On February 22nd, my group and I interviewed the Jewish real estate agent Tanya Gersh. We initially requested her to give us a brief rundown of her experience. She said that she had been a victim of a troll storm. A troll storm happens when someone gains access to your profession, address and contact information and distributes it to a group of individuals who are motivated by hate in order to harass you. They might, for instance, search every website that mentions you, leave negative reviews, and wreak havoc on your internet reputation. Also, they can directly message you with hateful comments. Tanya told us that even her 9 year-old and 12 year-old boys were being harassed. Tanya was harassed by a man named Andrew Anglin, who was the founder of the Daily Stormer. The Daily Stormer was a website made to spread hate about people. I am using past tense because after the attacks against Tanya and her family in 2017, she went to court against Anglin, Tanya won 14 million dollars against the Daily Stormer and got it removed from the web. Tanya talked about how she had this naive knowledge of hate, especially antisemitism, because she thought that “as a society we had evolved past hate and grown more inclusive” ever since the Holocaust. However, when everything happened to her she described it as “An instant change, I was almost heartbroken”. When she told us her story, I was very shocked that people in this day and age still possess so much hate for others.

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On Friday, February 24, my group and I had an amazing opportunity to speak with a Holocaust survivor, Leslie Held.
My group and I met up at 12:15 to get ready for the interview, which started with some technological difficulties. He is 92 years old, so unfortunately his memories have faded, but he still made some really interesting comments about the Holocaust. When we questioned him about his experiences, he revealed that he had spent time in two concentration camps and prior to this time, his mother had worked in a library while his father was imprisoned in a labor camp. After he reunited with his father, the family lived in Hungary until 1956, when Hungarian revolts sprung up about the Russian rule which was horrifying. This meant that they had to survive on food rations immediately following the Holocaust. Mr. Held and his family escaped the revolution to Vienna, and soon after, in 1959, he obtained a visa and traveled to the US. During the time Mr. Held was in a concentration camp, he advised us that he remembers the routine which was roll calls to do work, no matter the weather, whether it was rain, snow or sunshine. Finally, one last thing that he told us was that even though the Holocaust was one of the most impactful moments in history, he said that he would still be the same person he is today because he was 8 years old at the time and hardly affected the rest of his life. Even though this interview was tricky, we were still able to get vital and enlightening information from Mr. Held.

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At 1:15 pm, we met with our chaperone Jacob Farkas in the lobby. After getting acquainted, we took a subway straight to the Jewish Heritage Museum. Once we arrived, we saw the exhibition The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do. When we first entered the exhibition, we were surrounded by pictures of regular Jewish people. This was done to help us feel more a part of the culture and to give it a more authentic feel. Next, we witnessed a brief overview of antisemitism’s long history. Then, we were introduced to Judaism. Following that, it discussed concentration camps and places of execution. We also saw lots of paragraphs about the history of antisemitism. I found out that antisemitism has existed for many years before the Holocaust. We spent about an hour on the first floor, thus the rest of the museum required us to move more quickly. More information concerning the Holocaust was discussed on the second level, although the emphasis was on individual accounts, crimes, and resistance. Once we got to the top floor, we saw a documentary about a photographer who captured 75 images of Auschwitz survivors on the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. Behind us, the images were displayed in a chamber. Through this event, I discovered that antisemitism has existed for a long time throughout history.

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