide accusations against Israel, wherever you see it.
Equally important is supporting a Jewish community you may never have had contact with. These are your countrymen and women. They enrich our society. Speak up. Your words will carry more weight than you realise, especially when they come from those who have no personal connection to the Jewish community but recognise that its demonisation is intolerable.
At the political level, write to your politicians and political parties. Any true Westerner should find the demonisation of Jews intolerable. It is fundamentally un-Western. Without a groundswell of popular support, our current governments will continue kowtowing to anti-Israel obsessives and Islamists for votes. Make it clear that you will not vote for any parliamentary candidate who pushes these blood libels and who, in doing so, demonises the Jews in our societies.
I make this appeal not as someone observing the danger from a distance, but as someone who has just stood in the place where the consequences of such hatred were made horrifyingly real.
For three years, this battle has felt lonely. It never felt lonelier than standing outside the gas chamber in Auschwitz this week, as my Jewish friends inside stood and prayed on the exact spot where their ancestors died screaming as the Zyklon B hit their lungs and extinguished them. My friends prayed for the dead, while the phrase “Never Again” hooked into my navel and twisted and twisted and twisted.
One can never be the same again after visiting Auschwitz.
I grieve. And am filled with anger and dread. Never again. Yes.
Unless we stay silent and blind .
Simply transcendent. And eloquent. And heartfelt intelligently rendered. What will the non-Jewish citizens of the western world do now? And what will the Jews do when the non-Jews do nothing?