(Image source: AP/Morocco World News)

The first time I saw the image of the little boy in Gaza, his ribs sharp beneath the paper-thin skin of his chest, it knocked the air out of me. His sunken eyes, fragile bones pressing against the translucent veil of his face—it struck me that the hollows I saw there must have mirrored my own mother’s face. She had nearly frozen and starved to death, hiding from the Nazis on the same Amsterdam canal where Anne Frank and her family had hidden before being betrayed. After seeing the image of that boy I sat silent, motionless, for a long time, the weight of two griefs pressing down: the unbearable agony of the starving child and the shocking betrayal of my ancestors’ legacy. How are fellow Jews—many of them, like me, children and grandchildren of those once deemed less than human and starved to the point of fighting over a spoonful of soup—capable of using starvation as a weapon? Having grown up in Amsterdam, among the few who returned from the camps or resurfaced from hiding, I recognized the eyes staring back at me from the ruins of Gaza—that vast, bottomless sorrow had been thick in the air of my own childhood.

I have never had to dig through rubble with my bare hands to retrieve the limp body of my son or daughter, nor been gunned down for trying to feed my starving children. I have not lost twenty or fifty family members in a single strike, nor been displaced again and again, only to be bombed where I thought I was finally safe. But as a human being, and as a daughter of Holocaust survivors—I stand, as best I can, as a moral witness to these unspeakable acts in Gaza.

How is it that second- and third-generation descendants of those who came to Israel after experiencing persecution and even near-annihilation could cheer and share a casual smoke as they watched buildings explode into rubble and human flesh? How is it that from the sanctity of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, it takes only fifteen minutes to reach Ofer Prison—one of the Jewish-run torture facilities—where the body of Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, renowned Gazan orthopedic surgeon, was dumped in the prison’s courtyard, bloody and nude from the waist down? And, ultimately, what does it mean to carry the torch of Never Again, the post-Holocaust Jewish declaration to prevent genocide?

The way we interpret the vow of Never Again can create dramatically different futures. How do we hold the impossible contradiction of joy at seeing the last living Israeli hostages finally reunited with their families alongside the devastation of knowing that buried beneath the ruins lie thousands of Palestinians whose lives were brutally stolen from them? We do not know their names, their stories, whom they loved or who loved them. How would those who suffered the Nazi horrors apply the vow of Never Again to this moment? What pathway out of this nightmare would they envision? This is one daughter’s attempt to answer the call that has been with me always: to wrestle meaning from meaninglessness, to honor the dead and carry forward their memory by ensuring that the legacy of those who came before me is not lost.

The notion of Never Again infused my childhood. Before the War, one in ten people in my beautiful hometown was Jewish. Amsterdam had long been seen as the safest place for Jews in Europe, earning it the nickname Mokum—Yiddish for “place” or “safe haven.” Mokum is derived from the Hebrew word Makom, one of the mystical names of God, meaning, “dwelling place of the Divine.” The word became so woven into the Dutch language that Jews and non-Jews alike still call Amsterdam Mokum today. Yet, during the War, what had once been a sanctuary became one of the darkest sites of betrayal. Three quarters of Dutch Jews—the highest percentage of any country in Western Europe—were murdered in places like Sobibor, Auschwitz, and Bergen Belsen. Most of them were from Amsterdam.

(Image: The crawlspace in the ceiling of the Amsterdam attic where the author’s mother hid from the Nazis, used as emergency refuge during raids. Photo source: Niyati Evers )

At youth clubs and summer camps, it was instilled in us that we, the next generation, had to ensure no one could ever slaughter us again. Wearing our blue and white outfits, we stood in a circle, hand in hand, around the words Am Yisrael Chai—“The people of Israel live”—lit up in fireworks. Chills ran up my spine as we sang Hatikvah, the Israeli National Anthem, which means literally, The Hope. The message was powerful: we were the ones to carry that torch of hope and make sure its light would never be extinguished. But the Zionist dream never lit a spark in me. A different, deeper question haunted me, even as a child: How do people succumb to the forces of evil? If I could find the answer, I thought, it would reveal its opposite, as well—how not to succumb, how to prevent such horrors from happening again. That search led me to those who came before me.

While incarcerated in Bergen-Belsen, the Dutch Jewish survivor Abel Herzberg wrestled with many of the questions that haunted me decades later. As a child I saw him on TV—an elderly man with an imposing presence, a striking crown of white hair who spoke with the weight of an orator. He was a lawyer, a celebrated writer, and one of the earliest historians of the Nazi atrocities. His words are etched into the walls of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.: “There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times.”

Even though Herzberg believed Jews needed their own homeland, he thought Palestinians deserved equal recognition and envisioned both nations living side by side. Like Hannah Arendt, Herzberg had been an observer at the Eichmann trials and came to similar conclusions about the “banality of evil.” In a 1946 essay published after the capture of Joseph Kramer, the Commandant of Bergen Belsen, Herzberg, reflecting on his experiences in the camp, described how “for the Germans there were never enough corpses.” He wanted to understand how ordinary people became mass murderers, knowing that an entire nation—especially one that had produced Einstein, Freud, and Rilke—could not be composed solely of sadists. Herzberg understood the tendency among his fellow prisoners to see the Nazis as “fundamentally different from us,” thus “cleansing ourselves” and denying our own capacity for such degeneration. But he was compelled to understand his oppressor—knowing that it is only possible to comprehend something if it exists, however faintly, within oneself. Herzberg’s conclusion was that the Nazis weren’t inherently evil. They were ordinary human beings, conditioned over time and systematically molded into mass murderers. Further, given a certain set of circumstances and predispositions, the same thing could happen anywhere, to anyone.

Never Again through Their Eyes 

Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman living in Nazi occupied Amsterdam, was under no illusion about the Nazis’ intent. She knew they wanted to annihilate the Jews. Yet, she recognized that “the rottenness of others is in us, too.” In a diary entry written in the winter of 1942, she concluded that we cannot change anything in the world until we are willing to look inside and change ourselves.

She saw the dangers of seeking vengeance looming even then. As if speaking to the generations to come, she wrote that the only way for the sorrow in the world to lessen was by giving sufficient “shelter to our grief.” Because if instead we give ourselves over to hatred and thoughts of revenge, we’ll create new heartbreaks for others, and “sorrow will never cease in this world and will multiply.” The depth of her writings earned Hillesum the title “Mystic of the Holocaust.” Her diaries, published as An Interrupted Life, almost forty years after she was murdered at age twenty-nine in Auschwitz, continue to inspire people across the world, including Palestinian and Israeli peace activists. “The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head,” Hillesum wrote, after walking the outskirts of Amsterdam beneath signs forbidding Jews from entry. This expansive inner freedom revealed to her that true peace would come only when people find peace within themselves—when humanity has vanquished and transformed its hatred for fellow human beings, of whatever race, into love. She knew this was asking much, perhaps too much. Yet she saw no other solution.

Growing up, I was taught that Never Again meant that from this day forward, Jews will never again let others victimize us. By contrast both Hillesum, with blisters on her feet because Jews were no longer allowed to own bicycles or use public transport, and Herzberg, walking among the skeletal corpses of Bergen-Belsen, pointed to something different. The courage to take responsibility for the traits within ourselves that, when left unrecognized or untransformed, can erupt as cruelty—or even mass murder. As Herzberg wrote after the War: “It is not about the last step, but about the first step.” By focusing only on the end result—the Nazis’ extermination of millions—we externalize evil and “cleanse ourselves,” as Herzberg warned. We declare ourselves pure, incapable of such cruelty. And by seeing the darkness as something “out there” and refusing to see the “darkness in here,” we lose sight of who we ourselves have become.

The Last Freedom

In November 2024, Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans stomped through the streets of Amsterdam, ignoring the gold-plated Stolpersteine beneath their feet—brass plaques memorializing murdered Jews, placed in the street in front of their homes. Egging each other on, the fans reportedly vandalized taxis and tore Palestinian flags from residences, shouting “Fuck you, Palestine!” and “Death to Arabs!” They were filmed riding down escalators, belting, “Olé olé olé!/ let the IDF win and fuck the Arabs” —part of a team chant that ends with: “Why is there no school today in Gaza? / There are no children left there / Olé olé olé!”

As I watched footage of their genocidal chant, I imagined my mother, sitting at her desk at the Jewish Lyceum of Amsterdam—after the Nazis forced all Jewish children to attend segregated schools—just blocks from where they marched. Starting in the summer of 1942, day after day, the classrooms of the Lyceum emptied. On special orders from Berlin, the German Jews who had fled to Amsterdam during the Nazi era were the first to be deported—anyone between ages 15 and 40. My mother, a German-Jewish refugee, had turned fifteen in August of that year. Soon, she became one of the missing children. A year later, the school closed its doors. There were no children left.

After watching videos of the Israeli football fans in Amsterdam, I watched panicked parents run frantically through rubble toward whatever was left of Gaza’s shattered hospitals, clutching bloodied toddlers. I saw the trembling three-year-old, too shocked to speak; the skinny boy sleeping on his mother’s grave; the fathers holding out blood-soaked bags, filled with bones and body parts, weeping “this is my son, this is my daughter!” To see Jews in the city of my birth, where thousands of Jewish children were once deported to be exterminated, reveling in the extermination of Palestinian children is horrifying enough. But it also defiles our dead and betrays our heritage.

(A Palestinian boy after an attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp in December 2024. Source: Anadolu/Getty Images/The Guardian)

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, about the “last freedom,” and how the one thing no one can take away “is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me.” To accept that this “last of the human freedoms” cannot ever be stripped from us, not even in Auschwitz, means the end of externalizing responsibility. If we are free to choose our response, then we are likewise accountable to it.

On the eve of last year’s commemoration of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass” when Nazi paramilitary forces destroyed Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues throughout Germany, Maccabi supporters were chased, cornered, and viciously attacked on the streets of Amsterdam. Those who were beaten were not necessarily even those who had participated in the murderous chants or acts of violence. It came out later that calls for “Jew Hunts” had been shared on social media—a terrible echo from that time when Dutch collaborators were paid seven guilders and fifty cents for every Jew they caught. Those who attacked Jews that night bear responsibility for their actions. But if those who attack Jews must answer for their violence, so must Jews answer for theirs.

Violence surrounding soccer matches is a common phenomenon, and not unique to Maccabi supporters. What was different in the November 2024 Amsterdam event was the way the mob’s attitudes mirrored those being echoed across Israel itself. There, government ministers spoke openly about “cleansing the Strip of Arabs,” declaring that “there are no innocents in Gaza,” and even claiming that the “children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves.” The little girl, her body burned and swaddled in bandages, crying for the mother she lost to the flames—is that the face of guilt? I thought. Infants in Gaza, being bombed to death, or left to freeze or starve are not innocent? They have brought this horror on themselves? How could a government minister speak those words in a country that pauses every year for a two-minute siren to honor the six million murdered by the Nazis, including one-and-a-half million children? Children the Nazis likewise believed had brought their own deaths upon themselves?

Israeli television anchors have called for Gaza to be “wiped out.” Scores of videos have been uploaded by IDF soldiers, such as those of officers wearing the lingerie of Palestinian women in the ruins of their homes. As someone raised on stories of Nazis humiliating Jews in the center of Amsterdam, these images carry a weight beyond their immediate horror. They awaken something deeper in me—a sense that the dead are watching. I can almost hear our ancestors’ cries: Do you not remember our tormentors mocking us in our greatest despair? Have you so soon forgotten? 

Not long after surviving Bergen-Belsen, a Jewish woman attending his lecture asked Herzberg how to prevent “our children from becoming victims again.” His response shocked the audience. “That’s not the problem, ma’am,” answered Herzberg. “The problem is how to prevent our children from becoming the torturers.” Herzberg had named a hard truth: having gone through extreme persecution does not make one morally superior. On the contrary: it takes concerted effort and self-examination to not let suffering harden into an identity of victimhood and entitlement. Herzberg had profound compassion for the hatred consuming some survivors. Yet, like Hillesum, he knew that hate isn’t “extinguished by hatred but fueled.” He foresaw the dangers of seeing yourself as intrinsically righteous, and how that can blind you to your own misuse of power. Having barely survived himself, he recognized how this lethal cocktail could turn victims into victimizers.

I thought of his words when I read about a wounded prisoner at Sde Teiman, a detention facility near Gaza that holds thousands of Palestinians. The prison doctor who examined his broken ribs and punctured bowels expressed incredulity that Israeli guards could have caused such injuries. He assumed it must have been “revenge by the Nukhba against the Nukhba”—the special forces from the military wing of Hamas, which led the October 7th attack.

When news spread that the Israeli military police had gone to the prison to detain Israeli guards as suspects, a frenzied crowd of right-wing protesters, including members of Israel’s Knesset, came to protest not the near-fatal sodomizing of a defenseless prisoner—whatever he may or may not have done—but the arrest of the suspected rapists. In their fury, they even breached the gates. It was a powerful illustration of how people can become possessed by vengeance when we see ourselves as innocent and virtuous, while perceiving the “other” as wholly bad. This dehumanizes the “other,” so that whatever we do to them does not diminish our goodness, and we justify progressive acts of cruelty.

Hatred and desire for revenge are human responses to extreme trauma—especially when that trauma reverberates across decades and generations, as it does for both the Jewish and Palestinian people. But a nation that claims the Holocaust as central to its identity, entrusted with preserving the memories of its victims, should be morally bound to honor their legacy as a North Star. That legacy does not call for vengeance. It calls for recognizing the other in us.

A Light in the Darkness

My father wrote in his wartime diaries about reports he’d heard via the BBC on his family’s clandestine radio: the Nazis were conducting experiments on Jews using poisonous gas. This diary entry is dated April 1942. Auschwitz would not be liberated until January of 1945; Mauthausen, not until May 1945.

October 7 reopened a centuries’ old wound. In London, New York, and elsewhere, people tore down posters of the hostages who were brutally taken from Israel that day. Many showed cold indifference towards the victims or dismissed the violence with a “they had it coming to them.” Such attitudes reignite the collective terror of having been erased while the world averted its eyes.

At the same time, Israel is armed with one of the most formidable and technologically advanced militaries in the world. Long before October 7, those in power chose to use that military to oppress and brutalize another people. It’s understandable that, for some, the cruelty inflicted by decades-long occupation make it difficult to empathize with those seen as part of the oppressor nation. But dehumanizing others, whoever they are, won’t make the world a more humane place. And no child can be blamed for the system they were born into, the whims of that system’s leaders, or the policies of their government.

On October 7, among those murdered in the communities near the Gaza border were people who had fought for Bedouin rights in Israel, driven Gazan cancer patients to Israeli hospitals, worked to expose abuses by the Israeli military against Palestinians, and fought to end the occupation. Many who were killed, burned in their homes, or abducted that day had devoted their lives to peace and coexistence. These included people like Vivian Silver, Bilha and Yakovi Inon, and Oded Lifshitz, who had spent years warning of exactly this moment. Long before the October 7 attack, Oded had criticized Israel’s religious-nationalists who believe that Jews have a divine mandate to control all of the biblical Land of Israel and that settlements will hasten the arrival of the Messiah. He predicted that clinging to domination over the occupied territories, and the refusal to pursue a just agreement between Palestine and Israel, would result in “an explosion of terror.” Back in 2018, he wrote in Haaretz, “When our neighbors have nothing to lose, we lose big time.” At the age of 84, Oded, a lifelong, passionate advocate for peace, was kidnapped to Gaza and murdered there. To dismiss his horrific suffering and death does not merely dehumanize him and the others, it negates what they stood for and fuels the cycle of violence, reinforcing the belief that Never Again can only mean “destroying those who would destroy us.” It’s possible to bear witness to their pain while also unequivocally opposing how that pain gets weaponized.

It is common to divide the world into “good” and “evil,” to cast ourselves on the side of righteousness, and our enemies as the embodiment of darkness. Yet, this is precisely what both Herzberg and Hillesum refused to do. They illuminated the darkness, rather than being consumed by it. In the midst of the Nazi terror, they called instead for a deeper recognition of the seeds of evil inherent within all humans.

We can make Never Again a lived reality: by turning it into a path and a practice. Never Again will I be dehumanized, nor dehumanize. Never Again will I be humiliated, nor humiliate. Never Again will I be oppressed, nor oppress. This shift in perspective restores agency and responsibility to each of us. Because until we count ourselves among those responsible for its fulfillment, the promise of Never Again will continue to be broken. To commemorate the dead with the reverence they are owed we must embody the teachings they left behind. The question of where to from here then becomes, what does it mean for me, in this moment, in this situation, to exemplify Never Again?

Living the Legacy

Herzberg dedicated his Bergen-Belsen diary, Between Two Streams, to “those among the dead who, in their deepest misery, knew how to live their lives at the highest level attainable to mankind.” Those so-called “weak and helpless” Jews carried an inner strength so powerful that it can still guide our way today. They understood the Nazis wanted to annihilate them not only physically but spiritually—to corrupt their souls. To remember them only as victims, however unimaginable their suffering, does not do them justice. They defied the Nazis by refusing to surrender their souls. For Herzberg, this meant dedication to truth; for Hillesum, being “a balm for all wounds.” 

I bow to those whose lives have been shattered, and who, even through unbearable grief, summon the strength to reach for a higher vision. People like Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, a Palestinian Muslim and Jewish Israeli, two bereaved fathers of dead little girls—one killed by a soldier’s bullet, the other by a suicide bomb—who chose to build bridges from their broken hearts. Like Rachel Goldberg-Polin, a Jewish mother who, while grieving her kidnapped son, wrote that “the salt of her tears was the same as that of the mothers in Gaza.” Like Sulaiman Khatib, co-founder of Combatants for Peace, who chronicled his journey to collective liberation in his memoir, In This Place Together. Like Aziz Abu Sarah, Palestinian author and peacemaker, who broke free from the prison of hatred for his brother’s killer and now helps others free themselves from their own. Like Maoz Inon, who wept throughout the night for the murder of his parents on October 7 and dreamed of tears cleansing the blood from the earth and showing the path to peace. They are the ones carrying the torch of hope, making sure its light will not be extinguished.

For this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, I participated in an online ceremony called “Remembering the Innocents.” The ceremony mirrored a ritual held at Westerbork transit camp, where, over five days, the names of 102,000 Dutch Jews deported to the death camps—including Etty Hillesum herself—are read aloud. For 36 hours, after watching a carousel of dead children’s photos, more than 230 readers from around the world—including more than a hundred Jewish Israelis—read 13,635 names: children from Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Israel who had been killed in the war since October 2023. To speak each name and feel the reality of that child’s life cut short is a profound experience, the smiling girl with a pink flower tucked in her hair, the brown-eyed boy beaming in his Superman T-shirt, the newborn whose eyes still shimmered with wonder. From this heartfelt recognition of our common humanity, it not only becomes possible to imagine new solutions that honor the freedom and dignity of all; it becomes impossible to act otherwise.

When Herzberg won the P.C. Hooft Prize—a prestigious Dutch literary award for an author’s complete works—he described a scene he had witnessed while walking the grounds of Bergen-Belsen. Amid the chaos and filth, an elderly Dutch Jewish woman lay dying on the floor of her barrack. Her mutilated face bore witness to the suffering she had endured. With fingers already stiffened by the onset of death, she clutched something to her chest. As Herzberg came closer, he saw it was a book by the Amsterdam Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza—his most famous work, Ethica. Reflecting on the scene, Herzberg said:

“Penetrating to an absolute truth and holding onto that into the bitterest death—that turned out to have been possible even in Bergen-Belsen.

The victims of barbarity become the bearers of humanity.”

The book she clutched is now in our hands. The next chapter is ours to write: how will we choose to embody the legacy left to us? How will we answer that call echoing through their dying moments—to be the bearers of humanity?

Born in Amsterdam to Holocaust survivors, Niyati Evers is a Diplomate in Process-Oriented psychology and author in Portland, Oregon who facilitated dialogues in post-Apartheid South Africa where she lived for fourteen years. Her weekly newsletter offers transformational perspectives for the times we are living through now.