A Holocaust Survivor Died This Week. Words Matter.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Holocaust survivor was found frozen to death in her apartment in Kyiv.
She survived the Nazis as a child.
She survived the terror, the hiding, the loss.
She survived the machinery of genocide.
She did not survive this brutal winter or the Russia-Ukraine war.
Her name was Yevgenia Besfamilnaya. Neighbors called her Baba Zhenya. She was in her nineties. Missile strikes damaged infrastructure in her neighborhood. Heat and electricity failed. She was alone. Her body was discovered only after a burst pipe flooded the building and neighbors forced entry.
It is difficult to imagine a more devastating contradiction. A woman who lived through the Holocaust died quietly and unseen as the world marked remembrance with ceremonies, speeches, and solemn vows of “Never Again.”
And yet this same week, the word Nazi was tossed casually into American political rhetoric. Protesters and politicians accused their opponents of being Nazis. Calls were made for “Nuremberg-style trials.” The most morally charged language of the twentieth century was pressed into service for present-day outrage.
This is where women of faith must pause.
Not to silence moral concern.
But to insist on moral truth.
Nazi Germany was not a metaphor.
By that I mean this:
Nazi Germany was not an idea, a symbol, or a political insult.
It was an organized, state-run system of evil with specific features that cannot be abstracted without doing harm.
The word Nazi refers to a historical regime with a defined ideology, structure, and outcome.
It involved a government that legally stripped Jews of personhood through the Nuremberg Laws. It relied on propaganda to train ordinary citizens to see their neighbors as subhuman. It built bureaucracies that registered, tracked, transported, and categorized human beings. It carried out industrialized murder through paperwork, timetables, rail schedules, and quotas. It deliberately targeted children, the elderly, the disabled, and the unwanted, not because of what they had done, but because of who they were.
The Nazi regime did not begin by killing Jews.
It began by changing the law.
In 1935, Nazi Germany passed a set of laws known as the Nuremberg Laws. These laws did not merely discriminate. They redefined who counted as a person under the law.
Before violence became widespread, the law itself declared Jews to be something less than fully human citizens.
What “stripped of personhood” actually looked like
Under the Nuremberg Laws:
Jews were no longer considered citizens of Germany. They lost the legal rights and protections that citizens had. They became “subjects of the state” rather than members of it.
Jews were defined by racial categories, not religion or behavior. Even people who did not practice Judaism were labeled Jewish by ancestry. Identity became something imposed, not chosen.
Jews were barred from marrying or having relationships with non-Jews. Love itself was criminalized. Families were torn apart by law.
Jews were excluded from professions, schools, and public life. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, and civil servants were pushed out. Children were expelled from schools. Participation in society was steadily closed off
In legal terms, Jews still existed.
In moral and civic terms, they no longer belonged.
That is what “stripped of personhood” means.
It was not spontaneous violence. It was systematic, intentional, and total.
That is what the word Nazi actually describes.
So when people today invoke “Nazis,” or call for “Nuremberg-style trials” against political opponents, they are usually not describing gas chambers, death camps, or state-mandated racial extermination. They are not describing a regime committed to the annihilation of an entire people.
They are expressing moral outrage, not historical reality.
Moral outrage is an emotional response. It says something feels deeply wrong. Scripture is not opposed to that. The prophets cried out against injustice. Jesus Himself displayed righteous anger.
But outrage is an emotion. It is not a historical diagnosis.
And outrage, when it borrows the language of genocide, borrows moral authority it did not earn.
Words like Nazi, Holocaust, and genocide carry weight not because they are rhetorically powerful, but because of the suffering attached to them. They are heavy with bodies, ashes, and graves. When those words are used loosely, moral language becomes inflated. And inflated moral language always collapses.
When everything is called Nazi, nothing is. When the word is spent carelessly, real evil gains cover.
Evil is not confined to history books. It exists.
In Iran, the regime has responded to protest not with reform, but with brutality. Reports describe mass killings, secret detentions, enforced disappearances, and the silencing of entire cities. Civilians seeking dignity were met with bullets. Internet access was cut to hide the carnage. This was not rhetorical oppression. It was state-sanctioned violence against its own people.
Evil does not announce itself as evil. It arrives dressed as necessity, order, or righteousness. It begins with language before it ends with graves.
This is why Scripture insists on discernment.
“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8, NIV)
These are not abstract virtues. They are moral disciplines meant to shape how God’s people see, speak, and respond to the world.
To act justly means more than opposing what feels wrong. In Scripture, justice is always bound to truth. God condemns those who call evil good and good evil. Justice requires accurate naming. When evil is exaggerated, minimized, or mislabeled, justice collapses. To act justly is to tell the truth about evil as it actually exists, not as our outrage wishes it to be.
To love mercy does not mean surrendering conviction. Mercy is rooted in the image of God. Every human being bears that image, even when they are wrong, even when we disagree. Dehumanization is never the fruit of mercy. It is always the beginning of atrocity. Nazism required dehumanization. Pharaoh required dehumanization. Herod required dehumanization. To love mercy is to refuse that step, even in moments of deep disagreement.
And to walk humbly with God is to remember that we are not the first generation to face moral crisis. In Scripture, humility is inseparable from memory. God commands His people to remember slavery, exile, and deliverance because forgetting history breeds arrogance and repetition of evil. Humility listens before declaring. It learns before labeling. It remembers before speaking.
This is why careless moral language is not harmless. When we misuse words forged in genocide, we do not strengthen our witness. We weaken it. We blur the very distinctions history teaches us to guard.
Pharaoh was not a metaphor.
Babylon was not a metaphor.
Herod was not a metaphor.
And Nazi Germany was not a metaphor.
Evil in Scripture is never abstract. It is concrete. It has methods. It has victims. It leaves evidence.
The way we use words today shapes whether we will recognize evil tomorrow.
On a week meant to remember the Holocaust, a survivor died alone in the cold. That fact should steady us. It should quiet our slogans and sharpen our conscience. Memory is not something we perform. It is something we honor by telling the truth.
Today’s Prayer:
Lord, teach us to act justly with clarity, to love mercy without distortion, and to walk humbly with reverence for history and compassion for the suffering. Guard our words so that we may recognize evil when it appears and stand faithfully in truth. Amen.
