The prism of time.
A little more about the treatment of Jews in the first years after the war.
We live in a world where the Holocaust is an absolute tragedy, and Jewish concentration camp survivors are recognized heroes.
But this is the consensus of the last 50-55 years, which developed mainly thanks to Hollywood: in the first 20-25 years after the end of World War II there were still many living witnesses to the events, it was difficult for them to explain that the Jews suffered in any way in particular, compared to Russians or Poles, for example.
Therefore, there was no empathy for them; In the second half of the 1940s, Jewish pogroms swept through Eastern Europe and even Great Britain.
But the victims of the Holocaust did not find sympathy even in Israel, moreover, they received a considerable share of the humiliation.
Yes, yes! The survivors of the Holocaust in the newly established Jewish national state were revealed as a stigmatized social group, which in their historical homeland was given the contemptuous nickname "soaps" - in Hebrew "soap kidnapping".
The fact is that Israel militarized rapidly, and together with the captured German weapons given to it by its allies for the war with the Arabs, it adopted the very Nazi concept of militaristic propaganda, and cultivated the "new Jew" - an athletic, brave, skillful, merciless fighter for Israel's enemies. This image needed a contrast, an anti-example - they were concentration camp prisoners who survived by resigning themselves to their deaths and took their relatives so that the Germans could make "pieces of soap" out of them. The Israeli state propaganda, faced with an external threat, deliberately resorted to victim blaming, turning a concentration camp tattoo with a number into a symbol of unwillingness and cowardice.