This letter is written about Murray Sragow’s letter (“Not Trivializing the Holocaust,” July 25, 2019), not to him, for as a Jewish history teacher he certainly knows everything I am going to say but chooses to ignore it. He begins by calling every facility where people are confined or ‘concentrated’ against their will pending final resolution of their status, “concentration camps. “Once he’s made that leap he can then go on to point out their similar characteristics, and call all the camps somehow equivalent. Thus, American detention centers on our Southern border, Japanese detention camps in America during WWII, displaced persons camps and British detention camps for Jews in Cyprus after WWII, Siberian Gulag slave labor camps and Nazi assembly-line death factories are somehow all conflated into one category, that of “concentration camps.”

At various points, Sragow does concede that there are differences between the types of camps, but always reverts back to his fundamental narrative, that American camps are basically “concentration camps” because they have some similarities to the others. The fact that the overwhelming number of people in the various other detention centers emerged alive, whereas they were inhumanely slaughtered in the Nazi camps, seems to be just another event in history to him.

In essence, Sragow does not so much trivialize the Holocaust, but rather makes a mockery of the unimaginable horrors suffered by its six million, men, women and children victims by sacrificing this reality on the altar of petty politics in order to shamelessly conform to his current political agenda.

“There Are None So Blind as Those Who Will Not See.”