See to Believe

1,000 Syrian civilians were killed this week and Secretary of State Marco Rubio blames “radical Islamic terrorists.”

Rubio called for Damascus to bring the perpetrators to justice. “The United States stands with Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities, including its Christian, Druze, Alawite and Kurdish communities, and offers its condolences to the victims and their families,” he said.

Yet, there are no protests, no public outrage, no immediate UN condemnation. The Nameless One says they are “too busy covering for the Jihadists.”

The UN has in fact had terrorists among its ranks, such as the Hamas members that were UN employees who took part in the October 7 massacre.

Through this, the world witnesses that jihad can spread like cancer - but those in power choose not to acknowledge the truth: “Jihadists are the main threat for the world, be it Sunni or Shiite, be it the Salafists or the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Regardless of where it is - Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or Iraq - the Islamic Republic of Iran lurks. “The world must Unite against jihad,” asserts the Nameless One.

However, the world’s denial may be human nature - not seeing something because you don’t want to admit its existence, like a filter in the mind. But even that can’t account for the “willful blindness, added to terrible antisemitism.” Antisemitism is definitely a choice.

Even close to home, there is blindness to the truth - to the point of condemning someone who exposes the truth.

On Women's History Month, we feel it's fitting to bring you Rose Girone, the oldest known Holocaust survivor, who died on February 24 at the age of 113 (80 years after the end of WWII) in New York. Girone lived under both German and Japanese oppression.

Born in 1912 to a Jewish family in what was then Russia, her family moved to Germany where she married a German Jew in 1937.

Girone was heavily pregnant when her husband was sent to one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, and her daughter was born the following year. At that point she was able to send a postcard to her husband. She had news.

A relative in London had secured exit visas for the family to Shanghai, where Jewish refugees were still accepted.

Before 1940, some Jewish prisoners were being released under certain conditions, and Girone was able to secure her husband’s release if they left for China within 6 weeks and left all their valuables with the Nazis.

She told the USC Shoah Foundation that otherwise, “I don’t know what would have happened to us.”

Japan and China were at war also, and soon after their arrival the family was forced into a ghetto with other Jewish refugees.

She said that one of the Japanese officials in charge of the family called himself, “The King of the Jews.”

Their daughter told CNN, “We were lucky to get out alive from Germany and from China, but she was very resilient, my mother. She could take anything.”

When the war was over the family came to New York, where Girone opened a knitting store and divorced her first husband, later marrying a second time.

She told the Shoah Foundation, “Nothing is so bad that something good shouldn’t come out of it.” She said that because of her experience, “I could do anything and everything.”

After Girone’s death, Mirjam Bolle is thought to be the oldest living Holocaust survivor.

In 1943, Mirjam, then Levie, was a young Jewish woman in Amsterdam who wrote letters to her future husband who had immigrated to Eretz Israel a few years earlier, according to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. 

Bolle had written her letters as Jews were being deported, and during her incarceration at Westerbork (transit camp for Jewish deportees to death camps in Poland) and Bergen-Belsen.

Her letters are all that remains of event descriptions from the point of view of a Jewish detainee.

She kept her letters hidden, and when she was released in a prisoner exchange between Dutch Jews and German POWs she managed to bring them with her to Eretz Israel in 1944. They form a deeply touching diary of events as she lived them.

These young women of WWII are who Israel wants to save in 2025. 

Israel has the power and the strength to fight today’s Nazi force. The Nameless One promises that Israel will “Show the world how to defeat the Islamic Jihad, be it in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, The Islamic Republic of Iran and any other place near us.” 

Today, there are around 245,000 Holocaust survivors still alive and living in New York City. The world can’t allow the Shoah to happen again.

Tangible - visible - proof that it can happen again if not forcefully prevented, resides in the stories of Rose Girone and Mirjam Bolle.

Even more visible proof that it can happen again is October 7.

The latest visible proof that it can happen again is the massacre of civilians in Syria.