Everyone likes to think they would have saved people from the Nazis. That they would have hid people from them or even fought them. That they would have risked everything, even their own life. But the truth is much darker.

The prism of distance is a drug. Distance from a place. Distance from a time. It entrances us with a romanticized picture of history and of choices. The people in these stories become archetypes. Not flesh, blood and bone humans like us. They are devoid of the shadows that we contend with. Every decision is a moral and courageous moment to prevail over dire circumstances. But if so many of us fear the stigma or association with being labeled a bigot for simply opposing the murder of children, how can we believe we would have opposed the Nazis when they rolled into our village or city?

This drug is one of the most potent on earth, because it can be used by leaders or influential people to ignore the current reality in exchange for some imagined moral greatness. But every day we face the same choice. To be human, or to dissolve any trace of it.

Decades after those camps were closed and the dead disintegrated into dust, new camps have been opened. Different in optics, but exact in intent. Annihilation of that other we have been conditioned to dehumanize. We exchanged their insignias for new ones, but the monsters are the same. Only this time, we are on the wrong side of that red line.

Gaza is close to being erased. Almost every building has been reduced to rubble. Tombs for their inhabitants. The people who have survived thus far are being massacred every single day as they are starved by the Israeli regime. Corralled like cattle into ever shrinking pens, desperate for food or water, but really just waiting to be slaughtered.

We watch it all being normalized as it unfolds. The extermination process being presented as “humanitarian aid.” And we are scolded if we simply say what we see with our own eyes.

Gaza gives us a glimpse into the abyss of our deepest fears. A terrifying look at how depraved our leaders can actually be. How comfortable they are with evil. A clear window that shows us how shallow and meaningless our civilization is when its leaders are asked, begged, pleaded with to do the most simple of things. To stop killing people. To stop killing children. Or to just stop arming the assailants.

When this is over. And it will be over at some point. Some will try to understand our powerlessness in the face of such blatant evil. Such raw sadism. Others will try to rewrite the script. What many of us have found out, to our everlasting horror, is that most of us wouldn’t be the hero in a story about fighting fascism or state brutality. Not necessarily the villain. Maybe not the collaborator. But certainly not the ones who risked it all.

Some of us will carry on with our lives as if nothing ever happened. But there are many of us who will carry it all with them to the grave. One thing is certain, none of us will ever be the same again. The relationships that have been severed. The families that have been split. The friendships that have been broken. None of them can be mended after this. Even the indifferent ones will taste life differently. Bitterly. Indeed, Gaza will haunt us all, every one of us, for every single day we have left on this earth.

Kenn Orphan, June 2025