Holocaust Survivors in NY See Chilling Parallels Between Hamas Hostages and Nazi Atrocities

Holocaust Survivors in NY See Chilling Parallels Between Hamas Hostages and Nazi Atrocities

By: Fern Sidman

Eighty years after the Holocaust, Jewish survivors who rebuilt their lives in New York never imagined they would see images evoking the same horrors they once endured. But as The New York Post reported on Sunday, the release of three Israeli hostages—Or Levy, Ohad Ben Ami, and Eli Sharabi—after 491 days of captivity under Hamas has triggered harrowing memories for these elderly survivors, whose bodies and spirits were once crushed in the Nazi death camps.

For Aron Krell, a 97-year-old survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and survivor of the notorious Auschwitz death camp, the haunting images of the emaciated hostages brought an unbearable flood of memories. Speaking to The New York Post, Krell recalled his own liberation at the age of 18, describing himself as a “weak” and “feeble” remnant of the “warehouse of the living dead.” The sight of Levy, Ben Ami, and Sharabi, their skeletal bodies marked by starvation and suffering, was a painful echo of what he and millions of other Jews endured during Hitler’s reign of terror. “You could have lifted me up with one finger,” Krell told The New York Post, his voice filled with sorrow.

The images of the three freed men, their gaunt faces and frail bodies exposed to the world, reminded Krell of a grim reality he knows all too well: the profound cruelty of captivity and the indifference of the world. “When I saw their pictures coming out of captivity, they looked so emaciated and so sick,” he told The New York Post. His pain was not only in recognition but in the eerie similarity to his own past, a past he has spent decades trying to move beyond. “And the world doesn’t care. I can’t understand—where is the outrage?” Krell asked, voicing the same anguished question echoed by many Jewish communities.

The release of the Israeli hostages should have been a moment of relief, but for Krell, it was also a reminder of an even darker tragedy. As The New York Post reported, Eli Sharabi emerged from Hamas captivity only to learn that his wife and two teenage daughters had been brutally murdered in the October 7 Hamas attacks. The bitter irony was not lost on Krell, who experienced a similar heartbreak after being liberated from Nazi camps. “It’s a tragic moment when you find out you have no one—no mother, father, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins. Everybody is gone,” he lamented to The New York Post. This gut-wrenching reality, the survival of one at the cost of all others, is a cruel thread that ties together generations of Jewish suffering.

Survival, as Krell told The New York Post, required an unshakable sense of optimism. “What kept me alive was being an optimist—thinking that one day things will end and we’ll come out free.” He held onto the hope that, after liberation, he might find at least one family member still alive. It was a fragile dream that sustained him through the worst of Nazi brutality. “It’s the only thing left—maybe I’ll meet somebody again,” he recalled, his words heavy with the weight of history.

The New York Post reported Krell’s bitter assessment: “The whole world doesn’t really care. When it comes to the Jews, the Jewish question, everything is moot.” These words carry the weight of a man who has seen, firsthand, how indifference fuels atrocity. His disappointment is not just in Hamas’s brutality but in the global silence that has followed.

Krell, now living on the Upper East Side, has been outspoken about the dangers of rising anti-Semitism and the world’s failure to respond. As The New York Post report detailed, he has accused today’s leaders of suffering from a “case of laryngitis” when it comes to condemning anti-Semitism. The eerie silence following the release of the hostages has only reinforced his fears. As he wiped away tears upon seeing the images on Saturday, he admitted, “It’s a sorry thing, but history does repeat itself. It’s not very pleasant to revisit.”

The echoes of the past are not lost on other Holocaust survivors, like 91-year-old Lucy Lipiner, who has lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side since she arrived in the U.S. in 1949 as a frail, 90-pound girl from Poland. The New York Post reported that Lipiner, like Krell, was deeply disturbed by the images of the hostages, finding them eerily reminiscent of her own starvation and suffering as a child. “The horrible images of the hostages pale and starved that were released yesterday brought me back to a very dark time in my life,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter. The resurfacing of these memories calls attention to the painful truth that, even after the Holocaust, Jewish suffering did not end—it merely took on new forms.

The NY Post quoted Lipiner’s haunting observation: “The three men look like they came out from Auschwitz.” For a woman who survived the Nazi regime and witnessed firsthand the horrors of the death camps, these words carry a gravity that cannot be ignored. She is struggling to reconcile what she sees with the world she believed had changed. “It breaks your heart—how can this be happening in 2025, 80 years after the vow, ‘Never again’?” she asked incredulously.

The release of the hostages should have been a moment of relief. Instead, as The New York Post reported, the images of their emaciated bodies and vacant expressions served as a stark reminder of a past Lipiner had hoped would never return. “I saw almost skeletal men walking,” she said. “The worst thing about them was the depression that was written on their faces—the hollowed cheeks, sunken-in faces… can you imagine this emotional torture, on top of physical torture?” Her words underscore a cruel reality: for Jews, suffering has never been purely physical; it is always accompanied by the deeper agony of abandonment, of being forgotten by the world.

President Donald Trump also took notice of the deeply unsettling visual parallels. As The New York Post documented, Trump remarked on the horrifying resemblance between the hostages and victims of the Holocaust, stating plainly, “They literally look like the old pictures of Holocaust survivors. The same thing.” His words only validated what many survivors already knew—that history is not simply repeating itself in broad strokes but in haunting, photographic detail.

Despite the decades that have passed since the fall of the Third Reich, anti-Semitism has not disappeared; it has only evolved. As The New York Post report has documented, the persistence of global indifference toward Jewish suffering remains a source of deep anguish for survivors. Krell, Lipiner, and many others believed that the world had learned from the Holocaust, that the horrors they endured would never be repeated. But now, as they watch history unfold in Gaza, they are confronted with the painful realization that hatred against Jews is still alive—and, in some cases, even celebrated.

This realization is perhaps the most painful of all: that the vow of “Never again” has lost its meaning. As The New York Post reported, Krell now sees the world’s reaction—or lack thereof—as a bitter confirmation that Jewish suffering is still met with indifference. “There’s very little hope—you can see that the world is ambivalent,” he observed.

Lipiner, who moved to Tel Aviv just weeks before the October 7 Hamas attacks, echoed his disillusionment. The New York Post quoted her devastating conclusion: “After the Holocaust, we always said, ‘Never again.’ And I believed that. I never believed there was something like a Holocaust. But this was.”

The images of the hostages, as reported by The New York Post, do more than tell a story of survival—they reveal the cruel truth that history is dangerously cyclical. For survivors like Krell and Lipiner, the wounds of the past have been torn open, not just by the brutality of Hamas but by a world that once again seems indifferent to Jewish suffering. The question that remains is whether this time, anyone will listen.