Another Holocaust

by Davo Knepler

6 Million Jews. That number has become part of our collective memory. It is almost an incomprehensible number, yet it has become part of our reality as late 20th Century Jews.

30 Million Chinese. It is a number that virtually no one in America knows. 30 million Chinese were murdered simply because of their ethnicity. Japan invaded China in the 1930s. When the civilians of a city would surrender, they would often be murdered. Whole cities were wiped out. Chemical warfare was practiced on whole towns, with chemical bombs still being discovered today in China.

Women of all ages and mental capacities were raped, or taken prisoner and used euphemistically as ‘comfort women’ serving the needs of the conquering troops. Like the Nazis, the Japanese set up medical laboratories in the occupied land to perform experiments on live subjects, starting with newborn infants, to measure ‘pain reactions.’ (Unlike the Nazis, these experiments were also conducted on POWs from the Allies, who stood a much lesser chance of survival than those captured by the Germans.)

Japan has been slow to admit to its atrocities. To this day, Japan has refused to provide any information to the United States on those suspected of war crimes. (The United States only began to request this information two years ago (!) in order to bar entry of such war criminals to this country. The USSR began convicting Japanese biological war criminals as early as 1949.) In 1992, Japan began making token reparations to a tiny handful of the 200,000 comfort women it rounded up from China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and mainly Korea, in the paltry amount of $2300 each. Any further reparations or apologies for this and other atrocities have been held up by the strong influence of right-wing nationalists in Japan.

As Jews, we have been wary of how casually the term ‘Holocaust’ has been applied to other situations. As the murder of 30 million Chinese struggles for attention, I am proud, both as a Jew and the father of a Chinese daughter being raised as a Jew, that our congregation recognizes this other Holocaust. Gan HaLev has made a donation to the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of Sino-Japanese War (P.O. Box 2066, Cupertino, CA 95015), an organization dedicated to bringing these evils to light.

—from our July 1999 Newsletter

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