When Gabriella Major was 2 years old, she and her family were rounded up and held captive in a newly established ghetto in Debrecen, Hungary. The year was 1944, and the Nazis had just invaded. After several months fighting off starvation and disease, they were placed in cattle cars headed toward Auschwitz—only to be diverted.
“By some miracle, we didn’t wind up in Auschwitz,” Major says. “Twenty-eight members of my family were murdered in Auschwitz. We wound up in a concentration camp in Austria near Vienna called Strasshof.”
Strasshof was a forced labor camp that subjected prisoners to “vicious” treatment, including making them work in the dead of winter. Her grandmother did not survive. When they were liberated, they reunited with her father, who’d survived a separate concentration camp, and returned to their native Hungary—only to flee communist persecution in 1957 and immigrate to America.
I’m speaking with Major, 79, in recognition of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah. Major is one of 100 Holocaust survivors who participated in 100 Words, a video project by the Claims Conference featuring them—in 100 words—asking the world to never forget:
<p><i>Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day</i><i>We all survived the Holocaust</i><i>We are here to give voice to the six million Jews who were murdered</i><i>We are a reminder unchecked hatred can lead to actions, actions to genocide</i><i>Just over 75 years ago, one-third of the world’s Jews were systematically murdered</i><i>Among them, over 1.5 million children were killed</i><i>in the name of indifference, intolerance, hate</i><i>Hatred for what was feared</i><i>Hatred for what was different</i><i>We must remember the past or it will become our future</i><i>On Holocaust Remembrance Day we ask the world to stand with us and remember</i></p>
Previously, Major, who is based in New York City and works as a docent and speaker at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, spoke out against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s allowing of Holocaust denialism on the platform under the guise of “free speech.”
“I beg you, in the name of those who cannot speak, who were brutally murdered, to do everything in your power to have the conscience, courage, and honesty to abolish these horrible Holocaust deniers,” she said.
Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, finally reversed course in October 2020 and said Facebook would be “updating our hate-speech policy to ban Holocaust denial,” though reports indicated that Holocaust denialism was still prevalent on the platform months after the supposed ban.
Now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter for $44 billion—though the deal has yet to go through—critics have expressed worry that the site may soon be even more overrun by neo-Nazis, given the edgelord fan base he’s somehow cultivated, his numerous nods to allowing all manner of speech (eerily reminiscent of Zuckerberg’s 2018 defense of Facebook permitting Holocaust denialism), and his past usage of Hitler memes—including comparing Justin Trudeau to Hitler, which drew criticism from the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.
Major hopes that Musk will enact a “zero-tolerance” policy on Twitter when it comes to antisemitism and Holocaust denialism—as well as any kind of hatred toward people.
“There should be zero tolerance. That’s what I want to hear: zero tolerance,” she says. “What we can do, before it really takes hold—and takes roots—on Twitter, is to caution [Musk] and say, we’re glad we have this other social media, but we’re concerned that it should not become a platform for hatred. It’s a very big platform and we would like to support it, but only if it’s disallowing expressions of hatred—like antisemitism or the targeting of any people, including spreading the unfortunate hatred that exists right now.”
She adds, “We need to make this a better world, and he can be an ambassador of that because he has a very big platform. Unfortunately, when so much is in the hands of one person who’s monopolizing it, who knows.”
It’s been devastating for Major to witness the rise of the far-right not only in America but her native Hungary, led by Viktor Orban, as well as the crisis in Ukraine, where a Vladimir Putin-led Russian invasion has killed countless civilians and left millions more displaced.
“It’s a very difficult thing for me,” she laments. “I feel terrible and have been sending contributions to places. I cry out for them. They are refugees, and I was a refugee. We say this during Passover, when you read the Haggadah: We were refugees, and we were slaves, so we know how bad it is, and we know how you should treat refugees.”
A U.S. 7th Army medical corpsman, newly arrived with liberating troops, looks into a train car piled with the emaciated and mutilated corpses of men from the Dachau-Birkenau concentration camps.
Corbis via Getty Images“He’s just willy-nilly killing people,” she continues. “He’s a totalitarian ruler who has absolutely no conscience at all. He unfortunately reminds us of Hitler. It’s very scary… He’s a very sick man. Very sick men are narcissists with ambitions to take over. And we don’t know where he’s going.”
Major believes it’s vital for people all over the world to not only educate themselves about the horrors of the Holocaust, but also help combat the rise of antisemitism.
“We have a lot of antisemitism, and I see a lot of signs that are reminiscent of those times before the Holocaust happened,” she says. “You had a fire that went out and there were little embers remaining, and they caught on fire with the pandemic.”
She pauses. “If we do not take this seriously, history can repeat itself—and it has repeated itself numerous times. We must remember the six million who died. It’s such a large number that it’s hard to comprehend. One and a half million children. It’s a miracle that I survived, and that my children are here.”
“America and other places were silent until very late and did not let Jews come in during World War II. We cannot allow silence. We have to stand up. We need to do it, one person at a time. Each of us has a role in making this a better world.”
