Jochen “Jack” Wurfl knows the horrors antisemitism can breed. He was forced to hide out and conceal his family identity — and lost nearly every family member during Adolf Hitler’s reign.
Listen to them on the latest episode of “Quick Start”
Wurfl, who shared his harrowing story in the book “My Two Lives,” told CBN News he never thought he’d see such rampant antisemitism in America, where he settled in the years after the Holocaust.
“It’s frightening, because it could end up in the same sort of situation eventually,” Wurfl said of spiraling antisemitism that many have compared to the situation before Hitler launched his murderous quest. “I just don’t understand it. How people can feel like this again — that they don’t know what happened during the Holocaust, back during Hitler’s regime?”
The survivor lamented the loss of millions of lives and expressed his severe sorrow and fear over where the situation currently stands after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack and the antisemitism that followed.
“One would think that, once this happened, it could never happen again — that people have learned from this,” Wurfl said. “But I’m beginning to wonder, because the younger people nowadays don’t know anything about the Holocaust.”
Watch Wurfl explain:
Wurfl’s comments came after a recent YouGov and Economist poll of 1,500 18-29-year-olds yielded some shocking findings. A whopping 20% believed the Holocaust never happened — and an additional 30% were unsure, underscoring fears of antisemitism among youths.
Another recent poll from Summit.org and RMG Research found that 33% of 18-24-year-old voters believe “Israel does not have a right to exist as a nation in the Middle East.”
“It’s frightening,” Wurfl said of the current dynamic among young people who continue to occupy college campuses with anti-Israel fervor. “And I can’t understand that our education hasn’t been better to let the kids know what happened [during the Holocaust].”
As CBN News has documented, Wurfl’s own journey during the Holocaust was quite painful.
“I lost my entire family,” he said. “I lost my father, who had become a political prisoner … and my mother was arrested by the Gestapo and the SS, and she was taken to Auschwitz, and she was killed there.”
Wurfl continued, “And then all my grandparents, my uncles, my aunts, my nephews, everybody in my family eventually was killed during that period of time, so that the only people who survived the war in that period of time was my brother, Peter, and myself.”
As for Israel’s decision to decisively fight back after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, Wurfl said the Jewish state “had no choice.”
“Right now, we have these things going on in the colleges … the Jews never started a war,” he said. “Here, again, Hamas is the one who started it. What were the Jews supposed to do? Are they supposed to so sit back like they did during Hitler’s days, and let them come in, and just slaughter them, and kill them?”
Wurfl then recounted the history of the Holocaust and how Israel re-emerged in the land in 1948. He said the Jews, after all they’ve faced, won’t be giving up their country.
“They are not going to give it up again this time,” he said. “They’re not going to lay back and let everybody kill them. They’re going to fight, and they’re going to fight to the last soul — the last person.”