Gaza should not be investigated to see if the conflict meets the technical definition of a genocide, Edith Bruck told Pope Francis (both pictured).
The Pope can’t call Gaza a genocide. It isn’t, insists Bruck – a 93-year old Holocaust survivor.
“Genocide is something else. When a million children are burned to death, then you can talk about genocide” Bruck told Italian media.
What the Pope said about Gaza
The Pope’s comments about Gaza came in recently published extracts from a new book devoted to the Jubilee Year of 2025, titled Hope Never Disappoints: Pilgrims Towards a Better World.
“According to some experts, what’s happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide” Francis wrote. “Attentive investigation is needed to determine if it fits the technical definition formulated by jurists and international organisms.”
Bruck says Francis uses the term genocide “too easily”.
Doing so, she said “diminishes the gravity of true genocide… genocide is what happened to the Armenians. Genocide is the million children burned in the ovens of Auschwitz, along with five million other Jews also burned in the concentration camps”.
For genocide to be happening, Israel would have to have the extermination of the Palestinian population on its agenda. But while the bloodshed in Gaza is a “tragedy that concerns everyone”, extermination is not Israel’s intention.
In fact, Hamas is the only party to the conflict that has spoken of genocide and has vowed to destroy the Jewish people throughout the world, she said.
What the Pope should say
In Bruck’s view, Francis should be more outspoken against what she called a “tsunami” of anti-Semitism washing across Europe.
“I’d like the Pope to raise his voice on the subject, but I don’t hear it the way I would like” she said.
Bruck, who once received Pope Francis in her Rome apartment and later wrote a book about the experience – to which Francis contributed the foreword, said she’d tell him what she thinks when he phones her for her birthday, as he has done since they met.
“I’ll tell him that I’d like him to intervene decisively against this hatred that’s broken out again against the Jews” she said.
In her recent interview, Bruck said she thinks Francis is afraid of the current rise in anti-Semitism.
She says she’s saddened, demoralised, disgusted, scandalised and indignant. “I’m truly living a very ugly moment. Anti-Semitism, like fascism, is never dead. It’s millennia old and I believe it will never end”.
Holocaust survivor
Bruck is a Hungarian-born Jew. She survived the Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps which swallowed both her parents and an older brother .
Bruck, together with a surviving brother and a sister, was liberated by the Allies at Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
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